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She twisted her hands in her lap and stared down at them. “You have to understand we were dirt-poor, my family. My father was an alcoholic, was off the job more than he was on. My mother was doing all she could to make ends meet, but her hair salon wasn’t bringing in much. So when that girl—when she told me how much money I could make dancing, I was flabbergasted. I had dance training. It was one of the few things I was able to do because the local teacher let me study without paying because she thought I had potential.”
He blinked. “So you started stripping?”
She nodded. “I made more money in a week dancing than my mother made in a month cutting hair. I took it home, paid for things. But when my father found out what I was doing, he hit the roof.” Her mouth turned down. “They weren’t making ends meet. My sister had no clothes but my money was dirty money. So he kicked me out.”
A frown creased his forehead. “How old were you?”
“Seventeen. And believe me,” she said bitterly, “nothing was ever so good. My father was not a nice drunk.”
His gaze darkened. “God, Bailey, you were a baby. How were you even allowed to be in a bar?
“I lied. Got a fake ID.”
He sat down beside her, rested his elbows on his knees and pressed his hands to his temples. “So you move from Tampa to Vegas where you go to school? And you keep stripping?”
“I moved there to dance. To pay my way through school. The money is fantastic in Vegas if you know what you’re doing. I danced at a couple of different clubs, learned the industry, then I landed a slot at the Red Room. Every girl wanted to work there. It was very burlesque in the way we did the shows, they had the most beautiful women, and it was where all the high rollers hung out. I made a ton of money, easily paid for school every year.”
He scrunched his face up. “Didn’t it bother you the way men looked at you?”
“Like I belonged in the bedroom?” She threw his words back at him with a lift of her chin. “It was a job, Jared. Like any other occupation. I went to work, made a lot of money and got out when I could.”
“You took your clothes off in front of strangers. That is not a normal job.”
Heat rose up inside of her, headed for the surface. “My body was all I had. That was it. My sister, Annabelle, is still in Lakeland, working a ten-dollar-an-hour job and dealing with an alcoholic husband of her own.” She stared at him, her frustration bubbling over. “I had dreams, Jared. Just like you had. Except you had a brain and I had my body so I used it.”
His gaze darkened. “You also have an incredibly sharp brain. Why didn’t you use it?”
“I didn’t know that.” Frustration grabbed at her, tore at her composure. “As far as I was concerned, I was low-income trash from the swamp. And no one ever tried to convince me differently. Not my teachers, classmates, not the girls who wouldn’t let me into their cliques… I was the poor Williams girl who was never going to amount to anything. Well, dammit, I did.”
He rubbed his hands over his eyes. “St. John is not your real name?”
She shook her head. “I changed it when I left Vegas for California.”
“Is Bailey your real name?”
“Yes. My mother named me after her favorite drink.”
His eyes widened at that. He was silent for a long time, head in his hands. When he finally looked up at her, his expression was bleak. “When you say high-end stripper, what does that mean?”
Did she do favors for her clients on the side? Something inside her retracted. Curled up before it could be killed off. Before she showed him exactly how much that hurt.
“You want to know if I slept with the men I danced for?”
“Yes,” he answered harshly.
“Would it make any difference if I said yes?” Would it make the stigma of what she’d been worse?
“Goddammit, Bailey, answer the question.”
“I danced,” she said stonily, “and then I went home and studied. Nothing more. Ever.”
He let out a long breath. “Where does Alexander Gagnon fit in all this?”
She laced her hands together and stared into the hissing, sparking fire. “Every week at the Red Room, the owner would have his favorite dancer do a special number at the end of the night. You were the star attraction, wore fancy red lingerie, got tons of tips for it. That week, he chose me.” She registered the speculative look on Jared’s face and chose to ignore it. “Alexander came to the Red Room for the first time on a Tuesday night. He gave me a huge tip and asked me to have a drink with him. For some reason, I refused. He was well-dressed, had this aura about him you couldn’t ignore, but there was something I didn’t trust. And in that business it was all about instinct.
“He didn’t want any of the other girls. He came back two other nights after that, always tipping heavily and asking me to have a drink with him. On the third night, I said no, went to my dressing room and started taking off my makeup. I was the last girl to leave. The others were all in a rush to go out that night and I was just going home to study so I took my time. At one point, I had this feeling I wasn’t alone and I turned around and there he was—Alexander,” she qualified. “Just standing there.”
His gaze narrowed. “How did he get past the bouncers?”
She grimaced. “I found out later he’d bribed Bruno, my manager, to make them look the other way. I don’t know what Alexander had on Bruno to make him do that—Bruno was a big gambler, he owed people a lot of money so maybe that was it. Anyway,” she said, waving a hand, “I was shocked, totally thrown. I told him to get out. He completely ignored me.”
“Then what?” Jared growled.
“He propositioned me.”
“What do you mean propositioned you?”
“He offered me fifty thousand dollars to sleep with him.”
A dangerous glimmer entered his eyes. “For one night?”
“Yes.”
“What happened when you turned him down?”
Her fingers tightened around her glass. “He told me everyone has a price. To name mine. I told him to get the hell out again and this time he did.”
“And that was it?”
“He came back two more nights to see if I’d changed my mind. I never saw him after that.”
“Jesus—Bailey—” He stood up and paced to the fire. Raked his hands through his hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you?” She gave him a disbelieving look. “You, the man who just wrote a manifesto about how women belong in the bedroom, not the boardroom? You have to be joking.”
“Oh for God’s sake, you know that doesn’t apply to you.” He gave his head a shake. “What did he say to you on the yacht? You looked shaken.”
“He realized that nobody knows. That I’ve hidden my past.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “You interrupted us then.”
His gaze sharpened on her face. “You can’t run away from the past forever. It always catches up with you.”
Her mouth twisted. “So I should just tell everyone I was a stripper? Get it out of the way? I have worked my entire life to put my past behind me, Jared. I’m not ashamed of what I did. But others will judge me. ‘Jared Stone’s chief marketing officer—former stripper.’ How do you think that will go over?”
He was silent. Because she was right.
“He still wants you,” he muttered after a long moment. “He wants to win. That much is clear.”
Bailey felt her past close like a noose around her neck. Finally it had caught up with her. She’d always thought it might. But did it have to be now? Right at the moment she’d thought she just might rise above it?
Tears of frustration singed the back of her eyes. She drained the rest of her wine and set the glass on the ground. “I am now a liability,” she said quietly. “You need to take me out of this presentation, Jared. Eliminate me from the equation. You know it and I know it.”
Blue eyes tangled with darker blue. The flicker in his was almost indiscernible, but she didn’t miss it. The acknowledgment that she was right.
“Pull me out,” she repeated dully, getting to her feet. “It’s the right thing to do.”
And then she walked away before she bawled her eyes out.
* * *
Jared watched Bailey go, so dumbstruck by what she’d just told him he was actually incapable of pursuing. She’d been a high-end stripper in Vegas. She had taken her clothes off for total strangers every night, pocketed scads of money and put herself through school with it.
The idea of Bailey putting herself on display like that, letting men drool over her like that, was so far-fetched it was almost laughable. He would have laughed if he wasn’t so appalled. Here he’d been picturing her selling shoes at the local mall to put herself through school. Making cappuccinos at the local café…instead she’d been balling up the cash men shoved in her G-string to survive and sacrificing her innocence along with it.
Dear God. And then there was the image of Bailey dancing in expensive lingerie on a stage that wouldn’t leave his head…how many men had gotten off seeing her like that? And why did that idea torture him?
