Oh shit.
“Looks like we have a surprise guest on the stage now folks,” the MC said, stalling. “Kimmy Cat was supposed to be up next, but let’s see where this goes.”
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and watched as two bouncers made their way toward the stage with angry scowls aimed at me.
I surveyed the crowd around me. They weren’t angry, they were confused. I pushed onto the heels of my feet and tried to regain my equilibrium.
One of the bouncers reached the stage and leaned in to grab my arm.
“Let her dance!” a customer yelled.
“Yeah! Let her dance! Let her dance!” another chanted.
They want me to dance.
THEY WANT ME TO DANCE.
“Ladddiesss and gentlemen, we’ve got a brand new dancer on the stage tonight!” the emcee began, trying to make sense of the situation.
Oh no. No, no, no.
I stood and tried to get the emcee’s attention. I waved my hands back and forth in front of my chest in a universal sign of “STOP. LET ME OFF THIS STRIP CLUB STAGE.”
“Looks like we have a…sexy ninja,” he improved, misinterpreting my signals for dance moves. “Maybe a slutty samurai, showing off her erotic mooooooves! Give it up for, uh…”
“Busty Black Belt!” Josephine yelled from somewhere in the back of the crowd.
“Buuuuuuusty Black Belt!” he echoed, changing songs to T-Pain’s “I’m in Love With a Stripper”.
I smiled and held my hand over my brow to find Josephine, but the lights were blinding. I could only see the first row of men, smiling and goading me to dance.
“Show us what you got, honey,” a guy yelled from the front row.
I stood in the center of the stage, completely frozen. I had two options: I could dance or I could let the bouncers drag me away.
“Work it, baby,” another guy yelled.
My cheeks flamed as I wrestled with indecision, but in the end, my body made up my mind for me. It started moving to the beat, slowly at first, just my head and shoulders rocking back and forth. The front row of men cheered me on and I smiled.
This isn’t so bad.
The emcee kicked the music up another notch, loud enough to drown out the sounds of the club. I tried to shimmy to the left and to the right, but I couldn’t quite work out how to coordinate my chest, shoulders, and feet.
“Sexier, honey!”
They wanted sexy? I’d show ’em sexy. My rolodex was chock-full of the most sultry dance moves: stirring the pot, grocery shopping, watering the lawn, you named it. I watered that lawn like my life depended on it and the crowd sat stunned, watching me in complete silence.
I pulled the beanie from my head and tossed it out into the crowd. That earned me a few whistles and that’s when I saw Dean standing at the end of the stage with his arms crossed. His features were cast in shadows, but I could see the incredulous grin stretched across his lips as he watched me.
I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from laughing, and the crowd went wild.
“Yeahhh, honey!”
“Keep biting your lip!”
Dean tilted his head to the right and I glanced over to see the pole gleaming under the neon lights. I hadn’t touched it yet, but I knew I would before the song finished. I shimmied to the back of the stage and tried to recall how dancers usually mounted the poles in movies. Do they just hop on, or do they get a running start first? It felt like I needed a running start, so I let T-Pain’s wise, auto-tuned words wash over me as I ran straight for it. My body collided with the metal and I clung onto it like a baby monkey grabbing on to a tree branch. Usually the dancers jumped on and started to spin, but I just slowly slid down the greasy pole until my butt hit the floor. Nothing happened. The song ended and I was left with absolute silence.
One slow clap started near the back and then the emcee spoke up halfheartedly, “Well, A for effort, right folks?”
Josephine whooped it up beside Dean, tossing dollars onto the stage. “THAT’S MY BEST FRIEND!” she yelled.
The two bouncers who had stood off to the side during my “performance” stepped forward as I unwound my legs from the base of the pole, but Dean got to me before they did. He reached up to help me down from the stage.
“That was amazing, I ca—” he began.
Hunter emerged through the crowd, having left the bathroom sometime during my performance. He limped through the crowd, clearly looking worse for wear.
“Hey!” he bellowed, squinting quizzically toward the stage.
We all froze, getting ready to run in case he identified us through the dim haze.
“Why the hell was the nun dancing onstage?”
Chapter Forty-Three
Dean
“You guys did all of this tonight? While I was at dinner with my sister?” Julian asked, holding Dean’s limp mustache and staring at the three of us with a dropped jaw.
Lily shrugged. “I mean, it took some planning.”
Josephine tried to sidle closer to him, but he shot her a warning glance with narrowed eyes. “And you didn’t even think to tell me?”
She nibbled on her bottom lip, trying to come up with an excuse. “I knew you wouldn’t be okay with it.”
He grunted. “Well yeah, you don't know what a guy like that might’ve done if he’d found you out.”
“I was there,” I said, handing Julian the three fingers of bourbon I’d just poured for him. “Hunter was a harmless drunk and she was safe the whole time.”
It was a white lie. A harmless lie. We were all safely inside my house, so what did it matter if an hour earlier Josephine had been alone with Hunter inside a strip club? Julian didn’t need to know every gritty detail.
Julian stared down at the blonde wig laying across Josephine’s lap. “So did it work?”
I smirked and pointed to the recorder beside Jo. “Play the recording for him.”
We had over an hour of Hunter’s drunk ramblings at the strip club. We’d listened to it all earlier, but we only played the highlights back for Julian.
At five minutes into the recording, Hunter started bragging about his new restaurant: “It’s gonna be the hottest restaurant in New York.”
Then there was another ten minutes of him drunkenly bragging about his “brilliant” idea. Jo fast-forwarded to get to the good stuff: Colette.
“Aren’t you married?”
“Only on paper, baby.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that when she’s out of town, I do whatever I want, and tonight, I think that’ll be you.”
Julian held up his hand and Josephine hit pause. “All right, all right, I get it. You have some dirt on him. Now what are you going to do?”
“I just left a message for him to meet me here tomorrow. I’ll confront him with the recording and let him decide his own fate,” I said.
“What if he doesn’t back down? What if he doesn’t care about his wife hearing it?” Jo asked.
I shrugged. “That’s the beauty of Lily’s plan. It’s irrelevant what he thinks, because we can always just send the recording to his wife. I don’t think Mrs. Moneybags will be so forgiving. So he either does what we say and kills the restaurant himself, or he loses it completely.”
Julian slung back the rest of his bourbon and set the glass down on the coffee table in front of Lily. “Brilliant, but that’s enough cloak-and-dagger for me for one night. Jo, you ready to go? I’m exhausted.”
She pushed up off the couch and took his hand.
“You still smell like Hunter,” he said, wrapping an arm around her.
“He didn’t even touch me. I just smell like the smoke from the strip club.”
His paused. “Wait, you guys were at a strip club?”
Lily hopped to her feet and ushered them out into the foyer. “All right well, have a good night guys! Julian, you should know that she only went along with this as a favor to me.” She held up the blonde wig. “As repayment, I’l
l let y’all keep this. I'm sure you two can find some use for it.”
At first he kept his straight face, ignored Lily, and ushered Josephine over the threshold. The door had almost closed behind them when there was a pause. Julian’s hand slipped back through the crack and Lily dropped the wig into it. Then, without a word, he shut the door.
“Knew he’d take it.”
Lily locked the door behind them and propped her back against it. She’d left her black beanie at the club. Her blonde hair was parted down the middle, falling down over her shoulders. Her tight black shirt had ridden up on the left side, revealing a little sliver of tan skin above her jeans. That patch of skin called to me. I dropped my glass on the table in the foyer and moved closer.
“Do I still smell like smoke too?” she asked as I wrapped my hands around her waist. I dipped down and buried my face in her hair. It smelled like her shampoo, a tropical scent filled with coconuts and sea breeze.
“You smell like Lily.”
She smiled against my neck and then her tongue slipped out and licked down my skin.
“You taste like Dean.”
I laughed and stepped back, forcing her along with me. We made it up to my bedroom slowly, pausing along the way so that she could tear off my shirt in the hallway. I stripped off her jeans on the stairs and she straddled me in the doorway to my bedroom, curving her hips against me until I lost track of where I was going. We were supposed to head into my bathroom and shower the strip club off us, but instead, I carried her to my bed and we fell back onto the comforter.
No one had control of me the way Lily did. I laid back on my bed as she rolled on top of me, her hair tickling my chest. She was a force of nature, a swirling tornado that made me feel weightless and free one minute, and slammed into a tree trunk at 130 miles per hour the next. I let her hold my hands to the side. I let her think she had control for once. I had a dopey smirk on my face as she kissed her way down my chest. Inside, my heart rioted, warning me to proceed with caution.
This was dangerous.
She was dangerous.
“Dean?” she asked, staring up at me with her honey brown eyes. “I’m really happy you were there tonight, helping me.”
She was opening up to me, confirming with her words what she was showing me with her body.
“We make the perfect team,” she said softly.
I could handle the Tiger Lily, the fierce, independent woman who fought with me every inch of the way—but this? The vulnerable girl opening up to me as she lay naked across my chest?
She scared the shit out of me.
I had goals. I had restaurants to open. I had Forbe’s lists to top, and Lily would get in the way of that. Lily wouldn’t be an easy addition to my life. She wouldn’t appreciate the time I gave her. She’d demand all of me, every ounce, siphoning my focus away from my work until I resented her for it.
Love changes a person. I couldn’t let Lily slip into my life and change the core of me. The need for more was always there, lingering in the periphery of my mind. When I took a long lunch or slept fifteen minutes past my alarm, I pushed myself harder to make up for lost time. I had the world to conquer and Lily would only stand in the way of that.
…
I took my time showering, trying to gather up the wits Lily had stolen over the last hour and a half. The water steamed up, burning the skin across my shoulder blades, but I relished the sensation until the water ran cold. Only then did I step out and wrap the towel around my waist.
I wiped my hand across the fogged glass and met Lily’s gaze in the mirror. I wanted more time away from her, more time to regroup.
She was standing at the door of the bathroom, holding up a gold-leafed invitation with one hand and clutching her towel across her body with the other.
“What’s this?” she asked, turning it over in her hand.
It was an invitation to the James Beard Awards, essentially the Oscars of the food world. I’d worked my ass off for years to be noticed in the community and finally, for the first time, I was nominated for an award: Outstanding Restaurateur. Just to be nominated was an honor beyond anything I could comprehend, but I’d held the achievement close to my heart.
A nomination wasn’t a win.
“It’s an invitation to the James Beard Awards,” I said, reaching for my toothbrush.
Her eyes widened and her grasp on the invitation tightened. She knows how important the ceremony is. “It’s next week and you haven’t returned your RSVP.”
I shrugged. “I don’t think they’ll mind. I’m a guest of honor.”
She carried the invitation in and set it down on the bathroom counter, meeting my eye in the mirror.
“You want me to fill it out for us and send it in?”
For us.
Lily took that blank card and filled it in for herself. She assumed I would take her because she thought we were a team; she’d said so herself. I looked up in the mirror and saw her eyes brimming over with hope for us; I couldn’t mimic her sentiment. Where she felt hope, I only felt fear.
“I’m going alone.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Lily
My face stung as if he’d slapped me. I held my hand up to my cheek, just to check, but there was no pain, only red hot heat. The blotchy blush spread from my cheeks down over my neck as Dean stood with his back to me, meeting my eyes in the mirror and daring me to push him on his comment.
I stood there in his towel, on his cold tile floor. I was naked with the scent of his body wash swirling up around me. I turned on my heel and found my jeans, pulling them on before I could find my underwear. I slipped on my bra and tugged my shirt back in place. My hair was still sopping wet and it seeped down the back of my black t-shirt, chilling me to the bone.
Dean came to stand at the door of his bathroom with his towel hung low on his hips. He crossed his arms and turned his dark eyes on me. In the light, when the sun caught them, his eyes turned a golden brown, so bright that I had to look away. In that moment, in the dim light of his room, they were dark pools of black, emotionless and cold.
“Lily, we’re making this up as we go along. I never made you any promises. You said it yourself, this thing between us is just sex.”
His voice sounded dead and my eyes stung with unshed tears.
I didn’t want him to speak and I sure as shit didn’t want to hear his explanations.
“You’ll find a better man than me.”
I stared at the ground and blinked away the tears threatening to spill.
“You think this is a life, Dean? You think those restaurants will make you happy? One day you’ll wake up and realize that you’re completely alone, and your insides will twist with regret. No man is an island. Not even you.”
I stepped toward him and pointed my finger at his chest. His jaw tightened, but he held his ground, committed to his decision.
“And you know what? I’ll have moved on. I’m not waiting around for you, Dean Harper. I’m not begging you to change or standing by as you pretend the past few weeks haven’t been the best weeks of your life. Challenging, yes, but don’t tell me that you’d trade them. So have fun at your awards ceremony. I’m sure it’ll feel good to stand on that stage alone with a bunch of strangers clapping for you.”
I turned away and he stayed in that doorway. I walked out of his room, down the stairs, and out the front door, and he stood still, watching me walk out of his life like it was the easiest thing he’d ever done.
I held onto the fact that I hadn’t cried in front of him. I convinced myself that the insults I’d flung had been well-worded. I wanted my barbed words to sink deep and fester inside him. I still had a thousand things I wanted to yell, but it was done. Dean was in his house and I was walking home alone with wet hair and wet cheeks. I skipped the subway and ignored the cabs. I walked until my feet hurt and I used the burn in my legs to distract me from the burn in my heart.
My phone was silent the entire way home. No text messages, no pho
ne calls. Dean didn’t run out after me and he didn’t care enough to know if I made it home okay.
I was relieved to find the apartment empty. I tore at my clothes, tossing them into the trash on the way to the bathroom. They were sweaty and filled with memories I wanted erased by the morning. I turned on the shower and stepped inside. I squeezed shampoo over my scalp once, and then again, trying to expunge the scent of Dean.
I lathered myself in body wash from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and let it linger before washing it away with scalding water. I brought my arm to my nose and sniffed, feeling my heart break when I still smelled him there. His masculine scent overpowered my flowery body wash. I cried and scraped at my skin, sliding down to the floor of the shower. My fingers scrubbed furiously as I let his words haunt me.
I never made you any promises.
For all the progress we’d made, he still treated us like a contract that hadn’t been signed. I cried and let the water blend with my tears. The salty mixture disappeared past my lips as I curled into a ball.
I just wanted to get his scent off me.
I wanted to get him off me.
I wanted him gone.
Chapter Forty-Five
Dean
I let Lily walk out of my apartment and I stood there frozen. I was pushing her away for good; I knew it, and I couldn’t stop myself. Lily was a distraction at best and a liability at worst. I would have picked up on cues that something was amiss with Hunter had Lily not soaked up my attention during staff meetings. Looking back, there'd been plenty of signs that Hunter had been up to no good. It had worked out in the end, but I wasn't going to make the same mistake twice. For the time being, my focus would remain on work.