Beautiful Beast (Gypsy Heroes #3)(3)
Two
SHANE
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
—Steven Wright
I hear her shoes clatter down the wooden stairs as I light a cigarette and take a deep drag. Walking over to the large one-way mirror, I look down at my club. My eyes look for and immediately find Nikki. She is sparkling like a diamond. Sitting next to a man, her pose provocative, she raises perfectly manicured fingers and over the thin material of her gown, sensuously rubs her nipple. Her mark—I can tell straight away he’s got a cock full of bad f*cking ideas too—stares, transfixed.
You have to hand it to her, she’s good, she’s real good.
She even had me fooled once.
With girls like Bubbles you see them coming. But when Nikki approaches you, you don’t even see the snake, you just see the grass moving. Nikki is poisonous even when her legs are splayed wide open and she is moaning, in that crazy Russian accent of hers, ‘It’s so deep, baby. Oh yes, f*ck me, baby. Fuck me hard. Show this nasty * who its owner is.’
She crashed a vase into a mirror when I ended it. Good thing I’m an old hand at ducking. Sometimes, I still catch her watching me with a strange mixture of frustrated lust and venom, but she refuses to leave. Why, I don’t know. Any club would welcome her with open arms. I could have fired her, but why spoil a good thing? She’s the club’s highest earner.
I am suddenly distracted by a flash of white that appears in my peripheral vision. My eyes shift to follow it. A girl in a shimmery white dress is moving across the floor in the direction of the toilets. Her walk is slow and sexy, effortless, and her bone structure is very fine and delicate. In the dog world she would be a Saluki bred by the Bedouin to race across the desert sand during a hunt. A dog considered too fine to be called simply a dog.
Her skin is very pale and her hair is raven black. It pours thickly down her back like an oil slick. Normally, I would have been put off by the combination of pale skin and long black hair. It reminds me too much of the chalk-white, black-wig-wearing female demons in the Japanese horror flicks that my sister and I used to secretly watch until the early morning hours when we were really young, but something about this woman …
I exhale smoke.
A strobe light catches her face and my eyes widen.
Whoa! She is far more stunning than I had imagined. In the blue light she looks almost unreal, like a creature from a fairy tale. So pure she cannot be tainted by vulgarity or coarseness even when she is surrounded by it. The quality is so rare I don’t feel her call in my cock where most women make their presence felt, but deep in my gut. A tendril of excitement twists up my spine.
I want that woman.
Badly.
I kill my cigarette in an ashtray on my desk and leave my office. I take the stairs two at a time, stride down the corridor, and enter the club. Cool air from the vents above hits my face. Dillon Francis and DJ Snake’s track ‘Get Low’ is playing. I position myself by the Chinese bar with its blue and white porcelain tiles.
An acquaintance grasps my hand and pumps it. ‘Hey, Shane, how you doing? Let me buy you a drink?’
‘Thanks,’ I say with a smile, ‘but I’ve got one coming.’
He wants to talk, but I turn away from him and watch the door that leads from the toilets. My drink arrives and I take a gulp. The door opens. A woman comes out. The door shuts again. I am holding my breath. I let it go in a rush. Why am I behaving like this? My skin prickles, as if it knows something I don’t.
The door opens once more and she walks out. Her stride is still a slow sway, but up close she is even more breathtaking. And again I have the impression that she does not belong in this place. As if she is a shimmering water queen risen from a river, able to transform boredom into a feast of the senses.
As she gets closer I have the impression of something exotic. It could be her nose or the straightness of her eyebrows. But blood from distant lands flows in her veins. Her lips are full and painted some spicy color, a mixture of turmeric and chili. Her eyes are elongated and look straight ahead.
She would have passed by without noticing me if I had not shot out an arm and grasped her delicate wrist. Her reaction is strange because it is so deliberate. She stops walking and lets her gaze swing slowly from my hand wrapped around hers up to my eyes. This close, her irises are light green and liquid, the pupils flaring. They are almost ethereal. I have the weird sensation that I am waking her up from a dream. It is disconcerting.
Inside the circle of my fingers, her bones are as fragile as a bird’s. I stare into her deeply mesmerizing eyes. They make me want to know everything about her. About what has made her so fragile and otherworldly. They make me want to possess her.
‘And who would you be?’ I ask, flashing her my most charming smile.
She stares up at me for a few seconds longer. Then she frowns. ‘I’m probably not what you think I am.’
What surprises me is that she did not mean her answer to be provocative or flirtatious. That instantly makes her the most interesting woman I have ever met. My cock is pulsing and crushing against my jeans like crazy, so, naturally, I promise myself that I am going to f*ck her. I’ll be damned, I can’t remember the last time a woman had me this strong. I widen my grin. ‘What do you think I think you are?’
Her lips move and words quiver out. ‘A random pick-up.’