“Just two dresses and some shoes,” Lissa told him.

“Just, huh.” He looked at Ellen. “What about you?”

Be brave, she told herself before saying out loud, “I have a new dress, too. We need to go somewhere nice for dinner.”

He grinned. “We’re going fancy, huh? I’ll make reservations.”

“I need to run,” Lissa said, heading for the elevator. “The bus will be here soon and I have to curl my hair.”

Keith watched her go. “Are the dresses okay? Should I be worried?”

Ellen thought of the white sheath. “All the scary bits are covered.”

“That’s a relief.” He glanced at her shopping bags. “What did you buy?”

She smiled. “You’ll have to wait and see.”

Unity walked into the bedroom she used as an office and stared at her computer, not sure what to do. Curiosity battled with a sense of propriety. It would be wrong to invade Thaddeus’s privacy, she told herself, only to have a voice in her head whisper that if the man was so very concerned about privacy he probably shouldn’t have worked as a stripper.

She inched toward her chair, finally settling in place and going online. Once there, she hesitated. Maybe there weren’t any videos of him, um, dancing. Maybe nothing was posted. Maybe she was worried for no reason.

Cautiously, she typed his name in the search bar, then pushed Enter. The page filled with information about his company, articles in The Seattle Times about various acquisitions and a link to his LinkedIn profile.

She moved the cursor to the search bar and added the word stripper after his name. The page loaded again, this time giving her links on YouTube and several Facebook pages, along with articles with headlines like “The Most Fantasized About Man in Las Vegas.” She clicked on the first video, then drew back in her chair and braced herself.

The video quality was grainy and the sound was hard to hear, but there was no mistaking the stage and the pounding beat of the music. A man stood in the center, smiling at the crowd. He was barefoot and wearing only pants and a shirt, and yes, it absolutely was Thaddeus.

Unity held in a shriek, closed her eyes, then opened them again. After a couple of seconds he started to move, his body keeping time. He turned and strutted and slid across the stage, his perfect body on display. He was all muscle, but lean rather than bulky.

As she watched, he began to unbutton the shirt. The crowd screamed for him to take it off. Women threw themselves on the stage and had to be dragged away. Thaddeus took his time, going slowly, one button then another until the shirt was open.

He left it that way, dancing more, letting his movements open the shirt more and more until he finally pulled it off and tossed it to the crowd.