Hearts in Vegas (Harlequin Superromance)

by Colleen Collins - Hearts in Vegas (Harlequin Superromance)

  Frances had leaned against the handrail to look up at the sky, far enough away to not look like a lurker but close enough to still hear their conversation. So this dance thing is some kind of fund-raiser connected to his grandmother.

  “Glenda, man, she’s the bomb. Makes me feel like I’m one of the family. Which brings me to somethin’ I’ve been wanting to say to you, Brax.” He cleared his throat. “Sometimes the truth comes down to a moment...and this moment is it for you and me.”

  “It’s been a long day, maybe we can talk later—”

  “Brax, you’re my brother, man. I mean it. My brother. I’d kill for you.”

  “Okay, I’m going now—”

  “But I could never really kill.”

  “Good to know. See you tomorr—”

  “But I’d go right up to that line, man, because you’re my brother. I know, you already have a twin, which is way groovy in a random universe, but if I could have one wish—” he sniffed loudly “—I’d ask to be—” his voice broke “—your triplet, man.”

  After a drawn-out silence, Braxton said, “This brother thing. Like you said, I already have one, so how about you and I just be friends. Not brothers. Not triplets. Deal?”

  Pause. “Sure, Brax.”

  “Have I upset you?”

  “Yes. But I’ll get over it. Like Celine Dion said, life goes on.”

  “You mean ‘My Heart Will Go On.’”

  “Yeah, man, that too. See you tomorrow night. I hope you win.”

  The door clicked shut.

  She continued looking up at the sky, listening to Braxton’s footsteps as he walked down the walkway, passed behind her, his steps fading as he headed down the stairs.

  Frances looked at the half moon, thinking how she came here tonight to learn if Braxton was toying with her heart, and then to see whose heart he preferred.

  But what she really learned was that it took courage to give love.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE COFFEEMAKER BUBBLED and hissed as the dark brew dripped into the glass pot, the aroma filling the kitchen. Frances, her cell phone wedged between her ear and shoulder, dropped a piece of wheat bread into the toaster, pushed down the lever.

  “That’s right, Charlie, both feeds go to my phone.” She opened the refrigerator and peered into it. “A motion detector at each end of the airstrip, yes.”

  She pushed aside a jar of pickles that had taken up permanent residency in the fridge, wondered why they had three jars of strawberry jam but no butter.

  “I don’t know where he set the other motion detector....” Was that a Tupperware container? “Maybe he scooped out a chunk of cactus and put it in there.”

  She took the container out of the fridge and peeled back a corner of the lid, which opened with a soft pop. Inside were several thick slices of meat loaf with cut potatoes and carrots. She smiled.

  “It’s just a hunch, Charlie,” she said, reclosing the container and placing it back in the fridge. “Doesn’t hurt to keep an eye on that airstrip, just in case.”

  She smelled the bread toasting, made a mental note to pick up butter on the way home tonight.

  “I mentioned my uncle collected rare coins....” She poured steaming coffee into the mug. “No, Dmitri said nothing...looked disinterested...Oleg? Hard to say. Made a comment to me about meeting his wife in Saratov two years ago, so he probably wouldn’t have been in New York when they were stolen, but...right...a computer whiz can work from anywhere in the world.”

  She picked up her mug, blew on the steaming coffee. “Yes, he’s there every day by five...uh-huh...giving Dmitri reports on what I say and do, all of it inconsequential of course...yes, absolutely I trust Braxton.”

  After ending the call, she felt a little guilty about why she now absolutely trusted Braxton. Skulking about the Willow Creek Apartments, tracking him like some kind of stalker, wasn’t one of her finer moments.

  But it had sure made her happier. Now she knew there wasn’t some mysterious other woman, just a deadhead process server with a big heart who obviously wanted Braxton’s approval so much, he was almost begging for him to call him brother. But Brax had pushed him away. She wondered what that was about.

  She glanced at the wall clock. A few minutes past eight. Her dad must have come home late last night because she still hadn’t heard a sound from him. Not that he’d ever been a morning person. At best, he’d stagger out of bed, make coffee and plunk himself down in his chair to watch TV. But he usually got up in time to at least say goodbye before she left for work.

  She hadn’t heard him come in last night, hadn’t heard the hallway floorboards squeak as he made his way to bed, but such noises would’ve been drowned out by the screams and ominous music from the film she’d been watching in her room. Scary movies weren’t her thing, but after reading that a 1944 noir classic, The Uninvited, was starting at nine p.m., and that a curmudgeon film critic had enthusiastically called it “riveting,” how could she not try it?

  It had been riveting, all right. She should’ve turned it off, but she couldn’t make herself. Had to follow the couple as they investigated the deep, dark secrets of a haunted house, which made her think her of hers and Braxton’s investigations at Russian Confections...although, hopefully, their case didn’t have a heart-pounding, sinister twist at the end.

  After finishing her coffee and toast, Frances grabbed her jacket, stuffed her keys and phone into its pockets, grabbed her purse, which she’d lock in the trunk of her car, and headed for work.

  As she closed the front door behind her, something on the porch caught her eye. A small pile of cigarette ashes, as though someone had stood here, smoking. She looked around for a cigarette butt, didn’t see one. So this person had stood here, smoking...long enough to take several puffs at least, then left?

  She and her dad didn’t smoke, and their only recent visitor had been Braxton, who didn’t either.

  Could be the groundskeeper, an old guy named Jay, who maintained the trees and shrubs around the compound and almost always had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. Sometimes he’d stand up here to clip the top branches of her sissoo tree that crowded the porch. She looked at its leathery green leaves, trying to assess if it had been recently trimmed, but what did she know? Gardening ranked right up there with cooking in her life skills.

  Frances shifted her gaze back to the ashes on the concrete, just beside the round welcome mat on which she stood. An old wives’ tale flitted through her mind, something about evil spirits being unable to harm a person standing within a circle.

  Silly stuff. Just as it’d been silly to stay up late, scaring herself half to death watching that movie.

  As she stepped off it the mat, a gust of chilly air swept past, rattling the leaves of the sissoo tree.

  * * *

  “AND NOW,” VAL SAID, reaching into a cardboard box lying on the marble floor, “the cutlass!”

  Braxton reared back as his sister-in-law held up a small sword. “Is that thing real?”

  “No, it’s plastic, but sure as heck looks convincing, doesn’t it?”

  He and Val stood behind a large potted palm, which served as a barrier of sorts, in the tent acting as the backstage area for the Magic Dream Date Auction in the massive lobby at Sensuelle.

  The inside of the tent was buzzing with activity. People carrying clothes, clips of music as guys practiced their moves, hangers-on laughing and drinking cocktails. A popcorn machine sat in the corner, of
fering a sideshow of popping kernels that filled the air with their buttery scent.

  “Avast, ye varmint!” Val swished the play sword in the air a few times, its blade silvery bright under the lights. “Handy for slashing, hacking and stabbing.” She handed it to Braxton. “Slip it in your scabbard.”

  “My what?”

  “Your sword holster.”

  “Oh.” He slipped it into the plastic sheath hanging off his belt.

  “I bought these boots, too.” She held up a pair of high-heeled, calf-high boots. “I called Dorothy to double-check your shoe size. Didn’t want to assume you and Drake had exactly the same size feet, but guess what? You really do! Try them on, see what you think.”

  Braxton put them on and walked a few steps, thinking about how he and his brother had exactly opposite attitudes on some things, though. Like Frances. Since he and Drake had exchanged words on Tuesday, they hadn’t discussed Frances again. He figured his brother just needed some time. Maybe after he got to know Frances, saw she wasn’t some kind of threat, he’d accept her.

  “Boots are comfortable,” he said.

  “Good, ’cause they look freaking awesome with that outfit.” She pawed through the cardboard box. “Pirates were quite the clothes horses, Brax, which reminds me of you. Except they stole theirs off their victims.”

  “Yeah, I prefer shopping.” He frowned. “Peacock feather?”

  Val lightly waved the brilliant blue-and-green feather. “Thought we’d stick it in your hat. I’ve written a little introduction the announcer will read before your dance. He’ll say this exotic peacock feather was in the treasure chest you pillaged from the Isle of Kasbah, and you’re giving it to the first lady who bids one hundred dollars.”

  He and Val had clashed when they first met last August. Braxton and his brother had swapped identities so that Drake, pretending to be Brax, could gain access to Yuri’s office. Things were moving so quickly that day, there hadn’t been time for Drake to inform Val of the swap, so the first time she met Braxton, she’d thought he was Drake.

  And as the twin brothers’ six-year rift had only started to mend that same day, Brax didn’t know Val was involved with his brother, so his first words to her were some of his less artful pick-up lines.

  Which had instantly clued Val in that this guy had to be Drake’s identical twin because Drake had more class than that. The kind of class Braxton now emulated as he’d put his bad-boy days behind him for good.

  These days, he and Val got along fine. She was one of those people who loved to help others, so she’d volunteered to help Grams with this Magic Dream Date Auction. One of her tasks was to prep Braxton for his first and only dance performance. When Grams suggested that he’d have a better chance to win the Shelby if he were dressed like a pirate, Val was all over it.

  “Let me slip this into the fold of your hat,” she said, sliding in the feather. “Perfect! Just reach up, pull it out and hand it to the first lady who bids a hundred.” She picked up a large oval hand mirror and handed it to him. “Check yourself out, Captain Brax Sparrow.”

  He gave her a look. “Let me guess...Captain Jack Sparrow’s brother?”

  She nodded. “Long-lost brother. Last seen, you were sinking into the murky depths of the Roppongi Ocean, cutlass in hand, frantically hacking at the iron-weighted rope pulling you under.”

  Had to be the hormones. Val had a creative streak, but this and the private dick story she told at the dinner table the other night were going beyond the yellow brick road.

  But the baby would be here soon, and things would settle down to normal. Or as normal as they ever could be in the land of the Morgans.

  “Drake said something about the two of you starting a childbirth class tonight,” Braxton said.

  “That’s right. We’ll have to leave around seven-thirty to get there on time, so we’ll probably sneak out after you do your thing.”

  He held up the mirror, checked out the three-cornered hat with the peacock feather, his jaw darkened with five o’clock shadow. The only body part over which they’d had a “creative difference”—Val’s words—were his eyes when she tried to apply eyeliner and he refused.

  Vehemently.

  Then she mentioned how Johnny Depp had worn kohl around his eyes as Captain Jack Sparrow in the movies, and to this day, women all over the world swooned over his smoky eyes.

  Braxton had agreed to a dash of kohl.

  Angling the mirror, he looked at his bare chest. When Val had suggested he shave it, he responded over his dead body, which ended that creative difference. Below were the low-cut, tight-fitting red velvet breeches Val had found at a secondhand store, the scabbard and calf-high boots she’d purchased at a costume store.

  “What do you think?” Val asked.

  “I have a sudden urge to swill rum, weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen! I think you should be Johnny Depp’s stylist in his next pirate movie.”

  Val didn’t just smile, she glowed.

  “It’s six-forty, people!” bellowed a middle-aged guy with a cookie-duster moustache. “Auction starts in twenty minutes! Manwiches, I’m handing out numbers in the order you’ll be performing. Don’t swap numbers or we’ll get more confused than we already are.”

  “Are they really calling us Manwiches?” Braxton muttered.

  “Okay,” Cookie Duster continued, looking down at his clipboard, “where’s Michael Benning?”

  “Over here!” A shirtless twentysomething guy, his ridged abs visible from thirty feet away, waved. He wore tight blue jeans, a bulging thigh muscle trying to escape through a rip in the denim.

  Braxton looked around, noticed other buffed twentysomethings were dressed similarly, most also absurdly tan for February with no qualms about shaving their chests.

  Apparently, nobody had told them wearing costumes gave them an edge.

  Yo ho ho. Looked like the joke was on him.

  He felt dumber than the year he’d dressed as a spider for Halloween. After reading how to make a spider costume, his eight-year-old self decided to tackle the project solo, refusing any adult help. After stuffing nylon stockings with black tissue paper, he attached them to a black sweat suit, smeared black makeup on his face, and voilà. A spider.

  As he, Drake and some of their pals were trick-or-treating around the ’hood, one of the boys asked if Braxton was an insect ’cause he only had six legs. Or were they wings? Another kid said Braxton’s favorite comic hero wasn’t Spider-Man, but Spider-Insect, and the jokes just kept rolling, all night long.

  Tonight, he had all his pirate parts in order, but Captain Brax Sparrow looked as though he’d crashed a private Chippendale party.

  “Just got a text from your mom,” Val said, “Grams is sitting with the Keep ’Em Rollin’ board members, and your mom and Drake are taking their seats now. She wants to know if she should save one for Frances.” Val paused. “Oh, bad idea. We can’t have her anywhere near Drake.”

  “Tell me about it. Not an issue, though, as I didn’t tell Frances about this.”

  “I’m sorry about Drake being so...” She gave her head a shake. “That man can be fierce sometimes, but he has a good heart. Like those camera feeds he helped you set up at that airstrip—told me he ran a feed to his phone too, as a backup, in case you need help on the case.”

  “Great.”

  “Back to Frances, though. It’s probably good she isn’t here, seeing a bunch of drunken women shoving bills down your breeches.”

  Wome
n could donate money to the Wheels auction in several ways. Pay electronically through the website, bid at the auction or stuff cash into a hunk’s clothes. It was the last one that unnerved him. Which also made him feel like a hypocrite as he’d managed a strip club for years. Guess he would learn tonight how it felt to be on the receiving end.

  “I hope no one really shoves money,” he murmured.

  “All that free booze, estrogen and too few men in one room? Money-shoving might be the least of your worries. This place is just beggin’ for one helluva hissy fit.” She looked approvingly at his costume. “I expect you to take in lots of pieces of eight tonight, Captain Brax. Word to the wise, you should tell Frances about this soon ’cause you’ll be going on a date soon with your highest bidder.”

  Val was right. If Frances heard about this from someone else, she’d wonder why he hadn’t said anything. He’d already lived with way too many secrets, and knew how damaging even the little ones could be.

  Plus he didn’t want her father hunting him down.

  “Maybe I should call her now.”

  Val shook her head vehemently. “Darlin’, there’s a time and a place for everything, but trust me, this one isn’t it. Pick a quiet time when the two of you are alone—”

  “Whoa, dude, you got the pirate thing goin’ on!”

  Li’l Bit stood there, wearing a bathrobe and flip-flops, a pair of sunglasses stuck on top of his frizzy mass of hair. He looked like a guy you’d see wandering around the supermarket at three in the morning looking for a box of honey-nut cereal.

  “You okay?” Val asked him, looking concerned.

  “A little shaky, but I’m good,” he answered. “No weed, no Cheetos for five days... Man, hasn’t been easy. But I’ve lost five pounds. And thanks to Brax, gained some muscle.”

  “Better get your costume on,” Val said, “auction’s starting soon.”

  Li’l Bit looked surprised. “This is my costume. I’m dressed like The Dude in The Big Lebowski.” With a proud grin, he pulled open the robe to reveal his T-shirt with the words Is This Your Homework, Larry? and baggy plaid shorts. “Plenty of give in the waistband to hold the ladies’ bills,” he said, snapping the elastic.