by Ali Olson
Yes! her body screamed out. No! Run! Her brain shouted back. Lucky for her sanity, he didn’t move any closer.
After a deep, shuddering breath, she managed to sidestep out from under his powerful presence and get herself into clear space. As she did so, some other guy who was standing with the women near the front of the club called out, “Aaron, let’s go! I don’t want to stand here all night, and neither do these lovely ladies,” as he leaned over to one and kissed her on the cheek.
One of the girls joined in, beckoning to Aaron as if she were getting a German shepherd to heel. “Come on!”
It was very clear to Jessica that her stranger had plenty of company for the evening already. With as much force as she could muster, she said, “You need to leave me alone. Go back to your friends.”
And she spun away from him, marching toward the waiting limo.
As she stormed toward the vehicle and climbed in, her head was a flurry of thoughts, and she couldn’t stop them from rushing one after another. What an idiot. God, he smelled amazing. Another asshole. I should’ve known. I swear, I hate men. I wish my hands would stop tingling like that. Why do I only seem to like terrible men? He had amazing arms. Maybe I should have kissed him. No, that would’ve been the worst thing I have ever done. Dammit, I’m crying. I hope he didn’t see that.
As soon as she was safely hidden away from peering eyes with the door closed, Jessica allowed a few tears to slip down her cheeks. She wasn’t sure exactly why she was crying over a man she didn’t even know, a lost opportunity that had never been an opportunity at all. She just felt very, very alone.
Jessica wiped at her face, only to notice she had something in her hand. It was the paper Aaron had given her a few hours before, his phone number. She had taken it out while she was walking, wondering whether or not she should call him. But that was before she knew the kind of person he was.
Jessica stared at it for a moment—how could she have been so stupid as to even consider calling the number of a complete stranger?—and then crumpled it in her fist and threw it into the tiny trash can beneath the limo’s bar.
After a few minutes of quiet weeping, she wiped her eyes on the corner of her dress. She had to hike it up above her waist to do so and left makeup smudges on the hemline, but it made her face look a little more presentable when she looked at her reflection in the window. She shifted her gaze to the dark street and empty parking lot beyond the glass. The group was gone. Aaron was gone.
She curled against the cushions of the spacious interior and closed her eyes, exhausted from the day.
* * *
THE SOUND OF the door opening woke her, and the rest of the bachelorette party filed in, loud and raucous and discussing the different men they’d ogled.
A few were giggling like schoolgirls about “the other side of the club,” the part with the female strippers, and the customers over there who had bought them drinks and flirted.
“Marilyn even got a phone number from some random guy!” the black-haired one—Anna, her name was Anna—gushed.
Marilyn shrugged, as if this was an everyday occurrence. “Did you see how hot he was? Of course I got his number. I’m going to call him tomorrow and get him to hang out with us. I even like his name. Jeremiah. It rolls nicely off the tongue. I probably would have taken him back to the room tonight if he hadn’t disappeared when we went back to check on Cindy.”
Jessica turned her attention to her friend, whose head was resting on her knees. Jessica had never seen her that drunk. From the way the other girls looked at her, a mixture of amusement and pity, it was clear she’d spent a decent amount of time throwing up in the bathroom.
Jessica squeezed Cindy’s hand, but her friend was already half-asleep.
The conversations washed over Jessica as she attempted to listen and be a part of the group. She was still groggy from sangria and sleep, still feeling gloomy, and she wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed. Thankfully the limousine started to pull away from the strip club and turned toward the hotel.
She grabbed her phone and turned on the screen, the bright light stinging her eyes. It was nearly four in the morning.
* * *
AARON LOOKED AT the clock on the bedside table of his suite, and four o’clock glared back at him. But he wasn’t feeling tired. He felt sick and annoyed at himself. The room was dark, the large bed unpleasantly empty. He went back through his choices of the evening, unable to get over the level of idiocy.
After sleeping for a couple of hours and getting ready, he and Jeremiah had headed out to dinner at Bouchon, one of the top restaurants in Vegas, where they were joined by a few “friends” they’d met in Vegas in the past few years. He and Jeremiah had organized this dinner weeks before, trying to get their long weekend started off right, but once they’d arrived, Aaron’s heart hadn’t been in it.
The women were gorgeous and throwing themselves at him, and they had grown up on farms and ranches as he did. All the things that would normally have made his evening buzz with excitement, but he just couldn’t stay interested. Much of the meal was spent picturing his mystery girl, then trying to figure out what the people around him had said, usually responding with a very clever “Hmm.”
He kept looking around for her, even though the likelihood of seeing her again was so minuscule. A scan of the room, then the realization that Jeremiah and the girls were waiting for an answer from him. “Hmm.”
It was not going well.
With nothing better to do, and to try to help him focus on the moment at hand, he drank more ridiculously priced whiskey than he would normally allow himself.
He kept checking his phone, on the off chance the woman had called or messaged him, but there was nothing.
After dinner, thoroughly smashed, he had followed Jeremiah and the women, none of whom were much more sober than he was, to a club. Then Jeremiah, his eyes glinting, said, “I have an idea...”
Things were fuzzy there—he was pretty sure he’d called his voice mail just in case he had gotten a call—but during that time, his friend had somehow talked the girls into going to a strip club. Something had been said about being in Vegas, after all.
By the time they’d gotten to Sapphire, Aaron was starting to feel sober again, and he wasn’t happy about it. He’d been to strip clubs before—he was a guy, and a friend of Jeremiah’s. It came with the territory.
But he’d never really seen the appeal, in truth. If he wanted a naked woman rubbing against him, he preferred not to be paying her.
This time, though, he couldn’t even pretend he wanted to be there, but he didn’t want to be alone in his suite, either. And for some stupid reason he couldn’t get his fantasy of the airport girl out of his head enough to want to be back at his hotel with the women standing around him, even though they seemed more than willing to keep him company.
While Jeremiah had a great time staring at the women on the stage and flirting with any female in his vicinity, Aaron sat at the bar and had another drink. And another.
When Jeremiah and his entourage of women came to get Aaron so they could leave, he was unsteady on his feet and his mouth had felt too unwieldy to form words properly. Two ladies, both of whom he’d spent nights with on other rodeo weekends, pulled his arms around their shoulders and led him out, laughing and chatting.
He had tried to join in but was captivated by the voluptuous and prominently displayed breasts of the woman on his left. He thought she was named Laura, but he had trouble focusing enough to be sure. In his state, he couldn’t help staring, and as he did so, he wondered what the airport girl’s breasts looked like. He’d bet they were beautiful.
That was when he looked up, and there she was, as if materialized from his fantasy. She was turning away from him and several yards away, but even then he could see that the dress she was wearing revealed the tops of the lu
scious breasts he’d just been imagining, and the short skirt and tall heels showed off her impossibly long legs. Even drunk, he was clearheaded enough to see that shifting the dress just a few inches in either direction would serve up some amazing views.
If he’d been sober, he would’ve tried to be a little more suave, though with the way she made the bottom drop out of his stomach, he wasn’t so sure it would have worked, anyway. He might have sounded like a blathering idiot when attempting to talk to her at the best of times, but the alcohol made it worse. Worse than he could have imagined.
He sat up in the giant bed, turned the light on and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until it hurt. The pain was a welcome relief; it distracted him from his thoughts and how awful the entire evening had gone.
It seemed pretty certain that she wouldn’t be calling him. His stupid choices made any chance of him getting her into his bed impossible. He wanted her like crazy, and he maybe even had a chance at her, and he’d blown it.
She’d stormed away from him, and she might have even been crying. That didn’t make any sense, though. He’d been an ass, but could it have been awful enough to make her cry? The thought made his stomach twist unpleasantly.
After she left, he’d been so irritated at himself and everyone who had dragged him around all evening that he took a separate cab back to the hotel, leaving Jeremiah to deal with the women whatever way he wanted. They had protested when he left, but he just told them he wasn’t feeling well and got out of there as quickly as he could.
The ride to the hotel had been a blur of lights and frustration, and he had rushed up to his room as quickly as he could, only to sit there, alone in the dark, and replay the evening over again. Not only had he not forgotten about the woman from the airport; he had screwed things up with her, quite possibly with his best friend, and with a couple of other women he normally would have loved to have alone in a room with him.
What a start to the weekend.
He sighed and shook his head, but that only made him feel nauseated. The alcohol hadn’t worn off yet, but he was sober enough to realize that he was in for an ugly morning.
He turned off the light and lay back again, trying unsuccessfully to coax his mind into quieting enough for sleep.
After hours of tossing around on the bed, he finally got up and opened the shades, revealing the floor-to-ceiling window that took up an entire wall of the room. The bright sunlight of the morning was blinding, but his view of Las Vegas, with the desert mountains as a backdrop to the iconic cityscape, was beautiful. He sat on the wide leather couch in his boxers, his feet up on the elegant glass coffee table, and stared out at the majesty of it all.
It was a new day, and he was going to stop the nonsense from the night before and get himself back to normal. After a few minutes of looking at the view, he felt a little more serene, though his dissatisfaction from the previous night was still roiling inside him.
He and Jeremiah were supposed to meet up with their teams at two in preparation for the evening’s events, which meant he had a few hours to get himself back to some semblance of normal. Aaron could miss it if he wanted, since there wasn’t much for him to do, but he knew Jeremiah thought it was important, and Aaron wanted to support his friend.
If Jeremiah wasn’t too pissed at him for abandoning him and being a jackass, of course.
He had to get some air if he was going to make it through the day. Throwing on some workout clothes and running a few miles wouldn’t make up for tossing and turning alone all night instead of sleeping curled around the luscious redhead, but it was the best he could think of to get his head right.
Working on his ranch was plenty of exercise, but he had found that running was a great way to clear his head and improve his mood, so he usually ended up going out for a jog several days a week. It was the one thing that might get him back on track.
He hated running on treadmills, so he bypassed the hotel’s gym and instead made his way through the casino, heading for the exit. After stepping out the front door and into the mild sunshine of winter in Vegas, he turned toward the Strip, figuring it would be more pedestrian friendly than regular streets.
As he jogged, the fresh air against his cheeks and his shoes slapping against the pavement, he started to feel better. By the time he made it to the Flamingo Hotel, he felt halfway normal, and most of the nausea and headache had dissipated.
Aaron continued on his way north, passing several ornate casinos, finally making it to the Venetian and Palazzo hotels. He decided to run a little farther before heading back the way he had come. There were a surprising number of tourists on the streets despite the fact that it was early for vacationers to be up, not even ten, but he managed to move through them without breaking pace.
* * *
JESSICA STOOD OUTSIDE the Venetian, leaning against the railing of one of the bridges that arched over the fake canal running in front of the casino doors. As she looked around and soaked in the oddity of the oasis in the middle of the desert and the pedestrians walking by with large Eiffel Tower–shaped alcoholic drinks at barely ten in the morning, she saw a man jog past and instantly realized who it was. The shock and thrill of seeing Aaron once again, this time in basketball shorts and with only a thin white T-shirt on, ran through her body like a jolt of adrenaline.
It had been so difficult to get him off her mind all morning that she wondered if she had somehow deluded herself into thinking it was him, but no. It was definitely the man who had been starring in her imagination since their encounter at the airport.
Before she could do anything stupid like call out to him, he was out of sight, hidden by people and the decorative hedges that lined the Venetian’s walkway. The breath she dragged in shakily after he was gone felt like ice in her lungs, despite the relative warmth of the air.
She bit the inside of her lip, frustrated at her reaction. She knew that she would never feel his body tight against hers, so why did she torture herself with images of him? Erotic thoughts flooded her, but that was enough in itself to make her keep her distance. Trying to start a relationship with this guy would only leave her sitting on a plane home, frustrated with herself for making a choice she knew was bad before it even happened.
There was another option, though. She’d never truly considered having a fling—it wasn’t in her nature—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. She was always careful around men, distant, thoughtful. In fact, she hadn’t admitted it to anyone but Cindy, but Russ had been her first and only, and that was only after months and months of dating.
Still, that didn’t mean that she couldn’t let go once and enjoy herself without it meaning anything more. Women had no-strings-attached sex all the time. It was the twenty-first century. She could do that.
Hell, maybe it’d be good for her. She had spent so much time anxious about her dad or unhappy about her failed relationship that perhaps a little time feeling sexy and passionate for once in her life would be a welcome change of pace. She didn’t need to be methodical and sensible all the time.
Except she had thrown out Aaron’s number, so even if she decided to change her stripes and enjoy a wild night with an irresponsible man, she had no way to contact the particular man who sent fire through her veins. She was never going to see him again. Even with how crappy she had felt the night before, the loss of the possibility made her sad.
Throughout her musings, she continued to stare at the place where he’d disappeared. When he ran into view again going the opposite direction—as she’d secretly hoped he might—she allowed herself to bask in her attraction, knowing she was safely hidden from his eyes by the crowd.
As he disappeared from view yet again, she came to a decision: if she ever saw him again, she’d consider it a sign and think about doing something about those feelings and being deliciously illogical for a change. As it was, she would let herself fantasize about
him, guilt free. She leaned against the railing for a few more minutes before turning around and heading back into the casino, laughing at her agreement with herself.
As if there was any chance she’d ever see him again.
* * *
ONCE AARON MADE it back to the hotel, he jumped into the shower for a long, hot rinse to help clear his head. As the water splashed over his skin, his mind wandered once again to his fantasy woman, now with her name attached. He pictured Jessica, and what it would be like to touch her smooth skin, share a shower with her, rubbing her slick body, his hands in her long dark hair. He let himself revel in the scene. He’d have to content himself with his imagination, since the real thing was long gone.
After his shower, he ate and dressed in his jeans, a blue button-down shirt and his cowboy hat, the perfect attire for a day at the rodeo. It was the reason he was in Vegas, after all. By that time, he felt decent enough to try and fix a few of his mistakes from the night before, starting with Jeremiah.
As for Jessica, he doubted he would ever see her again, but if the universe aligned somehow, he wouldn’t mess it up. A third chance seemed impossible, but he would definitely keep watch for her.
He thought ahead through his day. It seemed unlikely she would be at the rodeo, but maybe he would get lucky. Then he thought of the women he was sure to run into during the day’s events, and he balked at the idea of spending his time with them.
How long had it been since he actually enjoyed the company of any of those buckle bunnies? Why had he thought hooking up with them was so great, and when had he stopped feeling that way?
He’d never before felt that fire and heat course through him the way it had done when he was just looking at Jessica.
He repeated her name to himself: Jessica. Anything less than that sensation seemed pointless when he knew that it was out there.
