AllFreeNovel
Share Us
No. She could not tell him.
“Rose? Didja hear me?”
Realizing the other dancer was waiting expectantly for her reaction to the flowers, Izzie nodded. “Yes, thanks Leah.”
“Not a problem. It was pick ’em up or trip over ’em,” she said with a cheery smile. Without the stage makeup and the sequins, the young woman looked so fresh-faced and wholesome an average set of parents would have asked her to babysit.
She’d been the first of the dancers to befriend Izzie when she’d first taken the job at Leather and Lace. The others had been slower to warm up, especially Harry’s wife, Delilah, who’d been the featured dancer up until a couple of years ago when she married her boss. Now she served as a sort of warden to the others…and hadn’t liked that Izzie wasn’t interested in her rules and regulations. She especially hadn’t liked that she couldn’t get her husband to order Izzie to listen to her…and that the Crimson Rose had become hugely popular.
The rest of them had all come around, though, especially since they had all started bringing home more money every weekend that she performed.
“How did you get into this, Leah?” she asked.
The girl shrugged. “Typical story. My parents divorced, father split out west somewhere. Mom remarried an asshole who tried to touch me after she’d passed out on their wedding night.”
Izzie instinctively reached out and put her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, I survived. Stabbed him in the wrist with a fork and took off. Never looked back.”
“Do you…” she didn’t know how to proceed without seeming judgmental. It just seemed so sad to think of this young woman making this, dancing at Leather and Lace, her only career goal. For Izzie, it was a part-time thrill to stay in shape and save her sanity. Some of the women here, however, saw no other future for themselves.
“What?”
“Do you think you’ll do something else when you get tired of this?”
Leah nodded, her blond curls bouncing around her pretty, heart-shaped face. “I got my GED last year and I’m taking college classes. I’m planning to be a nurse.”
“Good for you.”
Hearing footsteps upstairs, Izzie glanced at her watch. It was only six-a couple of hours before her first number. Usually Nick showed up later than this. But hearing the deep, male voice from upstairs, she immediately stiffened.
“That’s our sex-on-a-stick bodyguard I hear up there.”
“Damn,” Izzie muttered, immediately whirling around. “Stall him if he comes down the stairs, okay?”
“You still playing the ‘nobody can see me’game with him?”
Izzie nodded. “I don’t want him to see me. Please help me.”
The woman offered her a big smile. “You got it…in exchange for one of those flowers your secret admirer sent you.”
“I’ll do you one better,” Izzie said as she pushed open her dressing room door. She grabbed the vase and thrust the bouquet at the young woman. “You can have all of them. Just don’t let him near my door.”
Either Leah was true to her word, or else Nick hadn’t yet ventured downstairs. Whatever the case Izzie had privacy for the next twenty minutes. Long enough to get her hair extensions clipped in place and put her mask on. Only after she’d yanked it into position did she realize she’d forgotten her false eyelashes.
“Damn Harry for not giving me a lock,” she muttered, glancing at the closed door. If she took the mask off to put her lashes on, she risked Nick walking in on her. No, he hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to be alone with her as the Crimson Rose, but she couldn’t count on her luck lasting forever.
Frowning at her reflection, she did a quick evaluation, wondering if she really needed the lashes. Her eyes had disappeared. She looked like the Marquis de Sade.
“Need the lashes,” she muttered.
She’d been putting false lashes on her eyelids for years, she could probably do it…well, not blindfolded, but masked.
“Sure,” she whispered as she bent toward the mirror. Grabbing one lash, she dabbed special glue on it, then carefully reached into the eyehole of her mask and applied it.
“One down,” she said as she blinked rapidly, pretty proud of herself.
The second one was a little trickier, mainly because it was hard to see out of the first heavily lashed eye. But she managed it. And a moment later, when she heard voices in the hall, she was very glad she hadn’t taken the chance and removed the mask.
“Hey, Nick, how’s it shakin’ baby?” a woman’s voice said. Loudly.
