by Lulu Pratt
Table of Contents
Copyright
Author's Note
Auctioned
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Epilogue
Rough & Ready (Preview)
Thank you!
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Lulu Pratt
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Author’s Note
Auctioned is a full-length 60,000+ word novel. Please note it ends at 91%.
Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoy Auctioned.
I’ve also included a preview of my book, Rough & Ready, for your enjoyment.
Happy reading,
Lulu xoxo
Auctioned
No way will I let anyone else buy her v card
I’m her boss but Kiki hates me. She says I’m the reason she’s selling her virginity in the first place.
Whenever I’m around her I feel emotions I’ve never felt before. I’m falling for her... hard.
As the curtain rises for the auction Kiki’s on stage, her big green eyes betraying her vulnerability.
I can’t take anymore, I have to have her. All of her.
I win Kiki for the night, but she doesn’t want to sell her virginity to me.
The old me wouldn’t care, I always get what I paid for but with her it’s different.
My heart belongs to Kiki and I’ll be damned if I let her get away.
*** A steamy STANDALONE contemporary romance with a smoking hot hero. No cliffhanger, no cheating and a guaranteed happily-ever-after.***
CHAPTER 1
Kiki
MY BEDAZZLED shoe stepped with a wet thuck onto the carpet.
I didn’t need to look down to know that the offending liquid was barf. Working in a casino, you get good at identifying textures through the soles of your shoe. There are ones for cigarettes, ones for lost jewelry, the aforementioned vomit, alcohol, sometimes even blood. If you work in a place like this for long enough — which, mercifully, I have not — you can even start to tell different types of drinks as they soak into the three-pile shag.
I added to the mental tally in my head. This would be… hmmm… yes, the fourth time I’d stepped in vomit today. For the record, today’s additional tallies: fifteen times on cigarette butts, two jewels — one an engagement ring, so maybe an extra point — and five times in blood. I chalked the last up to the fact that a fraternity had rolled through on their spring fling, or whatever kids who go to college call vacations. There had been one solid fight in the middle of the casino floor, smack dab in the middle of my section, because I’m nothing if not a magnet for troubled men. After tearful bro hugs, the whole thing had been set to rest and I’d been stuck cleaning up after their mess.
Cleaning up after men, I thought with a grimace as I knelt down to take a swipe at the puddle with a handful of napkins. That could be the title of my memoirs. Though, let’s be honest, people don’t exactly read memoirs about cocktail waitresses.
As I did my best to scrub the carpet, thus hopefully making the late-shift cleaners’ jobs that much easier, I felt a swipe at my ass.
“Hey!” I said, jerking up and swiveling to look for said grabber.
He’d already disappeared back into the crowd.
“Fuck you,” I muttered, as though that would do anything.
If I really cared, I could go back through the security cams and try to find the guy, but it wasn’t worth it — the casino wouldn’t ban him, and I’d have wasted an hour to find out what I already knew — men, especially drunk men, especially drunk men in casinos in Las Vegas, are shitty.
Besides, it wasn’t like I’d gone into this gig blind.
The day I turned twenty-one, just over six months ago, I walked into Dazzlers and asked for a job. Winston, the floor manager, had recognized me immediately and I’d been hired on the spot. After all, through no fault of my own, I’d been practically raised in the casino. I knew which slots gave good returns, which roulette wheels were loaded, which patrons to watch for signs of stroke or overdose. In many ways, each more disturbing than the last, Dazzlers was my birthright.
So, yeah, I knew that guys were gonna touch me. Didn’t mean I had to like it.
On my first day of work — better known as my birthday, even though I hardly spent it celebrating — Sonia had been in charge of kitting me out.
As she passed me the scraps of material from a smelly locker, she’d suggested, “If you get a strapless bra, fewer men will try to snap your straps.”
She was right, and we’d been friends ever since.
The costume amounts to this — a thong leotard with gold and blue sparkles down the front, a deep-cut neckline, and slits up both sides of the skirt (what little there was to speak of). I’d put that shit on almost every day for the last six months. Think, if you will, about what that does to the human spirit. And if things kept on like this, I’d be in the same trollopy getup for the next nine-odd years, until I got booted out because of the casino’s insanely ageist cocktail waitress regulations.
Not like I’m bitter or anything. Twenty-one is too young to be bitter.
Even if I hadn’t been raised around Dazzlers, I reason to myself, I probably would’ve ended up in a casino somehow. Everyone I went to high school with did, anyways. It’s kind of the thing if you grow up in Vegas — get through school by wheeling and dealing, graduate, then go to work for one of the big joints in town. The Wynn, the Venetian, the Bellagio… so on and so forth. Sometimes it felt like high school was less of an education and more of a factory line into nightlife. It would’ve been more efficient for them to give us food safety degrees and be done with it.
As I deposited the dirty napkins onto my tray, I tried to picture a life beyond Vegas. Somewhere with trees, I thought. That would be nice. No more lights, no more buzzers or screams. Idyllic, that’s the word. Just calm. Where a person can be a person without needing to distract themselves from their own existence — no gambling, no drugs, no alcohol, no anonymous sex.
In this dream, which I’d perfected to a T, I was in Washington. In Seattle, to be more specific, but on the edges, near a large mountain that had a pancake shack at the top. The clouds were ever pregnant and the fog was thick, dulling all groundswells of illumination. Greens popped against the gray, none of the colors manufactured by a company or filtered by a smartphone.
In this dream, I ran a little general store with products made by locals, every one of whom I would know by name and greet when they dropped off their shipment of the week. I’d do a tidy b
usiness, just enough to keep the shop going and put food on my table, with enough set aside to buy a stirring painting every now and then. I’d host picnics in my backyards for friends and friends of friends. It would be quiet, for once.
I’d never been able to go to college. There hadn’t been enough money. Maybe up north, I could start taking classes at a local college, even if it was just at night. I’d been trying to teach myself Foucault and Hegel and Sontag, but what little time I could snatch from the mouths of Dazzlers or my father was dedicated to sleeping. In this dream, I was in a classroom of students, debating the great philosophers and closely reading secondary sources. This last thought, of just the simple act of receiving a good education, made my eyes water.
“Helllooo, sleepy head.”
I startled up from my vision, and realized I’d been standing stock still in the middle of the floor.
Sonia, one hand on a bedazzled hip, was positioned before me. She was petite, a Latina with thick brown hair and that kind of angular, cat-like look any Instagram model would kill for. My friend was, without a doubt, tougher than me. While I fell prey to constant, idle imaginings of an impossible future, she worked without cessation. And while I complained about the odd grope, she had to deal with racist tirades if she so much as spilled a drink.
“Daydreaming again?” she asked, raising a knowing eyebrow and a half smile.
I sighed. “Busted.”
“Kiki, the general store can wait. It’ll still be in your mind when we get off shift.”
I’d long since told Sonia about my little forest fantasy, which was a total mistake. She lovingly mocked me about it every chance she got, because Sonia was a realist and knew that if you were born in Vegas, you died in Vegas.
“The guy at table five threw a drink.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. Knocked over some chips. Security’s there, but we gotta clean up.”
I wanted to whine, but had long since realized whining did little good.
“Okay, fine, lemme just drop these napkins off.”
“Vomit?”
“You know it.”
I scampered over to one of the wait stations, throwing the napkins into a barely concealed container full of similarly marred ones. Dazzlers was middle of the road, quality-wise. Not the kind of place where we hide our dirty laundry.
Sonia had already made her way to the table, where patrons had dispersed as the felt got cleaned. There was little besides the potential interruption of a game that could get some of these old dogs out of their seats. Trust me, I knew.
“How long,” I asked, joining Sonia at the table with a clean load of napkins, “until I can leave town?”
She shook her head. “I told you to leave the day you started. Don’t give me that shit.”
That was true. And she was kind enough not to say the second part — there was no way I’d ever leave my dad, and he was never leaving Vegas.
Speaking of which — I tilted my head up from the poker table, scanning the room.
“You looking for him?” Sonia asked, without so much as glancing up from the table.
“Yeah.”
“Haven’t seen him yet today.”
I chuckled darkly. “If you haven’t seen him yet, it only means he’s found a slot machine further in the corner, where no else goes, that he thinks is prime for cashing out.”
My eyes stayed on the room, looking for his telltale shock-white hair and hunched figure.
As I was busy conducting my informal search-without-rescue mission, my gaze landed upon someone else, a person who seemed familiar, if only I could place him…
Maybe all hot people just look familiar because we want them to be. Even from across the room, with his features blurry and lights sparkling at the edges of my vision, I knew this gentleman was a stunner. He was tall, ripped in a way that even a nice suit jacket couldn’t hide, with well-kept, dark blond hair I was certain a million girls had run their fingers through.
I racked my brain, but still couldn’t decide where I knew him from.
“Hey, Sonia,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder. “Who’s that?”
I pointed in the stranger’s direction as she reluctantly arched up from the table, her eyes following my finger.
There was a long pause, and then:
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Uh… no?”
She chortled. “Sometimes I forget you’re technically new around here.”
I rolled my eyes, and said, “Oh lay off, just tell me who he is.”
Sonia could mock me all she wanted, but is it so criminal to try to get a positive ID on a hot boy?
“You don’t even recognize him from the posters?” she asked with some earnest skepticism.
The wheels in my brain jolted, clanging and shifting together over the sound loops of pings and ca-chunks pouring out of nearby machines.
Oh, I recognized him all right. It made sense now.
Holding my hand low at my side, I flipped him the bird.
Sonia caught sight of my erect middle finger, and murmured with some amusement, “Remember him now?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately.”
Much to my dismay, the hottie across the floor wasn’t some hunky stranger who I recognized from my past life, someone who could offer me a fresh start and my general store in Washington.
No, he was much worse. Because this was Tate, the infamous and infamously absent owner of Dazzlers, and literal poster child for the disasters of unmitigated intergenerational wealth.
And for the first time since I’d begun working here, he was strutting around the casino, like… well, like he owned the place.
My pulse quickened, and I averted my eyes, focusing on the green felt of the poker table. This man who I didn’t even really know, who for a moment I’d mistaken to be just a passing handsome gentleman in the night, had undone my family and by extension, forced me into this miserable job and this unfulfilling life.
Who was he to strut the floor, peacocking like a prince?
Face hot with rage, I gritted my teeth and focused on my work, hoping that the blood tingling in my cheeks (and, much to my embarrassment, in other places as well) would circulate normally in a moment.
Why are the hot guys always so damn evil?
CHAPTER 2
Tate
I EXAMINED MY finger nails. They were, as usual, perfect milky half-crescents, clean, trim, without a scrap of dirt beneath their white arches.
“Am I boring you, sir?”
“Yes, Jack, I imagine you are.”
The squat little man at my side gulped.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it.”
Sweat was beading on his bald brow, but I wasn’t in any particular hurry to assuage his anxiety. After all, as my father used to say, “fear keeps them on their toes.”
Besides, there was absolutely no way to feign interest in a tour of the casino. Blah blah money blah blah sales blah blah blah. Dazzlers had been the same since the day my dad had cut the ribbon — cheap, gaudy, and a final resting place for many a gambler. There was no innovation, no heart. Just vodka and polyester thongs.
“If I could just—” Jack, who I suppose I might also mention is my business manager, swallowed.
“Yes?”
“Shall I continue with the tour, even though I am boring you, and am also very sorry, so sorry, for boring you?”
You’d think those words would be laced through with sarcasm, like some kind of arsenic cocktail, but nope. He was, much to my dismay, dead serious in his earnestness. Jack was so eager to please me it was almost disquieting. Have you ever seen a dog jump on its hind legs at your bidding, but then never return to all fours, out of worry that you may one day want it on its hind legs again? That’s Jack.
Today, though, I would have to allow him his tricks. It was my bi-yearly tour of the casino, during which time I “made sure everything was running smoothly.” Or at least, th
at’s what I’d tell the board at our meetings. In reality, I just nodded and signed on dotted lines. I suppose, in a way, I too am an obedient little puppy.
We veered left at tables set for Texas hold ‘em. I saw rows of seats filled with asses which clearly hadn’t moved in hours, possibly days. Men had sunglasses riding low on the bridges of their nose, and women were chain-smoking with such gusto that I imagined they must occasionally swallow the cigarettes, mistaking them for food. These were the bottom feeders of society, and this casino their sea floor. What did that make me? Poseidon?
I couldn’t imagine sitting still for ten minutes, let alone ten hours. I loved the feeling of earth moving beneath my feet, of smelling new things and hearing new chords. To remain in one spot as day lapsed into night, the same buzzing whirls filling my ears and cheap smoke cloying at my nose… it sounded like hell. In fact, between the smoke and the sinners, the resemblance was actually quite pronounced.
We were moving past the blackjack section when Jack noted, “The casino is having one of its best years yet, sir.”
“Oh. Is that so?” I wasn’t particularly interested in an answer, but it seemed to be the thing to say.
“Yes, yes indeed. Player engagement has gone up, the new events booker for Hall Three has been getting stellar acts, and even drinks sales are on the rise. Quite an achievement, sir.”
Jack looked at me with ever-wet eyes that begged for my approval. Love me, they said. Tell me I’m your special boy. Tsk, tsk, Jack, only one person in this miniature tour group can have deep-seeded daddy issues, and I’ve already assumed the role, thank you very much.
I ignored Jack’s moist gaze, cracking my knuckles with the heel of a palm. I was itching to get back in the gym, maybe do a little boxing, anything to separate myself from the people before me.
But my business manager was persistent.
