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“My, my. Somebody is sounding a little ungrateful,” Blair chided, sounding miffed. “I had to score those wigs from a couple of hookers down the−“
Lexie raised an imperious hand to silence her. “I don’t want to know.”
“Suit yourself,” Blair said jauntily as Lexie stared out of the window and they hurtled their way to a wild night in Las Vegas.
* * *
Nic Fernandez felt like crap. Getting into a cab, he hightailed it out of the brightly lit mansion, away from one of the many parties he was expected to attend in the middle of what could be touted as polo season in Las Vegas. He wanted to get pissed badly, but not anywhere there was a big chance of being recognized. Before landing a spot on this year’s People’s Sexiest list, Nic was only known to a handful of polo fans and enthusiasts. Due to the publicity surrounding his inclusion in the magazine’s list plus the hype by Team Arion’s PR agent that led to several lucrative endorsements, any chance of anonymity was now limited if not unheard of.
“Where to?” the cab driver grunted unenthusiastically.
“Just drive around. I’ll tell you when to stop,” he replied curtly, in no mood to deal with any kind of attitude right now.
Nic glanced at the rearview mirror and wiped away a smear of red lipstick on the corner of his mouth disgustedly. “Shite,” he muttered, feeling like an absolute fucking dimwit for falling for Tansy Butler’s tricks.
On the pretense of showing him the newly acquired Arabian, Nic had accompanied his “patron” or team owner’s nubile third wife to the stables. Normally this would have had Nic’s sense of danger tingling, but he had been distracted by the rumor that his ex-girlfriend, California socialite and congressman’s wife Melissa Osgoode-Rathborn was also in Las Vegas. His senses were off-kilter. He was still not completely over his ex-lover’s ambush revelation last year in a party similar to the one he had just left. The betrayal still festered and the loss, though not acute, still lingered. He wouldn’t put it past Tansy to invite her to the party just to create mischief since he had refused, several times, to engage in her own kind of horseplay.
Upon arriving at the tack room at the back of the mansion, Tansy had immediately started untying the single knot at her nape. It was the only thing holding her scrap of a dress up. Nic let out a string of profanities in Spanish.
“You sound so sexy when you do that foreign thing, Nicky,” she purred, slightly slurred. She stepped out of her dress, one of her long, lithe Vegas showgirl legs kicking away the crumpled fabric with a stage-worthy flourish. It flew in a graceful arc and landed high up on a saddle mounted to a rack on the wall. “Talk dirty to me in Argentinian.” She started stalking him, wobbling on her heels, her hips undulating provocatively as she approached her prey. She looked so precarious for a second that he almost reached out a hand to steady her.
But he glimpsed the crazy in her eyes and so Nic took a step back, and another, and another. “Tansy, put your clothes back on,” Nic commanded, his tone that of someone talking to a child. He noted the slightly glazed look in her eyes. Sober, Tansy Butler would not have dared anything to earn the ire of her billionaire husband Rupert Butler and have her means to a lavish lifestyle cut off. But bloody drunk, she was a loose cannon.
“Don’t you want me, Nicky?” she pouted like a little girl, her lips artificially puffed like a blowfish and her platinum blonde hair framing a face with a strong, almost masculine jaw.
“I said put your clothes back on,” he repeated coldly.
“Or what?” she taunted. “You’re goin’ to tell Rupe I was comin’ on to you? Who’d you think he’d believe?”
Being a polo player meant venturing around the world on tournaments and meeting all sorts of people one would have normally never crossed paths with. Of those, Nic dreaded Tansy’s kind − bored socialites looking for a casual rut in the hay.
“Maybe the CCTV cameras?” Nic countered, his English icily clipped, the way his British mother sounded when she was not amused with his antics as a little boy.
