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Another man beat Ray to her, leaning over and stuffing a ten-dollar bill into Angel’s sequined G-string, the scrap of red barely covering the spot every guy in the place dreamed of touching. Angel whirled away from him and smiled, mouthing a thank-you. When she turned her back, raised her arms above her head and began swaying to the hard rock beat, another man stuffed a bill into the glittering strip of red around her waist above that sweet little ass.
Ray moved closer, hovering as Angel approached the edge of the stage. He leaned toward her, stuffed the money into her G-string. He was grinning when he turned away, his mind on pussy instead of escape.
Johnnie made his move, slamming into Carroll, knocking him over an empty table, both of them crashing to the floor. Ray struggled as Johnnie caught his arm, cranked it behind his back, lifted and hauled him to his feet. Johnnie caught sight of the club’s big Asian bouncer moving toward them, but he didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. Guess he’d got word about the pervert, too.
Carroll squirmed in his grasp. “What the fuck? Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your worst nightmare,” Johnnie said, cranking the arm a little higher, eliciting a satisfying grunt of pain. “I’m the guy who’s gonna make sure you get back to Houston safe and sound.” Ray stumbled a couple of times as Johnnie’s heavy frame propelled him forward, slamming him into the wall beside the door. “I’m the guy who’s gonna put your sorry, sick ass back in jail.”
The moment the song ended and she stepped down from the stage, Amy started to tremble. Angel, she reminded herself. Angel, not Amy.
“You okay?” Her roommate walked toward her, Babs McClure, Sugar Babs, she used as her stage name. She was five foot seven with a curvy figure and chin-length dark brown hair she sometimes covered with a hot-pink wig.
Amy managed to nod. “I will be in a minute.” It was one thing to be out there beneath the spotlights, dancing almost naked as Angel Fontaine, another entirely to be just a normal woman again. Onstage, she could fool herself into thinking she was Angel, a woman who enjoyed every catcall, every wolf whistle from the men she danced in front of without her clothes. An illusion she worked tirelessly to achieve.
But it didn’t last long once she stepped out of the spotlight.
“That was quite a scene.” Babs cocked her head toward the side door where the brawny, dark-haired man had just hauled a scummy-looking customer out of the club.
Amy followed Babs’s gaze. As if she hadn’t noticed the brawl just a few feet in front of the stage.
“Dante says the creep that guy busted is into kiddie porn.”
Amy shuddered. “He certainly looks the part.” She crossed the backstage area and started up the stairs leading to the studio apartment she and Babs shared above the club. “So I guess the other guy is a cop or something.”
“Or something.” Babs fell into step beside her, pulled off her pink wig and ranked a hand through her dark hair. “He was in here last night, too.”
“I saw him.”
Babs grinned. “Hard to miss a guy who looks like that.”
Amy grinned back. “No kidding.” Six feet of solid muscle, barrel-chested with a thick neck and shoulders. As he’d walked—more like swaggered—toward the stage, she’d noticed a tattoo of an eagle on his very impressive biceps. Every move he made spoke of power and strength, and in a rugged, masculine way, he was handsome.
“I asked Tate about him,” Babs said. “Says his name is John Riggs. He’s an ex-Army Ranger. Does P.I. work and pretty much anything else he can make a buck at.” Babs rolled her eyes. “What a hunk.”
Just hearing the words brought his image to mind: dark brown hair and eyes such a deep brown they looked black, strong jaw roughened by the shadow of a beard. He was the kind of guy who should have Dangerous stamped on his forehead.
Amy’s mind slipped back to her performance onstage and the way he had looked at her, his eyes following her every move. She had never felt a gaze so intense.
It was late, nearly closing. Amy blew out a breath, suddenly exhausted.
“You look like you could use a cup of coffee,” Babs said as they reached the small apartment they shared and Amy unlocked the door. There were other small apartments down the hall, cheap places for the girls to live. “I put on a fresh pot before I went downstairs.”
“Sounds good.” The rich aroma filled the room as she stepped inside. She and Babs hadn’t known each other long yet Babs watched out for her. She was Amy’s only confidante, the only person who knew the truth, knew she wasn’t really an exotic dancer, had never done anything in her entire life remotely as wild as what she was doing now.
She wasn’t a stripper, a pole dancer, a lap dancer or anything the least bit similar. She was a schoolteacher from Michigan, a woman who had absolutely no business being naked up onstage.
They crossed the studio apartment: two single beds, a kitchenette, and a small living area with a sofa and chair. Babs went to the kitchen counter and took down two mugs, pouring coffee into each one. Amy grabbed her robe from the hook beside the door, slipped it on and breathed a sigh of relief once she was more decently covered. Babs was still wearing her dark blue satin cocktail waitress costume, sexy but no worse than the bikinis women wore on the beach.
She took the mug Babs held out to her and they carried them over to the tiny round table in the corner.
“So what about the hunk?” Babs asked, watching her over the rim of her cup.
Amy’s blond brows went up. “What about him?”
“He was certainly giving you the eye.”
Amy just shrugged. “When you’re up there naked, they all give you the eye.”
“This was different—and don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”
Oh, she’d noticed all right. She could feel the heat in those dark eyes all the way across the room. It was what that hot look did to her that was startling. The Kitty Cat Club was filled with men every night. None of them made her stomach flip the way a single look from John Riggs had. Two nights in a row, he’d sat in the shadows watching, his fierce gaze singularly focused on her. At the same time he seemed aware of every other person in the room.
“He got his man tonight.” Amy sighed. “We won’t be seeing him again.”
Babs sipped her coffee. “Wanna bet?”
Amy glanced up. “You don’t think he’ll come back because of me?”
“I’ve been doing this for almost three years, hon. One thing you learn to recognize is when a man is interested. And let me tell you, honey, John Riggs has a major interest in you.”
Her stomach contracted. If she closed her eyes, she could almost feel the heat in those dark eyes burning into her. “You’re crazy. He was here on business, that’s all.”
“Five bucks?”
Amy laughed. “You’re on.”
Two
The club was closed on Sunday, and John Riggs wasn’t there the next night. As Amy finished her first dance set Tuesday evening, she felt oddly disappointed. She told herself it was just that she had been thinking she might ask him for help. He was a private investigator, after all—or something close to that—and he had been an Army Ranger. They were tough guys, she knew, and even if she hadn’t read about them, one look at that hard jaw and powerful body would have made that clear.
But he didn’t come back and the truth was she didn’t have enough money to hire him if he had. She loved teaching, but it didn’t pay that much to start with and she wasn’t a very good saver. Seemed like there was always something she needed for the kids in her class, and everything else went to rent and bills.
Amy thought of the weeks before her arrival in L.A. Back home in Michigan, the children at Grand Rapids Elementary School had been ready for summer vacation. Amy was packed to leave the afternoon of the last day of school. As soon as she had seen the final child safely out of her kindergarten classroom, she had headed for the airport to catch her flight to L.A. From the airport, she had come directly to the Kitty Cat Club.
It was the place where her sister, Rachael, was working when she had disappeared.
The music stopped. Her set was over. Pulling dollar bills out of her tiny costume as she left the stage, she hurried upstairs to change into her cocktail waitress outfit. Thoughts of her sister crept in, along with a sharp pang of loss. Rachael had gone missing more than six weeks ago. The last place she had been seen was the Kitty Cat Club where she worked as an exotic dancer.
Babs had been Rachael’s roommate and one of her closest friends, the person who had reported her missing when she failed to return to the apartment in time for her performance the following night.
“At first I just thought she was screwing off,” Babs had told Amy on the phone, the first of many conversations that followed. “Maybe she got drunk or something, you know? Not that she usually did that kind of thing. But she’d been acting strange for more than a month, being secretive, staying out all night. She was seeing a couple of different guys, but she didn’t talk much about them.”
More and more worried, Babs had called the police, who had taken a statement and started an investigation into Rachael’s disappearance. It was Babs who had first contacted Amy. Several times a week after Rachael’s disappearance had been reported, Amy had phoned the police from Michigan, pushing them, trying to make sure they were doing everything in their power to find her. So far the police had come up with nothing—though Babs didn’t believe they had tried very hard to find a missing dancer who worked at a place like the Kitty Cat Club.
Babs had also kept calling, figuring two people pressing the police would get more results than one. Babs had also done some digging on her own. She had talked to everyone who worked at the club—the bartenders and waitresses, the guys and gals on every shift. She hadn’t expected any of them to be involved in Rachael’s disappearance and that was the conclusion she had come to in the end.
If something terrible had happened, Amy sensed it had to have involved one of the club’s customers, or someone Rachael was seeing.
From the start, Babs and Amy had connected. Both of them cared about Rachael and both were beginning to suspect the worst—Rachael had either been kidnapped or killed. As the weeks slipped past with no word from her, the devastating scenario seemed more and more likely.
Amy’s chest tightened. Though she and Rachael hadn’t been close for years, they were still sisters, best friends once. Amy had decided to come to L.A. to find out what had happened. Since there was no way she could just walk up to a customer, tell them she was Amy Brewer and ask them if they had murdered her sister, she and Babs had come up with a plan. Amy would go undercover, take the job Rachael’s disappearance had left vacant, and start digging. Amy would find out what happened to Rachael—no matter what it took.
Amy raced up the stairs to the apartment to get ready for her waitressing shift, hoping that maybe tonight she would turn up something useful. Her costume, a two-piece dark blue satin number just like Babs’s, lay on the bed, ready for her to put on.
Before Amy got to L.A., Babs had spoken to the club owner, Tate Watters, and told him she had a friend who was looking for a job. Watters had hired her sight-unseen, even though she had “limited experience.” Fortunately, Amy and her sister had both been blessed with good figures, and faces that weren’t too bad, either, so he didn’t seem to regret giving her the job.
Babs had promised to show her the ropes, and after her first self-conscious, clumsy efforts, she had been able to get through an entire performance onstage. A couple of summers ago, she had learned a self-hypnosis technique at a teaching seminar in Detroit. The trick was good for controlling anxiety and aiding in memory work. Amy had used the technique to help her get over her stage fright and embarrassment.
She had always been a pretty good dancer, not the exotic sort, of course, and she had been on the cheering squad in high school. Her movements were fluid, and if she could forget she was almost naked and gave into the suggestions she put into her head, if she could manage to let herself go, she wasn’t half bad.
Which surprised the heck out of her. She guessed a person never really knew themselves completely.
A last glance in the makeup mirror above the dresser, a few quick strokes of the brush through her long blond hair, a dab of blush and a fresh application of lipstick and she was ready to go.
Her stomach tightened. By some ironic twist, being onstage as Angel Fontaine was the easy part. Mingling with customers, putting up with the risqué remarks while quietly digging for information that might lead to finding her sister—that was the tough part.
And no amount of self-hypnosis had helped. She was nervous and edgy the entire time she worked the floor, always trying to stay just out of a customer’s reach, trying to keep a smile on her face as the men flirted and propositioned her.
Not that they were usually that bad. Tate wouldn’t put up with harassment. And there was a house rule that the girls couldn’t date the customers, which all of the regulars knew. And after a warning or two, if any of the men got too far out of line, big Bo Jing, the bald-headed, oversize Asian bouncer who stood at the door with his legs splayed and his arms folded over his massive chest, looking like a half-ton Mr. Clean, made sure they left the club and never came back.
The club allowed lap dancing, both in the bar and in private VIP rooms, which was a good way to make a little extra money, but so far she had never done one, and it wasn’t something any of the girls had to do if they didn’t want to. Tate was clear on that.
Making her way over to the bar, Amy picked up a tray and headed for the table of new arrivals in her assigned section. One of the other dancers, a redhead who called herself Honeybee, kept their attention fixed on the stage until Amy could get their drink orders.
She plastered on a smile. “Hello, gentlemen, what can I get for you?”
An overweight businessman in a wrinkled three-piece suit was the first to reply. “A big taste of you, sweetheart, would suit me just fine.”
The other men laughed.
Amy ignored a wave of nerves and turned her attention to the customer beside him, gray-haired and a little too bright-eyed. “For you, sir?”
“Bombay martini,” he said, his gaze still fixed on the stage. “Very dry, and I want it up.”
“Hell, Sam, a martini won’t help you get it up!”
The men roared with laughter. Amy pretended not to have heard the remark, smiled and took the rest of their orders, grateful she had already learned the majority of the drinks people wanted and relieved there were no more comments. At the bar, Dante filled the orders and she returned to the table to deliver the drinks, setting the right order in front of the right customer, which wasn’t as easy as she would have guessed.
Waitresses earned their money, she had learned in a very short time, more so when they were only half dressed.
Babs walked past just then, wearing a pale blue wig tonight. “Far left corner. Kyle Bennett just walked in.”
Amy’s gaze swung in that direction. She was getting used to the dimness, getting to know her way around the tables and chairs, better able to work in the low light than she had been when she had first started.
She spotted Kyle Bennett, a regular customer and one of the men her sister had been dating in the weeks before her disappearance. He was sandy-haired, lean and elegant, almost effeminate. She might have thought he was gay except for the lascivious look in his eyes when he watched the girls onstage.
“Thanks,” she said to Babs. Babs had tried talking to Bennett after Rachael first disappeared, but as soon as he found out she was Rachael’s roommate he’d clammed up tight. Amy knew she couldn’t tell him her real name, or her connection to Rachael.
She took a breath to steady herself and started in Kyle Bennett’s direction. There was no one else at the table, which would make things a little easier.
“Hello, Mr. Bennett, what can I get you this evening?”
He looked up at her and smiled. “Tanqueray and tonic, doll, and a little conversation.” He wasn’t handsome but he was attractive, and so far whenever she’d talked to him, he’d been polite.
Entertaining the customers was part of the job, and it gave her the chance she needed to dig for information. “Let me get that for you and I’ll be right back.”
She hurried to the bar, waited for Dante to fill the order, then walked back to the table. “Here you go.”
Kyle stirred the drink with the plastic swizzle stick, tipped his head back to look up at her. “You know, Angel, with a face and figure like yours, you could be a whole lot more than just a dancer.”
She managed to look surprised. “You really think so?”
“Sure I do. Hollywood is always looking for the next big name. Angel Fontaine could be it.”
Amy figured that was probably the line he had used on Rachael, who had come to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a star. He was rumored to be a movie producer but no one really knew if it was true.
Fortunately, she and Rachael looked nothing alike, Rachael being several inches taller, with softly curling dark brown hair and green eyes. Amy took after her mother’s side of the family, Norwegians who had immigrated to Michigan during the past century to work in the logging industry.
She gave him a bright, interested smile. “I’ve always dreamed of being famous. Do you really think I might have a chance?”
“You’d have to do a screen test first, but I could arrange that for you. In fact I’m working on a film right now that might have just the right part for you. What do you say?”
She knew where this was leading and her nerves kicked up. “What…what would I have to do?”
“When’s your next day off?”
She moistened her suddenly dry lips. “Thursday.”
“All right, then. We’ll do it Thursday. You just come to my house and I’ll have everything set.”
She swallowed, knowing she had to say yes. Then she thought of how Rachael had just disappeared as if she had never existed, how there was a chance this man might have had something to do with it, and a chill slipped down her spine. “I need to check with Tate…see if that will work in my schedule. If I had your number, I could give you a call and confirm.”
“Sure, sweet thing.” He took out his wallet and handed her a business card. It was too dark to read what it said, but she had what she needed to find him.
“Just remember,” he said, “opportunities like this don’t come along very often.”
She nodded, smiled. “I’m really grateful, Mr. Bennett, truly, I am.”
His lips curved. “Keep my tab open, will you? I may stay for a while.” His gaze ran over her, ended up on the cleavage pushed up in her blue satin top.
Amy kept her smile in place. “No problem.” She started walking, grateful to escape. She would call Kyle Bennett and set up the screen test, but she wasn’t a fool. If she went to his house, she wanted to be sure Babs knew the address and time she was going to be there.
She had almost reached the next table when she caught sight of a dark-haired man sitting in the shadows a few feet away. He was staring at her with intense brown eyes and she felt the impact in every pore in her body.
Babs breezed past her just then. “You owe me five bucks.” Babs grinned as she hurried off with a tray of drinks propped on her shoulder.
For several seconds, Amy just stood there, her gaze locked with his. Even in the dim neon light, she could see the outline of his muscular body, see the faint glint of the eagle tattoo on his biceps just below the sleeve of the tight black T-shirt he wore with a pair of black jeans.
