Dream Chaser (Dream Team, #2)(20)

Rough, jagged, bumpy, with twists and turns and an almost-guaranteed cliff at the end.

I felt like Thelma and Louise, and I didn’t get the fun of shooting a lowdown, rotten rapist or sleeping with Brad Pitt.

“My uncle has been thinkin’ about the direction of the club and he wants to talk to you about it.”

Well, that was definitely a thing that made me go hmm.

Considering Smithie was not old, but he was also not young, and he’d been in the game a fair few years, it was generally thought from the minute Dorian showed that Smithie was grooming him to take over.

And since Dorian showed, his bouncer title mostly reflected his inability to put up with even an iota of shit from a creepy customer and his superpower of removing them from the club quietly, but with ease, and if necessary, force.

Also, since Dorian showed, lap dances were vetted by him and Smithie, and only him and Smithie. Girls no longer wandered the floor or came when beckoned.

Those dances further didn’t happen on the floor.

They happened in one of the two private rooms Smithie had where he’d previously allowed paid-for private dances, or he sometimes hired out for poker games or the like, and they always happened with a bouncer in the room, watching.

Payment was provided prior, to said bouncer, who immediately after the dance gave it to the dancer. The only money that exchanged hands between client and stripper were tips.

Now a lap dance was skeevy.

I was good at them, but they were skeevy.

And one who had never done them couldn’t know, but the difference between straddling a guy’s lap and giving him the good stuff with hundreds of onlookers getting a free show and doing it in private with a guard right there was massive.

In other words, with Dorian around, I was actually looking forward to hearing what Smithie was considering for the direction the club was going.

We snaked through the tables and around the stage to the stairs, up them, and after Dorian reached over my head to knock on the door to Smithie’s office, and we heard a “Yeah!” we went in.

I saw my boss behind his messy desk.

He was darker than Dorian, stouter, no dimples, but they had the same mouth, and height, and Smithie totally had that sharp-astuteness and warm-gentleness thing going on, though his he had down to an art.

I picked stripping because I had a decent body, I could move, I knew it’d make me loads of cash, especially if I danced at a class establishment like Smithie’s, and I had a high school education and a dream, and I needed the seed money to start it.

It was just dumb luck, some of the little of it I’d ever had, I landed in a joint like Smithie’s where our insurance was better than a government worker’s, he had a 401(k) plan and the infinite, albeit frustrated, patience to put up with a staff that consisted almost entirely of attractive people who were in their twenties.

“Hey,” I called when he looked up from his desk.

His eyes narrowed.

And there was the sharp astuteness.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said quickly, coming around one of the chairs in front of his desk and sitting down.

He sat back and stared at me.

“Life’s a little rocky lately,” I came clean (kinda). “Family stuff with my brother and his ex and their kids. It’ll be okay.”

He looked to Dorian, who had taken a seat beside me. His mouth got tight at what Dorian silently conveyed. He again looked to me, then, wisely, he let it go (I knew, only for now).

“I got a proposition for you I want you to take away and chew on,” he declared.

“All right,” I said.

“I wanna move the club to a revue.”

I had no idea what that meant.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“You, Hattie, Pepper, Dominique and maybe Champagne, along with Lottie, will have the stage for your own dances. Your music. Your choreography. You can take it all off. You can keep something on. I don’t give a shit. As long as it’s sexy, entertaining, and keeps me havin’ a velvet rope outside my door.”

I found myself breathing funny.

“I’ll hire other girls who’ll do routines together in between you girls doin’ your thing,” he went on. “Burlesque style. Filler will be general stripping, though the headliners won’t be onstage during this time, so patrons have plenty of breathers in the program to buy drinks and regulars still think they’re comin’ to a titty bar. And maybe I’ll throw in a comedian to MC.”

Holy shit.

This was so cool.

“Like Lottie, tips will be collected for you,” he continued. “I’ll be uppin’ the cover charge, so I’ll also pay you more as a base salary since you’ll have to come up with your own routines and wardrobe. But to get you started on that last, I’ll give you a stipend. Only thing you gotta do for the stipend is sign a contract that says you won’t quit for six months. You don’t do that, and you want your time onstage, you gotta provide your own shit. You don’t want your time onstage, you can dance in the burlesque. You don’t want a part of any of this, and I go this way, we’re gonna have to have another chat. You can serve tables, and waitresses don’t make dancer money, but they don’t do bad. Or you can tend bar.”

With this offer on the table, I wasn’t tending bar.