chapter
ONE
JOSEPH
What the fuck was this girl doing at my club?
She looked like she couldn’t be a day over twenty, which meant I had an issue with the door. Someone wasn’t checking the IDs, or not looking at the photos close enough. I’d have to talk to my manager about that, again.
The girl stood in a semi-circle with her friends, a half-empty drink in her hand while she surveyed the selection of men nearby. From my vantage-point on the second floor balcony, I saw the dark roots of her hair, giving way to pale, dusty blonde streaking down that glowed in the low light pulsing from the DJ booth.
She laughed and touched one of her friends on the arm. Calm. Casual. Like she had every right to be here, and wasn’t jeopardizing my club’s liquor license simply with her presence. Annoyance flared and made my skin hot. Perhaps I should have given my staff the benefit of the doubt. Maybe her fake ID was fucking amazing.
I turned away from the balcony and glanced back at my tiny, disorganized office. My manager had ordered too much of some import and now the cases were stacked in a corner, and the result was claustrophobic. Dune, a nightclub, used to be the favorite of all my properties, but in recent years there’d been a turn in clientele, and another club began to dominate my focus.
So dark and illegal, the smell of that place didn’t wash off for days. I fucking loved it.
The blonde finished her drink, tilting the glass back and obscuring her face. I didn’t like that. It was hard enough to see her across the expanse of the dance floor. Pretty, with a cute, up-turned nose and high cheekbones. Maybe a designer nose. I’d spent the last few years studying women and their quest for beauty. Was the girl lucky in genetics or lucky with rich parents?
The clients at my blindfold club would eat her up. The younger, the better, for some of them. I didn’t judge my clients’ tastes, as long as the girl was old enough and wanted it. Besides, I’d met plenty of thirty-year-old women with less maturity than ones who were eighteen.
Hairs lifted on my arm and the back of my neck in hyperawareness. Movement to the left of the girl was too abrupt and aggressive to be dancing. Shit. A couple of douchebags were getting heated. A hand flung in the other guy’s chest and shoved backward.
If he wanted space, he got the opposite. The offended man was all over the guy who’d shoved him, getting in his face. Stiff posture. Hands balled into fists and, as if sensing the impending fight, the area around the men cleared.
Except for the blonde.
Her friends scattered and she tried to follow, but she was the last one to get out of the way.
“Fuck,” I said into the earpiece I wore. “Someone get on that mess and break it up.” Where the hell were my bouncers?
The first punch landed on the guy’s jaw, knocking him askew, but only for a second. He reared back and unleashed his own attack, the thick rope of muscle in his neck straining, visible from all the way up where I was.
The only thing I valued was being in control, so my hands tensed on the balcony railing as I stood powerless to stop what I sensed was about to happen. The smaller of the two men began to retreat, backing up and trapping the blonde behind him, pinning her to the wall.
“Move!” I ordered into the earpiece to my bouncer, although I really wanted to say it to the girl directly. Move before this gets really bad. Mario’s enormous bald head worked its way through the crowd, struggling to get there in time, but his wide and impressive build made that difficult.
The bigger of the two men fighting launched forward, pummeling the smaller one. The girl’s mouth dropped open, her face twisting in shock or pain. Maybe she wasn’t receiving the blows directly, but she could sure as hell feel them.
Mario broke free from the crowd and grasped the bigger guy’s shoulder, jerking him away, but a second too late. The final punch missed its intended target and struck the girl instead. Her head snapped away from the impact, and one of her hands flew up to cover her cheek, which was sure to start swelling immediately.
Fuck me. If I had any hope of her not getting busted in my club, it died with that assault.
Realizing what he’d done, the guy threw his arms up and backed away in a silent apology. An “I didn’t mean to hit a girl” was plastered on his expression. Mario yanked the guy farther back as another bouncer appeared to collect the loser of the fight, releasing the girl from the wall. The last thing anyone expected, Mario included, was for her to spring forward at the man who’d hit her. Even over the pumping bass of the music that throbbed in my chest, I’d swear I heard the slap of her palm across the asshole’s face.
Her friends flooded in, surrounding her and pulling her away. Despite everything, I wanted to smile at this victim who refused to play the part. What a tough bitch.
But I had to work fast if I was going to stay ahead of this. “Get an ice pack, tell the friends their drinks are paid for, and bring the girl upstairs.”
I watched my orders executed one by one. All of the friends’ gazes turned up to my balcony, and finally the girl’s lifted too. Her hand fell away from her face to point at the balcony, maybe asking the staff member if that was where she was going or if I was who wanted to speak with her. This action revealed the spot that was already darkening on her pretty, underage face.
Fucking shit. I swore in my head the whole time she made her way upstairs. I didn’t need attention on this club, because it might lead to attention on other things, and prison was about as appealing to me as it was to anyone else.
My hand flattened the front of my dress shirt, smoothing it down. I could be charming. My eyes were kind and my smile warm, or so I’d been told, and I played up the old southern accent I used to have when needed. I disarmed. No one suspected the wolf beneath my surface, and only a handful of people knew about him.
The door swung open and my manager escorted the blonde in, who pressed an ice pack to her cheek.