His chest heaved, and my breathing was just as unsteady. I sagged back against the door.

“Why’d you stop?”

“I gotta know you want this too. Need to hear you say it. I don’t want to watch you run from me again because you decide this is more than you can handle.” His tone was edged with raw honesty.

My brain had finally kick-started back into reality. All the thinking was back.

“What if I say no? Then where do we stand?” I asked.

He jammed his hands in his pockets. “I guess we go our separate ways.”

“What about our deal?” I pressed.

Con hung his head, and his chuckle was humorless. “Guess that would mean I got my shot and blew it.”

“You’d still give me the deed?”

He jerked his head up, his eyes pinning me in place. He opened his mouth to respond, but I reached out and pressed three fingers to his lips. “Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I don’t need to know.” I took a deep breath. “Because I’m not saying no. I’m saying yes. I want this.”

Con released a long breath, and the giddiness I felt at his relief quelled the feeling that I’d just made a decision that would impact the rest of my life.

I dropped my fingers from his lips, and he caught my hand and pressed a kiss to the center of my palm. It wasn’t the kind of gesture you’d expect from Con, but having seen him at his smoothest once before, it didn’t throw me.

“So you’re willing to jump without looking again?”

Staring up into his fallen angel face, I knew I didn’t have a choice.

“Yes.”

The back booth of Tassel was supposed to be my information trafficking hot spot, and most nights when I left Voodoo and dragged my ass over here, it was. But tonight it had turned into something else completely—a place for too goddamn much introspection. After Vanessa and I had left the rooftop—separately—I hadn’t wanted to go home to my empty bed. So here I was.

What the fuck am I doing?

She wasn’t for me. I’d drag her into the gutter and dirty her pristine, lily-white reputation—and her life.

I stared down at my hands. One flat on the table and the other wrapped around a double shot of Wild Turkey.

Those hands had no business touching a woman like Vanessa.

I lifted the glass and sucked down the bourbon.

Not even liquor could burn away my need to bury my hands in her hair, slide them up and down her silky-smooth legs while I spread them wide and feasted on what my imagination had decided was the sweetest pussy I’d ever tasted.

I smacked the glass back down on the table. Drinking surely wasn’t going to help. If I hadn’t been so wasted that night, I wouldn’t have spent the last two years wondering if my imagination was right.

Those kinds of thoughts could wreck a man.

A dancer—a new girl—with dark skin, golden brown eyes, and velvety black curls sat down in the booth across from me. Normally, if a girl was going to attempt to get my attention, she made herself right at home on my lap. Not that it’d do any good lately, because unless you were a smoking hot society princess, my dick wasn’t having it. But still, this chick wasn’t even trying, which had my radar pinging.

If the girls were allowed to drink on shift, I would’ve offered to share, but given that I’d already ordered a half dozen or so to be fired for the offense, it didn’t seem quite fair.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

It was late, and I was ready to head home and escape from thoughts of Vanessa.

“Heard you’re looking for information.”

Her long eyelashes were fake and tipped with gold glitter, and she fixed her gaze on the table.

“I might be,” I replied.

The gold tassels hanging off her tits barely covered her wide nipples. She looked to be all of about twenty years old. I felt like an old man sitting across from her.

“What’s your name?”

She looked up, clearly surprised by my question.

“Gold Dust.”

I shook my head. “Your real name.”

She sat up straighter, eyes darting up to mine and then back down again. “Gina. Gina Mulvado.”

“How long you been stripping, Gina?”

“Just had my three year anniversary last week.”

“So you’re…what? Twenty-one? Twenty-two?”

“Twenty-one. Last week.”

The numbers lined up. “Started stripping when you were eighteen?”

One side of her mouth quirked up in a mocking smile. “As soon as they’d let me in the door.”

“Why?”

She finally met my eyes. “Why not? I got bills to pay. Ain’t like I got any other skills that’ll make me this much money, at least not without fucking and sucking my way across town.”

“That shit don’t fly here.” That was my policy, but it wasn’t like I had time to personally police it. My manager was on the up and up, and that was the best I could do. But I didn’t want girls using my place as a hook up for picking up Johns. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

“I know, and that’s why I like it here.” She tucked a dark lock of hair behind her ear. “So I heard you pay for information.”

“True.” And paying for information drew all sorts of attention my way. And some of that attention—especially from the gang bangers, ex-cons, garden-variety lowlifes—I’d never want spilling over onto Vanessa. Which is why keeping our relationship on the down-low was advisable on several fronts.

“Pay good?” she asked.

I surveyed her. “More than you’ll earn tonight otherwise.”

She nodded. “I used to work at a club on the other side of town, and there used to be this guy who’d come in for a dance once a week. He was always broke. We joked about having to dodge the quarters he tossed on stage because he could barely scrounge together a damn dollar.”

I rolled my shot glass back and forth between my thumb and forefinger, wondering where this was going.

“Well, one night he came in flush with cash. He went from digging in the cushions for loose change to tossing twenties on the stage and tipping fifty for a dance. He was drunk as hell, and rambling on and on about it being blood money for the little blood-sucking whores.”

I reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey and sloshed another three fingers into my glass as she continued.