“Queenie?” I ask.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d be seeing you in here or not, Phoebe, but I’m glad you stopped by.”
This is the woman Tucker spent time with? We look… nothing alike. Her chocolate brown eyes are warm and inviting, but the cat-eye makeup gives a come-hither vibe I couldn’t pull off if I tried. She looks sexy. I’d look like a drag queen.
Yeah, this was a big mistake.
“You okay, sweetheart?”
Clutching my purse, I remind myself that I’m here for a reason. “Can we talk?”
“Sure. Let me turn off the camera in the room, otherwise Pacino will burst in to throw a fit,” she says, moving back to the computer and tapping long, fake nails on the keyboard.
“This room,” Queenie says, leading me down a short hallway to an open room.
Even the way she walks is sexy. She glides. If I had on those shoes, I’d be clomping and stumbling.
How am I supposed to compete with her?
The door shuts, and she turns to me with a smile. “What do you want to know?”
A large massage table sits in the center of the room, and I frown. “I thought this was a brothel.”
“It is. We have themed rooms for the experience our clients want. This is the Happy Ending Room.”
Happy Ending Room. Okay, then. “Oh.”
“It’s a lot to take in for someone like you, isn’t it?”
“Excuse me?”
She holds her hands up. “I didn’t mean that in a bad way. This is just… normal for me. I come from this world. It’s not often I’m reminded that it’s not normal for everyone else.”
“I’m not as sheltered as everyone thinks.”
“Oh, I believe that.”
All I can do is stare at her. Plump lips that look like they were filled, covered in gloss catch in the dim light. I know she’s had work done, and I just pray her chest falls into that category. Considering I’m barely an A cup, if she’s natural, it’s just proof God isn’t fair.
“Phoebe?”
“You and me… We’re so different.”
“Which is why he’s never wanted more than a quick fuck with me,” she says.
The thought of them together—now that I know how hot she is—makes me want to crawl into a hole and just die there. “I see.”
“He wants something real with you, Phoebe. And if you’re here, it means you want that, too. You’re scoping out what you think is your competition, but you have none. That man is crazy for you.”
That makes me feel a little better. “Does this make me a crazy girlfriend?” I ask with an uneasy chuckle. “Coming to my boyfriend’s work and talking to the woman he used to sleep with?”
Laughing, she shakes her head. “We fucked, sweetheart. That’s it.”
Notreally making things better there. “Is it… He said… But I need to ask—”
“We have nothing going on,” she assures me with a shake of her head. “The last time he fucked me was the morning after you moved in. And he was thinking about you while we did it.”
My eyes widen. “How do you know that?”
