Stripper: The Fringe, Book 4 Read Free Page A

caused tears to blur her gaze. When she wiped them away, she spied a platinum ring on his finger.
    Moving back, she pressed her palm against her chest, feeling the chain-bound ring that hung between her breasts. With a trembling hand, she lifted his arm. After pulling the chain out from the folds of her diaphanous gown, she compared the two rings.
    Mates.
    She lowered his hand to the table.
    Clutching her ring, she left the room, locking the heavy metal door from the outside. She strode to the bridge as fast as she could in her decorative high heels. The fashionable yet delicate gem-encrusted shoes would probably disintegrate under her if she stomped. She yanked the useless fluffs off after she threw herself into the pilot seat. Her fingers flew over the keypad as she activated every defense system on her ship.
    Her hand hovered over the panic switch. If she flipped it, members of Network Thirteen would come out to the ship. Diane couldn’t turn Duster in. Maybe not just yet. Maybe not at all. She simply didn’t know enough about him to make that decision. Seven years ago, he’d been a slaver, but she had no idea what he was now.
    Duster still had twelve hours before he came out of the anesthesia. Ironically this would have been her grand finale for Network Thirteen. She was determined to change her identity and start working as a stripper on her own, far away from the unrelenting press of their thumb. After seven years, she had the money to do what she’d always longed for, but now that Duster reentered her life, he threw all her plans out the window. Since he’d wanted seven years stripped, she figured she had three days to strip him with four days for each of them to recover. At best she had a week with Duster before her network would come looking, suspicious that she hadn’t returned him.
    “A week to do what? Discover just how much he hates me?”
    Diane touched the ring on the chain around her neck. She didn’t wear it on her hand like he did, because she couldn’t let the women of Network Thirteen see a wedding ring. But not a day had gone by in the last seven years where she didn’t touch her ring and think of the only man she’d ever loved. Duster Jennings. A slaver.
    Just seeing the mate to her ring on his finger filled her with confused terror. He must have still care for her to wear it, or he had vowed to hunt her down and kill her. She didn’t know. She couldn’t read him, his memories, unless he allowed her to. She had to touch him to do her work, and he had to be in the proper situation for her healing touch to be effective.
    As a stripper, she would put him into a hypnotic alpha state with drugs so his mind would open to her. Duster had been in such a state when he’d been loaded on her ship. Once she realized who her mysterious client was, she’d panicked and hit a button that automatically injected him to the point he rested in a chemically induced coma. Diane could safely induce such a state in him for only a few more hours, which would extend the twelve-hour lead time she had, but any longer than sixteen hours might cause irreversible brain damage.
    What would she do with him after that? She couldn’t strip him. She couldn’t return him to Dahank, the planet she picked him up on. She couldn’t keep him. As pleasing as the prospect of keeping him her prisoner was, she couldn’t. He’d never let her do what she wanted to do with him. Given their history, he’d go out of his way to kill her, and she honestly couldn’t blame him.
    Pressing her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, she squeezed hard as she considered her limited options. If she kept him in the stripping room and drugged him lightly, he wouldn’t be able to escape. And she could touch him all she wanted. But she couldn’t keep him there forever.
    “We haven’t seen each other in seven years. You want seven years stripped. We once had seven days together. I have seven days to decide what to do with you.” Diane