by Holly Rayner
I stared at him, comprehension flooding over me like cold molasses. I was singing in a bar in Las Vegas, and this stranger wanted to pay me to fly to Monaco and sing at a…
“Where do you want me to sing?” I asked, having been too focused on the “Monaco” part of his offer to hear the finer details.
“The FP100. It’s a supercar race around one of the toughest tracks in the world. A very big deal.”
You have got to be kidding me!
“I work on the organizing board for the event,” Julien went on as I continued to stare at him. “The racing is the main attraction, obviously, but we like for there to be other offerings. It’s a great boost to tourism and local businesses. You could sing whatever you’d like. The race begins in a week, and I just want you to be there.”
There. In Monaco. My mind kept stumbling over the facts, not quite able to believe the offer was really being made to me. I had to say yes, right? Singing at the opening of a major sporting event in Europe would have been a big deal, even before my fall from performing grace. Not to mention that I was a classical music lover who had never been to Europe. I’d been talking for years about remedying that. I wanted to travel and see where my favorite artists worked and composed and played.
“I know you don’t know me,” Julien said. “But I have references. I can draw up an official contract, make sure you know exactly what you’re signing up for. And I’ll book everything—your room, the flights, the cars. All taken care of by me.”
My mind began to snag over the details. Could I really drop everything and fly to another country just because an attractive man asked me to? Not to mention, could I really fly to another country, something I’d spent my life avoiding?
The more I thought about it, the more insane it seemed. I had a life, responsibilities. I couldn’t drop everything to go to Monaco. Canceling tour dates and performances was the reason why I’d found myself singing pop opera in a bar in the first place. My reputation was already in tatters; I couldn’t damage it further by canceling the first gig I’d managed to book.
“I’m very flattered by your offer,” I said, surprised by the professional tone of my own voice. “But I’m afraid I’m unavailable. I have an agreement with the hotel to sing in the bar for another month. There’s no way I could cancel to fly out to Monaco in a week.”
Julien pulled back, his blue eyes wide in surprise. It was clear he was not accustomed to being rejected.
“Thank you very much for coming to two of my shows,” I said, finishing my drink and standing up. “I hope it was worth it.”
It looked like he was beginning to rouse, preparing to persuade me further, but I was exhausted from the performance and didn’t have the energy to turn him down again. I gave the handsome stranger a wave and made a quick exit, rushing into the hotel lobby and not stopping until I was outside in the dry heat of the evening.
Chapter 3
Julien
“Where have you been?” Alain demanded before I could even step through the door.
I’d messaged the group chat to let my friends know that I would be out for the evening but had avoided being unnecessarily specific.
“Out and about,” I told him, shrugging noncommittally.
Alain narrowed his eyes at me. “Out and about? You’re being weird.”
“You’re the one interrogating your friend. I think we can both agree that that is a little weird,” I said, dropping my key on the small table next to the door and flopping down on the L-shaped sofa as far from Alain’s sprawling figure as I could manage. The rest of the house, which the group of us had rented for our stay in Vegas, seemed unusually quiet. “Where is everybody?”
“Magic show,” he said, unable to contain his eye roll. “I wonder if Celeste knows what she’s getting herself into with Marc. Her future husband comes to Las Vegas and all he wants to do is get drunk and watch a man pull a rabbit out of his top hat. It’s not natural.”
“I think Celeste knows exactly what she’s getting into—they’ve been together for years. Plus, she would probably be more concerned if he was like you and wanted to do a strip club crawl,” I said.
He scoffed. “I get women just fine, and you don’t see me at magic shows.”
“I also don’t see you getting married.”
“Thank God for that,” Alain said with a laugh. He reached out his leg and kicked the sole of my shoe. “Am I right?”
I smiled at him, hoping it was convincing.
For a long time, the idea of settling down had felt like a kind of death. Building yachts for the Monaco elite had made me one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world, which came with a certain kind of lifestyle. I was invited to the most lavish parties where women dripping in diamonds and pomp would throw themselves at me.
It was great. But over time, it had grown stale. I’d begun to realize that my life was surface-level. The women I met didn’t want a relationship with me—they wanted one with my money. With what I could offer them. The friends I’d made since becoming rich wanted to know what I could do for them, how I could help them.
The only people I could really trust were Alain and Marc, and while that had been enough for a while, I was beginning to realize I wanted more. I wanted someone I could bear my soul to, someone I could depend on to have my back no matter what.
Of course, I didn’t have a single marriage prospect, but the idea of settling down with one woman and building a life together didn’t leave me with the same claustrophobic feeling it used to. In fact, it sounded nice.
But I couldn’t tell Alain that. Because even though I knew he was a loyal friend, I also knew he would never understand, and he would never let me live it down.
“So, are you going to tell me where you were or am I going to have to mine your phone data?”
“You don’t know how to do that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Besides, it would be a waste of time. I was just at a bar.”
“Why didn’t you invite me? I’ve been lying around this house bored out of my mind for the last few hours. Alcohol would have at least numbed the boredom.”
“You could have gone out to a bar,” I said. “Or drunk something from the minibar.”
“This was supposed to be a boy’s trip. I don’t want to drink alone,” he said. And then, before I could say anything, he waved a finger at me in warning. “And I also can’t go to a magic show. Boy’s trip or not, I refuse to be peer-pressured into something so lame.”
I laughed. “Even I’ll admit that a magic show is a little lame.”
“The lamest,” he said.
I thought that, perhaps, we had moved on from the topic of my evening, but a few seconds later, Alain brought the conversation back around.
“So, which bar did you go to? Did you meet anyone?”
My thoughts flashed back to the singer, Ashlynn. She’d been even more beautiful up close than she had been on stage. Her hair fell in rich, golden waves around her slight shoulders and her eyes were a vibrant green, like grass on a dewy morning. She spoke softly, her full lips hardly moving around the words, so shy it was hard to imagine she could be the same woman who had just been on stage.
“No one in particular,” I offered vaguely.
Alain groaned and rested his head back on the couch. “We need to get out of here. Vegas has nothing on Monaco. Especially now that the FP100 is coming up.”
I knew Alain was right, but I was having a hard time being as excited about it as he was. Like the past few years, I was favored to win the race, and that meant sponsorships and press junkets. My face would be everywhere in the coming weeks, which meant every woman in the city would have their eyes on me.
“Forget American women. We will each be surrounded by a mob of beautiful French women in a week’s time. And all of them will be begging to be ‘Julien’s good luck charm,’” Alain said in a girlishly high voice, arms folded behind his head as he stretched out on the couch and closed his eyes.
I mumbled that he was
ridiculous, but my heart wasn’t in it. The thought of leaving Vegas had suddenly lost its appeal. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to forget American women just yet.
Chapter 4
Ashlynn
Even though I was singing at one of one of the more popular resort hotels in Las Vegas, that didn’t mean I could afford to stay in one of the rooms. The job description had been clear: the residency involved payment and free drinks. It did not in any way include a place to sleep. So, I’d rented a small apartment just a couple miles from the hotel. It had a washer and dryer and came with access to a gym in the basement, so I couldn’t have asked for much better for the remarkably low price.
The first thing I did when I walked in the door was strip out of my dress. I felt sticky and miserable after my performance and the nerve-wracking encounter with the beautiful man, and the broken air conditioning in the cab ride home hadn’t helped.
I rinsed my makeup off with the poor water pressure in the shower, grabbed a granola bar from the pantry, and collapsed into bed. I watched a few episodes of a trashy reality TV show I couldn’t remember the name of and ate my snack, but my eyelids refused to even droop. My body was tired, but my brain felt like the fan of an overheating computer. It whirled and spun nonstop, replaying the encounter with Julien over and over again.
Had he been flirting? I’d thought so. The longing look in his eyes, the way he’d held my hand for just a beat too long. But just as I’d gained the confidence to reciprocate, he’d jumped into business.
Not that talking business was bad. Considering my job prospects, talking business was great. I needed more business! But there were some red flags.
Considering everything, I had to wonder whether his intentions were pure. If he had been flirting with me, would I want to begin a working relationship with him? What would he expect from me once we got to Monaco? I wanted to be paid for singing and nothing more. But even that was beside the point, because he’d wanted me to go overseas, which was a total non-starter. I avoided large bodies of water. Or, at least, I had for as long as I could remember.
I wouldn’t have even been able to take my seat on the plane without going into a near panic attack. My fear of water and flying overseas had been a hindrance to my career for years. After one of my shows in New York City, a producer in the audience had offered me the lead role in a production of Carmen, but I’d turned it down when I’d found out it was in Germany.
Jonathan and my parents and my sister had explained to me in too many ways to count that my aversion to flying over the ocean didn’t make any sense: “You’d die in the crash before you’d drown.” But my fear was so all-encompassing that I didn’t have space for reason. Besides, the production had been around the same time that Jonathan and I had begun to have relationship troubles. If I’d even joked about going to Germany for two months, he would have sulked around the house for twice that long.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and video-called my sister. It was late and I was surely waking her up, but I couldn’t lay around feeling sorry for myself anymore. I needed a distraction, and Brianna was great at that.
Her face filled my small screen, the day’s mascara smudged under her eyes. “Hey, baby sister! What are you still doing up?”
“Me?” I asked. “What are you still doing up? I figured I’d be waking you.”
“That’s what children are for,” she said wistfully, turning the camera around to show her four-year-old and two-year-old, Elliott and Charlie, respectively, playing on the floor. “I don’t sleep anymore. I think I’ve evolved to the next phase of humanity where I survive purely on caffeine and muscle memory.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t reward them by letting them play in the living room—”
The camera flipped around so fast, I nearly got motion sick. Brianna’s eyes were large, probing into mine even through the video chat.
“Are you trying to give me parenting advice? Because if you are, I swear, I will reach through this phone and—”
“I wasn’t!” I lied. Brianna’s pet peeve was unsolicited parenting advice. Unfortunately, unsolicited advice was my specialty.
Quickly, I steered the conversation back on track. “How is the next phase of humanity aside from the lack of sleep? Does dessert still have calories? Can you still get sunburnt from less than ten minutes in the sun?”
“There don’t seem to be any upsides to the evolution,” she said with a shrug. “I feel like I’m in med school all over again.”
Brianna was a pediatrician. She’d met her husband at the hospital where she did her clinical rotations. Jake worked as a surgeon and had curly, dark hair that he’d passed down to both of his boys. They were a picture-frame family.
“Anyway, enough about my boring life. How’s Vegas? Did you have a show tonight?” she asked.
I nodded, trying to muster up more enthusiasm than I felt. Even though the bar show was a huge step backwards in my eyes, my family thought having a show in Vegas made me a star. “Like Elvis!” my mom had exclaimed when I’d first told them about it.
“How did it go?”
“Great,” I said. “I got a standing ovation, which is about as much as I can ask for. A lot of the people were only there for drinks, so the fact that they paid any attention at all was a plus.”
Brianna pursed her lips and waved her hand at me. “False modesty doesn’t become you, Ash. I’m sure everyone was there to see you, and of course they loved it!”
I tried to tell her that I wasn’t being modest when Charlie grabbed Elliot’s hair for stealing his pacifier and Elliott screamed loud enough to make the speakers on my phone buzz. Brianna dropped the phone, and then I sat and stared at her living room ceiling while she used her stern parent voice.
“Elliott, you can’t steal things from your brother. Sharing is only sharing when the other person agrees to it. And Charlie, we don’t pull big brother’s hair. Use your words.”
I wanted to yell through the phone that Charlie didn’t have proper words yet, but I was pretty sure that would count as unsolicited parenting advice, so I kept my mouth shut.
When she finally picked up her phone and filled my screen again, Brianna looked a bit more frazzled, but she was still smiling.
“How do you spend your days when you aren’t performing?” she asked. “I know it’s not realistic, but I pretty much always picture you with a cocktail glass at a poker table. And you’re always wearing a bedazzled red dress.”
I panned the camera down my ratty tank top and cat pajama pants. “Yep, that’s me. Living the life of luxury.”
Brianna laughed so hard she snorted, which in turn sent me into a fit. “Seriously, promise me right now you will burn those if you ever find another man.”
Suddenly, my laughter stopped. I tried to keep smiling because I didn’t want Brianna to feel bad. She hadn’t meant anything by what she’d said. It had been a joke about my terrible pajamas, which I knew I shouldn’t show to any potential suitors.
However, even knowing all of that, my sad, lonely brain had focused on one word. If.
If you ever find another man. If you’re able to come back from your divorce. If you don’t die alone.
Even though I’d been the one to ask for the divorce, the decision hadn’t come easily. Even before I’d told Jonathan how I’d been feeling, I’d wondered whether I wasn’t making a huge mistake. Going it alone after having someone there to depend on, even when our relationship wasn’t at its best, had felt daunting. I’d wondered whether things would get better over time. Whether he would come to see my job as just as important as his own. Whether our schedules would balance out.
Of course, in the end, a divorce had been better for both of us. We could chase our dreams without the guilt of disappointing the other. Plus, it was better to get out before children were involved.
“When you find a man,” Brianna said, a sad smile on her lips. I couldn’t hide anything from her.
I smiled back and rolled my eyes, trying to brush
it off.
“Have there been any prospects in Vegas?” Brianna asked. “Maybe a magician or a celebrity impersonator?”
“Even if there were prospects—which there aren’t—they certainly wouldn’t be wearing a bedazzled white suit or a black top hat. I have standards, Brianna.”
“No one? Not a single guy?” She waggled her eyebrows, probing.
I wanted to insist that there hadn’t been, but it also felt pathetic. I’d been here for a couple weeks and hadn’t met a single guy I could talk to my sister about.
“Well…I talked to a guy tonight. A gorgeous guy, actually.”
She whistled. “Okay. Spill.”
“There isn’t much to spill. He was incredibly handsome, and he asked me to go to Monaco with him.”
Brianna’s mouth fell open. I could see her tonsils. Then, she closed her mouth, took a shallow breath, and nodded. “You’re going to need to reverse and elucidate, little sister. Handsome stranger asked you to do what?”
“He was an organizer for a big racing event in Monaco and asked if I’d want to perform at the opening ceremony. All expenses paid.”
Her eyes widened and then she began to bounce up and down, her phone shaking until her image turned into a swirl of colors. “Oh my gosh! That is incredible, Ash! When do you leave?”
“I’m not,” I said, biting my lip. “I turned him down.”
Suddenly, the shaking stopped, and Brianna was so still I thought my phone was frozen for a second. “You what?”
I sighed. “It’s not the right time. I know it sounds cool, but—”
“Cool? Ash, it sounds like the opportunity of a lifetime! You’ve never been out of the country before and your first international trip could be with a gorgeous man on a free trip to Monaco. That’s like a fantasy come true.”
