The Obsessed With Him Series: Complete Box Set (A Bad Boy Romance) (7 page)

“Are you saying I’m lying?”

“I’m saying it didn’t happen.”

“So you think I’m making it up.” But even as I was saying the words, I didn’t get the sense that he thought I was lying at all. I had the feeling he knew I was telling the truth, and yet he didn’t want to admit it for some reason. Was that what he was fighting with Mick about?

“I think maybe you’re confused about what you saw,” Colt said.

I started to protest, but something told me to keep my mouth shut. Part of it was that I didn’t want to piss him off. But part of it was something else, something I’d learned over the years. If someone was acting like they didn’t want to talk about something, there was a reason. And if you pushed them to talk about it, you became the enemy. The person began to blame you for whatever horrible thing they were avoiding, just because you wouldn’t shut up abut it.

So I stayed quiet as I followed Colt through a door and into a huge open room. The walls were painted a dark red, and the perimeter was lined with mirrors and vanities. The carpet was a black and white zebra print, and two huge wardrobes stood at the far end.

“This is the dressing room,” he said. “It’s where you’ll get ready.”

I nodded, and kept following him as he moved into another hallway that led out into the main part of the club, the part I’d been in earlier when I came in for my audition.

Jessa was behind the bar, drying glasses, and she looked up when she saw us.

“Oh, good,” she said, giving Colt a huge smile. “You’re here.” She didn’t even acknowledge my presence.

“I’m here,” Colt said. He motioned for me to sit down at the bar and so I did. There was a picture hanging on the wall in a black wooden frame, of a man and a woman. They were sitting at the bar in Loose Cannons, but the bar looked shiny and new, not like it looked now, with the wood scratched up and the paint fading.

“Who’s that?” I asked Colt.

His jaw twitched. “My dad.” His voice was low, gravelly, almost threatening.

“And that’s your mom?” I asked.

He ignored me, instead walking behind the bar and over to where Jessa had pulled out an iPad, with what looked like an excel spreadsheet open on the screen. When he got to her, she wrapped her arms around his waist and slid her body against his. “I missed you,” she said, kissing him on his neck.

My cheeks went warm and I averted my gaze.

So that was why Jessa hated me so much. She was Colt’s girlfriend. Well, she didn’t have to worry about me being any kind of threat. I wasn’t interested in Colt, and even if I was, there was no way I was any competition. Jessa was beautiful – long blonde hair, icy blue eyes, her body tan and taut under the leather vest she was wearing. I wondered why she didn’t have to wear the outfit I was wearing. But maybe Colt wanted to keep her more covered up since she was his girlfriend, didn’t like the thought of all those skeezy guys staring at her.

I felt an irrational flash of annoyance and something else (jealousy?) move through my body. But it was silly to be jealous. Of what? The fact that Colt had a girlfriend? I’d just met him.

And just because he’d seemed to like looking at me in my tight little outfit didn’t mean anything. What man didn’t like looking at a girl in a tight outfit?

What about back in his bathroom? When he said he would help you forget?
Had he just been messing with me, like when he almost kissed me back in the office? I swallowed my disappointment and grabbed a bottle of water that was sitting on the bar and took a sip.

I watched as Colt and Jessa leaned over the iPad. Her hand was on his back, and he wasn’t doing anything to encourage it, but he wasn’t pushing her away, either. It bothered me that I wanted to know what the deal was with them, and so when Colt said something I couldn’t hear and Jessa tipped her head back and laughed, I averted my eyes.

I looked out across the club, imagining what it was going to be like when it was filled with men (and women?), all of them drinking and watching naked women dancing on stage. Would the men be nice? Would they look at me in my skimpy outfit even though there were naked strippers for them to look it?

Well, Olivia
, I thought, trying to calm my racing heart,
you’re about to find out.

O
nce Colt
and Jessa were done going over the orders, he left her in charge of me, instructing her to teach me what to do.

“You’re leaving?” I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice.

Which obviously didn’t work, since Jessa immediately picked up on it. “Aww, Colt,” she said. “How cute. She has a crush on you.”

“You’ll be fine,” Colt said to me. “I’ll come find you later, see how it’s going.” I waited for him to say something else, something comforting, to tell me where he’d be or what it exactly it was he expected of me. We hadn’t even talked about what he wanted from me, why he wanted me to waitress for him. Obviously there was more to it. But he didn’t do any of those things. Instead, he turned and walked away, leaving me alone with Jessa.

My only consolation was that he hadn’t said goodbye to her, either.

“You look like shit,” Jessa said, shaking her head.

“Thanks,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”

“You need make up,” she said, ignoring my sarcasm. “And lots of it.”

She moved out from behind the bar and walked toward the back hallway, disappearing out of sight. I sat there for a second, not really sure what to do, and then finally, I got up and followed her.

“Anyway,” she said, when I found her in the dressing room, like we were in the middle of a conversation and she hadn’t just left me sitting out there like an asshole. “This is the dressing room.”

“Yeah,” I said, not able to resist getting a little dig in. “Colt told me.”

“Don’t,” she said, pushing her hair back from her face.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t act like you know Colt.”

“I wasn’t.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, almost like she wanted to say something else, but then she let out a little sigh, obviously deciding it wasn’t worth it.

“You can use anything you see here,” she said, opening a drawer filled with makeup in all different shades – lipsticks, blush, eyeshadows, liners, and foundations. All of it was still in its packages, neatly arranged and separated. “When you’re done, you can keep it. Don’t put anything that’s been opened back in the drawer. No one wants your nasty used shit. Got it?”

I nodded.

“We pool our tips,” she said. “So don’t even try to think about pocketing anything. They go in a tip jar on the bar, and we split them up at the end of the night.”

“Fine.”

“And since you’re not going to make any money looking like that, I guess I’m going to have to help you.”

She led me over to a dressing room mirror and went to work on my face, smoothing foundation, layering eye shadow, slicking lip gloss onto my lips.

“Better,” she said, when she was done, her tone conveying that she still thought I was subpar.

I turned to look at myself. I did look better. She’d evened out my skin tone, made my lips looked plump and pouty and my eyes smoky and sexy.

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it, even though I knew she’d only done it because if I made more money, she was going to make more money.

She shrugged, like she could care less. About anything. She leaned over the vanity, studying her reflection in the mirror as she arranged her hair around her shoulders. I watched her, wondering what it would be like to be so beautiful. When you were beautiful, people wanted to be near you. They wanted to help you, they thought you were good, worthy of something, whether it was attention or love or money. People wanted to be near beauty, almost as if they thought it would rub off on them.

Of course, there was another side to beauty. It could bring so much power that some people didn’t know how to handle it.

Jessa flicked her hair behind her ear. “The job is easy. You ask the guys what they want. You write it down. You bring it to me. Then you bring the drinks back to the customers. Got it?”’

I nodded.

She pulled the bottom of her vest down a tiny bit, adjusting it where it hit her stomach. There was a dusting of something shimmery on her skin, giving her a glittery glow.

I caught sight of something on her arms – red marks. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. There were tracks marks on her arms, faint, but there. Was Jessa into drugs? Or was she a cutter like me? Colt had made it perfectly clear there were no drugs allowed in the club, and yet this girl seemed like she was advertising that might not be the case.

Jessa saw me looking, but instead of trying to cover her arms or move them out of my line of sight like I would have, she gave me a smirk, almost like she was enjoying the fact that I was staring at her.

She reached over and grabbed a hair tie out of the glass jar that was sitting on the counter, moving slowly, making sure I got a good view of her arms.

I averted my eyes as she gathered her long hair up into a ponytail and slid the tie around it.

A second later, the lights in the room dimmed, and a slow, sexy song started, its beat pulsing through the club. “Showtime,” Jessa said, and grinned.

T
hree hours later
, I was so exhausted I thought I was going to drop right there in the middle of the club.

I’d been running back and forth to the bar, fetching drinks and filling orders all night. Besides the fact that it was exhausting, it actually hadn’t been that bad. The men definitely didn’t try to hide the fact that they were ogling my body, but with what was going on up the main stage, none of them spent too much time looking at me. Sure, their eyes lingered on my tits and ass as I walked by in my short little skirt, but it was only for a quick beat. While I might have been dressed provocatively, it was all relative. And in this place, I was practically wearing a snowsuit.

Up on stage, beautiful women, much more beautiful than I, danced and gyrated, removing their tops and showing off their gorgeous bodies. They flipped around a pole, showing off their toned legs and abs, their asses jiggling, causing the men to go crazy with appreciation.

I was serving a round of beers to a group of men in business suits when it happened. One of them looked at me and said, “Nice ass, sweetheart. How come you’re not up there, dancing?”

“Jesus, Neal,” one of the other guys at the table said. He shook his head and looked at me. “I’m sorry about Neal. He’s been drinking since lunch, and he’s obviously not in his right mind.”

Neal shrugged, then turned his back to me and started talking to the guy on the other side of him.

“No harm, no foul,” I said to his friend, shrugging. I’d made a pact with myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up over every dumb comment some drunk guy made. There were men drinking here, men celebrating, men getting horny and worked up without any kind of release. You could practically smell the testosterone pumping through the room.

“No, he’s…” The man motioned me closer, like he wanted to tell me something in confidence. “He’s not my friend. I just work with him.” He smiled at me. “Sorry, is it weird that I felt the need to point that out? I just didn’t want you to think I’d hang out with a guy like that.”

“No problem,” I said. “If we were all assumed to be friends with our co-workers, we’d all have a lot of explaining to do.” The words had just come out of me, my default whenever someone said something to me about friends or family. I tended to just agree with them, mostly because I had no friends or family, and so going along with whatever people said made me feel less awkward.

He held out a twenty-dollar bill to me. “Here,” he said, looking kind of sheepish. “You know, to make up for it.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I said. “I mean, it’s not your fault.” It wasn’t necessary, but I was hoping he was going to insist. I wasn’t doing this job for the money – if Colt was going to help me find Declan, if he did find Declan, that would be worth more than all the money in the world. But the thought of making twenty dollars just for walking some beers over from the bar was kind of blowing my mind, especially when I currently had eight dollars to my name.

“Go ahead, take it,” the guy said, pushing the bill into my hand. “It’ll make me feel better.”

“Thanks.” I took the money and slid it into the tip cup that was sitting on my tray.

“What’s your name?” the guy asked.

“Olivia,” I replied, before realizing it probably wasn’t a good idea to use your real name when you worked at a strip club. Wasn’t that why all the girls here used names like Diamond and Kat?

“Olivia,” the guy said. “That’s my sister’s name.” He gave me a smile, and suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my internal radar started going off. It wasn’t anything his tone or anything he’d done -- he sounded genuine and his smile didn’t seem fake. He was dressed in an expensive suit and had the semi-uninterested look of a guy who’d been dragged along on a work trip and didn’t necessarily even want to be spending his night in a strip club. I had no reason to think he was lying. His sister’s name probably was Olivia.

But I’d had enough experience with predators to know how this was one of their tactics. If a man wanted you to trust him, he’d find a way to connect with you. Something unassuming and innocent, something that would make you think he wasn’t a threat. It was how abusers were able to keep their victims close. They gave you a reason to connect with them and make you think you could trust them before exploiting that trust and confusing you about whether or not what they were doing was wrong.

“That’s nice,” I said vaguely.

“I’m Caleb,” he said, holding his hand out.

I took it and shook it. His grip was strong, his hand warm. Nothing about him on the surface seemed off – but my instinct was still telling me there was something more going on. It wasn’t even necessarily something nefarious. It wasn’t like I thought he was going to try to pay me to sleep with him or anything. It was just… I felt like there was more to him what I was seeing.