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were killing her, and the muscles along her spine were burning up . . . Evie came out of the Swan, loosening the locks at knees and ankles just enough to slide gently down the
pole till she could put her palms on the floor. Then she let the locks go completely, straightened her legs against the pole, and used it to kick herself over into a bridge. Careful not to bang her
face into the pole – she’d nearly broken her nose once doing that – she stood up from the bridge, her back groaning after holding the extreme arch of the Swan for all that time.
She dropped to all fours and did some cat stretches, pushing her lower back as high as she could, forcing it to round out, and finally it stopped complaining.
    Then she looked at her ankles and winced. She was really working hard on all her extreme hanging poses, and it showed. Benny would freak. He was obsessed with her feet being smooth. He paid for
twice-weekly pedicures, threw hissy fits if he ever saw her with bare feet – even in the apartment – and had bought her so many velvet slippers, marabou mules, softening foot lotions
and pumice stones that even if those were the only possessions she owned, her bedroom and bathroom closets would have been bulging at the hinges.
    It wasn’t all she owned, of course. Benny had bought her plenty more than that. Which was why the spare bedroom had been converted three months ago into her walk-in closet. Evie loved that
room, with its cedar panelling, its sliding drawers, its revolving clothes rails, its recessed lighting that switched from day to evening so you could assess the true colours of the clothes you
were choosing, its shoe shelves reaching to the ceiling with the built-in stepladder for getting right up to the top.
    Shoes. All those shoes. And the entire set of drawers right next to the shoe rack which were all for stockings, hold-ups and knee-highs. Benny loved that room even more than Evie did: he could
spend hours in there pulling things out and selecting outfits for her. She was his little dress-up doll. With a special emphasis on the leg and foot area.
    Evie grimaced, looking down at her ankles with the hard red lines running across the front of the bones, where the pole had bit in. She’d have to put on some opaque stockings for Benny
this afternoon, or he’d have one of his tantrums. God. Benny was a wonderful guy – so sweet, so generous – but you’d think a guy as smart as he was could figure out that a
girl he’d met hanging upside down on a hard metal pole by her ankles might have a few scrapes and bruises every so often as she pursued her art.
    Benny didn’t think that way, of course. He’d seen a girl who could do all those moves in a pair of flame-red patent heels, stacked six inches high, and fallen in lust in twenty
seconds. Hard and fast, the best way. He’d had Evie out of the Midnight Lounge and into this Tribeca penthouse loft quicker than you could say ‘billionaire tycoon’. And Evie, like
every other girl she’d worked with in the Midnight Lounge, could get those words out pretty damn quickly. Benny saw Evie as a delicate, fragile creature, slender as a wand (years of
gymnastics at high school, you needed to be skinny to compete), big dark doe eyes, slender wrists and ankles, small pointy breasts – his little gazelle, he called her sometimes.
    Actually, Evie was lean and strong as a steel wire, tensile and hyper-flexible, with clearly defined muscles in her arms and back from all that taking her weight on her hands, and she needed to
be that thin to do the pole moves she did. Curvier girls looked even better on a pole, those luscious breasts and asses wrapping round it seductively, but they could rarely do the hardcore flips
and climbs, or hold the poses for long. They were carrying too much weight for full-on routines, it strained their arms and back too much and cut into their ankles really bad. Whereas slim light
little Evie could haul herself up that pole in seconds