“Don’t be silly,” I said, lightly slapping his arm.
He turned his head to face me. “You could call it Purrfect Connection.”
“You’re getting less funny.”
Wheeler pinched his eyebrow and smiled.
“I had to make tough choices,” I continued. “Now I’m out of a job, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to dance again. Not in this town.”
“Sometimes when one door shuts, another opens.”
“Hmm,” I said, tickling his armpit with a stroke of my finger. “Are you sure you’re Wheeler and not Ben? That’s so optimistic of you.”
He narrowed his eyes at me in the sexiest manner before looking back up at the ceiling. “You have connections. Take a job as an event coordinator or personal assistant. Lexi should be paying you for helping with the menus and website, not just the people you’re connecting her with.”
“That’s what friends do for each other.”
“True. But you could be doing that for a whole lot of other people who don’t have connections. You seem to know everyone and keep good business relations. I’ve seen men hire professionals who do what you’re doing. Chew on that for a while.”
“And who is going to take an exotic dancer seriously?”
“Who wouldn’t?”
I laughed and snuggled against the pillow. “Are you going to tell me about the chain, or are you going to keep dodging the question? I have an excellent memory, darling.”
His face flushed, but it wasn’t from embarrassment. Something else was culminating within him—a confession. “Ben wanted to go big time, always looking for a pot of gold. Then he discovered cage fights. There was an unscrupulous ring in east Texas, deep in the backwoods. You don’t mess around with that world. Poker is one thing; Shifter fights are something else.”
My heart raced at his admission. I’d never known anyone involved in this life, and it’s something that haunted my dreams because of the stories my mother had told me about my father’s past.
Wheeler flattened his hands on his chest, rubbing at his shirt as if he were feeling physical discomfort. “Ben lost a fight and took off like he always does. I don’t know how he got away with not paying in full up front, but he’s always been a smooth talker. That left me to clean up the mess. We lived together at the time, and they tracked down our house. There was a knock at the door, and Ben looked out the peephole and panicked—actually slid underneath the bed to hide. These guys were going to collect their money or cut his throat. What the hell could I do? I had no choice.”
“You paid them off.”
“Didn’t have that kind of money. I made good money back then, but what Ben owed… Forget it. I bargained for his life, but they wouldn’t agree. No payment plans, nothing. So I did the only thing I could—the only alternative they offered. I paid off his debt by going into the pits.”
“You did what!” I shrieked, sitting up and looking down at him in horror. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“The band on my wrist,” he continued, holding up his right arm. “That’s where they shackled me. A year of my life. A fucking year. I was in survival mode; there was no way out even if I came up with the money.”
“You fought?”
He rose up on his elbows and looked at me with tortured eyes. “I survived.”
“But no one walks out of the pits alive. I’ve never heard of such a thing!”
“You’re right, and it would have been a matter of time before my luck ran out. That’s why the chain on my arm is broken. One of the guards got a little too drunk, stood a little too close to the bars, and that’s all she wrote. I opened all the cages, but some of them didn’t go. Can you believe that? They were gone—mentally,” he said, tapping his head.
I hadn’t realized I was covering my mouth with my hand. “How did you live?”
“What I did to survive I’ll never wash off my conscience. The tats? They started as a way to separate myself from Ben for good. But some of them are hiding scars. Sometimes they’d throw us into the pit in human form against an animal to toughen us up. Sometimes they whipped us. After I escaped, I went back to get my revenge, but they’d already packed up and moved. I never got my due justice.”
“You’re kidding me. Please tell me this is a joke.” Tears welled in my eyes. My God, what this man must have gone through, and all for his brother!
“Nope,” he said, easing onto his back. “So maybe you get a little tense around people because you think they’ll find out what you are and see you as a threat, but I’m the real deal. I’m the Shifter that gives people waking nightmares. I killed to eat, breathe, and live another day. There’s no glory in that, even if it was survival. I was undefeated, and they pitted me against some of the baddest fighters out there.”