Bad Girls (7 page)

Skye weaved her way across the club floor, glass of champagne in one hand, Marvin’s tie in the other. She picked a route between the tables, showing herself off to maximum effect. One of the Midnight Lounge’s top pole dancers, Oksana, was wreathing herself round the central pole, and as Skye passed half the guys at least turned away from Oksana’s contortions to watch Skye’s cute little ass wiggle its way past them. Skye cast coy, eyes-up-under-lashes glances at as many as she could. Partly because she was touting for business, partly just to get Oksana pissy: there was no love lost between them.

The look Oksana shot Skye dripped poison. Which is rich, considering the shit she’s tried to pull on me in her time! Skye thought crossly.

Hair bleached so blonde it was like straw, skin tanned satsuma orange, everything about Oksana was fake, from her stick-on nails to her pencilled-in brows to her coloured lenses. She’d tread over her mother’s dead body to beat another girl to a fifty-buck note.

Screw her.
By the time Skye had navigated between the smoked-glass tables, every man who gawked at her wished devoutly that they were in Marvin’s shoes. Skye practically never liked the guys she danced for, but it was still a major turn-on to know that she was desired so much that men would gasp and groan as she walked by.

Like you said, Mom
.
I’ll worry when they
stop
leching after me.

‘Private dance, DeVaughan,’ she cooed at the big bouncer, who was posted at the door to the back room.

‘No probs, babe,’ he said, holding open the door and looking significantly at Marvin, who was so overcome by excitement that it took him much longer than it should have done to slide a twenty into DeVaughan’s huge hand.

Skye took her hand off Marvin’s tie and touched her fingernails to her palm so quickly that he didn’t even notice. It was a signal to DeVaughan, who acknowledged it with an equally swift nod.

Five minutes, is what the hand signal meant. Five fingers, snapping open and closed.
This one’s not going to take any time at all
.

Skye had been bang on. As it were. She exited the room barely five minutes later, back into the pounding music and pulsating stage lights of the main club, her smile at DeVaughan positively demure.

‘Give him a few seconds,’ she said, and DeVaughan nodded in absolute understanding.

Skye wasn’t a hooker. Her bits didn’t touch the men’s bits without layers of clothing between them. That was her rule, though some skanks, she was sure, did more, even at the Midnight Lounge, which was pretty damn upscale. Those Russian girls, with their cold, dead eyes, would do anything for money. But Skye had her standards. She’d dance for the guys, she’d turn them on, she’d grind as much as they wanted, and they could touch themselves, sure: but they weren’t allowed to get their things out. That would be crossing the line Skye had set for herself years ago, when she started in this business.

’Cause that’s not really what they’re after, she told herself.

It had seemed weird, at first, and sometimes it still did; her clients could get laid for a great deal less than they paid for Skye’s services.

It’s the fantasy of picking up a hot chick in a club and getting a little alone time with her. That’s what they’re paying for.
She shrugged.
Whatever floats their boats.

‘Skye! Baby!’

The man calling her name was loud enough to be heard even over the pumping bass line of Def Leppard’s ‘Pour Some Sugar on Me’, one of the most tired anthems of exotic dancers all over the world. Skye flicked her eyes to the stage: yup, Oksana was up there, wiggling her skinny arse.

I know you’re a huge attention-whore, but you better get down off that pole and onto some laps if you want to make any money tonight, Skye thought nastily as she crossed to the table where Lew James, the guy who’d just called her name, was sitting.

Lew was an old client: he never paid her much himself, but he often brought in guys who spent like it was going out of style, and he always hooked her up with them. Lew was a journalist, if you could call it that, on one of the main gossip weeklies, the
National Investigator
. He went through trash cans and tapped phone lines and pulled all kinds of sordid crap so that Skye and millions like her could read about the secrets stars were desperate to keep hidden.

Lew liked showing that he was on first-name terms with the prettiest blonde in the whole of the Midnight Lounge. And if Lew got the Lounge name-checked in the
Investigator
, he drank on the house the next time he was in. Judging by the two bottles of champagne on Lew’s table and his air of smugness, Paulie, the manager, was comping Lew tonight.

Skye sat down next to him, despite the fact that he was patting his lap invitingly. You had to make guys work for it.

‘Hey, honey,’ she cooed. ‘Pour me a glass, won’t you? And introduce me to your sexy friend!’ She smiled at the other man at the table. ‘I’m Skye. Pleasure to meet you. Sorry about Lew, he lost his manners dumpster-diving.’

‘I told you she was a firecracker!’ Lew crowed, quite unoffended.

A small, ferret-faced man, Lew was too rattily dressed to have made it past the Lounge’s door staff if he hadn’t worked for the
Investigator.
His friend, though, was in the classic chinos-and-polo shirt combo worn by every off-duty businessman in America.

‘I’m Kevin Sanders,’ he said, reaching across the table to shake her hand. ‘And the pleasure’s all mine.’ He was much bigger than Lew, and much fitter, with a shaved head, wire-framed glasses, and the kind of tan you didn’t get naturally in New York in the springtime. ‘I work with Lew. I’m the LA bureau chief of the
Investigator
.’

Skye widened her eyes in fake fascination.

‘So
that’s
where you got that great tan! LA!’ she said, leaning forward to run one manicured fingernail along his forearm. ‘Is it all over?’

He choked on his drink – vodka and tonic it looked like. Smart guy, Skye thought. This champagne’s pretty crappy. I mean, I like it, but what do I know? She’d noticed that the classy clients ordered the champagne for the girls and something else for themselves.

‘Cute,’ Kevin Sanders observed, without answering her question. ‘Tell me a bit about yourself, Skye.’

Oh crap, Skye thought. I hate when they pull the ‘I want to get to know you’ routine. It’s so lame.

‘College dropout, no idea what I wanted to do, but I make a hell of a lot more here than working in an office,’ she said, sipping some more champagne. ‘I can dance a bit, but not good enough for Broadway. Can’t carry a tune and I’m not tall enough to be a Rockette. So here I am! I’ll do it for a few more years while I figure out what I want to do next. But I’m having a ball. It’s like a party every night!’

She flashed her best smile again, having trotted out the practised spiel she used for all the guys who asked her that kind of dumb question. He’s got five minutes more, she calculated. Ten, tops. Then, if he doesn’t want a dance, I move on.

‘And what were you majoring in at college?’ Kevin Sanders asked.

It was Skye’s turn to gulp on her champagne.
Is this guy for real
? She shot a glance at Lew, but he nodded at her, telling her to answer the question.

‘Acting and creative writing,’ she admitted. ‘I thought I’d maybe be the next Jennifer Aniston or Sophie Kinsella. But college wasn’t for me.’

She was embarrassed now, pissed off with this guy for pointing out the distance between her dreams and her reality.
And no way is he spending any money on me.
Skye’s instincts were very well honed by now.
He’s not gay, but I’m not his type, either. Clock’s ticking
. . . Finishing off the champagne, she jumped up, still smiling. Being an exotic dancer was kind of like being a pageant contestant – you had to keep flashing your pearly whites.

‘I’m gonna hit the stage now, guys,’ she said. ‘Pleasure talking to you, Kevin! Lew, honey . . .’ She blew him a kiss.

Skye hadn’t been fishing for compliments before. She knew she was no great shakes as a dancer. She took a few classes, sure, but those were as much about staying in shape as honing her craft. Oksana and the Russian girls who’d been gymnasts back home were stunning on the pole, much as Skye hated to admit it; they could pull all kinds of crazy stunts. But Skye’s talent didn’t lie in her gymnastic ability. It lay in her innate ability to be breathtakingly, fabulously sexy.

Britney Spears’ ‘Gimme More’ was playing, and much as the song bored Skye, it was great for this kind of dancing, perfect for bumps and grinds, perfect for swaying round a pole, dropping down till her bottom grazed her heels, switching it back and forth, popping up again; flipping round with her back to the pole, running it between her buttocks, arching her back so her breasts looked even higher and fuller, sliding up and down the pole, working it with everything she had.

When Oksana was on the pole, it was a gymnastic prop, like a balance beam or parallel bars. When Skye was working the pole, it was exactly what every guy in the Midnight Lounge imagined it to be: a stand-in for the part of their anatomy they were most interested in introducing to her, but bigger, harder and shinier than theirs would ever be.

As she flipped her blonde hair back, and wiggled her luscious little bottom and hooked the pole between her gold-glittering bare knees, arching back, it was with the wide-eyed wonder of a girl who had never seen anything this big before, and was overwhelmed by it. The whoops and cheers from the men pressing up to the stage were much louder than they’d been for the previous dancers, even though those girls had shown an awful lot more than Skye did, writhing round on the stage, spreading their legs.

Head tilted back, Skye surveyed the faces closest around the stage, and smiled to herself; they were sweaty, pleading, mouths hanging open in hopeless lust. Time to start working them, now she’d got them all wound up, time to sashay round the footlights and let them work their sweaty twenties and fifties into her tiny gold outfit.

And just then, the whoops rose into a roar of excitement.

Jeez, feeding time at the zoo! Skye thought, grinning as she swivelled to see Jada striding onto the stage behind her, over six foot in her spike heels. They had a little routine for the changeover on the pole that all the regulars eagerly awaited; Skye clasped the pole with both hands, undulating her hips, flirting with Jada over her shoulder as Jada mimed a forehand and backhanded slap to Skye’s arse.

‘Yeah! Give it to her!’ one guy yelled.

‘Spank her good, baby!’ another chipped in.

Jada grabbed the pole above Skye and ground herself against her friend. Skye smelled Jada’s light sweat, musky under her Paloma Picasso perfume, and the new leather of her little bra-and-hotpants outfit, felt Jada’s pubic bone tapping against her buttocks, caught the rhythm and went with it, the girls dancing now, grinding against each other, the pole between Skye’s breasts as she parted her lips and raised one hand to her mouth in faux-shock, winking at the spectators, doing a fifties pin-up face that had them screaming appreciation.

We are gonna
rake
it in tonight! she reflected happily. Queens of the club!

Off by the bar, she spotted Oksana, picking her out by the dark orange tan and the hair so bleached it looked as white as bone. She was sucking on a straw, her mouth twisted as bitterly as if it were a lemon.

Skye shoved back against Jada, listening to the hoots and catcalls of the guys, every yell a promise of money to come. It was literally like music to her ears.

T
he helicopter was landing at Bovey Castle at noon; beforehand, Tony had dragged Amber out to the terrace to watch the daily falconry display. Because she was nervous at having the big birds fly close to her, she had taken a Klonopin, and now, leaning back against Tony, she watched the enormous owl, which turned out to be called Merlin, hopping around on the grass from one huge, clawed foot to another, squawking imperiously for food.

‘He follows the guy round like he’s a dog,’ Tony muttered to her. ‘The guy actually had to teach him how to fly. Funny, huh?’

Amber nodded as the falconer called Merlin up to his arm and carried him over to the big black box in which he was transported. Two harris hawks came out of the boxes next, brown with white tails, and Tony squeezed her arm excitedly.

‘That’s what I hunted with yesterday!’ he said. ‘The Lab flushes out the rabbits and then the birds pick them off – one bird actually jumped on the Lab’s head, it was crazy! The best bit’s coming next – he’s got a gyrfalcon, they go from nought to sixty as fast as a Ferrari. He’ll take it down to the lawn. Very cool.’

Amber sighed, holding onto his arm to balance in the heels of her suede Jimmy Choo boots on the gravel path. Even though Tony had hired a golf cart to drive them back and forth from the lodge to the hotel – a bare five-minute walk, but the stone steps were ankle-threatening in the Balenciaga spikes she’d been wearing the night before – you still had to navigate some gravel and grass, both of which were murder on expensive shoes.

The falconer was bringing out a large whitish bird, which took off over the velvety green lawns below the terrace as if it had been fired out of a gun. The bird soared up, disappeared behind the castle, and circled it, darting down out of the trees to swing back in a pale blur as it swooped down on the lure the falconer was swinging.

An hour later, as Amber and Tony’s helicopter rose from the helipad, she looked down at the castle and had a momentary sense of what the falcon and the hawks must see, how free they must feel for that short time they were unhooded, free to fly. The noise of the whirring blades drowned out everything else: she loved helicopters for exactly that reason. Settling back into the hand-stitched leather seat, she stroked the walnut panelling on the door with her finger. It was a Bentley.

Only the best for Tony. A Bentley four-seater helicopter, a five-star luxury hotel with its own falconer and fishing lake. And so that her luggage would be the best, too, he’d bought her a matched set of Vuitton suitcases, some of which were stacked in the seat next to her: the weekender, the garment bag and the vanity case, an adorable, hard-sided oval with padded leather straps inside to hold all her creams and lotions and perfumes standing up. Amber gazed at it lovingly.