“Are you short-staffed again?” she asked, wondering if Harry would need her to dance an extra set.

He shook his head. “Everybody’s here, sound and healthy.”

“What do you mean?” Nick asked, a frown furrowing his brow.

Harry began to explain about the sick dancers, which made Izzie feel guilty again. Especially when he groaned over how hard it had been to tell Delilah, his “retired” wife that she wasn’t in shape to go on in their place. Oy. She wouldn’t have wanted to see the redhead’s expression during that conversation.

Something else she didn’t want to do was have to look Nick in the eye and admit she’d called in sick rather than face him last weekend. She figured he knew that much, but didn’t particularly feel the need to confirm it.

Excusing herself, she headed to her dressing room. The door wasn’t locked, but she immediately noticed the deadbolt, which had not been there the previous weekend.

“You sneaky man,” she whispered with a smile as she dropped her purse and keys on the vanity. She could think of several wicked ways Nick could help her kill time between her numbers.

Of course, being the hard-ass guy he was when on the job, she suspected he might resist her. That was okay. Izzie had found she was pretty good at working around his resistance.

Having stood most of the day at work, she wanted to relax before going onstage. Kicking her shoes off her feet, she pulled her chair out from under the makeup vanity and sat down at it.

She immediately heard a cracking sound, but didn’t register what it was until the chair broke apart beneath her, sending her crashing to the floor. “Son of a bitch,” she snapped as she lay still on the tile. The back of her head had scraped the concrete block wall on the other side as she’d fallen. She rubbed at it, shocked to see a few flecks of fresh blood on her fingertips.

“Izzie? Are you all right? What was that noise?” Nick asked as he burst into the room.

He swung the door open so hard he almost hit her with it. An inch closer and she would have taken a flat piece of oak square in the face.

“Oh, my God.” He immediately dropped into a squat beside her. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s okay,” she insisted, slowly sitting up.

He put his hand under her arm to help her. “What happened?”

“My chair broke,” she admitted, almost embarrassed about it. She’d never fully gotten over that chubby girl terror of breaking a chair in public.

“Is that blood on your fingers?” he asked, his voice so taut it almost snapped.

She lifted it to the back of her head again. “Yeah, I scraped my head on the wall when I fell.”

“You need to go to the hospital.” He rose and tugged her up, too. “Come on, I’ll take you right now.”

“No, Nick, I don’t. I didn’t bang my head, I promise. I just scratched it on the way down.”

He frowned, obviously not believing her.

“Check and see for yourself. I swear, it’s nothing but a scratch.” She turned around, tilting her head back so he could see the spot where the blood had come from.

Nick gently pushed her hair out of the way. Izzie watched him in the mirror, seeing the frantic expression on his handsome face. And the way his jaw clenched as he tenderly examined her.

He was worried about her. Truly afraid for her.

“See?” she asked softly.

“Looks like a scratch,” he admitted.

“Good.”

“But that doesn’t mean you’re not hurt anywhere else. God, Izzie, what the hell happened?”

She gestured toward the remains of the chair, in pieces at her feet. “It fell apart as soon as I sat on it.” Glaring at him, she added, “No big butt jokes.”

He rolled his eyes. “As if.” Stepping away, he ran his hands up and down her arms. “You’re sure you’re not hurt anywhere else?”

She was hurt elsewhere. Her hip was killing her from where she’d banged on the floor. But thankfully, she hadn’t landed on her bum knee. “I’m okay.”

Nick shook his head, muttering something, then bent down to examine the pieces of the chair. It was a sturdy rolling one that easily slid around when Izzie needed to reach something on the vanity. But it had fallen apart into several pieces.

“This doesn’t make any damn sense.” His tone was curt, all business now. “How could it just fall apart like that?”

“I have no clue. Maybe it was just defective.”

Nick didn’t even look up. He was poking around in the pile, picking up a couple of screws and staring at them hard.

“Rose? Nick? Is everything okay? Somebody heard a crash.”

Glancing at the door, she saw Harry Black, and, right behind him, one of the bouncers. They both stared wide-eyed from her, down to Nick and the broken chair.

“Are you okay, honey?” Harry asked.

“Can I help you up?” the bouncer, Bernie, her self-appointed watchdog, asked.

“I’m fine. Just a little mishap.”

“She could have been badly hurt,” Nick barked.

“But I wasn’t,” she murmured, trying to calm all three down. If Nick was like a protective lion, Harry was like a fatherly teddy bear. And Bernie was like a big grizzly somebody had poked with a stick. They all looked equally upset.

“It’s okay, I swear. Just an accident. Now, if you don’t mind, Harry, could you find me another chair? I need to get ready to go on.” The older man nodded and backed out of the door, taking Bernie with him.

Glancing at Nick, she added, “You need to get to work, too, making sure everything is safe and secure for me to perform.”

He slowly rose, his eyes locked on hers. “Are you really worried about something, or are you trying to get rid of me?”

Izzie offered him a cocky grin, put her hand on his chest, and pushed him toward the door. “I’m trying to get rid of you. I have to be onstage in an hour, and with you in here oozing all that hot man stuff, I’m going to be tempted to test that lock and seduce you.”

His eyes twinkled. But his frown remained. “You’re not going to seduce me into forgetting you could have been hurt.”

“And you’re not going to bully me into forgetting I have a job to do.”

He reached up and cupped her cheek. Izzie couldn’t help curling into his hand, loving the roughness of his skin against her own. “I would never bully you into doing anything, Izzie.”

They hadn’t yet talked about her job. They’d officially been secret lovers for two wild, passion-filled nights, and she hadn’t had a chance to even ask him if he was going to have some kind of macho problem with her dancing. Now he’d opened the door for the question.

“Are you going to be all right upstairs, watching me?”

He brushed his thumb over her jaw. “I love watching you.”

Nibbling on his finger, she murmured, “I meant, will you be okay watching everyone else watch me?”

His jaw stiffened and his dark eyes flashed. But he didn’t pull away. Instead, he drew closer, tipping her head back so sweetly, so tenderly, she knew he was still worried she could be hurt. “Izzie, I can’t promise anything because I haven’t experienced it yet. But I can tell you this…I know and want the real you…both sides of you. The Rose and the woman you become when you walk out of this place every Sunday night. I’m in this with both of you.”

Without saying anything more, he bent down and covered her mouth with his, kissing her sweetly and tenderly. Then, with one more brush of his hand on her face, he turned and walked out.

AS IT TURNED OUT, Nick did not have to test himself to see how he’d handle watching Izzie strip for other men. Because before she ever went onstage, Nick was forced to deal with a couple of punks who didn’t understand the rules of a place as upscale as this one. One of them had made a move on a waitress, another had lunged at a dancer. Nick and Bernie plucked the guys up and dragged them out the front door, where, high on liquid courage, they’d both tried to put up a fight.