The Wedding Gamble

by Cindi Myers

  Correction—she lusted for him. Exhibit A: the way she’d thrown herself at him in the pool. They’d been practically having sex in public, in broad daylight. Maybe she was just horny because David was so gorgeous, and it had been a while since she’d had a boyfriend. Did the reason behind her behavior really matter when the results were so exhilarating and memorable?

  Unfortunately, she really couldn’t spend every waking minute with him thinking about sex, tempting as that prospect might be. She’d agreed to help him, and that meant keeping at least some of her wits about her. First step, make sure Rachel was okay. She dug her phone from her purse and punched in Rachel’s number. After four rings, Rachel answered. “Hello?”

  “Rachel, it’s Laura.”

  “It’s about time you woke up, sleepyhead,” Rachel teased. “And shame on you for bailing on the party last night. I had to make a detour to a Walgreen’s to get glue for my nail, and when we finally decided to call it a night, I had to get the front desk to give me another key.”

  Laura had known Rachel wasn’t likely to worry about her, but it still stung a little to have her suspicions proved. She could have been kidnapped or killed and it might have been days before Rachel even noticed. “Where are you now?” she asked.

  “The girls and I are playing slots here at the hotel. We have appointments to get our nails done at noon. The glue didn’t do such a good job, so I decided to just have them all redone. I’m sure they could squeeze you in if you want.”

  “That’s okay. I’m going to stop by for a minute to see you, though. There’s somebody I want you to meet.” Her original plan had been to have David wait outside while she ran in and reassured her sister, but Rachel’s careless attitude had changed her mind. Time to do a little gloating.

  “Everything okay?” he asked after she’d snapped shut her phone.

  “Fine. She didn’t even miss me.”

  “You said she’s getting married?”

  “Next week, back in Davenport. To a lawyer who works in the county attorney’s office. Our parents are over the moon about it.”

  “But you, not so much,” he guessed.

  She flushed. “Of course I’m happy for her. It just grates sometimes that her life is so perfect—she was a beauty queen in high school, and she’s still a size two. She has her own business staging houses, and now she meets this guy with his own very profitable career. Me, I have a low-paying job that nobody even pretends to think is glamorous, and the only boyfriend I’ve ever had for more than a few months dumped me last year for a woman he met online.”

  “Jerk.”

  David’s vehemence on her behalf surprised a smile from her. “I’m not bitter—just annoyed sometimes that Rachel gets all the good luck and I get the leftovers. It would be nice to turn the tables on her, even for a little bit.”

  “I sense a plan in the making.”

  She laughed. “If you’d just come inside with me and meet her…I want to introduce you as my husband and watch her jaw drop.”

  “If I’d known this plan of yours, I’d have dressed to impress.”

  “Oh no, you look great.” More than great. In the pool she’d had plenty of opportunity to appreciate his broad, muscular chest, dusted with dark hair, not to mention his buff arms, rippling abs and other, um, attributes. The memory of his rock-hard erection pressed so firmly against her left her weak-kneed and breathless. Knowing she so obviously turned him on was enough to make her whisper a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods oversaw the distribution of luck to patrons on the Strip.

  They arrived at the hotel a few minutes later and Laura led him to the casino entrance. “Rachel said she was playing slots,” she said. “I’ll just talk to her a minute, and then we can get my things from my room.”

  “Anything special you want me to do? Strike a pose or anything?” He flexed his biceps.

  “Just standing there should be enough.”

  She spotted a familiar blonde head at the end of a row of slots. “Hi, Rachel.” Laura stopped beside her.

  Rachel barely glanced at her, then she did a double take and took in David. “Hello!” she said, all wide-eyed interest.

  Laura wrapped her hand around David’s and pulled him closer. “Rachel, I’d like you to meet my husband, David Abruzzo.”

  Rachel’s mouth dropped open, then she laughed. “She is such a kidder,” she said to David.

  “No, Rachel, I’m not kidding. David and I got married last night. I have the license to prove it. It was a whirlwind romance.” It was a whirlwind, anyway.

  “You married my sister?” Rachel slid off the stool and stood, all five-feet-five of her facing David’s six feet. “What kind of a scam are you trying to pull? Do you think she has money? Because she doesn’t. She teaches at a preschool. Did she tell you that? And there isn’t any family money. My parents even had to take out a loan to pay for my wedding.”

  “Rachel.” Laura couldn’t decide if she was touched that Rachel suspected a scam or hurt she’d think there couldn’t possibly be another reason a man as good-looking as David would want her.

  “I promise there’s no scam involved.” David put his arm around her, his firm grip reassuring. “I was attracted to her from the moment I saw her. And I have money of my own, so I’m not concerned about hers or your family’s.”

  “What do you do?” Rachel asked.

  “I work for the government. I’m a diplomat.”

  Some of the starch went out of Rachel. She not so subtly checked David out again. “I can’t believe a guy like you fell for my sister.” She had the grace to blush as soon as the words were out, but she forged ahead. “I mean, she doesn’t seem like your type.”

  “Laura is exactly my type.”

  Even if the words were a lie, the fact that he stood up for her made her feel as beautiful and confident as she’d always wanted to be. All her life, Rachel had been the pretty sister, the thin sister, the smart sister, the sister who was marrying well. For this one brief moment, Laura got to have the upper hand. She leaned against David and allowed herself a moment of smugness. Rachel’s own husband to be, Josh DuPree, had a weak chin and was already losing his hair. A nice guy, to be sure, but no match for David in the looks department.

  Okay, that was a petty thing to think, but all her life she had been on the receiving end of other people’s pettiness. Her family’s assumption that of course she’d make sacrifices for them. The co-workers who shuffled extra work onto her. The boyfriends who “joked” that she could stand to lose a few pounds. She was always so damned nice to everyone. Resisting her inner niceness, if only briefly, felt liberating.

  Rachel turned to her. “This is so unlike you,” she said. “You’re never impulsive like this.”

  “I decided it was time for a change,” she said lightly. Being a little wild felt better than she’d ever imagined. Guilt and remorse would no doubt set in eventually, but for now she was riding the wave of her own daring.

  “Let me see the ring.”

  Rachel’s words sent a moment of panic through her, until she realized that she did, indeed, have a ring on the third finger of her left hand. She extended the hand toward Rachel. Rachel leaned toward the gem, squinting. “It looks like something out of a gum machine.”

  David coughed. Laura suspected the ring had, in fact, come out of a gum machine or a Cracker Jack box. “It’s an antique,” she said, slipped the hand beneath the folds of her sarong. “It just needs cleaning.”

  A familiar pair of bug eyes appeared around the other end of the row of slots, followed by a taller man with a high widow’s peak. Dumb and Dumber were back. They were like a couple of ticks. When the taller man—Charlie—saw that she had recognized him, he glowered, as if he expected one look to send her ducking for cover. The old Laura—the ordinary, real Laura—would have run away in fear. But David needed her to be brave, to show this guy she wasn’t afraid of him. After all, Charlie couldn’t do anything to her here in a crowded casino, could he? She released
David’s hand and rushed toward the thug.

  “Laura, what are you—?” David called after her.

  “Charlie, isn’t it?” She grabbed the goon’s hand and dragged him toward her sister and David. Victor followed at a little distance. “Rachel, these are two business associates of David’s. This is Charlie, and that’s Victor.”

  Victor fluttered his fingers in a small wave.

  “Rachel couldn’t make the wedding last night because she was indisposed,” Laura told Charlie.

  “Indisposed?” Rachel frowned.

  “You had a little too much fun at the bachelorette party,” Laura reminded her, hoping Rachel wouldn’t blab about whose upcoming wedding they’d been celebrating.

  Rachel grinned. “I guess I did. Those drinks go down like Kool-aid, but they really hit you later. It was a good party.”

  “You’re saying you were at a bachelorette party last night?” Charlie asked Rachel.

  “Of course,” Laura said. “Before the wedding.”

  “Hey, it’s the bachelorettes!”

  Right on cue, as if she had planned the whole thing, the two frat boys from the evening before joined them in front of the slot machines. “That was some party last night,” one said, and gave an exaggerated wink.

  To her amusement, Rachel blushed bright pink. “Just remember what they say,” she said. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

  “Oh, you got it.” The taller boy gave a thumbs-up sign.

  Charlie was still scowling. “Isn’t it funny how we keep running into you two,” Laura said. She took hold of David’s arm. “I couldn’t believe you were sitting out by the pool in that hot suit. You’d better go put something on your head. It looks like you got pretty sun-burned.”

  Charlie shook his head and walked away. “Nice to meet you,” Victor said, then hurried after his friend.

  “For a diplomat, that big guy wasn’t very pleasant,” Rachel said.

  “He’s been losing big at the blackjack tables,” David said.

  “Oh.” Rachel nodded wisely. “That would put anybody in a bad mood.” She turned to Laura. “I still can’t believe you’re married.”

  “We’ll talk later, I promise.” She hugged her sister close. “Have fun.” Then she hurried away, before Rachel—who was not dumb, only sometimes slow to pick up on things—started asking more questions about how she had ended up married to a man she’d just met.

  Chapter Four

  “We’ve got to find a way to ditch Charlie and Victor,” David said as he followed Laura down a long hallway toward her room. For one thing, he couldn’t have her confronting the two goons the way she had just now. They might decide to take their attention off him and target her. “I need to get in touch with Tommy, and they can’t see me talking to him.”

  “Maybe I could distract them somehow.” Laura stopped in front of a doorway at the far end of the hallway and inserted her key card.

  “Absolutely not. You’re already too involved in this.” He couldn’t believe how involved. She was supposed to be a small-town nursery school teacher, not a woman who faced down killers and badgered them into leaving her alone. That was his job. He stepped in front of her, opened the door, and leaned in carefully.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I want to make sure you don’t have any nasty surprises waiting for you.”

  She paled. “Surprises?”

  “If Zacolli got a look at the records from the wedding chapel and learned your name, he might have sent someone up here to go through your things, to try to find some clue to what I’m up to.” He didn’t like scaring her, but he needed to impress upon her that she had to be cautious.

  She covered her mouth, as if to stifle a gasp. “I told Charlie and Victor I’d lost my luggage. If they came here, they’d know I lied.”

  “The airline could have found your luggage and delivered it this morning. What’s more important is if they found anything that proved you couldn’t really be married to me.”

  “They wouldn’t have found anything. I mean, I don’t keep a diary or anything like that.” She followed him into the room. “It’s just clothes and a romance novel I bought to read on the plane.”

  He checked the closet then the bathroom, stopping before the cracked sink. “This room is a dump.”

  “I don’t think they usually rent it, but the hotel is really full.” She pulled her suitcase from the closet and began emptying the drawers. “I had a much nicer room next to Rachel’s. But she said she needed her maid of honor, Kimmy, close to her so they could plan wedding stuff. So I traded with Kimmy.”

  “You’re too nice for your own good,” he said. He’d have told the sister to take a hike. Then again, he didn’t have any brothers or sisters. Maybe he’d feel differently if he had a real family.

  “If I weren’t so nice, I might not have agreed to stick around and help you,” she pointed out. She added a handful of toiletries and a make-up bag to the suitcase then glanced around the room. “That’s it, I guess.”

  He took the suitcase. “We’ll get another room at a different hotel, and I’ll register under a different name. Hopefully, that will throw the goons off the track long enough for me to contact Tommy. If I can just talk to him, I know I can persuade him to come back to Chicago with me.”

  They started down the long hallway. “What hotel will we stay in?” she asked.

  “Somewhere off the Strip. I haven’t decided.” He took her hand in his. “But first, we get you a better ring.”

  “This ring isn’t so bad.” She held up her hand and pretended to admire the ring he’d purchased as part of the “economy wedding package.”

  “It’s turning your finger green. And if your sister ever gets a closer look at it, she’s going to know it’s not a priceless antique—just worthless junk.”

  “If Rachel asks about the ring again I’ll just ask about her ring. She’s crazy about it and won’t want to talk about anything else.”

  “Fine. But Rachel isn’t the only one you have to fool. If Charlie decides to check out the ring, the game is over. Crooks like him know about diamonds.”

  She hugged herself and shuddered. “That guy gives me the creeps. Why doesn’t he believe we’re married? That you were in Las Vegas on legitimate business that had nothing to do with him?”

  “Charlie doesn’t trust anyone. And he takes his work very seriously. Zacolli frowns upon killing civilians for no reason, so I think Charlie’s hoping to catch me in a lie so he’ll have an excuse to pop me.” He took her hand in his once more. “I won’t let a little thing like a ring betray me.”

  “Rings cost a fortune,” she protested. “If we’re only going to be together a few days…”

  She talked as if she didn’t deserve nice things—as if she didn’t deserve a decent room or attention from her self-centered sister. “The least I can do for putting you through all this trouble is get you a decent ring,” he said. Getting her the ring was suddenly very important to him—a way to repay her for all the trouble he was putting her through.

  “All right.” She was silent for a moment, following him down the long hallway. At the elevator she said. “I guess you can write it off as an expense. It’s not as if the government hasn’t paid for crazier things.”

  “No. I’ll buy the ring myself. I want you to have it.” It wasn’t as if he had anyone else to spend his money on. He lived modestly, and most of his salary just piled up in his bank account. It would be nice to think he could do something good with it. Something meaningful. He caught and held her gaze. “You deserve it.” As far as he could tell, she was always the one on the giving end of things—giving up her room to her sister’s bridesmaid and catering to her sister. When the two of them parted company, at least she’d have the memory that he’d been the one to give something to her, instead of only taking. And he’d know that, for once in his life, he’d done something truly nice for someone else, just because he wanted to.

  “Oh. Well
…thank you.” She looked away. Then the elevator arrived and she stepped in ahead of him.

  Outside once more, he scanned the sidewalk for a sign of Victor and Charlie. If they were following him now, they were lying low. “Let’s get the ring while we’re alone,” he said, and steered her toward an adjacent shopping complex.

  Glittery displays of diamonds and gold beckoned lucky gamblers with winnings to blow or couples who’d decided to get engaged and seal a Las Vegas wedding with an appropriately gaudy and expensive piece of jewelry. “See anything you like?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know…”

  “Something simple, I think. But beautiful and classy, like you.” He pointed to a small section of diamond solitaires. “Something like that?”

  “They’re beautiful. But really, you don’t have to—”

  He motioned the sales clerk over and asked to see the rings. He slipped a two-carat, emerald-cut solitaire with a platinum band onto the third finger of her left hand and a smile blossomed on her face. “It’s spectacular.”

  His heart stuttered in his chest. He’d thought she was pretty, but in this moment, she was truly beautiful.

  She started to slip the ring off. “It’s too much. I could never accept something this expensive.”

  “I want you to have it. Please.”

  She stared longingly at the ring. “If you’re sure…”

  “I’m sure.” He handed the clerk his credit card.

  Laura waited until they left the store before she said anything. “It’s the most beautiful ring I’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s perfect.” She threw her arms around him, her lips finding his.

  Though she’d probably only planned one grateful smooch, he slipped his arms around her and pulled her close. He wasn’t going to pass up another chance to kiss her. She melted at his touch and fit herself against him. He went hard again, a condition that was becoming semi-permanent around her. Her lips parted slightly, and she brushed the tip of her tongue tentatively against his mouth.

  The innocence of that gesture had him completely undone. He pulled her closer, and deepened the kiss. His world was full of hard and jaded men and women, yet Laura was neither. He would have bought her a whole store full of diamonds if that would have convinced her how special she was.