Bad Girls by Rebecca Chance Page B

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