Consumed By Him (Obsessed With Him, Book Three) (3 page)

“Anyway,” she said, when I found her in
the dressing room, like we were in the middle of a conversation and she hadn’t
just left me sitting out there like an asshole.
  
“This is the dressing room.”

“Yeah,” I said, not able to resist
getting a little dig in.
 
“Colt
told me.”

“Don’t,” she said, pushing her hair back
from her face.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t act like you know Colt.”

“I wasn’t.”

She bit the inside of her cheek, almost
like she wanted to say something else, but then she let out a little sigh,
obviously deciding it wasn’t worth it.

“You can use anything you see here,” she
said, opening a drawer filled with makeup in all different shades –
lipsticks, blush, eyeshadows, liners, and foundations.
 
All of it was still in its packages, neatly
arranged and separated.
 
“When you’re
done, you can keep it.
 
Don’t put
anything that’s been opened back in the drawer.
 
No one wants your nasty used shit.
 
Got it?”

I nodded.

“We pool our tips,” she said.
 
“So don’t even try to think about
pocketing anything.
 
They go in a
tip jar on the bar, and we split them up at the end of the night.”

“Fine.”

“And since you’re not going to make any
money looking like that, I guess I’m going to have to help you.”

She led me over to a dressing room mirror
and went to work on my face, smoothing foundation, layering eye shadow,
slicking lip gloss onto my lips.

“Better,” she said, when she was done,
her tone conveying that she still thought I was subpar.

I turned to look at myself.
 
I did look better.
 
She’d evened out my skin tone, made my
lips looked plump and pouty and my eyes smoky and sexy.
 

“Thank you,” I said, meaning it, even
though I knew she’d only done it because if I made more money, she was going to
make more money.

She shrugged, like she could care
less.
 
About anything.
 
She leaned over the vanity, studying
her reflection in the mirror as she arranged her hair around her
shoulders.
 
I watched her,
wondering what it would be like to be so beautiful.
 
When you were beautiful, people wanted to be near you.
 
They wanted to help you, they thought
you were good, worthy of something, whether it was attention or love or
money.
 
People wanted to be near
beauty, almost as if they thought it would rub off on them.

Of course, there was another side to
beauty.
 
It could bring so much
power that some people didn’t know how to handle it.

Jessa flicked her hair behind her ear. “The
job is easy.
 
You ask the guys what
they want.
 
You write it down.
 
You bring it to me.
 
Then you bring the drinks back to the
customers.
 
Got it?”’

I nodded.

She pulled the bottom of her vest down a
tiny bit, adjusting it where it hit her stomach.
 
There was a dusting of something shimmery on her skin,
giving her a glittery glow.
 

I caught sight of something on her arms –
red marks.
 
I tried not to stare,
but I couldn’t help it.
 
There were
tracks marks on her arms, faint, but there.
 
Was Jessa into drugs?
 
Or was she a cutter like me?
 
Colt had made it perfectly clear there were no drugs allowed in the
club, and yet this girl seemed like she was advertising that might not be the
case.

Jessa saw me looking, but instead of trying
to cover her arms or move them out of my line of sight like I would have, she
gave me a smirk, almost like she was enjoying the fact that I was staring at
her.

She reached over and grabbed a hair tie
out of the glass jar that was sitting on the counter, moving slowly, making
sure I got a good view of her arms.

I averted my eyes as she gathered her
long hair up into a ponytail and slid the tie around it.

A second later, the lights in the room
dimmed, and a slow, sexy song started, its beat pulsing through the club.
 
“Showtime,” Jessa said, and grinned.

***

Three hours later, I was so exhausted I
thought I was going to drop right there in the middle of the club.

I’d been running back and forth to the
bar, fetching drinks and filling orders all night.
 
Besides the fact that it was exhausting, it actually hadn’t
been that bad.
 
The men definitely
didn’t try to hide the fact that they were ogling my body, but with what was
going on up the main stage, none of them spent too much time looking at
me.
 
Sure, their eyes lingered on
my tits and ass as I walked by in my short little skirt, but it was only for a
quick beat.
 
While I might have
been dressed provocatively, it was all relative.
 
And in this place, I was practically wearing a snowsuit.

Up on stage, beautiful women, much more
beautiful than I, danced and gyrated, removing their tops and showing off their
gorgeous bodies.
 
They flipped
around a pole, showing off their toned legs and abs, their asses jiggling,
causing the men to go crazy with appreciation.

I was serving a round of beers to a group
of men in business suits when it happened.
 
One of them looked at me and said, “Nice ass,
sweetheart.
 
How come you’re not up
there, dancing?”

“Jesus, Neal,” one of the other guys at
the table said.
 
He shook his head
and looked at me.
 
“I’m sorry about
Neal.
 
He’s been drinking since
lunch, and he’s obviously not in his right mind.”

Neal shrugged, then turned his back to me
and started talking to the guy on the other side of him.

“No harm, no foul,” I said to his friend,
shrugging.
 
I’d made a pact with
myself that I wasn’t going to get worked up over every dumb comment some drunk
guy made.
 
There were men drinking
here, men celebrating, men getting horny and worked up without any kind of
release.
 
You could practically
smell the testosterone pumping through the room.

“No, he’s…” The man motioned me closer,
like he wanted to tell me something in confidence.
 
“He’s not my friend.
 
I just work with him.”
 
He
smiled at me.
 
“Sorry, is it weird
that I felt the need to point that out?
 
I just didn’t want you to think I’d hang out with a guy like that.”
  

“No problem,” I said.
 
“If we were all assumed to be friends
with our co-workers, we’d all have a lot of explaining to do.”
 
The words had just come out of me, my
default whenever someone said something to me about friends or family.
 
I tended to just agree with them,
mostly because I had no friends or family, and so going along with whatever
people said made me feel less awkward.
 

He held out a twenty-dollar bill to
me.
 
“Here,” he said, looking kind
of sheepish.
 
“You know, to make up
for it.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” I
said.
 
“I mean, it’s not your
fault.”
 
It wasn’t necessary, but I
was hoping he was going to insist.
 
I wasn’t doing this job for the money Рif Colt was going to help
me find Declan, if he did find Declan, that would be worth more than all the
money in the world.
 
But the
thought of making twenty dollars just for walking some beers over from the bar
was kind of blowing my mind, especially when I currently had eight dollars to
my name.

“Go ahead, take it,” the guy said,
pushing the bill into my hand.
 
“It’ll
make me feel better.”

“Thanks.”
 
I took the money and slid it into the tip cup that was
sitting on my tray.
 

“What’s your name?” the guy asked.

“Olivia,” I replied, before realizing it probably
wasn’t a good idea to use your real name when you worked at a strip club.
 
Wasn’t that why all the girls here used
names like Diamond and Kat?

“Olivia,” the guy said.
 
“That’s my sister’s name.”
 
He gave me a smile, and suddenly, the
hairs on the back of my neck stood up and my internal radar started going off.
 
It wasn’t anything his tone or anything
he’d done -- he sounded genuine and his smile didn’t seem fake.
 
He was dressed in an expensive suit and
had the semi-uninterested look of a guy who’d been dragged along on a work trip
and didn’t necessarily even want to be spending his night in a strip club.
 
I had no reason to think he was
lying.
 
His sister’s name probably
was Olivia.
  

But I’d had enough experience with
predators to know how this was one of their tactics.
 
If a man wanted you to trust him, he’d find a way to connect
with you.
 
Something unassuming and
innocent, something that would make you think he wasn’t a threat.
 
It was how abusers were able to keep
their victims close.
 
They gave you
a reason to connect with them and make you think you could trust them before
exploiting that trust and confusing you about whether or not what they were
doing was wrong.

“That’s nice,” I said vaguely.

“I’m Caleb,” he said, holding his hand
out.

I took it and shook it.
 
His grip was strong, his hand
warm.
 
Nothing about him on the
surface seemed off – but my instinct was still telling me there was
something more going on.
 
It wasn’t
even necessarily something nefarious.
 
It wasn’t like I thought he was going to try to pay me to sleep with him
or anything.
 
It was just… I felt
like there was more to him what I was seeing.

“Thanks for the drinks,” he said, holding
up his beer and taking a swig.
 
“And
for putting up with my friends.”
 
He rolled his eyes and I smiled.

“Have a good night,” I said.

“Yeah, you too.”

My heart was pounding as I walked away
from him.

Relax,
Olivia,
I told
myself.
 
You’re being crazy.
 
Just
because you have the same name as some guy’s sister doesn’t mean something shady
is going on.
 
Stop acting like a
victim.
 
Stop being so suspicious
of every single person you meet.

I got back to work and was just about to
put in a special order for a bunch of frat guys when Jessa called me over to
the bar.
 
“Olivia,” she said.
 
“You need to bring this to the VIP.”
 
She pushed a bottle of champagne across
the bar.
 
“There’s a bachelor party
back there, and they want bottle service.”

“Okay,” I said.
 
“Um, where’s the VIP?”

“Straight through there,” she said,
pointing to a red crushed velvet curtain with a textured square pattern
imprinted into the fabric.
 
“It’s
the second door on the left.
 
They’re
waiting for you.”

I grabbed the bottle of champagne and
slipped through the curtain.
 
At
the end of the hall was a full-length wall-sized mirror, and I almost didn’t
recognize myself as I walked.
 
My
breasts were pushed up, my hair loose around my shoulders.
 
My skin looked luminous from the makeup
Jessa had put on me, and my cheeks were flushed from running around the club
all night.
 
My lips were pouty with
lip gloss.

I looked pretty.
 
Or at least, as close to pretty as I
could get.

When I got to the second door on the
left, I stopped, wondering if I was supposed to knock or just walk in.

Finally, I knocked.

I heard a bunch of hooting and hollering
coming from the room, which I guess meant the men were ready for their drinks.
 
I turned the knob and pushed open the
door.