Текст книги "Sweet Sinful Nights"
Автор книги: Lauren Blakely
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The ace of diamonds winked at him, a mate to the ace of clubs that the dealer revealed next on the green felt of the blackjack table at the Luxe.
“I’ll split,” he said to the goateed dealer.
Together, Brent’s two aces were a bust. Torn apart, they gave him a second chance in the game.
“I’ve got a very important question for you,” Mindy said, as the dealer laid a three on top of her eight and Matchbox Twenty played overhead. The band was in concert at the Luxe in two weeks, after the Alvin Ailey troupe departed from its brief stay at the hotel’s new theater.
“Hit me,” Brent said to his friend, and she rolled her eyes at his pun. “What’s the question?”
Mindy adopted a girly, love-struck tone. “Have you thought about what you’re going to wear tonight to Alvin Ailey?” She batted her eyes and squeezed his arm. “It’s such a big decision.”
“Bow tie. Seersucker suit,” Brent said with a straight face, as the dealer slapped two new cards face up for Brent. Only the two of them and a lone bald guy nursing a tropical drink played at that table on a Saturday afternoon. The goateed man dealt Mindy another card, too. A six, giving her seventeen.
“And a panama hat. That’d be a nice touch,” Mindy added, nudging Brent with her elbow as he stared happily at his new cards. Eight and a nine. Didn’t get much better than that.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Or, call me crazy, I could just go with jeans and a nice button-down shirt.”
“I’ll stay,” Mindy said to the dealer, then to Brent, “Fine. Be that way.”
The bald man busted on his turn, then the dealer drew until he reached 17 and had to stand. It was house rules, and Brent beat him with his 18 and 19.
“You lucky bastard,” Mindy said in a low whistle.
Brent simply shrugged, an admission that he’d always had some kind of Midas touch at the tables. But he also had another more important skill, and while it was one he’d told Shannon he was not applying in relationships, it was a rule to live by if he wanted to survive in the casinos with a wallet intact.
Scooping up the chips, he tipped an imaginary hat to Mindy. “And on that note, I’d better quit while I’m ahead.”
“Thanks a lot. You killed me there, taking all the good cards,” she muttered.
“Play another round. I’m out.”
The bald man with the piña colada took off, too.
“Stay with me. Be my lucky charm,” she said, and Brent relaxed in the chair as Mindy went up against the house again, trying to win back some of her losses. “By the way, have I ever told you that Michael Sloan is insanely hot?”
Brent groaned. “Can we not talk about how hot you think her brother is?”
“Oh, they’re all lookers. All three of them,” she said, with a breathy sigh. “All three. I’d take any of them, honestly. Ryan, Colin, Michael.” She counted off on her fingers.
“Okay, you really need to stop now.”
“Hey,” she said, lowering her voice, a sign that she was downshifting to a more serious moment. “Speaking of tonight, does she ever talk about what happened with her family?”
Brent nodded. Mindy had lived in Vegas her whole life. She knew the Paige-Prince saga, since it had been in the local news when they were both in high school.
“It’s weird, don’t you think?” she continued. “The Royal Sinners.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just the whole idea of them. Like the Latin Kings, or the Crips and the Bloods. I hate them,” she said, her voice a harsh seethe as the dealer slapped her cards on the green felt and “Overjoyed” sounded through the casino.
“They’re street gangs. Of course you hate them. That’s like hating cancer.”
“They went kind of quiet for a while there. A few years ago. Did you know that?”
He shook his head. He honestly hadn’t tracked the goings on of the gang culture. But Mindy knew the underbelly of the city of sin better than anyone. “Five or six years ago, it seemed like they’d all kind of fallen apart. But I hear they’re trying to be active again. Recruiting new members. Hitting the streets again with drugs, tagging, fights over territory.”
He clenched his fists. His blood went cold. “Should I be worried? For her? For her family now?”
Mindy shook her head and squeezed his shoulder. “I wasn’t saying that at all. When you started seeing her again, I did a little digging into Stefano with some of the guys I know on the force. A couple of them were active when it all went down. They say Stefano was on the outs when he killed Thomas Paige. He was doing his own thing. Kind of separating from the Sinners.”
Brent’s jaw tightened. A fresh wave of hate surged through him. He hated that Shannon had gone through that, that this kind of canyon of awful had not just touched her life, but had marked it. Had been the line in it. The before and the after. “So, he was, what? The odd man out in the local gang?” he asked, as the dealer tipped his forehead to Mindy, his way of asking her next move.
“Hit me,” she said to him, then dialed down the volume. “Supposedly. They said his girlfriend disappeared, too, around then. They’d wanted to question her to see what she knew, but couldn’t find her. Anyway, those were just the things I heard. That’s all.”
That’s all. That’s all. That’s all. The words reverberated in his head, mingling with the anthemic chorus of the pop song about a love so powerful it consumes you with joy.
Joy. Hate. Love. Death. They were inextricably linked.
“Hey! Look! I got twenty-one!” Mindy clapped in glee.
“Then it’s time to cash out,” he said.
She shook her head. Her eyes lit up with a fresh wave of excitement. “No way. My lucky streak is just starting. It’s my day off. I’m staying.”
“I’ll catch you later then, lucky lady,” he said, and headed to his office, needing work, needing business, needing the relentless focus on contracts, and deals, and plans to erase the cold metallic taste of hate that the discussion of gangs had left in his mouth. No fault of Mindy’s, and all things being equal, he’d rather know the details than not know them. But he was ready for that part of Shannon’s past to stay firmly in the ground, and never fuck with her future.
Focus on the present. Focus on today. Focus on tonight.
The trouble was, the conversation gnawed at him. He opened a browser window and searched Google for news on “Royal Sinners.” He read a few articles—drug busts and convictions here and there. That was it. Like she’d said, the gang seemed to have petered out for a bit. All in all, this had to be a good thing—that the gunman her mother had hired hailed from a gang that had dwindled in power and was now focused on drugs. Shannon’s father’s murder had never been about drugs; it was a cut and dried murder-for-money crime.
Brent shut the browser, parked his boots on his desk, and rang his buddy who ran the Luxe hotel chain—Nate Harper, who lived in New York with his wife. After they caught up briefly on work and business, Brent made his request. “Hey man, you know anyone at this hotel who can score me a nice suite last minute on a Saturday night in Vegas? Happy to pay top dollar.”
Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe it was just some mad hope. Or perhaps he simply wanted to be prepared for any and all possible outcomes tonight. Hit, stand, or double down.
Nate laughed loudly. “You hoping to get lucky at my property this evening?”
“I’m always hoping to get lucky,” he said.
“I’ll take care of you. Stop by ops on the way out. Alfonso will get you a key,” he said, referring to the property manager on site. Brent knew the guy well.
“I owe you,” he said.
“I owe you. Your club is driving business like crazy. It’s like a goddamn slot machine that pays off every time,” Nate said, and Brent grinned. That was what he liked hearing. Edge was indeed the golden goose. He zeroed in on that for another hour, then checked the time. He needed to head home and get ready to pick up his date. No motorcycle tonight. He’d reserved a town car.
On the way out through the casino, Tanner’s name flashed across his phone screen. He nearly crossed his fingers, praying the man wouldn’t say something to ruin his Saturday.
“Hey Tanner. What’s up?”
“Meeting was moved up. Gotta do lunch instead of dinner,” Tanner barked.
Brent’s shoulders tensed. “Tomorrow? What’s the deal?”
“The neighborhood association president, Alan Hughes, has to drive his daughter to summer camp on Sunday night, so dinner won’t work tomorrow. Only lunch. But listen, I think I’ve got him fluffed nicely for you.”
Fluffed. The man actually used a porn term. “So he’s leaning our way?”
“It’s looking like that. See? I told you I’d be good for you. I bet you want to pay me extra each month on the lease, don’t you?” Tanner said with a raspy laugh.
Brent shook his head in exasperation. Tanner was a piece of work. “Glad to hear that about Alan,” he said, avoiding the other comment. He flashed briefly to his conversation with Bob from the comedy club, who’d been getting fleeced by his landlord, too. Fingers crossed that this meeting tomorrow would send them all down the right path. Brent could continue the expansion of Edge, and Bob would have the new job he needed to pay the bills.
“So be here by noon, got it? Same location. McCoy’s.”
“See you tomorrow.”
Brent sighed heavily in frustration as he hung up. Win some, lose some. He called his assistant and asked her to change his flight from the morning to the midnight red-eye to New York. That gave him two hours with Shannon after the show ended. Crap. Make that one hour, since he’d need that hour to get to the airport and through security. Even so, he picked up a key from Alfonso.
Wishful thinking for sure at this point. But sometimes you had to roll the dice.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Not too long now,” Michael said. “A few more edits.”
Shannon drummed her fingernails against her kitchen table as she peered at the computer screen with Michael. “Colin’s such a loud mouth,” she said with a laugh.
“I know,” he said, taking a break from tapping away on her keyboard to pat her on the back. Michael had stopped by to help her finish editing a video she’d shot of rehearsals for the Edge show at her studio. The dance was almost perfect, but there was a section she wanted to review with her assistant choreographer. The problem was that Colin had stopped by during the rehearsal and had started talking her ear off about a new investment his firm was making.
“Ding dong,” she’d told him. “Now I’m going to have to edit out the audio.”
“Oh shit,” he’d said, covering his mouth.
“I’m assuming you don’t want to take a chance on anyone but me hearing about the new data storage company that has a ten times valuation of blah blah blah,” she’d said quietly, parroting him back as she held her phone to record the dancers.
“That’d be a no,” Colin had whispered, then mouthed a thank you as he zipped his lips shut and let Shannon finish shooting the video.
Michael was a whiz at editing video, so he’d stopped by to help her remove Colin’s audio. Which also meant now was as good a time as any to tell him what she was up to tonight. She hadn’t said a word to him last weekend at her grandmother’s house, but she didn’t know then that she’d actually be dating—seriously dating—her ex-fiancé. Now she was, and she didn’t like cloaking her life in lies around her brothers, especially Michael. They were as tight-knit as a clan could be, and that was because they’d protected each other and trusted each other through thick and thin.
She steeled herself for his reaction. Of all her brothers, Michael had been the biggest fan of Brent, and then turned the other way when Brent left her.
Best to rip off the Band-Aid.
Michael zoomed in on the software, pushing a flop of dark hair off his forehead as he worked. She cleared her throat. “I’m going out with Brent tonight,” she said before she could back out of her confession.
His fingers stopped moving. She didn’t see his eyes, just his forehead as he furrowed his brow. He raised his face, and rubbed his knuckle against his ear. “Pretty sure I just heard you wrong,” he said slowly. “Say that again.”
“I’m seeing Brent,” she said, straightening her spine, keeping her chin up.
“You’re dating him?” he said, as if she were speaking in tongues.
She nodded.
“I thought you were just doing business with his clubs,” he said, taking time with each word, as if he could restitch them into a pattern that made sense.
“I thought so, too. But then it turned into something more.”
“How? How did it turn into something more?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.
“We started spending time together again,” she said, keeping it PG.
“Why would you do that? You were pretty damn clear ten years ago you never wanted to see him again. You told all of us—me, Ryan, Colin. You made it abundantly clear he was persona non grata.”
“I didn’t want to see him then. But that was ten years ago, Michael. Things changed.”
“What changed?” he asked through gritted teeth. “I can’t imagine what could have changed in the last week or two that would erase what you went through.”
She bit her tongue. She didn’t want to serve up all her feelings for everyone to judge. It was hard enough to say them to Brent, let alone to her big brother. She didn’t feel she needed to defend her heart. Some things were personal. Some things were private. Like the fact that she was falling again for someone who was tender and kind, rough and fiery, funny and sexy, and who only had eyes for her.
Someone who was putting her first.
“He’s different. I am, too. That’s what has changed,” she said in a crisp voice.
Michael closed his eyes, gripped the side of the table, and breathed out hard. “I have no idea why you would want to do this. After everything that happened,” he said, opening his eyes and staring at her.
“Nothing that happened was his fault.”
Michael’s eyes widened. “If it wasn’t his fault, whose fucking fault was it?”
“Both of ours,” she said, holding her ground, even as something darkened inside her.
“Shan,” he said in a heated whisper, as if that was the only thing keeping him from shouting, and Michael Sloan never shouted. Michael Sloan never raised his voice. Michael Sloan stayed in control of his emotions at all times.
Except when it came to his sister. “I was with you in London. You were devastated,” he said, his eyes black and hard.
“Of course I was.”
“You were torn in pieces,” he said between gritted teeth.
She slammed a hand on the table. “I know! I fucking know. I was there. It was my body. Goddammit, Michael. I’m sorry you don’t like him, but I’m seeing him again and I care about him. And I’m not asking for your approval. I’m simply telling you because I don’t like to keep secrets from you. So if you could just chill out, that would be great.” She pushed back from the table, the legs of the chair scraping against her wood floor in a shrill shriek. The sound jolted her brother.
“Shan,” he said gently.
She held up a hand. Don’t come closer. Not now. “I need to get changed,” she said, and tipped her forehead to her bathroom. She wasn’t ready for him to say he was sorry for getting mad.
“I’ll be done soon,” he said, in a gentler tone.
She shut the door to her bedroom, headed to her bathroom, and stripped off her clothes as she turned on the shower. As she stepped under the hot stream, the water pelting her, she closed her eyes, returning to ten years ago.
* * *
Brent had been gone for a few weeks, and she was six days late. She’d hoped and prayed and bargained and bartered with the universe that she was simply that—late. Women all over the world were late, and it didn’t mean they’d been stupid. It didn’t mean the pill hadn’t worked. It only meant they were late, but that red was coming.
Right?
Right, she told her freaked-out brain.
While they’d stopped using condoms a long time ago, she was on the pill. She’d switched prescriptions, though, since the one she was on had been giving her headaches. They’d used condoms during that time, but something must have gone wrong. Hell if she knew when the little bastard sperm had breached her body.
She pressed a hand to her belly, alone in her tiny Brooklyn bathroom in a room she rented for one month from an older couple, fingers crossed behind her back, trying to remember if a condom had broken during those times they’d relied on them. But when the two pink lines appeared, churning her stomach and stabbing holes in her future, it didn’t really matter if she could recall the moment when the protection failed.
Her body had spoken, changing her life yet again.
Twenty-one, pregnant, and alone in her first job out of college. With the father of the baby on the other side of the country and out of the picture. Without a clue what to do, how to feel, what to think.
She sank down onto the toilet seat, dropped her head in her hands, and asked the universe for a redo. She waited for the tears to roll from her eyes, to saturate her cheeks. But, strangely, they didn’t come. Maybe she’d used up her lifetime supply when her daddy had died. Maybe whatever droplets were left had been reserved for the re-opening of that wound with her mom’s letters.
She did what shocked women around the world have done for years when confronted with two pink lines: retraced her steps to the drug store, glanced furtively around in case she saw anyone she knew, and grabbed another test from the shelf. She bought it, ran home, then peed on the stick again.
Another pair of pink lines punished her with their clarity.
You’re knocked up, bitch, the twin lines seemed to say with a cruel sneer.
She sank to the floor of the cramped bathroom, parking her rear on the cold teal tiles. Options flickered before her eyes. But really, the choices were very few. Terminating a pregnancy wasn’t on the table. That wasn’t anything she’d ever do.
So it came down to this—keep the baby or give up the baby.
Keep. Give up. Keep. Give up.
Over the next month, Shannon swung back and forth by the day, by the hour. Depending on what she ate, or what she didn’t eat. What she wore. How hunched over the toilet she was at West Side Story rehearsals. How well she hid her morning sickness from her boss.
If there was one thing Shannon Paige-Prince knew how to do it was keep her own damn secrets.
She hid it so well that no one knew why she kept popping into the ladies room to yack up her morning toast. Mercifully, the morning sickness didn’t last long.
As she packed up her bags for London, ready to move with the cast and crew to open the show on the West End, she picked up her cell phone. She flipped it open, ran her thumb across the screen, and started to dial the most familiar string of numbers in the world to her. The ones she’d called during college, every night, every day. Her man’s number.
She didn’t know what to say. Or what to do. Maybe it was better that way. A call for help. Let him listen. Let him talk. Let her not have to make this decision alone.
She ran a hand over her belly, still terribly flat. She threw caution out the window and dialed his number. She didn’t wait long to hear a voice.
“This cell service has been disconnected,” a recording said, tinny in her ear.
She tossed the dumb thing on the floor, and it clunked dully on her rug as she cursed her own stubbornness—she should have taken his calls those first few days. He was truly gone now. Off in Los Angeles, living his new life, with his new Los Angeles phone number that she didn’t know.
Or perhaps this was the sign that she wasn’t ready to talk to him yet, so she flew to London, no one the wiser that she was stowing away an extra passenger in her belly. She saw a doctor twice. An ultrasound told her the baby was growing perfectly.
That made her sway closer to the keep side.
So damn close.
But then there was work, and her future, and those things seemed to tug her back to the give up side.
Work consumed her in London as the production began. Indecision swamped her nights and gripped her dreams. She and Brent had both wanted kids. They’d talked about having a family, but as a someday-down-the-road possibility. Knowing he’d wanted to though, eventually, was a heavy weight on her. Telling him would kill two birds with one stone—she’d have him back, and she’d have a decision. She could track down his number, call him, and tell him she was pregnant. If she did that she knew that they’d be together again.
He was too good, too upstanding, and too family-centric to ignore his duties.
He’d leave Late Night Antics in the blink of an eye, fly to London, and be by her side. As she rehearsed the cast through Officer Krupke on the new stage, her fingers itched to track him down again. She could drop this bomb on him, and he’d come running back to her. She desperately wanted him in her life again.
But as the dancers finished, she rewound to the day he’d shattered her heart. She clutched that memory in her hands, like a lifeline to her brain. Somehow, she had to connect her heart to her head. To find the wires, and reattach them properly, so her brain would receive the right message.
Keep the baby. Give up the baby.
One or the other.
She crossed the weeks off on her calendar, but she was no closer to a decision. Week sixteen. Week seventeen. Week eighteen. Week nineteen.
They came and they went. No one knew. She was barely showing. Even so, she snapped a photo of herself in the mirror, as if the reflection could confirm the small curve in her belly.
Michael had an assignment in Europe for a few weeks, and she vowed to decide when he arrived in London to visit her for a couple days. She’d lay it all out for him. Ask for his help. He’d always been her rock. Her guidepost.
They went to dinner at a pub after the theater, and she told him everything, then asked him what to do.
His answer was swift and immediate. He pulled his phone from his pocket and locked eyes with Shannon. “Call the motherfucking bastard. Tell him he knocked you up. And tell him to get his fucking head out of his ass and take care of the mother of his baby and his child. Done,” Michael said crisply.
“Oh, that’s all?”
“Do it, Shan. Do it,” he urged.
“I don’t have his number. His cell service is disconnected.”
“He works on that late-night show, right?”
She nodded.
“I’ll get it for you,” he said, and a few phone calls later Michael was writing Brent’s new phone number on a cocktail napkin. “Here you go.”
She put the napkin in her purse. A weight eased off her. It slid to the dirty, hardwood floor of the pub as Michael knocked back a beer, and she nursed a soda. The decision had been made.
“Tomorrow,” she said with a nod, resolute. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
It was the first decent night’s sleep she’d had since those two pink lines had the audacity to fuck with her life. All she’d wanted was a path. A roadmap. A decision. She had it now.
She woke up early the next morning needing to pee.
The bed was already wet.
Embarrassment washed over her, even though she was alone in her tiny studio apartment. She hadn’t wet her bed since she was a child. But when she stood up, it wasn’t her bladder that was gushing. It was the water in the baby’s sac. A rush of utter helplessness slammed into her, then she rang Michael at his hotel and asked him for help. He called a taxi for her, and told her they’d meet at the nearest hospital. He gave her the name of where to go.
Fear seized her as she buckled the seatbelt, as if that safety measure would somehow protect them both—mother and child. As the cabbie drove her to the foreign hospital—it didn’t matter that the doctors there spoke the same language, everything felt foreign—she did what she’d already intended to do that day.
Called Brent.
Her cell phone service routed her to a switchboard, and then sent the call through to Los Angeles. International calls were hard to make directly. Usually only the country codes appeared on the screens. She hoped the London code would tip him off to pick up the call. But he didn’t answer. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles. Then she remembered—it wasn’t even after midnight. It was the night before, and his show was on. He was working. Always working. The thing he’d loved more than her. His job.
She hung up.
The tears she’d held back the last few months were unleashed, like a lashing of the windows during a hurricane, like the punishing of a cold storm. Wild and ravaging streams of tears, matching the way her body was once again letting her down. She hated the way she’d lost the ability to dance because of a fluke injury in rehearsal. Hated the way she’d become pregnant when trying not to. And hated the way her body was expelling a baby she didn’t know she’d wanted, but would now do anything to keep safe inside her.
She reached the hospital a wet mess.
“Your water’s broken, love. There’s nothing we can do,” the nurse said, her warm British accent almost fooling Shannon into thinking everything was going to be all right. But nothing was all right. Not as she went into labor—did they even call it labor at twenty weeks? It was fast and furious, and it barely hurt her physically. But it tore apart her already-shattered heart an hour later as she delivered a baby boy. Less than one pound. His heart no longer beating. The nurse wrapped her son in a white hospital blanket and handed him to the mother who was no longer a mother.
Her.
That was her.
She was there, but somehow seeing it all through a lens, as if that lens was supposed to protect her from the pain. It didn’t. It couldn’t. Not even as she watched the scene play out. Not as she sobbed into the blanket, and cried over a life she hadn’t even been sure if she was keeping for her own. A life that had stopped sometime in the early morning when she woke up. Or on the cab ride to the hospital. Or on the hospital bed. The nurses and doctor didn’t know when the baby had slipped from the living, but it didn’t matter. Her water had broken prematurely for unknown reasons. The baby would never have survived. It didn’t matter when his tiny heart stopped working.
The only thing that mattered was that the decision had been taken out of her hands.
Michael walked into the room and sat with her as she said goodbye to the son she would never name and never know.
