“You can date strippers, but you don’t bring them home to meet the family,” Nathaniel said. He sounded sad.
I hugged him tight. “You are my family.”
He rewarded me with that brilliant smile of his, the real one, not the practiced one that the customers thought was the real deal. If he could have looked at them like that on cue he’d have gotten more hundred-dollar tips than he already did.
“I didn’t mean it that way, Nathaniel. I know you’re Anita’s family,” Zerbrowski said.
Nathaniel wasted some of the smile in his direction. “Thanks.”
Then Katie got a strange look on her face, and she paled.
“What’s wrong?” Zerbrowski asked.
“Ages ago, they tried to tell me about a bachelorette party that a bunch of the wives went to when Rosetti was about to marry. They told me some details and . . . I told them to stop, I didn’t want to hear it.” She looked at Nathaniel.
He was very still against me. I looked up at him. His face was guarded, as if he were waiting for something bad to happen.
“That was you they were talking about?” Katie asked.
“Probably,” he said, softly.
She blinked at him, brown eyes very wide. “But they said . . . you . . .” She blushed from neck to the roots of her hair. She finally hid her face against Zerbrowski.
“Whatever they said, I did not have sex with anyone at the party.”
She raised her head from Zerbrowski’s chest and blinked at him. The look was enough to say that was exactly what she’d been told.
“The stories grow in the telling sometimes, but whatever they’ve decided to tell people, sex did not happen. Now, here I am in person, and every woman who heard the story will be wondering if it was true; some were drunk enough they may believe what they were told happened, and whoever lied the most will be freaking out that I’m here.”
Katie mastered herself enough to say, “I just need a minute. If you could set the rest of the food on the table and watch the pasta in the oven, I’ll be right back.” Katie went out the door with a bemused Zerbrowski trailing after her.
I looked up at Nathaniel. “If you say you didn’t have sex, I believe you, but what did you do at the party that was so share-worthy?”
“Nothing illegal.”
“I knew that, silly you.”
He smiled. “You never think less of me, do you?”
“Why should I?”
“It doesn’t bother you to know that at least five women here have seen me naked.”
In my head I thought, since you did a few p**n ographic movies before we met, there might be a lot more people who have seen you naked, but I didn’t say that out loud. If I brought that up, we’d fight, or he’d get his feelings more hurt than they already were, and that wasn’t what I wanted.
“You don’t take your G-string off in the club,” I said.
“For enough money I do at private parties.”
I hadn’t known that, and fought to keep my face from showing it. Then I thought of something else. “Did the lap dances start before or after your thong came off?”
“Most before, but the bride got one after.”
“That must have been tricky.”
“Lap dances without clothes are always tricky,” he said.
“I’ll bet.”