Belle: hello, you snail-eating, gilet-wearing, regatta-attending posh bloke, you. I won’t be able to join you at the opera today, but you may stop at my apartment any time after midnight and I promise to hit those high notes. – B.
That message, too, remained unanswered.
I worked into the evening, manning the bar along with six more bartenders, clad in a ruffled lace overbust corset dress. The scent of my own sweat had become so familiar to me over the years I’d built my career, I relished it.
I served drinks, cut limes, and hurried to the storage room to fetch more cocktail umbrellas. I danced on the bar, flirted with men and women, and rang the bell several times, signaling a tip-a-thon.
The burgundy curtain had ascended over the front stage, revealing a live band in tuxes. Their jazzy tune soaked into the tall walls. The burlesque dancers prowled slowly across the stage in high heels and sage-colored sequined dresses. People hooted, clapped, and whistled. I stopped, a crate of cocktail umbrellas in my arms, sweat dripping from my forehead, and watched them with a grin.
My decision to buy Madame Mayhem wasn’t accidental or offhanded. It stemmed from my wanting to promote the idea that being a sexual creature wasn’t sinful. Sex didn’t mean dirt. It could be casual and still be beautiful. My dancers weren’t strippers. You couldn’t touch them—you couldn’t even breathe in their direction without getting kicked out of the venue—but they took control of their sexuality and did whatever they goddamn pleased.
This, in my opinion, was true strength.
When I got back behind the bar, it was almost eleven. I knew I needed to wrap things up soon if I wanted to make it back home before midnight, with sufficient time to take a shower, shave my legs, and look the part of Devon Whitehall’s sexual partner.
“Ross,” I roared over the music, gliding across the sticky floor behind the bar and aiming a soda gun into a glass, making a vodka diet coke for a gentleman in a suit. “I’m off in ten.”
Ross’s thumb rose up in the air to signal he’d heard me. His other hand plucked a fifty-dollar bill from a woman leaning against the bar, her breasts spilling out of a neon-yellow sports bra.
I was about to take an order from a bunch of women wearing bachelorette party sashes （Maid of Dishonor, Bad Influence, and Designated Drunk）。 When I propped forward to do so, a hand shot toward me from the dark, gripping my forearm and giving it a painful squeeze.
I spun my head in the hand’s direction and was about to yank my arm away when I noticed the person attached to said hand was staring at me with death in his eyes.
His face was so scarred that I couldn’t guess his age even if I’d wanted to. A large portion of it was tattooed. He was swathed head-to-toe in black and looked nothing like the usual clientele we had here.
He gave me Lucifer vibes … and he wasn’t letting go of me.
“I suggest you remove your hand from my arm right now, unless you’re not feeling particularly attached to it,” I hissed out through gritted teeth, my blood boiling over.
The man smiled an awful, rotten smile. It wasn’t that his teeth were bad. On the contrary, they were big, white, and shiny, like he’d recently had dental work. It was what was behind him that made me uneasy.
“I have a message to deliver to you.”
“If it’s from Satan, tell him to come to me personally if he’s got the balls,” I spat out, yanking my arm away with force. His hand dropped, and I used every ounce of my self-control not to stick the lemon knife in it.
“I suggest you listen carefully, Emmabelle, unless you want very bad things to happen to you.”
“Says who?” I chuckled.
“If you don’t—”
Just as he began to speak, a tall, elegant form materialized from the shadows of the club, tossing the man away like he weighed no more than a straw. My scarred offender collapsed on the floor. Devon appeared in my line of vision, clad in a full-blown designer tux, his hair gelled back, his cheekbones as sharp as blades. He stepped onto the man—deliberately—scowling down at his loafers like he needed to clean dirt off of them.
“I was in the middle of something.” I flashed him my teeth.
“Allow me not to sympathize.”
“Are you capable of sympathy?”
“Generally? Yes. With women who leave me waiting? Not so much.”
Devon leaned over the bar in one swift movement and hurled me across his shoulder, turning away and marching toward the entrance doors. I looked up, catching Ross’s deer-in-the-headlights expression, frozen with a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle opener in the other.