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Jack interrupted my acidic thoughts with the flap of a hand.
“Whaddya say?”
“To what?” I grumbled, peeved out of habit rather than for any definitive reason.
“To coming to the strip— I mean, the acrobatic show?” Jack asked. “It would, uh, bolster morale. Be good for the team.”
I rolled my eyes. “Did I give you the impression I care about the team?”
My business manager bit his tongue, but I saw him clench a fist in the pocket of his lightweight linen pants. Good to know he wasn’t entirely devoid of fire.
“It’ll help market the show, sir,” he said in a monotone. “If you show up, get a few pictures, do the rounds.”
Ah, now that made sense. I was, technically speaking, the face of Dazzlers. I’d recently done a single photo shoot with some big magazine, and shortly thereafter, my picture was plastered around town with Dazzlers written in a glittery pink scroll across my chest. Overnight, I’d become a sex symbol. As a twenty-seven-year-old man, this isn’t the worst outcome, but it did have the negative side effect of making me synonymous with my casino, as though it was somehow my brainchild, and forcing me to do additional publicity for Dazzlers, once the public realized that I was conventionally attractive.
The upshot was that it kept the investors happy. They saw me posing and preening, and interpreted it as me being committed to the cause. The cause, in this case, being their bank accounts. This was hilariously off base, of course — spend any time with me, and I think it becomes fairly apparent that I’m not ‘committed’ to shit — but there was no harm in letting the men have their fun. Besides, if my press kept them from looking too closely at my daily involvement with the casino, so be it.
“Fine,” I agreed. “I’ll go to the show.”
Jack heaved out a breath he’d been holding in for far too long.
“Excellent, sir, we’ll be thrilled to have you in attendance.”
We were maneuvering to a row of craps tables. Jack had resumed some speech about switching alcohol vendors while I tuned him out with ease. I looked into the crowd before me, trying to pick an individual and guess their story. It was a trick I’d learned as a kid, when my dad used to make me watch him play a round of poker, his specialty. While he played, my eyes would wander to Dazzlers patrons, and I’d make up whole worlds in my head for them. Vegas may be the average person’s fantasy, but my fantasy was just, well, average people.
Today, I was met with nothing distinct, just a sea of khaki and sunburns.
Except…
There, in the corner, not more than five feet away, was a waitress bent over a table, cleaning something up. Normally, my eyes glazed over the wait staff — not because they’re dull, per se, but because in their uniform getups, they become one with the gilded décor.
But this girl, she was something else. I couldn’t see her face, just hair draping over her shoulder and hanging down like a thick divider between her and the world. Her body was lovely, yes, but that wasn’t it, either. Maybe I was drawn to the determined set of her shoulders, the way they squared off. Though her face wasn’t visible, I could imagine her biting her lip in concentration as she worked at a particularly challenging stain.
It was right about then that I saw her eyes dart to me, then return to her fellow waitress.
In a voice I’m sure she thought was too low to be audible, she whispered to the other woman:
“Don’t look now, but Mr. Evil Prick has arrived.”
“Excuse me?” I said, loudly enough that other patrons eyeballed me with mild interest.
The whispering waitress bolted up from the table, her tiny skirt flipping through the air.
I was about to demand an apology when I got a good look at her face.
Well, fuck.
She was just about the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.
Now what was I supposed to do?
CHAPTER 3
Kiki
OLD GAMBLERS will tell you that there are days the cards are dealt in your favor, and days where they, pardon the language, “fuck your wife, fuck your kids, and kick your dog.”
My cards today appeared to be hemming to the latter.
I twirled around, but before my body had even arced a one-eighty, I knew that standing behind me, glowering and pissed, would be the man himself — Tate, inheritor extraordinaire of Dazzlers, in all his unfair beauty.
Sure enough, my character heels twisted in the carpet and I was brought face to face with him.
And damn, was it a nice face.
If I had to pin him somewhere on a sliding celebrity scale of appearance, I’d put Tate between Chris Evans and, mmm, maybe like a Zac Efron after he got buff for Baywatch or whatever.
