The pink and green neon signs reflected off the haze on the mirrors lining the back wall of the bar. The fake leather bar stools perched along the gritty wood floor and formica counter were sticky with grime. With the exception of the women who danced on stage, there was nothing inviting about Fantasm Strip Club. Yet, somehow, taken as a whole, the place worked. Fantasm was the epitome of a dive, right down to the dim, sporadic lighting, the thick, pungent atmosphere and the sketchy regular customers. Harvey, a massively fat, old guy, who needed two bar stools to support his weight, was already leaned over his usual corner of the bar, working on his second pitcher and hogging all the bowls of peanuts. Ruby, the bartender, had mentioned that Harvey occasionally fell asleep at the bar, and since no one could wake him or budge his giant whale-sized form, Rocky, the owner, would just let him stay like that all night.

I pushed aside the three empty whiskey shot glasses, poured myself another beer and slumped back against the hard sticky chair, my gaze only half focused on the woman wrapped around the stripper's pole. Fantasm was a place I slinked into when I wasn't in the mood to hang with snobby, self-centered people in richly decorated night clubs. No one knew me at Fantasm, and I liked it that way. It was my escape. And tonight I needed that escape more than ever.

The speakers perched on each corner of the stage were broadcasting more static than actual music. Or maybe it was the gritty noise in my head, reminding me that I was fucked. I was looking for every damn excuse in the world to make myself feel better, but as my dad had taught me, you never make excuses for failure. I'd been soft on myself, feeding my needs more than keeping my self-control. I'd spent two decades of my life under my dad's rigid iron fist. Now that I was free of it, on my own to do as I pleased, it was just too damn easy to let loose, party, fuck women and enjoy life. After I got to college, it had dawned on me that, for once in my life, I was free of Dad's harsh rules. I went fucking crazy. I was that badly shaken can of beer just waiting for someone to pull the tab so I could erupt. Temporarily forgetting that David Nash Senior was a psychotic control freak, I had naively thought I could get away with it. But I quickly discovered that he had promised the dean of students a nice lump sum for the university in exchange for the dean keeping a close watch on me. The dean called home with the news that my midterm grades were bad, and that I'd missed a lot of classes. For three weeks, I was slammed with cold silence from my dad. Then I arrived home for the winter holidays. I tromped upstairs to my room to find that all of my things were gone. Not that I had many possessions. Dad had a theory that the more stuff you owned, the stupider you got. My bed sat in the middle of an empty room, and the mattress was bare, no pillow or blanket. I spent the entire break wearing the clothes I'd flown home in. I had no computer, no books, except the textbooks in my bag. Not even a damn magazine. It gave me a lot of time to study, so, technically, the punishment worked. Except that it made me hate him even more. But after I made my first million, I realized my crazy, fucked-up old man had been right. He'd taught me that once you let life's distractions overwhelm you, the game was over. He was always hard on himself, and he was extra hard on me. But in the end, it had worked. Losing the Rad Video deal had been a wake-up call. I needed to get my focus back. I just wasn't completely sure how the hell to do that.

I was so deep in my beer soaked misery, I hadn't noticed that Jack walked up until the chair scraped the floor. He glanced at the parade of empty shot glasses and then stared at me, seemingly assessing my state of mind, as he sat down.

He grabbed the pitcher of beer and poured himself a glass. "So did Grant really can you?"

"I don't know what else you would call it when your boss tells you to get the fuck out of his building."

"Well, shit. Maybe he'll come around when he realizes how much revenue you bring to the business." He took a long gulp of beer. Jack Hunter was one of the few individuals I'd allowed into my personal circle of friends. I had thousands of acquaintances, mostly business, but very few friends. And I preferred it that way. Jack was one of those California pretty boys who the women went nuts for. Like me, he hadn't settled down with one partner. His motives for staying single had less to do with focus and a resolve to stay unattached and more to do with the fact that he loved women, all women, and as he liked to say, he didn't want to 'miss out by tying himself down'. I'd met Jack in college. We were both studying business administration. He was from a working class family of six, where his parents put more emphasis on love than on money. And I was from a family of two, my dad and me. The only focus was on money. Love was a four letter word in our household and not just literally. Not that Jack didn't love money. He was nearly as cutthroat as me when it came to business. That and an extreme fondness for women were probably the only things we had in common.

The usual set of horny, drooling loudmouths had already taken over three of the tables lining the front of the stage. The dancer who Jack and I called Dorothy of Oz because she started her show wearing a short blue dress and red sparkly shoes had already stripped down to her red sparkly thong. Her long leg snaked around the pole as she swung her mostly naked body around. I'd never done anything more than tuck twenty dollar bills in the dancers' g-strings. Jack had a harder time keeping his hands off of them. And they had a hard time resisting him and his thick wallet.

I smacked my glass down hard on the table, not out of anger but because the earlier whiskey shots were throwing off my coordination. "Fuck it. I've been wanting to start my own private equity firm. That's what I'm going to do. If I can ever get my head back in the game. I just let things get out of control. Dad always said ignore the pain, but I forgot to ignore the pleasure."

"You don't have to ignore the pleasure. You just have to dial it back some." Jack leaned forward and rested his forearms on the table, then immediately regretted it. He wiped each arm with a napkin and sat back. "This is Jeremy Travers all over again."

I lifted a questioning brow at him. "Who the hell is Jeremy Travers or do I even want to know?"

"I went to school with this weird kid named Jeremy Travers."

"Guess I'm going to find out, whether I want to or not."

Jack nodded confidently. "Just hear me out. Jeremy wasn't such a weirdo. He was just under complete control of one of those wacky moms who thought playing video games turned kids into killers and eating candy shaved years off your life." He shrugged. "She was probably right there but then who wants to live a long life when you can't even eat candy."

"I might not be drunk enough to hear this stupid, seemingly pointless story." I slammed back the rest of my beer and refilled the glass.

"There's a point, and a good one, because, in a way, Jeremy's mom was from the same warped school of parenting as your dad. When we were in fourth grade, Becky Jones was having a birthday party. Becky was one of those sugary sweet girls that everyone liked. She brought cupcakes for every class event and she lent you her cool colored markers during art without a second thought." Jack sensed he was losing me and sped up his story. "Anyhow, Becky invited everyone in class to her party because she didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I'm pretty sure it was the first time Jeremy was ever invited to a party or at least I never saw him at one before that. Becky's parents set up a carnival theme. They had placed bowls of candy all over the house, and you could fill up little paper bags with as much candy as you liked. Jeremy, who never got to eat candy, was out from under his mom's thumb for those two hours. He shoveled that candy as if he might die without it. His mouth and tongue were stained with every color in the rainbow." The music stopped along with the usual chorus of hoots and hollers as the stage cleared for the next dancer. No longer competing with the usual clamor, Jack lowered his voice. "Jeremy ate a lot of fucking candy. Then we were sitting around singing Happy Birthday to Becky, and all of a sudden, Jeremy's eyes rolled back in his head and he had this crazy seizure right in front of all the gifts. The ambulance came. Most of us thought the whole thing was pretty cool, but Becky was crying because her party was ruined. Jeremy came back to school on Monday looking as if he wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear. It turned out he had eaten so much candy, it had spiked his blood sugar to a dangerous level." Jack finally took a breath. He waved toward me with a flourish. "And there you have it. Jeremy Travers, all over again."

I stared at him across the table. "Sometimes I wonder why the hell I keep you around."

"Who the fuck else is going to read your eulogy when they're shoving you in the ground?"

"I told you, no eulogy, no send off. Just send my remains to the nearest medical school and let them chop me into parts. Tomorrow would be a good day to start."

"Ah come on, buddy. You'll get through this. You're a fighter."

I glanced around. Some of the dancers and servers were lingering around the bar floor. "You're sitting here alone? Normally ten minutes is enough time for you to have a woman on each arm."

"That's because I'm not here for my own pleasure tonight. I'm here to support a friend," he said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. "I was in here last week though." Jack flashed his big white grin and winked across the room at a petite red head leaning against the jukebox in the back corner. She stepped in as a substitute dancer whenever Rocky needed one, but tonight, she was wearing shorts and a t-shirt that showed off the rhinestone stud in her belly button. "That night, Jade, the sweetie who looks as if she's about to dry hump the jukebox gave me a hand job in the back room." He spoke without moving his jaw, and he kept that smug smile plastered across his suntanned face. He raised his beer glass to her and took a gulp, then rested his forearms on the table and returned his attention to me. "I gave her twenty, but she insisted she would have done it for free," he boasted. "She just wanted to see if my erection was as magnificent as the rest of me. Her words. Not mine."

"So I guess she was disappointed."

Jack laughed dryly. "Considering that while she jerked me off, she was making the kind of sounds you hear from women who are getting their pussy pounded, I think not. Which reminds me, Rocky hired a new dancer. Her name is Shay. I don't know what it is about her, but I was sporting a chubby plank of wood before she even stripped off her clothes."

I took three slow gulps of beer. The beer on tap was another good reason for ignoring the trashy ambience. I lowered the glass. "And the new dancer gave you a blow job after the successful hand job?"

"Nah, she never came out on the floor. Which was probably a good thing because she left the crowd pretty damn wild. I thought they were going to start throwing chairs when she slipped off stage to the dressing room."

Jack refilled my glass to the brim. "Drink more. You look like crap. I can't remember the last time you lost a deal."

"That's because I haven't."

Jack sat back and his bearded chin shifted back and forth. "That can't be right. Never? What about that—" He stopped. "No, that's right. You got that one too. Well damn, then I guess this really is a milestone in your career."

"I think milestones are supposed to mark a good goal. Like reaching twenty million in my portfolio, which is so fucking close I can taste the flavor of cold green cash on the tip of my tongue. This deal would have eventually tipped me over to the nine figure mark." I poured myself another glass. My aim was getting worse and I spilled some on the table.

"You pathetic, rich bastard, how the hell will you survive this tragedy? Of course, I know the loss takes a bigger chunk out of your ego than your bank account. DNA and losing just don't belong together." Jack drank some beer and swallowed loudly. "I was thinking about your dad's initials. It goes right along with my theory that the man was not born. I think he was created in a cold, sterile lab by a group of misfit scientists determined to create the perfect human. But once they hatched ole DNA in the Petri dish, they decided that they'd created a monster and threw away all evidence of the experiment before letting their creation loose on the world."

I stared at him over a frothy head of beer. "I'm named David Nash Archer too. How does that jive with your brilliant theory?"

"It fits perfectly. You were sort of born in a Petri dish too. I mean, sure, your dad paid some lady to carry his spawn and drop you out nine months later, but she was acting like a beaker of sorts. And since she didn't have a name—"

"She had a name. I just never knew it." Which was only partly true because my dad had told me her name was Jane Doe. And for the first eight years of my life, I thought of her, this woman I'd never seen before but who I had always imagined as having soft skin and smelling like cookie dough, as Jane Doe. The harsh reality hit me with a good dose of humiliation when the second grade teacher in my exclusive private school asked us to write poems for our moms on Mother's Day. When I wrote mine about my imaginary cookie dough perfumed mom, Jane Doe, the teacher had a good laugh. Then she sent me to the headmaster's office for being a smart ass. I was suspended for the rest of the day. Our housekeeper picked me up from school. I waited in my room the entire afternoon, sure I was going to feel the buckle of my dad's belt once he got home. But when he discovered why I'd been sent home, he told me to Google the name Jane Doe. And while I read that the name I had etched into my brain as my mom's name turned out to be nothing more than two syllables used as a placeholder for any unidentified woman, my dad walked into his office and made one loud, angry call. The headmaster and teacher were immediately removed from their positions.

Jack's attention was temporarily diverted as Dorothy of Oz walked past the table. He reached up and stuck some money in her g-string. He dropped back down in his chair. "How is your dad anyway?"

"The doctors give him four months. He's down to about a hundred fifty pounds, which on his frame makes him look like a skeleton."

"Guess that 'laser focus' chant doesn't do you much good when you're facing the big C," Jack said with a shake of his head that landed his bangs in his eyes. Recently, he'd decided to let his hair grow long, thinking it gave him an edgy vibe. Mostly, it just made him look like he was trying to be a teen again. "Death," Jack continued. "It's the one thing that makes us all equal. You can have a bank account worth more than a major city, but when the grim reaper comes around, he doesn't accept bribes."

The music started back up. "You are full of all kinds of philosophical bullshit tonight."

"Yep." He drummed the table for a second to go along with the beat of the song and to add to the clamor of idiots at the next table, yelling and drooling as they waited for the next dancer. "Speaking of your dad, did you tell him that you lost your job? Shit, that might just put him in his grave faster than the cancer."

Jack knew enough about me and my unorthodox upbringing to talk casually and coarsely about my dying dad. I probably wouldn't take it from anyone else, but Jack was different. He was my sounding board, the person who occasionally kept me grounded. But only when I wanted to be grounded. Which was rare.

"My life is none of his damn business anymore. Besides, he's pretty buzzed on morphine most of the time. I think he's finally coming to grips with the fact that he's not invincible." I refilled my glass. "Guess that's the lesson I learned today too."

"You haven't told me exactly what happened."

The lights on stage dimmed, then lit back up. "Introducing the newest addition to Fantasm's hot entertainment line-up—Shay Starling. And you asshole's up front," Rocky continued, "behave or else."

I sat forward to respond to Jack. "Let's just say my cock got in the way of business. I've been—" A flicker of movement pulled my attention to the stage.

The new dancer strutted out to an old Bon Jovi classic. She had a black top hat pulled down over her shiny hair. Her long white blonde bangs were pushed into a fringe over her big eyes, eyes that could only be topped by the full, lush lips beneath her tiny nose. She moved like smooth cream as she gracefully flowed across the stage on incredibly long legs. She was wearing a black tail coat over a blue sequined vest. I caught a glimpse of a matching blue g-string as the panels of her coat fluttered apart.

Jack kicked my foot under the table to grab back my attention. "She's something, eh?"

It took me a second to drag my gaze away from the woman on stage. "Huh? Yeah. Shit. She's in the wrong place."

"So what the hell are you going to do now?" Jack asked, without taking his eyes off the dancer.

I returned my attention to the stage as well. "I've got to get my life back in control."

A short laugh shot from Jack's mouth. "Maybe you need to apply some of your dad's militant, draconian methods of self-denial. Didn't you tell me once that he caught you masturbating and he went full dictator on you?"

I nodded and thought about how crazy that story sounded in my head whenever I replayed it. "I was fifteen."

"Yep, that's the age I remember jacking off every fucking chance I got. My mom thought I was having digestion problems because I spent so much time in the bathroom. She made me eat stewed prunes for a week."

"Stewed prunes would have been a treat compared to what I went through." I stopped for a second and rolled my fists as one of the goobers at the next table climbed halfway onto the stage. Rocky, a big, brutish guy with a lot of skull tattoos was there in a split second, yanking the fool off the stage.

I sat back and stretched my legs out. "I was in the shower, doing my thing, when Dad just barged into the bathroom. He told me masturbating was the reason I was bringing home Bs instead of As in math."

Jack laughed. "Well that explains me failing geometry."

I took a drink of beer and watched as the black tail coat dropped off the dancer's slim, white shoulders. Her skin looked smooth as silk. My cock tightened as I envisioned myself trailing hot kisses down the center of her back.

"What happened after he caught you?" Jack's question snapped me out of my erotic daydream.

"He made me watch hard core porn every night for an hour before I did homework. I had to struggle through math with a raging erection. But that wasn't all. The fucking madman took the doors off my bedroom and bathroom, making sure I didn't have a minute of privacy. He told me self-denial was the only way I was going to learn discipline."

Jack's eyes widened. "Holy shit, the more you tell me about your childhood, the more I wonder how the hell you are able to function as a human at all. Not that you're always human."

"Thanks."

"And did the porn slash self-denial thing work? Besides turning you into a warped adult, I mean?"

"I got an A in math, so I guess so." I picked up my drink and turned my focus back to the girl on stage. She was stripped down to a lacy bra and her sequined g-string, which split her milky white bottom into two perfectly bitable pillows. "What did you say her name was?"

"Shay. She has the kind of body, curves and face that give a guy wet dreams while he's wide awake."

I sat forward as Shay spun around and stretched her lithe body around the pole. The rest of the spectators hadn't settled down yet. They were waving their money around and nearly falling over themselves to get a better view.

"I can't pinpoint what it is about her," I said. "Her lips are too full and her nose is a touch crooked and yet . . ."

"She's incredible," Jack added.

"Yeah."

"It's just a natural sex appeal. And she doesn't seem to give a damn that she has the men in this room crazed and out of control. She just keeps to her routine and shoots that sweet Cover Girl style smile out at the crowd every once in awhile."

"And I'm already wondering what that Cover Girl smile would look like across a pillow after a night of fucking." I'd just lost the chance at a highly lucrative partnership because I couldn't keep my cock in my pants, yet I was still obsessed with fucking. Maybe Jack was right. Maybe I needed to employ one of my dad's severe tactics for regaining focus. Self denial. "You're right, Jack."

He pulled his eyes from the dancer. "That your dad was hatched in a science lab?"

"No, well, maybe that. I need to use my dad's methods to bring back my focus. I'm going to start my own damn company, but I've got to get my head one hundred percent back in the game or I will fail. Your analogy about the kid at the party was spot on."

"You're going to stick bowls of candy all around your house?"

I stopped and tilted my head in question. "How the fuck do you make so much money?"

He pointed to his face. "This mug is my secret weapon. I'm kidding about the candy. Let me guess—you're going to set up televisions all around your beach house and play cheap, dirty porn movies twenty-four seven, which you will watch with your hands tied behind your back so you can't jack off."

"Would you shut up for a second so I can finish. First of all, those porn movies are fucking background noise if I'm working on the computer or something. They were effective when I was fifteen, but now that I've experienced the real thing in hot curvy 3-D, they are useless. I need the real thing. I need temptation that is right in front of me so I can get back that laser focus I used to have."

The highly seductive dance on stage was coming to an end. The bra came off, revealing two star shaped pasties covering what I was sure were the most delectable pair of nipples on earth. A thunderous yell vibrated the walls. Shay kept to her routine, seemingly unaware of the ruckus she was creating on the club floor. Cash was flying onto the stage at her from every direction.

"Speaking of focus," Jack noted. "She doesn't miss a step. Rocky might just have found a gold mine with her. I swear that woman could bring a grown man to his knees with just a wink and a smile."

I leaned forward to get a better view of the stage. Shay, Rocky's new dance star, twirled around like a seductive ballerina. She looked totally out of place in the center of the crummy stage with its tattered silver curtains and sputtering spotlights. Her almond-shaped, brown eyes swept along the crowd and stopped temporarily on me. Our gazes stuck for a second, then she pulled hers away to finish her dance. My entire body instinctively leaned toward the stage as if that split second of locked gazes had secured me to her.

Jack's voice drifted to me through the noise in the room and the thumping pulse in my ears. "You haven't told me what you're going to need for this self-inflicted punishment."

"I need someone to hang around the house, someone who I crave like a madman. All the while keeping her at arm's distance."

"Are you thinking about that rich little hell cat? What's her name? Kimberly?"

I shook my head "Nope, that would never work. Kim basically grabs my cock the second she walks in the door." I watched with keen interest as Shay swept up her discarded clothes and the money that was strewn across the stage like fallen leaves. Men were crawling over each other, shoving elbows into noses, trying to push more money into her g-string. Rocky had to stand right next to her on stage to keep them from grabbing her.

I sat forward and pulled my wallet out from my back pocket. I plucked out a crisp hundred dollar bill, then I walked to the edge of the stage and held it up.

Shay caught a glimpse of me, standing politely, away from the fray, with my new hundred dollar bill. She sashayed over with enough swing of her hips to spin the sparkly pasties covering her nipples. Her plump round breasts hung low, near enough for me to smell the perfume on her skin, as she leaned down and favored me with that magazine cover smile. On closer inspection, her eyes were a sable brown with flecks of gold and those too full lips were shiny with gloss. I kept my focus directly on her face as I reached up and pushed the hundred dollar bill into the lacy band of her g-string.

She winked at me and swiveled away on her high heels, leaving everyone with an unforgettable view of her ass as she walked off stage.

I turned my attention back to Jack. "I need that girl."