King of Sin: Las Vegas Syndicate Book One

by Michelle St. James

  The house was quiet as a tomb, sealed off from the desert with state-of-the-art insulation and large premium windows, as he made his way to the kitchen.

  He put a bagel in the toaster and started a pot of coffee. He was waiting, tapping his fingers on the counter, when the woman appeared around the corner.

  He tried not to show his relief when he saw that she was already dressed, her purse in hand. In spite of the smeared make-up, she was pretty, and he tried to remember if she’d told him where she was from during their drunken evening the night before.

  “Good morning,” he said, crossing the kitchen to hand her the coffee.

  “Morning.” She took a drink. “Hmmm… Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.” He bent down to kiss her head. “There’s a bagel in the toaster.”

  “Thanks.” She took another sip of coffee, watching him over the rim. “But I’ve already called a car, so you don’t have to worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said, hoping she couldn’t hear the relief in his voice.

  She laughed a little. “You’re a smooth one — and sweet — but I’m a big girl. I know how this works.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. The bagel sprang from the toaster. “See? I even made you breakfast.”

  Her phone chirped and she glanced at it before setting down her cup of coffee. “Thanks for the coffee, Max.” She turned to leave. “It’s Tiffany, by the way.”

  “Tiffany?”

  “My name.” There was a sparkle of mischief in her eyes as she glanced back over her shoulder. “It’s Tiffany.”

  He chuckled as she made her way toward the hall. “You are one cool customer, Tiffany.”

  “Takes one to know one,” she said lightly, not bothering to turn around.

  He waited for the front door to close to exhale, then poured himself a cup of coffee. When it was done, he walked out onto the balcony off the kitchen.

  Soon it would be hot enough to cook an egg on the sidewalk, but for now, the weather was temperate and comfortable. The back of the house faced the semi-manicured backside of the golf course, scrubby trees and brush maintained just enough to keep them from growing wild. The green was well beyond the tree line, out of view of the house. It was one of the reasons he’d bought the lot when he’d returned from Afghanistan; he could almost fool himself into believing the house was in Sonoma or Napa, maybe even in the foothills of Greece.

  Of course, he could have moved to any of those places. Despite the collapse of his father’s real estate empire, Max had enough money to last two lifetimes thanks to the trust fund that had been untouchable to his father’s debt collectors.

  But leaving Las Vegas was unthinkable. His tour in Afghanistan had taught him that one desert wasn’t equivalent to another. Vegas was his city, for better or worse. He loved the shine of its lights at night, the way it washed out like an old photograph during the day. He loved the long-legged beauties, as commonplace as the beeping of slot machines that was the soundtrack in every public place. He loved that he could drink, gamble, and pick up women at any hour of every day, that he could eat at some of the world’s finest restaurants.

  Plus, Abby was here, and she loved the city as much as he did.

  Her face appeared in his mind, the pronounced features and eyes that shifted from mysterious brown to dark green, like the waters of the Colorado River. She had hair like honey and full lips, a sly smile that said she knew all of his secrets.

  And she did, although that went both ways.

  If you didn’t count Jason Draper — and Max didn’t — she was his oldest friend.

  Max could close his eyes and see her as she’d been when they were kids, her scraped knees and worn clothes, the sadness in her eyes that haunted him even before he knew what to call it.

  He’d wanted to save her — from being poor, from the kids who teased her, from the father who beat her and who Max suspected had done far worse. But he hadn’t been able to do any of it.

  He’d only been able to be her friend.

  Jason had been poor, too, although he’d been raised by a single mother who OD’ed just before Jason’s nineteenth birthday. But even then, Max had known Jason could take care of himself. It was Abby they both rallied around.

  Abby they both loved.

  Their mutual affection for her hadn’t dampened their friendship. Jason had done that later, all by himself.

  Max had loved having Jason and Abby over when they were teenagers. He hadn’t even minded when his father took an interest in Jason, when he’d taken Jason under his wing in high school, when he’d anonymously funded a scholarship so Jason could attend Stanford with Max. Jason was one of his two best friends, and every moment Jason spent with Max’s father was another moment Max had alone with Abby.

  It wasn’t until they’d gone away to college — Max and Jason to Stanford, Abby to community college and then on to Nevada State — that Max realized he would never have known either of them if not for his father’s insistence on sending him to public school.

  He’d always been proud of his father — Donald Cartwright had met the death of Max’s mother with strength and grace, had been unfailingly kind and honest — but as Max grew, his admiration for his father only expanded. His father hadn’t wanted him to be a private school snob. He’d wanted Max to have empathy for everyone, to understand that he wasn’t better than anyone else because he happened to be born to wealthy parents.

  Max liked to think the lessons had stuck in spite of his recent debauchery. He had, after all, volunteered for the military with a war on. True, he’d eventually been kicked out for failing to follow orders, but only because those orders violated the ethics instilled in him by his father.

  It was also true that he had no fucking idea what he was doing with his life, that most of his days consisted of chasing showgirls and cocktail waitresses and drinking. But he never lied to anyone, never pretended his encounters with the endless stream of women were anything other than what they were.

  He took a drink of coffee, savoring the bitterness on his tongue as his thoughts returned to Abby. It was nothing new. He and Jason had been estranged for years. His parents were dead. He had no siblings. Abby was the only real thing in his life.

  Not that they would ever be more than friends.

  He’d promised himself long ago that that was one line he would never cross. She was too important to him. Sex was nothing. He could have sex anytime, with virtually anyone.

  Anyone but Abby Sterling.

  A flush of anticipation spread through his body when he remembered it was Friday. He and Abby texted almost every day and sometimes met for lunch or dinner on a whim, but Friday was their standing night for drinks. It was the end of her official work week, and while he tried to steer clear of conversation involving Jason — Abby had worked for him for the past two years — Max would never pass up an opportunity to sit in a darkened booth at Herbs & Rye and watch the emotion pass over her expressive face, listen to her throaty laugh as it traveled through the bar.

  He’d hated it when Abby had gone to work for Jason. Had hated the hesitation in her voice when she’d told him. Hated knowing his feud with Jason put Abby in an awkward position.

  Abby, more than anyone, deserved everything.

  She’d put herself through school, had remade herself as an educated, elegant woman. She still took care of the father who had abused her, still paid his rent and utilities and even brought him groceries. Jason Draper had offered her a shot at the brass ring — head of finance for the Tangier Hotel and Casino.

  Max didn’t blame her for taking it.

  When she’d told him, he’d swallowed an emotion that felt too much like jealousy to call it anything else. He’d congratulated her, taken her out to celebrate. Then he’d avoided all but the most cursory of questions involving Jason Draper.

  How is work? Glad to hear it.

  The end.

  Then it was onto the guys she was dating
(also not his favorite subject, but that was just because she was like a little sister to him, or that’s what he told himself anyway) and the renovations she was doing on the house she’d bought in one of the city’s few quaint suburbs.

  He took another drink of coffee and was surprised to find it cold. How long had he been standing on the balcony thinking of Abby? How many times had it happened before?

  He headed inside and set the cup down on the counter on his way to the gym on the ground floor of the house. He was suddenly filled with pent-up energy, his body coiled too tightly considering he’d just woken up. It was too soon to line up his bedmate for the night.

  A good workout was the next best thing.

  Three

  Abby Sterling watched through the glass walls of her office as George Filippovic made his way down the hall, briefcase in hand. He was a hulk of a man, well over six feet tall, with the meaty physique of an aging football player gone to fat and a face that looked like it had been flattened by a meat cleaver.

  All of which made his title — he was listed as an appraiser on payroll — even more bizarre.

  Technically he was employed by the Tangier Hotel and Casino, but he didn’t have an office and he was only seen on the executive offices of the sixtieth floor on Tuesdays. Rumors in the office that the briefcase held some kind of ledger were enough to give Abby pause, but she’d known Jason Draper since he was a scrawny kid, every bit as poor as her, the two of them orbiting Max Cartwright like twin planets to his sun.

  Jason was ambitious, too smart for his own good, but he wasn’t a criminal.

  Abby had never asked him about George, or about the briefcase. A lot of things had changed about Jason since he was a kid, but his zealous demand for privacy wasn’t one of them. Her position as his employee complicated their friendship, and she was careful not to blur the lines or take advantage of the opportunity he’d given her.

  Filippovic continued out of her line of sight on his way to Jason’s office, and Abby looked down at the spreadsheet on her computer.

  As the Tangier’s Director of Finance, she could have delegated the review to someone else on her staff, but she liked to do a final check of the numbers herself. She hadn’t been sure she was equipped for the job when Jason first offered it to her. Two years later, she was still meticulous in her work, still careful not to take anything for granted.

  She finished checking the numbers and tabbed over to enter the totals in the casino’s private accounting software. Her eyes skimmed over the accounts, hesitating over the one at the bottom. It was the only account without a name — just a number — and it was empty.

  It wasn’t always that way. Some days of the week, the account held millions. A couple days later, it might be inexplicably empty.

  In her early days at the Tangier, she’d tried tracing the funds to the casino’s deposits in an effort to be thorough. When she hadn’t been able to find its source, she’d asked Jason about it in one of their private meetings and he’d explained that it was a personal account. She could only assume he was transferring some of his wealth into the account at various intervals, then sending it offshore where the tax liability was more favorable, but when she’d asked if he needed help with it, he’d told her he preferred to manage it himself and instructed her to ignore it.

  It wasn’t exactly shady. He’d built a six-hundred million dollar empire since graduating from Stanford ten years earlier. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to keep some of his money from Uncle Sam. It’s not like he was an exception. The vast majority of wealthy people she knew — and it was strange to realize she now knew a lot of them — did the same.

  She glanced at her phone as it buzzed and smiled when she saw Max’s name.

  Still on for tonight?

  She reached for her phone, hesitating as she wondered if she should wait to respond, then picked it up. Max wasn’t one of the suited men who took her out to dinner a couple times a month.

  And he definitely wasn’t one of the few she allowed into her bed.

  She shook her head as her face grew warm. She’d promised herself she would never think of Maxwell Cartwright that way. He was her friend. Her very best friend. He’d protected her through the awful years of her childhood, had let her linger at the Cartwright mansion on the outskirts of town when she would have done anything to avoid going home, in a place where doing anything could have gotten her into a heap of trouble.

  When it could have changed the course of her future.

  Instead, she’d seen another life. One where it was possible to be safe and to feel loved, where there was always food in the fridge and someone to tuck you in at night without having to worry about a hand slipping under the covers, sliding up her leg and —

  She pushed the thought down. Looking back wouldn’t change anything.

  Definitely. H&R @ 9?

  His answer came a moment later, more proof that Abby’s just-friends edict for Max went both ways. She would have bet a week’s salary that Max Cartwright didn’t jump to answer the texts of any woman who shared his bed.

  Can’t wait. Need nachos.

  She laughed out loud.

  See you then.

  She set her phone down and sat back in her chair. Beyond the wall of windows in her office, the city’s dull daytime shimmer beckoned. Even the newer casinos like the Tangier somehow looked shabby by daylight. It was something she loved about Vegas: it was like Cinderella, perpetually waiting for nightfall to put on its glass slippers.

  She knew a lot of people thought it was a cheap town full of cheap people. Knew that deep down, she was one of those cheap people — a poor, sad girl who had somehow escaped the stripper’s pole when a lot of girls didn’t.

  But she’d never felt the cliché of wanting to leave, to break free of the place that had been a backdrop to her past. The city had been witness to all her pain, all her shame. It was her oldest friend, and she had the strange feeing that it was somehow responsible for her salvation. That if she’d been the same poor, sad girl anywhere else she wouldn’t have gone to college, would have instead fallen victim to an opportunistic man, might even be dead by now.

  It was magical thinking. She’d gotten herself out of her old life. Jason and Max had helped — and Max’s father had offered moral support after she rejected his offer to pay for her schooling when it was disguised as a “scholarship" — but in the end it had been her determination, her hard work. It had been living in a cramped apartment in a bad part of town with four roommates to escape her father’s drunken hands. It had been working nights as a cocktail waitress with her best friend, Meredith, putting up with pinches to her ass and invitations to the suites that offered free-flowing champagne and equally free-flowing coke and heroin. It had meant smelling like spilled liquor when she raced to her classes the next morning at community college, painstakingly accumulating the credits to transfer to State.

  Then it had meant even more studying, adding internships to her workload to accumulate the real-world job experience that would give her a better shot at a corporate position.

  It had meant graduation with only Max, his father, and Jason present (her own father had been on a five-day bender, not that she would have invited him anyway) followed by a string of poorly paying jobs in the Accounting Departments of several old casinos, the ones off the strip that were occupied by retirees looking for cheap rooms and $9.99 all-you-can-eat prime rib.

  But she’d done it. She made more every month than her father had made in a year with his odd jobs. She’d bought a house in an old neighborhood, a storybook home with a steeply pitched roof and mullioned windows. She was slowly bringing it back to life and filling the rooms with overstuffed chairs and table lamps, houseplants and throw pillows. Sometimes when she pulled up outside, the porch light beckoning, she still couldn’t believe it was hers. It was nothing like Jason’s modern house in the city’s most expensive area or Max’s vineyard-inspired home — also modern, although it’s modernity was hidden under faintl
y Spanish architecture.

  Still, it was hers. Part of the life she’d built to forget.

  Part of the life Vegas had helped her build.

  She looked up as Filippovic passed by on his way out of the office. A moment later, Jason appeared on the other side of the glass.

  She waved him in, and he opened her door. “Hey.”

  She smiled. “Good timing. I just finished the reports.”

  “Are you free to go over them in say…” He looked at his phone. “Ten minutes?”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Good.”

  He closed the door and she watched him take a sheath of papers from Rosie, his executive assistant. If she didn’t know Jason like she did, she would have expected him to have a young, sexy admin. But Rosie was an older woman with chic silver hair, and Abby couldn’t help but think about how different Max and Jason were — and not in the way she would have expected.

  Jason had been a scared, bullied kid, hiding in Max’s shadow. He’d been sweet and shy, maybe even a little effeminate. Max, on the other hand, had been tall and broad-shouldered, even in high school. He’d been gregarious and outgoing, although he hadn’t seemed overly interested in all the girls lusting after him in the halls of their high school.

  If anyone had asked her then, she would have expected Jason to grow into a quiet geek and Max to become a politician or public speaker, someone who married well and lived out the rest of his life in quiet luxury.

  Which was why Jason’s dynamic leadership was as much of a surprise as Max’s reclusive millionaire act. She could name a hundred little things that had happened along the way, a thousand seemingly small decisions, but it was Jason’s hostile takeover of Cartwright Holdings, the company that had been owned by Donald Cartwright, that had changed everything.