“We’re all accounted for.” He shifted in his seat as if he was…oh, shit, trying to accommodate a hard-on. He couldn’t possibly be ready for more after he had just had his dick tickling Kelly’s tonsils, could he?
“I can smile more, show more skin, whatever it takes,” she said quickly, working to keep the panic out of her voice. Sex was the currency at Club Girl, so upping her game was imperative. Maybe she could borrow a push-up bra from one of the girls, stuff it with tissues and use them later when she bawled her eyes out.
“By the end of the night, the customers are going to love me.”
Ray knuckle-rapped the desk. “That’s right, Emma. They will.”
Chapter Three
The muddy red stain on the carpet compelled Brody’s focus. A whiskey spill? Dried blood? Some other weird fluid his imagination refused to shape? And Flynn thought this place was classy. If this was what the VIP lounge looked like, Brody shuddered to think what the other areas of the club had to offer. Just one more nod to the tired nature of this entire enterprise: the girls, the decor, the utility of strip clubs in general. Not to get overly philosophical, but was this really supposed to represent the evolution of a capitalist market? Women selling a flash of T & A to drooling apes? He didn’t get it at all, and yet here he was doing his part for the adult entertainment economy.
God bless America.
“You look like you could do with a bit of fun, Brody,” Smythe-Osborne said for what had to be the forty-seventh time tonight. He clinked his glass of Macallan eighteen-year against Brody’s and raised it to his lips. Fifty bucks on the tab right there. Rather than think about how much this client outing was going to cost him, Brody’s gaze attached to the woman doing a zombie corpse dance around a pole that would probably give you an STD if you touched it.
A petri pole.
Christ. How in the hell had this happened?
One minute, Emma was serving oolio or whatever that fancy tea was called in his office as Brody tried to nail Smythe-“call me Nigel, mate”-Osborne on a timeline for the Crown Point development bid. Next, he was bar-crawling through Rush Street, introducing S-O to the seedy underbelly of Chicago nightlife, and had finally ended up in a strip club. But not just any strip club. The one Flynn had recommended.
Brody had opened up his wallet to pay for the client’s $200 steak dinner and found the card along with a brand-new condom. Cherry flavored. Flynn’s sleight of hand was a thing of beauty. Brody had no idea how the ass*ole
managed to get hold of his wallet whenever he damn well pleased. Guy could give Penn & Teller a run for their money.
All night, through each bar he’d hit with S-O, the card had taunted him. Club Girl—Where Fantasies Become Reality. Not especially imaginative, as he doubted anything remotely in the same zip code as fantasy occurred here. Even calling it a “strip club” was wishful. The restrictive Illinois laws prohibited full nudity in the presence of alcohol—or alcohol in the presence of nipples. Whatever, it meant that he was about to get pretty damn drunk, reamed of great wads of cash, and would be lucky if a nipple made an appearance. The girls on stage were wearing those weird pasties that looked like Band-Aids along with boy shorts that weren’t nearly revealing enough.
They also looked miserable. No way in hell was Brody getting a listless lap dance from one of these women.
“So what do you say, Brody?” S-O said, his tongue practically flopping all over the stage. “Lappy for two?”
“All you, Nigel. Think I’ll sit this one out.”
Nigel laughed, a braying donkey sound that stepped on Brody’s last nerve. “Sit this one out. Cracking, mate. Absolutely cracking.” A slight turn of his head was enough to make a skimpily dressed woman materialize.
“You want dance?” Blond and fit, she had an Eastern European accent and the downtrodden look of a woman who grew up on a farm and probably thought mucking out the pig trough would be a more tantalizing prospect. Brody was with her on this.
“Sure, love,” Nigel said. “Lay it on me.”
“You like private room? Can do all nude. And touch.” She ran her hands down her hips, previewing what Nigel could do if he was willing to pony up the green. Likely Brody’s green.
“Let’s start out here and see how the night goes. Got a bird for my friend?”
“Yes. I get friend.” Following her gaze to the bar, Brody found a number of women lined up like a horseflesh market in Lubbock. “You choose?”
He shook his head and laughed off the offer. “I’m just here for immoral support.”