Chapter 3

"The fuck you do," I wheezed, and then sucked in a deep breath, only to immediately double over coughing again as I got a whiff of the coin between his fingers.

It absolutely reeked of magic. Strong magic.

Fae magic, in fact, of the most wild and inhuman kind.

"Christ," I tried again, and then hacked, sniffed, and pushed off my knees to stand upright again.

Blinking to clear my watering eyes, I examined him through this new lens. Yeah. Fairy absolutely fit. Short, slim, unearthly beauty, the too-wide eyes and the glossy black hair color that I'd assumed came from an expensive salon and instead had actually grown that way. Plus, super fucking weird. Fairies always were.

Like any shifter with a functioning nose, I could usually pick one out of a crowd, but his scent wasn't like anything I'd ever encountered. At least this explained the tongue.

The coin gleamed a rich, pure yellow-gold even in the pink lighting, taking on no hue whatsoever. My fairy would-be john's thumb partially obscured the side facing me, but an intricate raised design peeked out, maybe outspread wings.

"Well?" he said, and I tore my eyes away from the glittering thing and back to his face. "What do you think of my offer?"

His offer. Right.

At least now I knew I didn't need to blame Dominic for this.

This little fairy asshole had been using magic to entice me so that I'd want to accept his "offer" of fucking for money. The fall on stage must've been an accidental side effect—which meant I'd still need to kill Cassidy for the body oil thing. But that hadn't been malicious on his part, I didn't think.

Besides, I was pretty sure he'd put on his apparent bravado like his clothes. The arm holding the coin upraised had the very slightest tremor. Had he used his magic in order to boost his own confidence? Could he be incredibly ugly underneath an illusion of beauty, and self-conscious about it? Unable to get laid any other way?

Maybe if I'd been new to my profession I'd have been surprised, shocked, or more pissed off. But aside from the fairy magic thing, which was a new one in the annals of club clients trying to pay for sex…yeah, I'd been here before. Many, many times.

So my tone was more resigned than anything as I said, "What do you think I think of your offer? I'm a stripper, not a prostitute, dude. I don't do that."

His lips tightened, and his chin jutted out stubbornly. "You sell your body every day. How is this different?"

"I'm looking at your face right now. If I rubbed my hand all over it, how would that be any different? Right? Come on. Don't be an asshole. I'll dance for you, or let you dance for me, or some other stuff you can probably think of, but that's not in my repertoire."

" Repertoire 's a fancy word for someone who tripped and fell on his behind while performing a Nine Inch Nails song," he snapped, lifting that small chin another couple of degrees.

Oh, for—and here I'd been making excuses for him in my head, trying to give him the benefit of the doubt!

"Okay," I snarled, stepping forward again, hands on my hips and totally done with the Mr. Nice Guy routine. "Yeah, maybe it is. But behind 's a pretty fucking prissy euphemism for someone who's trying to trade shitty fairy trash for getting knotted by a glittery stripper!"

"Oh!" he gasped. "Shitty fairy—how dare you!"

"How dare I ?" I demanded back. "You're trying to pay me to knot you. One of us is being crass, and it isn't me. You could at least offer actual cash, not whatever the fuck that is. I mean, that's doubly insulting."

"This," he said with as much dignity as a fairy trying to pay a weretiger for sex in the seedy back room of a strip club could muster—surprisingly, more than zero, "is pure gold, worth thousands of human dollars. That means nothing to me, of course, as I can get as much gold as I like." He shrugged. "I gather you've figured out what I am?"

"Yes, and I also know that your kind aren't exactly honest when you make bargains, and your ‘gold' tends to not stay that way."

As the words left my lips, it dawned on me that what I'd said sounded a lot less like absolute refusal on any terms, and a lot more like negotiating.

Damn. It really did. His magic had gotten to me, because my body definitely liked the idea of his offer, even if my mind had more sense.

Maybe he wouldn't notice.

He sighed heavily and shook his head. "There's no need for rude stereotypes," he said chidingly, "and I give you my word that this coin is truly made of gold. I don't have access to any cash that's not traceable in ways I don't want it to be, and I'm assuming you don't want to use any other method that's traceable to you, either? Since we're discussing price now, aren't we?"

Well, double damn. He might be weird, but he didn't seem to be stupid. And for a fairy, giving his word meant something. The coin was really gold, and even though I didn't know a lot about precious metals, yeah, that had to be an ounce or two, and I'd lived in Vegas for long enough to have the contacts to sell it for close to what it was actually worth. The workmanship and its fairy provenance might drive the price up, too.

Fairy provenance.

And the beautiful, tempting little fairy offering it to me. Tempting, because he'd made himself that way. I might not even want him naturally, and I had no idea how much of what I was seeing, smelling, and feeling was real.

Oh, this coin and its owner were bad news. Very, very bad news, that'd pay Louie off for the time being and buy me another couple of months of breathing room. During that couple of months of grace, I could work double shifts and shake my ass like I'd never shaken it before.

It didn't really matter if I wanted him of my own free will, did it? As long as I knew it might not be real and made the conscious choice not to care?

Thousands of dollars. And the chance to satisfy this ache, this gnawing physical craving that had been building, naturally or not, since the moment I first scented him.

A good fuck. Paying off Louie. A turn in my luck, maybe, and all because of a weird fairy's weird whim.

But that didn't mean I had to be completely stupid about it.

"Yeah," I admitted after a second. "Yeah, I guess we are. But it's not just the price. I don't trust you. Why me?"

"Honestly?"

"No, please lie to me."

"There's no need to be sarcastic," he sniffed, and tossed his head, his glossy hair rippling like something out of a vaguely R-rated shampoo commercial.

It hit me all of a sudden that when—if, dammit, if—I took his offer, which I couldn't really believe I'd basically committed to doing, I'd be able to wrap my hand in that smooth shiny waterfall of hair. Around and around. Tug his head back with it. Unbutton his collar.

Bite my way down his throat while I…

"Mmmph," I said, biting back a real groan. Knot my pants. That's what I would do.

Christ, I needed to fuck him and get this magic out of my system.

His brows furrowed. "Are you quite well? Did you hurt yourself when you fell down? You're an alpha, aren't you? Don't you heal?"

The knee-jerk response came out before I could stop it. "I'll show you how much of an alpha I am."

"Good," he said sweetly. "Then let's get out of here."

Get out of here. Go to…not my apartment, I knew better than to take a fairy home with me. Somehow I also knew he wouldn't be taking me to wherever he called home, either. A hotel, maybe? He'd better be paying for it. The club was plenty staffed for the night, and it was getting late anyway. We could head out to wherever he had in mind once I had a quick word with Scott and let him know I wouldn't be on stage anymore.

But I'd asked him…my head spun. A question. I blinked, and he faded in and out. Magic sucked so hard.

"Why me?" I dug my claws into my palms a bit, and the sting cleared my head. "Straight answer, or no deal."

"I lost a bet with a friend," he said after a noticeable hesitation, his eyes darting away again. Hopefully he never played poker, because he had more tells than a drunk frat boy on his first trip to Vegas. This one, in my limited experience, seemed to indicate discomfort and embarrassment. "I'm not sure if you know what happens to my kind when we fail to carry out an obligation, but it's deeply unplea—anyway, that doesn't matter to you. All that matters is that this seemed like a more or less safe place to find a suitable alpha. And you were the first one who caught my eye. It was difficult to overlook your performance."

Right. He probably figured I'd be the most desperate, since I couldn't even get through a dance without slipping on a banana peel—although that had been his fault in the first place, for having the most distracting scent on Earth.

Not that I'd be telling him that. He didn't seem like a guy whose ego needed a whole lot of stroking, especially since he didn't seem inclined to stroke mine in return.

Because rephrasing his fairy weaseling as bluntly as possible, he'd picked me to fuck him because he'd probably die horribly if he didn't, and he thought I might be enough of a sad sack to take whatever he paid me.

How fucking flattering.

That said, however much it stung, he wasn't completely wrong.

"Fine," I said shortly. "Wait for me in the parking lot out back. You drive here?"

"We can walk to the hotel." I suppressed a growl. The details of his transportation didn't matter, particularly, but I'd started getting annoyed by the way he tended to answer a different question than the one I'd asked. "I booked a room at that place with the big palm trees around the corner. It didn't look like we'd get lice from walking in the door, but otherwise, I can't make any promises."

Meh. I worked in a strip club with people like Dominic, so my standards were already a little iffy. His were guaranteed to be much higher.

Besides, he hadn't made the obvious joke about fleas that most people did when talking about shifters and potential vermin in the same sentence, and I had to give him points for that.

"I'll meet you out back in ten minutes," I said, and headed out of the room without waiting for a reply, shutting the door behind me.

I gave it fifty-fifty that he'd actually follow through after ten minutes to think better of it, and he was probably giving me the same odds.

But when I emerged from the discreet employees-only door at the corner of the building, there he was, leaning against the low cinderblock wall that divided our parking lot from the strip mall next door. Moonlight glinted blue on his hair and snowy white on his face and seemed to be absorbed into his outfit like it would into a black hole. Another slight gleam picked out his painted toenails. The whole effect unsettled me, and I actually jumped a bit when he started moving, walking toward me like something out of a particularly surreal dream.

It had all my hackles up as he fell into step with me without a word, crossing through the strip mall's parking lot and around the corner to the cheap hotel on the other side of the block.

Hopefully that was really where he meant to go, anyway. If he tried to lead me out of the mundane world, I'd be out of here, debts or no debts, painfully hard erection or not.

Past midnight in this far off-Strip area, only a few cars went by, and all the other businesses had closed. My footsteps echoed loud in the relative silence, and his high heels clicked on the pavement, a reassuringly normal sound. A chill desert wind brushed by us, and my breath came out in huge puffs of steam. Even more reassuringly, so did his.

That faint, nagging sensation of prickling wrongness didn't vanish, though.

But a quick glance around, and a deep breath to parse any scents in the air, gave me nothing at all to concern me.

By the time he pulled a key card out of his pocket and beeped open the door to a ground floor room at the back of the hotel, I'd pushed it out of my mind. Fuck it. Of course I'd feel weird about the whole situation; I was being paid to knot a fairy who'd gotten me hard with magic.

He flipped the switch by the door and bathed the drab room in equally drab yellow light: a maroon bedspread with the faint sheen of cheap polyester, chipped particle board furniture, and a dark blue carpet that, surprisingly, bore the faint imprints of an actual vacuum cleaner.

Whatever. It didn't smell any mustier than the back of the club, and shifters didn't really get human diseases. It'd take a worse breeding ground than this place to produce a fungus that could overcome my inborn healing magic.

The room had no personal touches at all except for the expensive-looking glass bottle of lube on one of the nightstands. I had to choke back a laugh. This guy really had planned ahead. How incredibly presumptuous—except that he'd had a solid gold coin and magic to back up his confidence.

Speaking of which.

The fairy stepped aside, and I followed him in and closed the door behind us with a click.

"Let's see that coin again," I said.

He nodded and fished in his pocket, and when he held out his hand the coin glittered in his palm. It looked bigger lying flat like that, and now I could see that the wings belonged to a dragon, stylized and outspread, with its tail curling around the edge of the coin and traceries filling in the rest of the design.

I reached out and took it, and he didn't stop me, though he whipped his hand away and rubbed his fingers together as I did. Huh. Well, if I worried about every weird thing he did, I'd need a therapist. It had more heft to it than I'd expected, and the warmth of it heated my hand. It'd been in his pocket this whole time absorbing his body heat, but…fuck it. Put that in the same category of things I shouldn't worry about. It felt like gold, and he'd promised me it was real in a way that would bind a fae, and more questions would be useless, anyway, I had no doubt.

I slipped the coin into my own pocket, pay rendered for expected services, no more denial possible. And there we were. Closing the door had shut out the wind and the groan of the ice machine compressor along the walkway and the idling car a few doors down. Silence fell. Near silence, anyway, since my alpha shifter ears picked up everything. But now I could hear him breathing, short, sharp little inhales and exhales, as if his apparent calm poise was nothing more than the thinnest fa?ade.

On the walk I'd been more focused on my surroundings and my sensation of unease than on his physical presence. But now that we were alone in a private place, with the bed right there…he might not want me, particularly, but I had nothing here to distract me from how fucking badly I wanted him .

Would his scent intensify if I rubbed my face against the curve of his throat? Or wrapped my hands around his waist, his hips, his thighs? Maybe his breath would come even faster as I slid my palm over his cock, teasing out an erection I could fondle to full hardness as I pressed into him from behind, my own cock digging into his lower back…

"You might as well do whatever it is you're thinking about that's getting you so worked up," he said irritably, and I snapped out of it with a jolt, biting my lip to keep in the…yeah, I'd been fucking growling. Well, at least he couldn't claim he wasn't getting the alpha experience. He'd done that chin-lifting thing again, that made me want to bite his neck, and his black eyes blazed. "I'm paying you to do it, and we're here, so get it over with. Please don't trip and fall on me and mess up my clothes."

Everything around me—the faint hushing of water through the hotel's pipes, a distant siren, the turning of the gods-damned Earth—came to a halt so grinding I could feel it in my teeth.

Get it the fuck over with ?

Don't fall on him and mess up his clothes ?

Okay, this was some bullshit. And I'd had enough. Dominic and his metallic jock strap and his dangling hairless testicles. Cassidy and his miserable body oil addiction. Motherfucking Louie planning to call my parents, reveal that their only son was a hopeless screw-up, and break their hearts.

More than anything, me, and my own feckless habit of kicking the can down the road and hoping it'd all work out somehow.

And now…this. This mysterious, condescending little magical jerk who'd used magic to make himself more appealing to me on the one hand, and then had the nerve to snark at me for getting "all worked up" on the other!

"Okay then," I said, and I moved at last, prowling like the tiger I was, circling him, not closing the distance between us until I'd forced him to twist around to face me, off-balance and flushed. I leaned down until our faces were only inches apart, until I could feel the quick, uneven brush of his breath and see myself reflected in his pupils. "Let's get this straight. You are requesting, and in fact demanding, that I earn my pay by doing whatever I'm thinking about doing. I have to knot you, and other than that, it's up to me. Yes?"

That quick, not-quite-human tongue darted out again, flickering over his lower lip and leaving it glistening. His pulse pounded in the side of his neck.

"You're not allowed to hurt me. I could defend myself effectively, I warn you, but I don't want to have to. I don't want to be concerned that I'll need to."

"No hurting you," I said, and meant it down to my bones. He might be annoying as hell, but—no. "I don't want to, and I'll be careful not to. You can relax."

The fae could detect lies most of the time, I thought. I'd heard it somewhere, probably from the same dubious source that had claimed they couldn't lie themselves. Maybe he could tell if I told him the truth, maybe not, but either way, he believed me; he nodded slowly, and some of his tension seemed to ease.

"Fine. Then yes, do whatever you need to do to get the job done. You have carte blanche." He paused. "No ruining my shoes, either. I'm not sure how you would, but it's worth mentioning."

He thought I was a graceless, crude knothead with more glitter than brains, and he obviously expected me to flip him over, pull down his pants, trip, and possibly only manage to fuck him because my cock went in when I fell over on top of him.

No. Screw that. I had carte blanche, and I was going to give him the absolute best fuck of his life.

Whether he liked it or not.