A moment passes where something unspoken passes between us—an acknowledgment that she suspects I’m lying and I know it.
She finally lifts the glass to her lips and takes a sip. “So, what do you think?”
“About what?”
“The club.”
I grin, never looking away. “It’s beautiful. Fantastic vibe.”
“And the girls?” She tries to keep it out of her voice, but there’s a tension there, something I can’t quite place. Surely, not jealousy. “What do you think of them?”
I keep my eyes locked on her stormy dark bourbon ones. “There’s one I’m very interested in.”
She dips her head, averting her gaze, and takes a much longer sip of her drink before she clears her throat. Her slender yet muscular shoulders and arms tense as she scans the club.
The incident certainly got her worked up, but this seems like something else. A rigidity and unease that goes far beyond two drunk men getting a little handsy with a stripper.
“You seem to be on edge tonight. Is something going on?”
Her head whips in my direction, her eyes hard, suspicious, and maybe even annoyed. “You mean besides the fact that one of my girls got grabbed by a total creep and I didn’t get here fast enough so you had to step in?”
And there it is…
The real reason she’s upset.
I smirk, turning slightly on my stool toward her. “That really rubs at you, doesn’t it? That I took care of the situation before you could.”
She presses her lips together in a firm line, her jaw tensing.
A chuckle slips out before I can bite it back, and I take another sip of my beer, never tearing my eyes away from her. “It does.” I set the glass down on the bar top and lean toward her. “It really bothers you that someone else stepped in.”
My observation causes her to shift on the stool. “My father has run security for the Hawkes longer than I’ve been alive.”
“And that means it automatically becomes your job?”
Drumming her nails on the bar top, she releases a long sigh and shakes her head. “No. I wanted it to be. I could have gone to law school or been a doctor like my brother. I had the grades for it, but I stayed in the family business.”
Why?
She’s clearly intelligent, focused, driven—and the type of student who had grades good enough to get her into those types of schools. Yet, after experiencing the way she took me down so easily tonight, I can see how it may have been the right career move for her to work with her father.
That move was effortless, and on a man who has at least fifty pounds and a foot on her, she made it look like child’s play.
This woman is a force of nature, like a fucking hurricane that can’t be brought to submission by anything or anyone.
She will always come out on top and be in control.
Or at least try to be.
And tonight, she wasn’t.
For those few moments it took that fucker to grab the dancer and for me to intervene, she wasn’t doing what she’s best at; she wasn’t doing her job. Or, at least, she thinks she wasn’t. But I know she was keeping an eye on the other three guys near the stage, watching out for the girl on the pole. And it’s impossible to watch, let alone be in, two places at once.
My chest tightens, and a dull ache forms there watching her struggle with what she sees as a failure.
I lean back, giving her some space as she shifts uneasily in her stool, trying to gather herself back to the stoic, controlled woman she undoubtedly typically is.
A new song starts, signaling a change in dancers on the stage, but I don’t even so much as glance in that direction. The only woman in this entire place that could hold my interest is sitting beside me right now.
