Read Girl Gear 4: Striptease for Free Online Page A

her both in and out of the office, the chemistry between them was going to be in the way, getting on her nerves, aggravating her until she did something really dumb.
    Like sleep with the man.
    The itch was there. A nice itch that she wouldn’t mind him scratching. Except she could hardly sleep with him and work with him. That was a no-no and a no-win. Seeing him on a daily basis meant living with the increased frustration.
    And since no one had ever said all was fair in love and sex in the city, she wanted him as hot and bothered as thinking of him made her.
    If anyone was going to hold the upper hand here, it was not going to be Jacob Faulkner.
    Working up a sweat while adjusting the lights and camera equipment she kept set up in her condo’s sparebedroom, she pressed her lips together, stepping back to eye the layout. At least now, after an hour of pacing and therapeutic scrubbing of toilets and tubs, she’d finally managed to settle on a payback certain to burn off her adrenaline-laced energy.
    Yep. Two could definitely play this warped show-and-tell game. She headed for the kitchen, returning with the bar stool she needed as a prop for her sound stage. She might not work as a videographer, but she could just as easily put together a production to suit her needs.
    Right now her needs were all about assuaging her pride and about setting her course through the next few sure-to-be-turbulent weeks. She’d have him eating out of her hand, even if she had to play dirty.
    And making use of the stripper’s pole she’d had installed in the room for exercise was about as dirty as it got.
    She stepped back, checked out her setup. The lights were hot, but working up a sweat wasn’t going to be a problem. It was, in fact, inevitable and a very good thing. Crossing the room’s hardwood floor in bare feet, she moved to the computer station and launched the system’s media player.
    She chose a file of dance-appropriate MP3s, adjusting the equalizer until the floor fairly thrummed beneath her feet. And then she smiled. He thought he knew the real Melanie Craine? He thought he’d capture the undisciplined truth? He didn’t know half of who she was. No one did. Even her partners. At times, she hardly knew herself.
    She knelt on the floor in front of the light she’d positioned to cast her shadow onto the wall. Her silhouette faced that of the glass sculpture in a mirroredpose, the sculpture she’d brought home from work and placed on the bar stool. The shadow of the pole ran down the wall in a line between the other two shadows.
    Jacob’s fascination with the female nude had inspired her, had made her want to show him that she was much more than the single fraction of her personality he’d seen. His harping-shrew video of her was totally skewed. As skewed as the sexed-up version she was about to make.
    Satisfied with the placement of the shadows, she closed her eyes, splayed her fingers low on her belly and got into the music. Feeling it first with her head and her shoulders, she nodded and swayed to the bass in the beat. She kept her eyes closed as her torso began to move and the first tingling waves of excitement tickled the base of her spine.
    Whenever she danced, she forgot everything but her body. Her brain lost all ability to handicap sensation and she melted into what felt like pure liquid motion. She felt that way now, sliding her hands from her thighs to her knees, dipping forward before raising her arms overhead with sinuous grace, stretching high, grasping for something that remained out of reach.
    Something like Jacob Faulkner.
    Instead she took hold of the pole.
    The thought of Jacob brought another tingle, this one centered lower in her body, deep between her legs. Slowly, she got to her feet, shoulders rolling side to side as she pushed up from the floor, her hands sliding high on the pole again. She turned, faced the room and arched her back, tilting up her pelvis and lifting one knee waist high.
    Oh, yeah. She