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I felt actually honored they were sharing it with me, even just for a night.
We headed up the poured stone walkway, toward the contemporary-looking front door. My guys were each carrying two bags of groceries and essentials. Mason hung back a little, and offered me his arm.
“So I feel the need to warn you,” he smiled as I took it. “We’re outside the city limits. Which means we’re technically not in Vegas anymore.”
“Ah,” I said with a grin. “So you’re saying…”
“That what happens here no longer falls under the blanket protection of the city’s main slogan,” he quipped.
“Then we’ll all have to be good,” I said sweetly.
“Oh, I’ll be good,” Mason promised. “I’m always good.”
I laughed as he led me through the front door, and into the most beautiful foyer I’ve ever seen in my life.
“It’s the other guys you need to worry about,” he winked.
Twenty-Eight
MASON
She was sexy as hell, wherever they’d gotten her from. A few years older maybe, but not by much. She had the face of a twenty-one year-old, and a body to match. The curves of someone with experience. The firmness of someone who spent time at the gym.
My first reaction was jealousy. That of all the women they’d tried this with, the two of them had finally stumbled across a gem. One that shouldn’t be taken for granted, or kissed goodbye after only a date or two.
One that I’d certainly — if it were me running the show, anyway — ask to stick around.
And she was funny, too. Funny and smart. She matched the both of them line for line, joke for joke. And though I could tell she enjoyed their company, she wasn’t intimidated by them either. She wouldn’t back down an inch.
“So what part of New York?” I’d asked her, as soon we got into the car. One good thing about being a New Yorker was you could spot another New Yorker anywhere in the world.
She’d smiled, and even that part of her was attractive. “The City now, but I grew up in Bayside. You?”
“Ah, a Queens girl,” I’d grinned back at her. “Hell’s kitchen here.”
“You sure don’t sound like a standard New Yorker,” she’d said. “I mean, I can still hear the accent, but it’s not nearly as pronounced.”
“Acting class,” I’d told her, as if that explained everything. “One of the first things they teach you is to hide your accent. Unless you’re being cast as a New Yorker, of course. In which case they all expect you to talk like Tony Soprano.”
“Ah, Tony. The quintessential New Yorker.”
“Except that Tony grew up in New Jersey,” we’d both laughed together.
I’d dropped her off at her hotel, so she could freshen up and grab a few clothes. Then, after a quick stop by the guys’ place for their own things, the four of us went sailing off into the desert at a cool seventy-five miles per hour.
It was a nice ride. A fun ride. And as much as I wasn’t proud of it or anything, I ogled her in the mirror the whole way.
She was right in that we’d never brought a girl out to the house with us. Especially not one of Brody and Corey’s girls, who I knew from experience never stuck around very long. They had a strange but interesting thing going on. One that provided them with a lot of crazy stories and even wilder experiences, to the point where even I had to admit it sounded like fun.
Then again, I didn’t have much time for fun these days. I already had too many irons in the fire.
California had been good to me, at least when I first arrived. I’d found quick work and quick success, in a town that could often be slow and cruel. I was the new guy for a while, and that rocked. Even my headshots had that fresh, new car smell to them, and jobs were easy to come by.
But as Robert Frost would say, nothing gold can stay. Everything shiny eventually dulls, and unless you keep that momentum going, you end up at a dead stop.
I sure as hell wasn’t stopped yet, but the winds of change had definitely blown me off course. I’d lost some big parts, and taken some bad ones. I’d resorted to doing commercials to make rent, and pay a few major bills.
Unfortunately, that left me picking up a few odd jobs here and there… to pay the rest of them.
