I smiled and held my hand over my brow to find Josephine, but the lights were blinding. I could only see the first row of men, smiling and goading me to dance.

“Show us what you got, honey,” a guy yelled from the front row.

I stood in the center of the stage, completely frozen. I had two options: I could dance or I could let the bouncers drag me away.

“Work it, baby,” another guy yelled.

My cheeks flamed as I wrestled with indecision, but in the end, my body made up my mind for me. It started moving to the beat, slowly at first, just my head and shoulders rocking back and forth. The front row of men cheered me on and I smiled.

This isn’t so bad.

The emcee kicked the music up another notch, loud enough to drown out the sounds of the club. I tried to shimmy to the left and to the right, but I couldn’t quite work out how to coordinate my chest, shoulders, and feet.

“Sexier, honey!”

They wanted sexy? I’d show ’em sexy. My rolodex was chock-full of the most sultry dance moves: stirring the pot, grocery shopping, watering the lawn, you named it. I watered that lawn like my life depended on it and the crowd sat stunned, watching me in complete silence.

I pulled the beanie from my head and tossed it out into the crowd. That earned me a few whistles and that’s when I saw Dean standing at the end of the stage with his arms crossed. His features were cast in shadows, but I could see the incredulous grin stretched across his lips as he watched me.

I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from laughing, and the crowd went wild.

“Yeahhh, honey!”

“Keep biting your lip!”

Dean tilted his head to the right and I glanced over to see the pole gleaming under the neon lights. I hadn’t touched it yet, but I knew I would before the song finished. I shimmied to the back of the stage and tried to recall how dancers usually mounted the poles in movies. Do they just hop on, or do they get a running start first? It felt like I needed a running start, so I let T-Pain’s wise, auto-tuned words wash over me as I ran straight for it. My body collided with the metal and I clung onto it like a baby monkey grabbing on to a tree branch. Usually the dancers jumped on and started to spin, but I just slowly slid down the greasy pole until my butt hit the floor. Nothing happened. The song ended and I was left with absolute silence.

One slow clap started near the back and then the emcee spoke up halfheartedly, “Well, A for effort, right folks?”

Josephine whooped it up beside Dean, tossing dollars onto the stage. “THAT’S MY BEST FRIEND!” she yelled.

The two bouncers who had stood off to the side during my “performance” stepped forward as I unwound my legs from the base of the pole, but Dean got to me before they did. He reached up to help me down from the stage.

“That was amazing, I ca—” he began.

Hunter emerged through the crowd, having left the bathroom sometime during my performance. He limped through the crowd, clearly looking worse for wear.

“Hey!” he bellowed, squinting quizzically toward the stage.

We all froze, getting ready to run in case he identified us through the dim haze.

“Why the hell was the nun dancing onstage?”

Chapter Forty-Three

Dean

“You guys did all of this tonight? While I was at dinner with my sister?” Julian asked, holding Dean’s limp mustache and staring at the three of us with a dropped jaw.

Lily shrugged. “I mean, it took some planning.”

Josephine tried to sidle closer to him, but he shot her a warning glance with narrowed eyes. “And you didn’t even think to tell me?”

She nibbled on her bottom lip, trying to come up with an excuse. “I knew you wouldn’t be okay with it.”

He grunted. “Well yeah, you don't know what a guy like that might’ve done if he’d found you out.”

“I was there,” I said, handing Julian the three fingers of bourbon I’d just poured for him. “Hunter was a harmless drunk and she was safe the whole time.”

It was a white lie. A harmless lie. We were all safely inside my house, so what did it matter if an hour earlier Josephine had been alone with Hunter inside a strip club? Julian didn’t need to know every gritty detail.

Julian stared down at the blonde wig laying across Josephine’s lap. “So did it work?”

I smirked and pointed to the recorder beside Jo. “Play the recording for him.”

We had over an hour of Hunter’s drunk ramblings at the strip club. We’d listened to it all earlier, but we only played the highlights back for Julian.

At five minutes into the recording, Hunter started bragging about his new restaurant: “It’s gonna be the hottest restaurant in New York.”

Then there was another ten minutes of him drunkenly bragging about his “brilliant” idea. Jo fast-forwarded to get to the good stuff: Colette.

“Aren’t you married?”

“Only on paper, baby.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that when she’s out of town, I do whatever I want, and tonight, I think that’ll be you.”

Julian held up his hand and Josephine hit pause. “All right, all right, I get it. You have some dirt on him. Now what are you going to do?”

“I just left a message for him to meet me here tomorrow. I’ll confront him with the recording and let him decide his own fate,” I said.

“What if he doesn’t back down? What if he doesn’t care about his wife hearing it?” Jo asked.

I shrugged. “That’s the beauty of Lily’s plan. It’s irrelevant what he thinks, because we can always just send the recording to his wife. I don’t think Mrs. Moneybags will be so forgiving. So he either does what we say and kills the restaurant himself, or he loses it completely.”

Julian slung back the rest of his bourbon and set the glass down on the coffee table in front of Lily. “Brilliant, but that’s enough cloak-and-dagger for me for one night. Jo, you ready to go? I’m exhausted.”

She pushed up off the couch and took his hand.

“You still smell like Hunter,” he said, wrapping an arm around her.

“He didn’t even touch me. I just smell like the smoke from the strip club.”

His paused. “Wait, you guys were at a strip club?”

Lily hopped to her feet and ushered them out into the foyer. “All right well, have a good night guys! Julian, you should know that she only went along with this as a favor to me.” She held up the blonde wig. “As repayment, I’ll let y’all keep this. I'm sure you two can find some use for it.”

At first he kept his straight face, ignored Lily, and ushered Josephine over the threshold. The door had almost closed behind them when there was a pause. Julian’s hand slipped back through the crack and Lily dropped the wig into it. Then, without a word, he shut the door.

“Knew he’d take it.”

Lily locked the door behind them and propped her back against it. She’d left her black beanie at the club. Her blonde hair was parted down the middle, falling down over her shoulders. Her tight black shirt had ridden up on the left side, revealing a little sliver of tan skin above her jeans. That patch of skin called to me. I dropped my glass on the table in the foyer and moved closer.

“Do I still smell like smoke too?” she asked as I wrapped my hands around her waist. I dipped down and buried my face in her hair. It smelled like her shampoo, a tropical scent filled with coconuts and sea breeze.

“You smell like Lily.”

She smiled against my neck and then her tongue slipped out and licked down my skin.

“You taste like Dean.”

I laughed and stepped back, forcing her along with me. We made it up to my bedroom slowly, pausing along the way so that she could tear off my shirt in the hallway. I stripped off her jeans on the stairs and she straddled me in the doorway to my bedroom, curving her hips against me until I lost track of where I was going. We were supposed to head into my bathroom and shower the strip club off us, but instead, I carried her to my bed and we fell back onto the comforter.