Of course, he wanted to talk about Serenity. She probably was the girl he liked. The human girl I’d been thinking of nonstop, eversince she’d walked into my office looking vulnerable but so determined and strong, and mustering so much courage and enthusiasm for an interview that many applicants seemed to struggle with.
Hopefully I could hide from Hunter that she was the real reason I was here tonight, eager to learn more about her and maybe even be around her lovely presence. Though I think she worked in the kitchen, and not like anything could happen between us anyway. “Oh, was that the human girl who works here? Applying for the logo designer or something?”
He laughed. “Yeah, the one I specifically talked to you about. Like you’ve ever forgotten a name or a face.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Sometimes I think you know me too well.”
He reached over and patted me on my covered shoulder, being careful with the movement, which I appreciated, as well as the momentary sense of normal human interaction. “Twenty-five years of knowing each other will tend to do that.”
I swirled the amber liquid of my drink, taking a gulp and a moment to consider my response. “In answer to your question… she seems like a very talented young woman with a lot of potential.”
“She sure is. She’s the best worker here. She’s also a human alone in New Omaha who needs a break. You get what I’m saying?”
I nodded. I rarely drank these days, and the strong liquor was already starting to loosen my inhibitions, and my words alongside them. “I get it, brother.” And we had grown up like brothers, all three of us, even though he and Dagger were the ones actually related. “She’s certainly got a passion for design, but I haven’t decided yet.”
He tilted his beer again, leaning forward and resting his thickly muscled arms on the bar. “I was really hoping she might catch that break at Midas. You know, considering she’s got my personal recommendation. She needs the chance. Badly.”
I held up my palm gently to interrupt. “Chance, yes. And she is talented. But there are a lot of applicants—”
The music grew louder and abruptly changed to a dance songwith country and western vibes. The lights on stage glowed brighter as the crowd quieted, all eyes focused on a broad pair of cherry red curtains from where the dancers must wait to make their entrance.
Hunter looked a bit pale of all sudden. “God, I hope this goes well,” he mumbled.
And from among the velvet curtains burst the sexiest cowgirl I’d ever seen in my life. With beautiful auburn hair and a beaming smile.
Serenity.
My mouth gaped and I almost dropped my glass.
She skipped across the stage toward the pole in her knee-high leather boots, cowboy hat and cute outfit. And the fires within me sparked to life too. Heat washed through my body. What the hell was she doing up there? She was a dishwasher, a cleanup girl. I always logged details mentally, even minor ones, and Hunter had definitely said that.
Taking a large gulp from my drink and tearing my eyes away for a moment, I looked at the man in question, whose eyes had a wild look about them as he shuffled awkwardly on his bar stool. “Hey, you said she was a dishwasher,” I said.
He clunked his beer on the bar and swiveled on his stool to face the show fully. He spoke from the side of his mouth. “This is how badly she needs the money. She begged me for a chance on stage. The first human dancer I’ve had.” He paused, his face mesmerized, fixed in a frown of surprise. The next words came out softly, slowly, in a way hard to describe, as if it were speaking about his own wife up there. “And, uh, she’s a quiet girl too, she…”
She wasn’t acting very quiet right now. The rhythmic bobs of her hips and slinky leg movements weren’t those of a wallflower. She had a toy six-shooter in a holster, and was pointing it out into the audience playfully, pretending to target individual guys, shooting off imaginary bullets before dancing the revolver barrel across her neck, chest, down to her slender abs which she’d revealed by pulling up her tank.
Super sexy and classy.
The response came in a tsunami of clapping and whistling. Men and even some women were stumbling out of their seats, bills in their hands, beckoning her to lean forward so they could thrust money into the waistband of her short denim cutoffs or holster. One guy, looked like a tiger shifter from his red hair, had a whole fistful of cash. Gazing upward at the edge of the stage, he pointed at her hat and waved his money. She took it off in a graceful bow and he dumped the wad into it. She put the hat back on and blew him a kiss. The tiger’s eyes were alive with desire.
And he wasn’t the only one feeling that way. My fingernails were starting to glow. That hardly ever happened these days. I flapped at the collar of my shirt, my cheeks and forehead pulsating as Serenity held the whole club in the palm of her small human hand. Holy shit. I couldn’t believe it was the same girl who’d been sitting in my office. Just yesterday.
I looked at Hunter again. The guy was drinking it all in, I couldn’t see his face properly because he’d turned his focus so intensely to the cowgirl show everyone was going crazy for.
My heart was thumping, fire in my blood pulsing, raging. Maybe I could stop interviewing other candidates at Midas after all. I couldn’t stand the thought of other men seeing her this way—
A sickening, terrifying pain coursed across my hand and up my arm. Like it had been smacked with a sledgehammer. Gasping, dizzy, I turned to see a waitress lying on the floor, writhing, screaming. Oh fuck. She’d touched me.
I stumbled off my stool, steadying myself on the bar with the hand she hadn’t touched, my knees near to giving in from my own agonizing pain.
The bouncer’s attention, like everyone else in the room, had been captivated by Serenity’s dance. The waitress must have just thought the cordon was a regular VIP one, slipped past it, and notknown about my condition. Now she was wailing and shuddering violently for her mistake.
The music stopped and all eyes turned in our direction. The poor girl, suffering what I knew would be pain like she’d never felt before, screamed so loud she could have had a knife buried eight inches into her chest.
Hunter looked horrified. I tried to stammer out some words, to tell him to help the waitress, get her to a hospital, get her some morphine, but my own burning agony from us touching had now spread across my torso, pummeling me like a dozen thugs swinging electrified hockey sticks. I dropped to my knees, suffocating under the relentless pulses of malice my own body was punishing me with.
My vision slowly blurred, but it didn’t stop me from seeing Serenity still on stage, staring straight at me with wide eyes. A look of horrified shock on her face.
