Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
Ridge
“ W here’s your office?” I said to Addison’s manager once I walked back through the entrance of the club, the motherfucker still standing there with a bodyguard.
The manager crossed his arms over his chest. “Why?”
“Unless you want me to out you in front of your employee”—I nodded toward the young woman who was standing at the register—“and your patrons”—I nodded toward the group of men who had just come in—“then I suggest we go somewhere private.”
The manager looked me over like I was scum. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
I smiled.
I didn’t get this question a lot. But when I did, the gratification felt so good.
“Ridge Cole, an owner of Cole and Spade Hotels. That’s who I am.”
The manager and bodyguard looked at one another.
I didn’t need to mention that my name came with power, that my pockets were deep enough to buy this strip club, the building, and to pay the salary of every employee here for the rest of their lives.
They knew.
Which was only confirmed by their expressions.
“Follow me,” the manager said.
He led me to the section of the club where the private rooms were located. Rather than go to the right—a hallway I’d walked down enough times since Addison brought me into one of those rooms during each of my visits—he took me to the left, past the cashier, and into a tiny office.
There were two folding chairs. The bodyguard took one, and I took the other. The manager sat behind his cheap, small desk.
“I’m assuming Addy is your girlfriend?—”
“Addison,” I corrected. “If you’re going to talk about her, you need to address her properly.”
“Addison,” he said.
Before he could utter another word, I voiced, “What Addison and I are is none of your business and irrelevant to this conversation.” I leaned closer to the desk. “When I found her this evening, she had just run out of a private room, where one of your customers had sexually assaulted her. What’s the purpose of having cameras in those rooms if no one is watching the footage to ensure your employees are kept safe?”
“We have a security guard stationed?—”
I pounded my fist on the fake wood. “I don’t give a fuck where he’s stationed. He clearly wasn’t close enough to intervene or do anything to help her.”
“Mr. Cole, I think you’re getting confused by what our employees do here and what these private rooms are for.”
“Confused”—my brows rose—“is the last thing I am. Addison sets boundaries in those rooms. I know because I’ve been in there with her multiple times. If those lines weren’t defined, that would be one thing. But they are, and one of your customers crossed that boundary.”
“Define ‘crossed,’” the manager said, using air quotes.
“He forcefully grabbed her chest and wouldn’t let her go. To the point where she had to take matters into her own hands and protect herself.”
“He touched her tits,” the bodyguard said. “That’s it?”
I didn’t like his tone.
I also didn’t like how he was downplaying the incident as though her tits were open to the fucking public.
My neck swiveled so I could take in the sorry excuse of a man. “It’s a boundary. He crossed it.” My stare returned to the manager, and I pointed at his computer. “Why don’t you pull up the feed so we can see exactly what he did?”
“Not an option,” the manager said.
My anger fueled me to chuckle. “Why?”
“Because you’re not an employee.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” I growled. “We both know a place like this doesn’t have a rule like that.”
The manager rocked back in his chair. “I don’t have access to the feed.”
Fucking liar.
I set my arms on the edge of his desk. “Don’t make my legal team come in here and bury this club. The second they get ahold of the footage—and they will—the PR damage alone will put you out of a job, and the doors of this establishment will be locked forever.” My eyes narrowed. “Or you can play nice and give me what I’m asking for.” I pulled out my phone, entered my password, and found Jenner Dalton’s contact information, my thumb hovering over the Phone button. “Do I make the phone call? The choice is yours.”
His stare hardened. “You’re a son of a bitch—you know that?” He typed something on the keyboard, moved the mouse around on its pad, and turned the screen toward me. “Just so you know, I haven’t seen any of this.”
“Do you think, at this point, I’m holding you liable?” I spit. “I already know you’re underqualified for this position, and whatever idiot hired you clearly didn’t know what the fuck they were doing.” I ground my teeth together. “Pull up the camera feed. I’m losing my patience.”
What was showing on his monitor was feed from the hallway that led to the private rooms.
He rewound the footage until I spotted her and said, “Stop.”
The footage began to play in real time. He noted which number door she had taken the customer to, and he pulled up the individual feed for only that room.
As I watched the screen, seeing the bastard take a seat and spread his legs and cup his hard-on, my jaw clenched.
My hands balled into fists.
I hadn’t anticipated what it would feel like to see this on the screen. To witness a man be this close to Addison, to put his hands on her, to look at her in a way that should only be reserved for me.
I didn’t care what we were or what pace we were moving at or whether we had titles or not. In my mind, that woman was mine.
And seeing that he was touching her, that his grip was aggressive and attacking, was sending me so far over the fucking edge.
But it didn’t just end there.
He put his face in her ass when she was bent over, and his hand skimmed the inside of her thigh as well.
There was no volume. I couldn’t hear the exchange of words. I could only see her lips moving, my mind filling in the words that she was shouting at him.
“Look at what that motherfucker is doing to her.” I stared at the manager, demanding a response. “You can’t tell me he’s not crossing a line.” When he said nothing, I slapped my hand on the desk. “Answer me!”
“I think it’s best that I say nothing.”
That response made me want to reach across the desk, pick him up, and slam him on top of it. But that wouldn’t get me what I ultimately needed from him.
So, I hissed instead, “And I’m the son of a bitch.” When Addison kicked the man in the balls and took off from the room, the customer falling off his chair and shriveling up in a ball on the ground, I seethed. “Where is he?”
“Who?” the manager asked. “The customer?”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you go see if he’s still here?” the manager said to the bodyguard.
The bodyguard left and shut the door behind him.
The second the handle clicked in the lock, the manager turned the monitor so I could no longer see it, folding his arms on top of the desk. “Don’t ask me for a copy of that feed. I won’t give it to you.”
I said nothing. I just continued to stare at him, letting him simmer in silence, guessing my next move.
I could take this in many different directions.
But only one worked to Addison’s benefit, even if the others would self-satisfy me.
“I don’t want the feed.” I crossed my legs and my arms and felt the smile slowly creep across my face. “There’s something else I want instead.”
“How’s the temperature?” I asked Addison, dipping my fingers into the bath I’d drawn for her to ensure the water wasn’t scalding. “Do I need to add in some cold water?”
Even though she’d asked for it to be extra hot, I didn’t want her burning herself.
“It’s perfect.” She spread some of the bubbles up to her neck. “Just what I needed. Thank you.” She reached over the lip of the tub to put her fingers on mine. “Are you sure you don’t want to join me?”
I wanted nothing more.
But she’d had herself a hell of a night, so I wanted to give her some space at the same time.
I grabbed a washcloth from the tray beside the tub and dipped it into the water, getting it wet enough so that while I was massaging it across the top of her shoulders, I was cleaning her at the same time. “This one’s just for you.”
She continued to hold me, locking our stares. “I’m okay, Ridge.”
“I know.”
“You’re worried. I can feel it. You don’t have to be.” She adjusted her position, sending a wave of bubbles to her feet. “Kicking him in the balls was the most liberating feeling in the world. And I got to do it twice because the first kick hadn’t felt like enough.” She went quiet, but I could tell she wasn’t done. “I’m just glad that when the adrenaline took over, it turned me into a badass. If I hadn’t done what I did … I don’t know what would have happened.”
I ran my thumb over her forehead, down her cheek, palming the side of her face. “After you left the room, he fell to the ground.”
Her eyes widened as she silently stared at me. “How do you know?” She sat up a little higher. “Wait, you saw the camera feed?”
During the drive to my house, we hadn’t discussed what had happened when I went back inside the club. She didn’t ask a single question, and I said nothing about it. I asked her if she wanted to go to the police, and when she said that was the last thing she wanted, I had taken her here, the conversation minimal until she got in the bath.
“I saw all of it,” I admitted.
“And my manager did too …”
“He’s no longer your manager, Addison.”
“He fired me?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I just need to understand what I’m facing here. Just because I can’t go back—or I shouldn’t go back—doesn’t mean my bills go away.”
“You’re telling me you’d return?”
She tilted her head, elongating her neck, her eyes then closing. “I don’t want to. I never wanted to even work there in the first place. But I’m so close to paying off my sister. Like, two weeks away. And then I was going to pay down a huge chunk on my student loans.” She looked at me again. “That’s the first time anything like that ever happened to me there. Maybe if the manager promised to beef up security or …” Her voice drifted off. “Why am I even letting myself go there?” She paused again. “I’ve lost it … haven’t I?”
“You haven’t lost it.”
“But I’m focused on the finances when I should be thinking about my safety. And in regard to my safety, why would I even consider putting myself in that situation?”
I dropped the washcloth and held her chin. “Because what happened there could technically happen anywhere. Who’s to say a teacher couldn’t pull you into a closet at school and do the same thing? Or when you’re out and someone yanks you into an alley? I get where your head is at. This isn’t easy—at all.”
She nodded, resting her hand on top of the water. “Except in those situations, I’m not half naked.”
I slid my hand into her hair. “You don’t have to even think about it anymore. You never need to step foot in that hellhole ever again.” I reached into the pocket of my jeans and pulled out the folded envelope. “For you.”
“What is it?”
“You can call it a severance. A payoff. Or what’s keeping that motherfucker from getting sued.”
She searched my eyes. “Ridge … what are you saying?”
I set down the envelope and held her face with both hands. The words I was about to say had been in my head since I’d joined her in the car. They had pulsed through me while I carried her from my garage to my en suite. I wanted to wait for the right moment to have this conversation. It seemed like this was it.
“I didn’t want to be that guy, Addison. But, shit, from the moment I first tasted you, I wanted to tell you to quit. I wanted to write you a check and take away every worry you had. But the more I learned about your situation, the more I saw how prideful you were.”
Her light-brown eyes were gazing back at me, the emotion beginning to fill them.
“You wanted to do this on your own, it was important to you. I didn’t want to take that away from you. I thought it would be the last thing you’d want from me.”
“You read the room right.” She gave me a soft smile. “Besides, I wouldn’t have cashed your check.”
“I know.” I traced my thumb over her lips. “But the thought of you going to the club every weekend”—I shook my head—“was getting harder to stomach. Every goddamn day, I was feeling worse about it. I didn’t want you on that stage. I didn’t want those men giving you money. I didn’t want them fantasizing about you. It even got to the point where I didn’t want their eyes on you—something I hadn’t felt at the beginning, but I feel that way now.”
I took a long, deep breath.
“When I saw you rush into the lounge, braless, looking terrified and defeated and in the middle of a panic attack—” I cut myself off, needing a second before I continued, running my hand over my head to try to calm myself down. “I’ll never forget that moment. I’ll also never forgive myself for not writing you a check and getting you out of that fucking nightmare of a place.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. Like I said, I wouldn’t have cashed it.”
On my way back into the club, the plan had started to formulate in my head. By the time I got to the manager’s office, I already knew what I wanted and what I was going to ask for.
And the bastard had made it so easy for me.
“Instead, you’re going to accept a check from him.” I opened the envelope, unfolded the wide paper inside, and held it up for her to see. “If I’d gotten my legal team involved, you would have gotten a lot more. Hundreds of thousands, I’m sure?—”
“Oh my God, Ridge.” Her hand went over her mouth as she looked at the amount on the check. “Fifty thousand? That’s what he gave me?” Her hand then returned to my arm. “It’s plenty. I don’t need a cent more. I shouldn’t even take it because it’s from him.”
“But you’re going to take it.”
She hesitated and finally said, “Yes, I will.”
“It’s enough to pay off your sister and to make a large dent in your student loans.”
“It is.” I could tell she wasn’t done speaking, and I could also tell she was still upset. “I just feel bad that I didn’t work for that money.”
“Addison, don’t say that. You worked your ass off for that money. Not to mention, that asshole put you in an environment that wasn’t safe. In a place like that, protocols need to be established to ensure what happened to you doesn’t happen to anyone else. The fact of the matter is, he just doesn’t give a fuck. So, look at this money like a future advance on dancing you no longer have to do.”
She slowly nodded. “You’re right.” When I set the check down, her hand moved to my knuckles, rubbing the cuts across my skin and the blood that had dried, which I hadn’t yet washed off, and the dark purple bruises that were starting to form. “Tell me what caused this.”
“You weren’t the only one who felt liberated tonight.”
Her brows rose. “You punched my manager?”
I smiled. “Let’s just say, the motherfucker not only has broken balls, courtesy of you, but he now has a broken nose too.”
“Ridge”—she let out a tiny laugh—“you’re kidding?”
“The only good thing that fucking security guard did this evening was find the man who had assaulted you. The dumbass hadn’t left the club, so I was able to give him a little piece of my mind.”
Her head tilted as she gazed at me. “You came to my rescue. In ways I can’t even process yet.”
“Baby,” I whispered, “you don’t need to. You just need to know that I’m here.”
“About that …” She turned quiet for several seconds. “You know, working at the club was the major thing that was holding me back from you. There’s still the teaching layer, but it was the club that ate at me the most.”
“I know.”
“And because of you, that’s no longer an issue.” She sat up even higher and put her arms around my shoulders, hugging me against her wet body. “Ridge, I’ll never be able to thank you for tonight.”
“No thanks needed. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat.” I held her tightly, and when I sensed she needed more, I squeezed her harder. “I care about you, Addison. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”
“Ridge …”
“Yeah?”
“Fuck turtle speed.”
I let out a deep chuckle. “You’ve never said anything sexier.”