Private Dancer Read Free Page A

uncontrollable quiver of her lower lip.
    He ran his thumb over the tautness of her nipple. “For a private dancer,” he said softly, “you’re quick to arouse.”
    Excitement clenched painfully in Bev’s stomach and streamed down her thighs, weakening her legs until she could hardly stand. Her whole body was a quivering mass of nerves. Look at what he was doing to her! Damn him to hell, she thought, anger flaring. She ought to bring up her knee and make a choirboy out of him.
    The emotions colliding inside Bev made her act on a dangerous impulse. She didn’t bring up her knee, but she did do something that matched him move for move. She lifted the hand that was frozen at her side and placed it squarely on the button fly of his jeans.
    His breath caught, and the sound gave Bev intense satisfaction. She pressed harder, and a thrill rolled up her arm that was as hot as hellfire.
    “You’re pretty quick to arouse yourself,” she said.
    He hissed one raw word through his teeth and grimaced in disbelief. “Wh-what the hell are you doing?”
    Her fingers curved over the shape of him. “This,” she answered. Her heart pounded like crazy as she stared him straight in the Ray Bans. “How do you like it?”
    “Lady, if you don’t get your hand off my pants, you’re going to find out how much I like it in about ten seconds.”
    He wasn’t bluffing. All hell was breaking loose beneath the brass buttons of his jeans. But even if he’d been built like a bull elephant and buck naked, Bev wouldn’t have removed her hand at that moment.
    “Lady, hands off!”
    “I will if you will,” she countered breathlessly.
    The released each other simultaneously and stepped back.
    Bev was panting like a winded sprinter. He was breathing hard too, but he had a faint smile on his face that was as intrigued as it was bemused.
    “Let’s dance,” he ordered under his breath.
    “No thanks.”
    He gripped her arm firmly and drew her with him onto the dance floor. “That wasn’t an invitation,” he said, stopping just long enough to pump some quarters into the jukebox before he took her into his arms. “I don’t want the whole damn bar to see the condition I’m in.”
    Bev wanted nothing more to do with his condition, but she was as limp as a newborn kitten at that moment, and much too weak to object. She was exhausted just thinking about the way she’d groped a man she didn’t know.
    The music started, a country-western song about cheatin’ husbands and cheatin’ hearts, and Bev fully expected to be dragged into a hammerlock of an embrace and to be plastered up against his body. He’d given her no reason to think he wasn’t the kind of man who danced with his hands all over a woman.
    Instead, he held her at a respectable distance, just close enough for camouflage. At first Bev was more confused than relieved. Adrenaline was still coursing through her, and her imagination was conjuring up enough steamy images for an adult video. She was wildly overstimulated, and prepared for just about anything but a display of good manners.
    They weren’t really dancing, just swaying slowly in time to the music, and she found herself wanting to look up at him, to search his scarred, darkly handsome face and ask him a million questions. Why was a man who terrorized headwaiters, a man who groped strange women and behaved as if life’s rules had been written for him to break, suddenly treating her as though this were their first date?
    She didn’t ask the questions, however. She didn’t even look at him. Her head was still swimming with excitement, and she was afraid of what he might see in her eyes.
    “I’m curious,” he said, his voice made even huskier by the faintest suggestion of masculine laughter. “Do you like it? Dancing, I mean.”
    She started to nod, then realized he meant private dancing. “That depends ...”
    “On what?”
    “On who I’m dancing with.”
    She heard his slow intake of air and wondered if she had her