Her lower lip started to quiver, which made her mad. She pinched her mouth into a thin line of control then gave me a curt nod.
Or at least I thought the nod was for me, but perhaps not—her eyes had an unfocused, faraway look. “Do you know where the picture was taken?”
“On my Gram’s farm.”
All the questions I wanted answered punctured my fear like shrapnel perforated skin. How to find the seeds of truth in her story? “Did your Gram own the farm?” There’d be deeds and all, easily findable—pieces to the puzzle.
“Not outright. She was paying Dr. Dean off, she’d said.”
A privately financed sale. The deed wouldn’t be generated until she’d paid off the farm. Okay, scratch the deed trail.
“And your name? You haven’t told me your name.” Jesus! How had I forgotten the most obvious question of all?
The girl licked her lips as her gaze darted around my office like a trapped fly searching for an open window. “Tawny. Tawny Rose.”
Tawny Rose. She’d named herself after a color of lipstick or a kindhearted stripper.
Looked like the girl had an on-again, off-again affair with the truth.
But where did she get that photo?
“Okay…Tawny.” I didn’t try to hide my skepticism and slight amusement. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.” Too young to be by herself in Vegas, wandering casinos in the wee hours looking for her mother. A bad modern take on a Dickens novel.
I’d lived that life. I knew the empty heart feeling.
Thanks to my mother.
Mona.
What had she done?
If the present mimicked the past, in a nutshell, she’d abandoned me—then justified it by leaving me in the care of someone…sort of. A man—my boss—who I found out later…much later…was my father. Of course, she’d left me in the dark about that little factoid—I’d thought I was alone. And now here we were, a happy little family with a past threatening to blow it apart at the seams.
What were the legal boundaries of justifiable matricide?
And here I thought I had finally gotten my personal baggage down to a carry-on. Silly me.
My mother was a skilled emotional surgeon, slicing, dicing, leaving pencil-thin scars to crisscross one’s heart.
And that girl I used to be was still a part of me. And her pain gnawed, a tiny beast that could cripple one bite at a time.
Mona had cut and run once. She could’ve done it again.
Funny, but that possibility had never entered my reality—not until tonight when it walked through my door.
If Mother had walked away from this young woman, I’d kill her myself.
No one deserves that, especially not a kid.
No one should have to live through what I did.
Trying to focus, I leaned forward to stare again at the picture on the edge of the desk. The photo was old, Mona very young, but I’d recognize her before I would myself. For as long as I could remember—except for those years where it had seemed she’d abandoned me in Vegas—Mona and I had been the Two Musketeers. Now she was married to my father—normal for most but an interesting turn of events for me. I hadn’t known about our family ties until recently. My newfound father, Albert Rothstein, aka the Big Boss, was the majority shareholder in the Babylon Group and a major player in Vegas. As such, he and my mother were targets for every grifter and con who could get this far.
Did Miss Tawny Rose have an angle? Was she pulling a con? Or did someone send her to undermine Mona’s political aspirations? I immediately eliminated the latter. Mona was the proof to the old adage that if you gave someone enough rope, they would hang themselves. With Mother, political suicide was nothing more than a timing issue. Anybody who would care knew that already.
“You want to know who she is?” I asked the girl as I paused and took a deep breath.
This was Mona’s fight. I couldn’t protect her from this one. No, this was a crack that would swallow her tiny, perfect, taut little ass. I know I sounded like I’d like to see her get her comeuppance, but not really. Although, there was a part of me that enjoyed seeing Mona swing over the abyss holding on for her life. Yes, shallow is my middle name. Not something I was proud of, but something I could live with.
God knew she had a myriad of faults—up to this point, the most important of which was being irritating as hell. But she was, above all, my mother, and that counted for everything.
Family, the ties that bind. What I wouldn’t do for a knife.
As if sensing the answer to her question, the girl leaned forward, hanging on expectation.
I delivered the one-two punch. “She’s my mother, Mona.” I lifted my chin toward the photo that still lay on the desk like an accusation. “But I think you knew that.”
“Mona,” the girl whispered with hushed reverence.
Misplaced reverence, but I wasn’t going to be the one to burst that bubble.
A flood of emotions widened her eyes. “I didn’t know.”
They were blue. Like mine. Like Mona’s.
“Mona.” This time her voice held a bit less reverence. “Your mother.” She angled her head as if seeing me anew. “And that makes us—”
“—still trying to figure this out.” The words should’ve been sufficient to shut down that line of thinking, but I breathed a bit of cool into them for extra clarity. I do tend to overdo, but adjusting to the Big Boss as my father was hard enough. Then with the recent birth of twin siblings (you’d think after years in the bordello business, my mother would know what causes that), I was having a hard time getting my pea brain around my burgeoning family.
Now, this.
“How did you happen to get to my office?” Of all the gin joints…I knew how Humphrey Bogart felt. “Who put me together with that photo?”
“I like your name.” Enigmatic to a fault, the girl gave me a half smile, surprising me and, from the look on her face, herself as well. There was more there, but the steely look in those baby blues told me I’d need a pickaxe.
But she had more to gain than I did, so that meant I held the cards. “Always play the odds, kid. You want your shot with Mona, then tell me why you like my name.” My voice went low, riding on a hard demand.
The girl gave it a moment’s hesitation, then wilted. Smart girl. “My grandfather, he drank. I didn’t know him well. He died when I was young. Of a broken heart, my Gram said. But there were times just before he’d pass out when he’d talk to himself. I don’t know why but I got the impression he was talking to someone he knew, someone who was no longer there. He called her Lucky Bean.”
“And that led you to me?”
“How many Luckys do you know? Your name is all over everything at the rodeo.”
“A long shot.” With a big payoff.
“Sometimes you play a hunch rather than the odds.” To her credit, she didn’t rub my nose in it. Instead, she focused on the photo. “Are you sure that girl in my photo is your mother? It’s not that clear and was taken a long time ago.” Emotion thinned her voice, but she looked like some of the pieces to a puzzle she wasn’t sharing completely had fallen into place.
“That’s Mona. Even then she was distinctive.” I wondered what she’d been like back then. Carefree, young, the future open and bright. How had she ended up a hooker in Pahrump? Why had I never asked?
“You favor her,” the girl said.
She did, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words. “Flattery will get you everywhere.” The angels on my shoulders whispered in my ears. Should I believe her? Should I not?
Whether she was telling the truth or not, that didn’t alter the fact that she really looked like she needed help. And if what she said was true…
The good angel won.
I so wouldn’t like myself if I didn’t get to the bottom of her story.
Compassion, the upside to bad decisions.
At least there was one.
The girl glanced toward the doorway then
gave me the eye. No, not the eye, but more of a calculated once-over with the wariness and savvy of a youngster who had seen too much. But some of the kid peeked through in the hope and fear she tried to hide. Yeah, the girl was still in there—she didn’t have the tough shell and dead eyes of a kid who lived on the streets.
She smelled of horses. The shavings that clung to her fleece jacket told me I wasn’t crazy. The rodeo was in town—the Western Finals to be exact.
“What’d you do? Run away with the rodeo? I thought kids ran away to join the circus. Guess I’m hopelessly out of date.”
What little color she had left her face. “What?”
“You’re here with the rodeo?” I pressed.
She flinched like I’d hit her with a cattle prod. “How’d you know?”
I pointed to the shavings on her jacket.
Some of the tough melted away. “Yeah.” She brushed them off and they fluttered to the floor. She didn’t pick them up. “You got a cleaning crew.”
An explanation but hardly an excuse.
What was it they said about teenagers? Purposefully irritating so their parents would be ready to see them take wing and fly on their own? What, so they could fly around and poop on the rest of us? Or, worse, land in our laps?
I wouldn’t go back to being a teenager on a bet—a child trying to navigate a grown-up, bad-guy world without a map. “Yeah, I have a cleaning crew. I’m a big cheese, don’t ya’ know?” All I really wanted to do was fold her in a hug and tell her life would be okay, that she’d get to be a kid a while longer. But I couldn’t promise that, which made me sad and mad at the same time.
I glanced at the clock. Still too early, or not late enough, to get off the Strip—on New Year’s Eve it was shut down to traffic until morning. “Have you eaten?”
Surprise flickered across her face. “No. Why?”
“Hungry, then?”
She wilted into the truth. “Starved.” Her eyes flicked to the doorway again.
“Are you expecting someone?” I narrowed my eyes. “Or maybe someone is following you, hassling you?” The streets were mean for a full-grown badass like me. They’d be hell for the wisp of a kid scared out of her shoes but determined to pretend otherwise.
She met my eyes and held them. “No. No one.”
I didn’t believe her, but I let it go. If she had someone coming to shake me down, this was the wrong place to do it—security in Vegas hotels is unsurpassed. Well, other than letting sixteen-year-olds in without question. “You have a story, and I want to hear it—all of it. I thought we could do it over some food.”
Tears sprung to her eyes. She gathered her fleece over the heel of one hand and swiped at a drop that had the audacity to trickle down her cheek. Without meeting my eyes, she nodded once.
Leaning forward, I raked together my phone and other minor detritus of my life, stuffing them in my Birkin. Then I thought better of it and pulled out my phone, pausing before I dialed. “Will the best hamburger in the world suffice? And maybe a milkshake?”
She looked like I’d offered her a king’s repast, which, considering Jean-Charles Bouclet, world-renowned chef would be doing the cooking, wasn’t shading the truth too much.
“Good, then.” I hastily texted my chef and got an immediate, affirmative response, no questions asked. Gotta love a guy who was willing to open what I knew to be an almost closed kitchen for the asking. And I did love him. More than I knew and probably as much as he hoped.
The whole fiancé thing was so new I often blew by it when thinking of Jean-Charles Bouclet—my French chef. And, yes, my fiancé. Of course, when thinking about him, rational thought was a wish but rarely a reality.
Warmth rushed through me. I’d stopped trying to control my body’s involuntary reaction at the mere thought of my chef. Degrading, so I ignored it.
He’d be waiting. I flipped around the big sparkler on my left ring finger a few times as I tried to figure how to play this whole thing—an impossible task, considering I was running on barely one cylinder, and that was misfiring. Maybe I, too, needed food.
Or maybe I just needed a hug.
“Come on, it’s just upstairs.” I gathered her up and, with my hand in the small of her back, escorted her through the outer vestibule of my office and into the hall. I took an immediate right to push through a set of double doors.
“Aren’t the elevators that way?” she asked with a nod down the hall.
“Yep, but you’re getting the VIP tour.” After shoving my card in the slot, I punched the button for the top floor and the machine whirred to life. Too bad my card wouldn’t shock my heart back to a normal rhythm.
We’d settled in for the ride in the service elevator, me staring at our reflections, the girl studiously avoiding them. Once the doors closed, she stopped doing her imitation of a rabbit ready to bolt.
“Mona is a hooker…or was.” I’m not sure why I stated it so harshly, maybe wanting to cut through the whitewash of the girl’s fantasy.
“Was? You mean she’s dead?” The girl looked stricken. The hooker part didn’t seem to faze her.
“No. Sorry, I thought I’d made that clear. She’s mean enough to outlive all of us. At present, she’s retired from her former profession.” And contemplating a political career, I thought. An abandoned child would surely derail Mona’s ambition train.
Life was like ice—one hard blow and the consequences radiated outward in unanticipated cracks.
“So, you really think the lady in the photo is your mother?” I asked the girl the same question she’d asked me, both of us wanting to be sure of the answer.
The girl was half my age. Even though I was a bit thrown, I worked through the simple math. She would have been born while I was living in Vegas, working for the man I didn’t yet know was my father and attending UNLV. Mother was still working in Pahrump at her eponymous whorehouse. We didn’t see each other often back then—I’d been pissed that she’d dumped me in Vegas. I hadn’t known she’d dumped me with my father—I felt like I’d been abandoned and my mother had become my least favorite person. We both weathered it, but the hurts ran deep.
The girl squared her shoulders. “There’s only one way to find out. Where is she? My mother…Mona.”
As the elevator slowed, I pulled my phone out of my bag and squinted at the screen. I didn’t wear a watch for obvious reasons—in a casino the time of day, or night, didn’t matter. It was later than I’d feared. “Probably asleep.”
No matter the personal cost, I wanted a happy ending for the girl—even though I doubted Mona qualified. But, she was better than no mother at all…some of the time.
The elevator whirred to a soft stop, and the doors slid open. Neither of us moved, even though I could smell the luring aroma of charcoaling beef all the way out here.
As the doors started to glide shut, I thrust a hand out, stopping them. “Come on. Let’s get that food. I’m sure you have a lot more to tell me.”
The girl gave me the side-eye as she stepped by me. “I can find Mona without your help.”
Jesus, did dealing with a teenager earn one a special place in Heaven?
“No doubt. But getting to her might prove a challenge.” I figured the photo would get Mona’s attention, and probably an audience with her as well, but with Mother, one never knew. But the girl didn’t know that. “Besides, the person leading the charge usually takes the first bullet.” That shut down any further argument, at least for the moment.
Jean-Charles’s restaurant was at the end of a short hallway. After serious, prolonged negotiations, we’d settled on JCB Prime as a name. He’d wanted just JC, but to me, that held a hint of blasphemy—not that many of us in Vegas knelt before an altar, but still. Jean-Charles had dug in his heels saying he wasn’t going to apologize for his initials, nor shy away from any implication of a Divine blessing. I sorta got his point but, I’d countered with, no matter the deity you prayed to, she probably wasn’t into having her name emblazoned over a restaurant i
n Vegas. That argument, and concurrence from his mother had carried the day. Yes, I called in the heavy reinforcements—all’s fair in love and war, and this was both. Such folly mixing business with pleasure. Even I knew that. But even I didn’t listen to me.
Jean-Charles had left the back door open a crack for us. A bit prophetic, I thought—the back door was the only way I’d be getting into Heaven. Anxious for a hug, I went first and dove straight into his arms almost before he had a chance to turn away from the stove.
Burying my face in the crook where neck met shoulder, I breathed him in as he held me tight. “Who knew hamburgers could be an aphrodisiac?” My lips moved against his warm skin.
He chuckled, a rumbling I felt before the sound registered on my heart. “I said that out loud, didn’t I?” Given we had an audience, I should’ve been embarrassed. But at my last birthday, I’d vowed to give up worrying about what other people thought of me.
That was all of twenty-four hours ago, so that head trip was a bit new.
I leaned back in his embrace so I could take the kiss I wanted. He didn’t disappoint, and I drank deeply.
Before I was ready, Jean-Charles pulled back. “Are you going to introduce us or are you going to let your friend stand there in her discomfort?”
What was it about Jean-Charles that made conscious thought flee? Just a scant millimeter taller than me in reasonable heels, Jean-Charles looked resplendent in his chef’s whites, which hid a body that would drive Adonis to envy and me to distraction. How I would love to… I chewed on my lip as I let my mind wander.
Sex wouldn’t make this all go away, but it sure would make me feel better.
“Are you going to introduce us?” Amusement lit in his blue eyes. He knew what I was thinking.
Perhaps I should have blushed, but blushing was beneath the me I wanted to be, and, if anything, I was all about fake-it-until-you-make-it.
I wanted him. We both knew it. He reciprocated. Everyone was happy, albeit a bit frustrated at the moment.
“I’m sorry. Where are my manners?” I was usually so good at introductions and all the Emily Post stuff. Mona had seen to that. A hooker with refined sensibilities.
Lucky Ride (The Lucky O'Toole Vegas Adventure Series Book 8) Page 2
