“Thank God. Maybe that will set him back to rights and he can go back to being his normal level of frightening and ruthless.”
“I’m not coming back for him, Reeve. I’m coming back for me. I thought I could make a life here but I didn’t even really try.”
She hummed a little. “Why didn’t you try, Key?”
I looked around the small apartment and gritted my teeth. “Because as much as I wanted my own life and my independence, as much as I wanted to do something good, when I saw Nassir I realized I didn’t want to do it here and I never will. Denver isn’t home.”
“You can keep your own life and your independence and still love someone as long as it’s the right someone, you know?” Her tone was quiet but it was sure and steady. “Hey, I need to go work. One of the girls just tried to go onstage drunk off her ass and that’s a big no-no. Call me when you get back to town and let me know if you’re going to take Nassir up on his offer.”
She was about to hang up when I screamed her name like a crazy person. “What offer?”
“What are you talking about, Key? I really have to go.”
“Take Nassir up on what offer, Reeve?”
“The business offer he went to Denver to tell you about. He wasn’t just asking you to come home so he could fuck you, though I’m sure that was his primary reason. He’s been sinking a ton of money into a new club and he wanted you to be a partial owner. He knows you have a pretty hefty nest egg stacked away from dancing.”
I was so dumbfounded I could barely speak. “A club?”
“Yeah. It’s massive and super swanky. It’s way too nice for the Point, but people are dying to get in already. He finally decided to open it next week. I think he realized you meant it when you said weren’t coming back.” She snorted. “Men are dumb.”
“What kind of club?” His old club had been part dance club and part fight club. It was seedy and oily. It didn’t fit him at all but it generated all kinds of cash, and he was pissed when someone burned it to the ground.
She laughed. “A sex club. What else? I gotta go for real. I miss you, bitch.”
“I miss you too.” I said it automatically as I hung up. I stared at the glowing screen and couldn’t decide if I wanted to laugh or throw the thing across the room.
In my head I heard him as clear as if he had been in the bed next to me . . . “I have a business proposition for you, Key.”
His voice, with its faintest hint of an accent as he looked at me with those candy-colored eyes, gave nothing away. Of course, when he offered me something other than sex and physical temptation, it was a chance to get into bed with him in a different way . . . a way that would probably be just as dirty and complicated as the traditional way. Only Nassir would take something people did anyway and charge for it. He was already making money from the strip club and from the working girls he looked out for, so why wouldn’t he take that a step further and make money off of people chasing a chance to indulge in their kinky vices. It simply made good business sense.
I scrolled back up to the Ns in my contact list and stared at his name before pulling it up. It took another ten minutes before I could get my hands to stop shaking enough to type out a text message. I couldn’t call him. The sound of his voice after what had happened with the guy from the bar tonight would be too much. I would be in my little Honda Civic racing back to the Point and throwing myself at him like a lunatic. I needed to keep the upper hand with him if I was going to go home, if I was going to even consider tying myself to him in any way.
I’m coming home, asshole.
I sent the message off and stared at the phone, expecting an immediate response. Expecting a “good” or an “about time.” I got nothing. Zero. Zilch. The screen stared back at me, taunting me in silence for hours. When I couldn’t stop hitting the message button to see if anything was there, and as dawn started to cross the sky, I finally gave in to frustration then and threw the thing across the room.
There had been good men and bad men in my past. There had been men I wanted to stay longer than they did and ones I couldn’t get rid of fast enough, but in the background there was always Nassir . . . always. I couldn’t escape his pull and not even time and distance had done anything to stop the irresistible attraction I felt toward him. I told Reeve he couldn’t be the center of my world, but the reality was that he had been the core of everything from the get-go, and all I was doing was orbiting around him. Forever circling and trying to get as close as I could without succumbing to his gravitational pull and colliding into him.
I fell asleep after the sun was in the sky and was so tired and stressed out from the night before that I slept through my alarm, missing my shift at the diner. I guess it was a good thing I was going back to the Point. I didn’t think my ego could handle getting fired from a waitressing job I never really wanted in the first place.
I shoved the covers off and went to retrieve my phone from where it had landed. The battery was almost dead, but there was enough life left in it for me to see Nassir never texted me back. I almost threw it again but stopped when I noticed I had an e-mail. I never used the app on my phone. I had no need for an e-mail address and didn’t want anything that was easily tracked, but I did like to shop on Amazon, so there was no getting around having one. When I clicked to open it, my heart started to race and I got a little light-headed. I was so surprised, mostly that I was surprised, that I sat down heavily in the center of the floor and just stared dumbly at the first-class ticket with my name on it for a flight that was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning.