Daniel squeezed her hand. “Are you okay?”
She nodded. He watched her as if he expected her to elaborate, but she didn’t particularly want to talk. She wanted him to talk to her again. Every time he put his voice and his breath in her ear, all her blood rushed downward.
“How’s your head?” he asked.
“A lot better,” she answered truthfully.
“I guess you don’t want a drink,” he said doubtfully.
She shook her head. She could have used one, but there was way too much over-the-counter painkiller in her bloodstream for a drink to be safe.
“I’m drinking a soda now myself,” he said. “I had to cut myself off.”
She laughed. “You don’t seem drunk, but you seem very careful.”
Oh, he treated her to that rare, open laugh she loved so much. “You’re right. It really has been fun tonight. Colton and his posse have become my best buds, which tells you a lot about how drunk we all are. Thank you.” He kissed her on the lips.
She hadn’t been expecting the kiss. It was so fast that her heart opened to it after it was over.
Daniel had sat down in a huge booth scattered with shot glasses and entire bottles of liquor. He scooted over to give her room, pulling her by the hand. Obediently she sat beside him. He let go of her hand and sandwiched his fingers between her crossed thighs. It was a signal of possession that was not allowed in polite settings and was barely socially acceptable even in a strip club. Wendy felt like the presence of his hand was a hot rock sinking and melting through the ice of her body. They were fully clothed. They were not really together. And she had never been so turned on.
“Where is everybody?” she asked, looking around. Except for them, the booth was empty.
Daniel nodded toward the nearest pole, where a stripper talked with Colton. They didn’t look like they were in intimate conversation. They looked like she was giving him instructions. Colton reached up, braced his hands wide apart on the pole, and pulled himself close to it. He was able to hold his body up for several seconds before collapsing to the floor. Lorelei and her friends clapped for him as they approached the table. Colton stood and bowed to them, grinning goofily.
“This has been going on for a while,” Daniel said, nodding to Colton’s driver and bodyguard, who stood to one side of the pole as if they’d already taken their turns. “It started out with everybody displaying their big guns.”
He slid his fingers out from between her thighs, making her shiver. He pulled back his T-shirt sleeve to show her his thick bicep. “Go ahead. You can touch it.”
Seeing him like this was hilarious. She humored him by trying and failing to wrap her hand around his upper arm. “Wow,” she said dreamily.
Grinning, he put his arm down. “Then the lady here”—he gestured to the stripper, who was now laughing with both Colton and Lorelei—“came over and told us that pole dancing is the true test of upper body strength. And here we are.”
“Did you take a turn on the pole?” Wendy asked in disbelief.
“Ha! I’m not that drunk.” He sipped his soda, made a face, and set it down.
Wendy was very glad Lorelei was now hanging out with classy young actresses instead of the reality star and the celebrity hairdresser. These girls had spotless reputations. And they were now taking turns getting instructions from the stripper on how to tackle the pole. In their company, Lorelei wouldn’t look bad when she inevitably tried it.
Sure enough, Lorelei came bounding up to the booth. She asked Wendy, “Am I allowed to pole dance?” Her face fell. “Don’t look at me that way. It was a fitness craze a few years ago.”
“I know,” Wendy said. “Like boxing!”
Daniel pinched her.
Lorelei still stood in front of Wendy, looking unsure.
“Go ahead,” Wendy said. “I think it’s an okay PR move. Even I know how to pole dance.”
“Yay!” Lorelei jumped up on the small stage. The men in the party gave each other knowing looks as they slid into the booth with Lorelei’s friends to watch. There was an interim while the stripper offered Lorelei some pointers and the men poured Lorelei’s friends some shots. Then Lorelei braced herself on the pole as Colton had. She couldn’t hold herself very long at all, but her dismount was a lot more graceful. She curved her body around the bottom of the pole. The men cheered for her.
“Five point five,” Daniel whispered to Wendy in his dead-on British accent, sounding exactly like an announcer in the summer Olympics. “Five point six. Five point five.”
Wendy was laughing so hard that she didn’t realize Lorelei was standing in front of her again until Daniel nudged her. “What?”
“Your turn!” Lorelei exclaimed. “You just said you knew how to do it.”
“Immersion therapy,” Daniel murmured to Wendy. “Hair of the dog. I dare you.”
Wendy raised her eyebrows. “Oh, you dare me, do you? You just want to see me do a pole dance.”
“Duh,” he said.
Wendy told Lorelei, “Let us negotiate for just a second.” She whispered in Daniel’s ear, “We’re supposed to be together. Isn’t this going to ruin your reputation with these guys?”
“Ruin my reputation? You just made my reputation. It’s every man’s dream to be with a nice lady who just happens by accident to know her way around a stripper pole.”
“Every man’s dream, or every fourteen-year-old boy’s dream?”
“That kind of fantasy doesn’t change with age.”
“Is that right?” She examined him more closely. “Are you okay?”
“Very.” He grinned at her. “Why?”
“You don’t seem like yourself, even taking the drunkenness into account. It’s not like you to tell me what you’re thinking. Suddenly I’m finding out that your mind is as dirty as mine.”
He raised his brows. “You doubted this?”
“Yes.”
He gave her a small, naughty smile. “Never doubt this.”
She threw back her head and laughed. “You’re sure you’re okay? I just heard a little hint of British accent.”
“Uh-oh.” He covered his mouth with one hand.
She set her forehead against his and asked, “If I do this for you, what will you do for me?”
His eyes widened, filling her vision, black like the darkest night. Suddenly this bargain had turned serious. His lips parted, but he didn’t say a word.
“Kidding,” she said breathlessly, scooting away from him. “This one’s gratis, in celebration of your newfound fun.” She turned to Lorelei. “Get the DJ to put on some Missy Elliott.”
“Um . . . kay.” Lorelei scampered away.
As Wendy slipped out of the booth, Daniel slid to the seat where she’d been. “Your stripping soundtrack is Missy Elliott?”
“She was very big in 2003, and this was my small protest against the patriarchy. While stripping. I know. Shut up.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he said. “Please don’t fall on your injured head.”
“Don’t worry about me. Though bare skin gives you traction. I think it’s going to be harder to do with my clothes on—”
“Keep your clothes on,” he stressed.
“I love it when a man says that to me. So sexy. Instills a lot of confidence.” She laughed at the face he made at her. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ll have trouble. I haven’t done it in ten years, but I’m sure it’s like riding a bicycle, except without the carefree innocent overtones.” The creepy beat of her favorite Missy groove pumped through the speakers. “That’s my cue. Here I go.”
The helpful stripper waited onstage for her. “I don’t need any pointers, if you know what I mean,” Wendy told her. The girl swept her arm toward the pole: all yours.
The cheers from her booth had gotten so loud that they were attracting the attention of the rest of the bar. Shadowy figures turned their backs on their own pole-dancing ladies and approached their corner of the club, curious. Wendy would have felt intimidate
d if she hadn’t been good at this.
With a wink at Daniel, she braced herself on the pole as the losers had done, then hefted herself up, splitting her legs on either side of the pole and pointing her toes. The booth was whooping, but she couldn’t pay attention to them. Pole dancing took concentration. She allowed gravity to spin her body down the pole. Then she launched herself up again and wrapped herself around the pole this time, spinning down. After a quick calculation of whether she could hold herself upside down on the pole by her ankles in these particular high-heeled boots, she took a chance on the affirmative.
The hard part was holding herself up by the arms while she balanced her body upside down in the first place. But it looked like the real trick was letting go with her hands and hanging there by her feet. She could tell by the slight resistance that her hair was touching the floor, which, strangely, she was beginning not to mind. All of Vegas was finding its way into her hair, and all of Vegas had taken a piece.
The applause for her was growing wild. The thought passed through her mind that if she got fired from Stargazer, maybe she really could go back to her first career. She could laugh at this now, almost, because she had hope of salvaging Lorelei’s image.
She did a few more tricks, until her head wound began to throb from all the blood rushing to her brain. She dismounted from the pole, curtsied ironically, high-fived the stripper, and jumped down from the stage. The table went crazy. The women kept screaming “Wow!” at her and the men were agog. She focused on Daniel, who’d been laughing moments before but now looked dangerous, his face full of dark shadows, the smudge under his eye still visible.
She shouldn’t come on to him. It wasn’t fair to lead him on, and she couldn’t risk her job by following through. But she wanted him. She breathed deeply, feeling her nipples tight against her bra, and imagined him wrapping his hands around her heavy breasts. She was twenty-eight years old, a grown woman, and so needy tonight. Why did the man she was falling for have to be the one she couldn’t have?
Against her better judgment, she slid into his lap. He still watched her seriously, which was starting to make her nervous. She tried to lighten the mood by saying, “Boy, will I be sore tomorrow. I’m in okay shape now, thanks to Sarah’s badgering, but I was so much better at eighteen. I used to be built like a truck.” When he looked grim and didn’t respond, she clarified, “A feminine, dainty truck. What’s wrong?”
“We have to get out of here,” he barked. “Now.”
Heat rushed to her cheeks. Daniel wanted to leave with her. She couldn’t say yes to sex with him, yet she’d never wanted anything more in her life.
But as she stared into his dark eyes, racking her brain for what she should say, she realized that wasn’t what he’d meant. His tone was wrong. And then he said, “All of us need to get out of here.”
“Why?” she breathed.
“Someone drugged me.” He nodded to his glass, pushed to the middle of the huge table. “Someone is trying to get past me to Colton. Or the guy who’s been after you is trying to get past me to you.” His intense gaze dissolved into a vacant expression. He looked lost.
A chill swept over Wendy. She felt afraid for the first time. It was not in Daniel’s nature to look lost.
“What?” she squeaked. “Like, a roofie?”
He nodded solemnly at her.
She hopped off his lap, jerked him up by the hand, and dragged him through the club, despite him calling, “Wait. Wendy, wait.” Finally he stopped next to the main stage. Her pulling didn’t budge him. When she turned to him, desperate and questioning, he said, “We have to tell the bodyguards, at least.”
“I’ll call them from the cab,” she promised. “We can’t screw with that right now. We have to get you to the hospital. People die from that stuff.”
“I only drank a sip.”
“You don’t know how much drug was in that sip, though. Come on.” She tugged at his hand.
“We can’t go to the hospital by ourselves,” he insisted. “We can’t leave you out in the open now that I can’t protect you.”
“It’ll be crowded,” she reasoned. “Nobody would dare do anything there. We’ll walk to the crowded taxi stand and take a cab to the crowded hospital. Stop arguing. Don’t make me cause a scene. That’s not good for PR.”
She kept tugging his hand until he reluctantly took a step after her, then another, and followed her through the packed club, dancers jostling them on all sides. When Colton brushed past them, she put out her other hand to grab him so she could warn him what was going on. But he’d already hurried three deep into the crowd. She kept going, pulling Daniel out the door.
She flinched in panic as bodies moved toward them. She’d forgotten about the paparazzi lying in wait for Lorelei and Colton. She forced her heart to stand down, and the photographers, realizing she and Daniel weren’t the celebrities they were after, retreated.
In the taxi, she phoned Franklin, then Colton’s bodyguard. They couldn’t hear their phones in the din, and she had a flash of panic that someone else would get a mouthful of tranquilizer. But on another try, Franklin answered. She told him what had happened and extracted a pledge from him to close the party down and tell the club manager—quietly—what they suspected. Then she phoned Detective Butkus and left a message. She sounded stupid to her own ears. A stolen phone, stolen hair, and a roofie. Their case would hardly be high on the priority list for the crime task force.
Frustrated, she clicked her phone off and looked over at Daniel. He stared out the window, his head bobbing strangely as the car bumped over seams in the pavement. Anxious to make some connection with him, she smoothed her hand onto his knee. Without looking at her, he placed his hand over hers.
An hour ago she would have thrilled at this intimate gesture. Now it just seemed strange, and it certified how sick he was.
At the emergency room, still dragging him by the hand, she marched up to the counter and said, “Poisoned.” Four people rushed from behind the counter and led him through swinging double doors to the bustling network of examining rooms. Wendy followed, not sure whether she was allowed. After all, she was not Daniel’s wife or his girlfriend or even his friend, really, but his business rival, his enemy. This would become clear as soon as they wrapped up their jobs in Vegas and returned to New York. But right now, she was determined not to leave him.
A nurse pointed her into a tiny examining room and shoved a clipboard into her hands, along with Daniel’s wallet. Wendy paused a moment over the expensive black leather, then drew out his insurance card. She examined his New York driver’s license and slowly, neatly copied his name onto the form: Blackstone, Daniel, I. The act of putting pen to paper and scratching down this representation of him tugged at her deep inside, as if helping him in this small way would heal his whole body. With difficulty she resisted the urge to dot the i’s with little hearts.
Soon he wandered in. He clung to the doorjamb for a moment, then pushed away from it, tripped over her feet, and managed to land in the chair beside her.
“Jesus, I’m toasted.” He laughed.
“There’s a whole bed for you to lie down on.” She knew instinctively that he wouldn’t take her suggestion. Lying down would mean he was a patient, out of control. As long as he sat beside her in a chair, he was as healthy and as free to leave as she was, theoretically.
He shook his head. Then he blinked rapidly, as if shaking his head had disoriented him.
Tentatively she reached behind him. She placed her hand on the other side of his head, fingers sliding into his coarse hair, and pressed his head down toward her shoulder. She was a lot shorter than him. She sat up straighter and squared her shoulders to give his head a place to settle.
He resisted, his head pressing up against her hand.
She whispered the words he’d said to her the night before: “Give up.”
After a final sigh, he relaxed against her shoulder with more weight than she’d expected. She remained steady for him, s
houlder firm, while she filled out the rest of his forms. She listed herself as his emergency contact and felt another flood of warmth in her belly.
“Now, tell me what happened,” she said, setting the clipboard across her knees. “How do you know you were drugged? Did you taste it in your drink?”
“Not at first,” he said. “When I thought back on it later, yeah, it had tasted salty. But I wasn’t expecting it, so it didn’t occur to me until my face went numb. I’ve felt that way before.”
“All the girls give you the date rape drug?” she joked. Then she realized she shouldn’t be kidding about this. “When?” She heard her own alarm as her voice pitched higher. “Here in Vegas?”
“No.” He waved her panic away with one loose hand. “Back home. A long time ago. High school.”
“Somebody slipped you a roofie?” she asked in disbelief.
“No.” He paused so long that Wendy was about to remind him what they’d been talking about when he sat up straight and said, “It was on 9/11, when my brother died.”
“Oh.” He’d always seemed so aloof. Now she wasn’t just seeing him loose for the first time. She was seeing him more vulnerable than ever. And she was beginning to understand how his hauteur was a protective shell for the pain underneath.
“The first few days,” he said, “I had a hard time holding it together. And, you know, holding it together is everything.” He took a deep breath. “My dad told the doctor to give me something. He needed to fix the situation and he couldn’t help my brother anymore, so he fixed me. I did feel calmer on the surface, but underneath, the horror was still there, just weighed down with sedative where I couldn’t access it, like oil floating on water.”
“You were how old?” Wendy thought back to 2001 and how surreal it had felt to see images of the Twin Towers collapsing from her living room in West Virginia. “Sixteen?”
He nodded.
“And you’ve been trying to make it up to your dad ever since.”
He looked down, black brows furrowed, lips pursed in concentration on that lost day he couldn’t help. She’d known him when he was college age. It was easy to picture him younger still: thinner, in a rock band T-shirt rather than a designer one, his face more open and trusting.