He chuckled as he took a sip of his beer. “Sometimes, we do other things too. That’s all part of the fun of it. Perhaps you’d like to come back to my apartment to talk some more? There are drinks and music there too. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better without all this noise. I’m a pretty good dancer by the way.”
My mind blanked for a moment. Ice Malone wanted to take me back to his apartment? Even if I was that kind of girl, and I most certainly wasn’t, this was all happening too fast. I finally saw that Stacey had turned her attention back to us and had likely caught the tail end of the conversation. I felt her kick me under the table.
“No, thanks,” I said, dropping my eyes back to my drink.
“That’s it? No, thanks?”
I could tell that he was stunned. That made me feel a tiny bit vindicated. Clearly, the guy wasn’t used to getting turned down. There was no doubt that I was attracted to him. The dampness that I felt between my legs just from imagining dirty dancing with him was a testament to that, but I wasn’t the kind of girl who jumped into one-night stands. Even if the other party was a larger than life sultry sex god wrapped up in an MMA fighter package.
“That’s it,” I said coolly. I stirred my mixed drink.
Shayne pushed back from the table, and I immediately missed the heat of his body next to mine. But at least I felt like I could breathe again. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out two tickets. He put them on the table in front of me. “VIP tickets for my fight tomorrow night. You should come.”
Stacey snatched up the tickets with a squeal. “Hell, yeah! We’ll be there.”
I glared at my friend before turning back to Shayne. “I have a lot to do tomorrow. I don’t know that I’m free.” There was no way I was committing myself to seeing this man again. He was dangerous to my carefully crafted view of myself. Because, in all reality, there was a part of me that wanted to go back to his apartment with him. It was a small crack on an otherwise sheltered and conservative exterior that had been my entire existence for the last four years.
He put his hand over mine. I stared at it. It completely engulfed it. “Think about it. It’ll be fun. Last hurrah and all, remember?” He winked at me.
I rolled my eyes again and saw his frown. He and his friend moved away. I caught Stacey staring at me with an expression that told me she thought I was crazy. I knocked back the shot. “I’m not going to that fight,” I declared as I slammed the shot glass down. That was all there was to say about that.
CHAPTER FOUR – SHAYNE
“What just happened back there? The almighty Ice Malone actually struck out with a woman?” Kyle said jokingly. “Classic.”
I wasn’t in the mood. “I barely hit on her. If I had turned on the full charm, she would have been on her knees ready to suck my dick in less than ten minutes.” I wasn’t usually so crude, but I was pissed. I couldn’t even remember the last time a woman had blown me off like that.
“What about the redhead then? She seemed into you.”
“Groupies are a dime a dozen,” I said as I stalked around the dance floor to the bar. I tipped back the rest of my beer in one swallow. “This place is lame. Let’s go somewhere else.”
Kyle seemed willing enough to indulge me. “The groupies are easy,” he said. “You might have to work a little bit harder with the ones who have no idea who you are. You know, like the rest of us mere mortals.”
Alexa knew who I was, though, and she still didn’t seem interested. It didn’t make any sense. Kyle and I made our way to another club that was a few blocks away. Even though there was a line around the block to get inside, we breezed through the VIP line. The celebrity thing worked to my advantage most of the time. The fact that it hadn’t with Alexa was frustrating.
We scored a VIP booth set back from the dance floor, and several more of my buddies arrived. I had to admit that it was nice to talk about normal stuff and not anything about the fight. The couple of times that one of the guys brought it up, I brushed it off. It wasn’t anything that I was incredibly worried about. I was a heavy favorite, and the guy I was fighting had less than a year of experience. But I still felt wound up and tense.
The conversation eventually turned to women. It was inevitable given the sheer number who were sashaying by our booth at any given moment.
“Man, I wish I was you,” Kyle said with a laugh as he took a swig of beer. “You could seriously score every night of the week.”
“Nah,” I said casually. “Maybe just four or five.” The guys laughed, but I knew that most, if not all of them, felt the same way that Kyle did. “It comes with the territory. You’d be amazed how wet it makes these woman watching two grown men beat the shit out of each other.”
“That is awesome,” Kyle said. “You see anything here that you like?”