Revealed. Joanne Rock
Three minutes and she’d be out of here. She could make it another three minutes without bursting out of her costume.
The musical note grew, reverberating through her. She relaxed and breathed, nearly forgetting about the duct tape, but not quite forgetting about Greg De Costa.
“Happy birthday to you…” Jackie launched into her song, a slightly revamped version of the birthday classic.
Was it her imagination, or did the room still once her voice hit the airwaves? Her audience grew less leering, more attentive as she belted out her song in perfect pitch.
Nothing like a good performance to soothe her nerves.
She vocalized her way into the last refrain, more confident with every note that she was going to make it out of Flanagan’s back room with kitty costume and her dignity intact.
Then her eyes collided with Greg’s.
His warm-coffee gaze wasn’t offering up heated glances anymore. Unless you could call his intense, enraptured stare heated.
He liked her voice.
She knew it as surely as if he’d spoken the words aloud. Her vocal chords were her one and only vanity, the lone genetic gift from her prodigy parents.
Men—being such visual creatures—rarely recognized her single outstanding quality. But Greg De Costa knew it, heard it, admired it.
Her heart started pounding in a way that threatened her furry shrink-wrap. Blood pulsed through her, flushing every last inch of her body with liquid heat.
Oh no.
Desire swamped her along with the closing notes of her birthday song.
“Happy birthday, dear Gregory…” Dear God, had she just called him Gregory again? She’d meant to sing it as Greg.
Nervous embarrassment joined the swirl of musical notes and sensual hunger building in her veins.
“Happy birthday to…” Her chest hammered against fuzzy black fur as her song reached its final crescendo. The duct tape strained and stretched to hold the material of her costume together.
If she had any sense she would have risked singing off-key to save her outfit.
Damn her musical pride.
“…you!” Arms flung wide, she belted out the last note like a certified opera diva.
And froze in horror as her kitty costume slid all the way to her knees.
2
GREG HAD BLOWN OUT LOTS of candles in his day, but he’d never had a birthday wish come true so fast as tonight.
Sure, he’d wanted to see Jackie naked, but he’d been so hypnotized by her phenomenal voice, it took him a minute to realize she’d ditched her whole outfit in a bolder move than he’d ever seen any stripper attempt. No one else sang their way out of their outfit, of that much he was certain.
She’d stunned the crowd so much the guys around him forgot to whistle for one long moment. Hell, Greg forgot there was even anyone else in the room as he took in her completely bared breasts. Taut pink nipples tipped slightly upward, free from any bra or those little tasseled cups some strippers wore.
The only garment she sported underneath the fallen cat clothes were flame-red panties so small they could have served double duty as a postage stamp.
Despite the panties, she couldn’t have looked any less like a stripper. She had curves in all the right places, but they probably weren’t as generous as most women in her profession. Every inch of her creamy skin was perfect, without a beauty mark or false eyelash anywhere to detract from it.
But most unstripper-like of all—she appeared absolutely mortified to be on display in front of thirty salivating men.
One lone wolf whistle pierced through the crowd and shattered the silence along with Greg’s greedy catalog of her every feature.
The sound seemed to jar the mostly naked cat woman as much as it startled Greg. Jackie folded her arms over herself to shield her body from her audience, giving Greg all the proof he needed that she didn’t want to go through with her striptease.
Screw the audience approval ratings.
Ignoring the rapidly multiplying catcalls and whistles, Greg yanked a fresh tablecloth off of a nearby busboy’s cart, disrupting at least ten glasses of champagne. With the flick of his wrist, he unfurled the white linen and cloaked Jackie’s body in a crisp blanket.
A chorus of boos echoed through the crowd of Mike’s half-baked friends.
Jackie turned grateful eyes toward Greg, cinching the makeshift cape around herself with slightly fumbling hands.
Some moron shouted from the back of the private room. “Take it off!”
An even bolder moron pushed his way to the front of the group, crunching broken glass under his feet from the disrupted bus boy’s cart. “What the hell kind of striptease was that?”
“Show’s over.” Greg kept his body between Jackie and the inebriated masses, wishing like hell he had the option of just cutting to a commercial.
He reached for Jackie, figuring the best thing to do would be to whisk her out the back entrance.
“That was not a striptease,” Jackie announced, standing on her toes to look over Greg’s shoulder at her accuser. She was obviously recovering from her bout of stage fright. “ That was an accident.”
The vehemence in her voice seemed to catch the guy off guard as much as Greg.
“I’ll say it was an accident.” The guy turned his bleary-eyed attention toward Greg, lucky for his sorry butt. “You’re trying to tell me that’s all we get from the stripper?”
“I am not a stripper.” Tennis shoes squeaked in a flurry of restless movement as Jackie fairly bristled right out of her tablecloth.
An unwelcome sense of relief washed over Greg. Why should he care whether she was or wasn’t a stripper?
“Who are you?” Greg prompted, wondering what woman in her right mind would walk into a bachelor party clad as a cat.
She drew her compact self up to her full height. Her kitty ears just reached his nose but she packed a powerful glare with intense green eyes.
“I am the Zing-O-Gram.” She enunciated every word with slow precision.
Greg bit his tongue to staunch the automatic laughter rising in his throat. He doubted anyone could make a Zing-O-Gram sound like a force to be reckoned with, but Jackie was doing a damn good job.
Even the drunken guy looked cowed before he stalked off toward the pool table, muttering under his breath until they couldn’t hear him anymore.
The rest of the crowd had failed to disperse however, and Greg didn’t like the rumblings of discontent. He needed to get Jackie out of here, fast.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.” She hitched at the tablecloth around her shoulders, the black leggings of her costume still visible from her knee down. Apparently she had knotted the rest of the fallen outfit around her waist somehow. “Thanks to you.”
Could he help it that her words made him stand taller? “You’re really not a stripper?”
“I think I’m a few alphabets short of the right cup size to be an exotic dancer.”
His natural inclination was to allow his gaze to wander over the breasts that had received more than a passing grade from him, but that didn’t seem in keeping with his attempt to rescue her from a room full of horny bachelors. Greg closed his eyes instead, willing away memories of Jackie’s perfect body.
He was surprised when