by Linda Seed
Lacy waved her hands in front of her face as if to clear away the noxious fumes that were his words.
“Now you have a problem with the books I read?”
“Yes. Yes. Now that you’re bringing it up, I do.”
“You brought it up, Brandon! Not me!”
“Well, now that it’s out there, I think it’s time we talked about it.”
Brandon’s car shot down the I-15 at 70 miles per hour amid sparse traffic, the great expanse of barren desert stretching out around them. A flock of birds flew overhead, and a wiry brown rabbit took cover under a scrubby bush.
“What the hell is wrong with my books?” Lacy demanded.
“Like this one?” Brandon snatched up a paperback that had been sitting on the center console between them. A historical romance, it featured a shirtless man embracing a woman whose breasts were perilously close to spilling out of her dress. “This is garbage, Lacy. It’s … it’s the worst kind of trash. You need to be reading quality books. The classics.”
“The classics? This is my life, Brandon. This isn’t senior English.”
“No, although when you were in high school, you probably cut class every day, or you might have a real job.”
Lacy felt stunned and sickened. Was this how he felt about her? Was this how he’d felt all along?
“Give me the book,” she said, her voice low and even.
“No.”
“Give me the book, Brandon.”
“No!”
She reached for it, and he yanked his arm away. He hit the button for the automatic window, and when the glass had rolled down, he dodged her reaching hand and hurled the book out the window, where if flapped and fluttered to the roadside like a dying bird.
There wasn’t much to say after that. Lacy turned away from him to look out her window at the passing desert landscape. She crossed her legs and folded her arms over her chest. If she could just make herself very small, maybe she could pretend that she wasn’t here, beside this man.
Chapter Eight
On day eight of his trip to Vegas, Daniel had just finished his final inspection of the ceiling installation and was crossing the casino on his way to the hotel’s burger joint for lunch when he saw Lacy Jordan sitting at the bar. He headed toward her, buoyed by the sight of a friendly face, but then stopped short when he realized she had been crying.
“Lacy?”
She turned toward the sound of his voice, her eyes red and puffy. “Oh. Daniel.” She had in front of her the remains of what looked like a Long Island iced tea. Those things were lethal. He could recall more than one hangover caused by that particular cocktail, and shook his head to clear the memory.
“Hey, Lacy. Are you okay?” He slid onto the barstool next to hers.
“No.” She shook her head. “Really, no. I’m apparently stupid and childish, and I don’t have a real job. Plus, my friends and family are a bad influence.”
“Jesus. Who told you that?”
“Brandon. My fiancé. My future husband.”
Of course it was Brandon. That asshole.
“Where is he now?” Daniel was asking because he thought it might be refreshing to find the guy and punch him in the face.
Lacy shrugged, a big, theatrical gesture that involved the entirety of her arms. “The room, I guess. The one he wouldn’t let you pay for.”
“I didn’t pay for any of them,” Daniel reminded her.
“Whatever. I left while he was in the shower. Shithead. I hope he drowned.”
Well. It seemed to Daniel that people usually were well into a marriage—say, ten or twelve years—before reaching that level of hostility. Of course, that probably varied.
Daniel looked at Lacy and assessed the situation. From the sound of her voice and the slightly unfocused look of her eyes, he deduced that the drink wasn’t her first. She wasn’t fully drunk, but she was at least buzzed, and the sadness in her face cut right through him. He wanted to help her somehow, but felt woefully unprepared. “Should I … Do you want me to see if Kate’s here yet? Or Gen?”
“No, no.” Lacy waved a hand and let it flop heavily onto the bar. “They already hate him. They’d just say ‘I told you so.’ ”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
“Okay. Maybe they wouldn’t. But they’d be thinking it.”
Daniel couldn’t argue with that, as much as he wanted to. Lacy’s friends had told her so, on more than one occasion. He knew that because guys talked, sometimes about whatever their girlfriends were currently obsessing over. So, yeah. They’d told her, and so far, she had ignored them. But, hell. You couldn’t control what other people thought, and there wasn’t much payoff in trying.
“It doesn’t matter what they think,” Daniel said, going with the theme. “What matters is that they care about you. They want you to be okay.”
She gave him a long, tearful, meaningful look that said she knew he was right. But then she turned back to her drink and pounded what was left in the glass. Which wasn’t an insignificant amount.
“You know what I want?” she said after a while.
“No. What?”
“I want to have fun. I want to see Vegas. And I don’t want to think about Brandon.”
“Okay.” He could work with this. “Okay. Why don’t you give Kate or Gen or Rose a call, see if they’ve checked in yet. When you hook up with them, you can—”
“I can’t talk to them. Not right now.” She stood up decisively. Lacy tried to pull the strap of her purse over her shoulder, but she got her hand tangled in it. She looked at the hand and the strap as though she were puzzled by what she was seeing. She tugged at the strap and flapped her hand around, trying to free it.
It occurred to Daniel that she was more drunk than he’d thought.
“Here. Let me help with that.” Daniel gently unwound the strap from around Lacy’s hand, and laid it gently and carefully onto her shoulder.
“There!” Lacy said, as though she’d been the one to fix it. Then she walked away from the bar and headed toward the exit of the casino. Daniel hurried to catch up with her.
“Lacy? Where are you going?”
“Vegas!” she said, waving her arms in an extravagant gesture that encompassed the casino, the hotel, and the city beyond.
She walked away from him, and he weighed his options. Unless he restrained her by force—which he sure as hell wasn’t going to do—it seemed to him that he had no choice.
Drunk and upset, she wouldn’t be safe out there amid the anonymous crowds on the Strip.
He sighed and let out a curse under his breath, and then followed her out the door, into the afternoon sun, and into a waiting cab.
“So. Where to?” the cabdriver asked.
Lacy made her voice bright. “To a place where my asshole fiancé can’t tell me what to do, and who to see, and … and what to read!” she announced.
The cabdriver looked at her over the back of his seat. “I don’t know that place. You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
“Just take us to the Strip,” Daniel told him. “Caesar’s Palace.”
The driver turned on the meter, and they headed into the desert toward the sparkling skyline in front of them.
When they arrived at Caesar’s, Daniel paid the fare plus tip, and they went inside. Within ten minutes, Lacy had bought a strawberry daiquiri in a plastic cup that was as tall as a toddler. Daniel wasn’t sure more alcohol was a good idea, but he was her friend, not her father. And it seemed to him she’d had more than enough of being told what to do. So he watched her sip the drink through a straw as they wandered through the designer shops under a ceiling made to resemble blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds.
“God, this is good,” Lacy said as they paused outside the Louis Vuitton store. “You should try it.” She held the ridiculously tall cup out to Daniel.
“I’d better. If you drink the whole thing, I’ll have to carry you back to the hotel.” He took a sip from the straw and tried to hand the cup
back to her.
“Have a little more,” she said. “You look tense.”
Lacy herself didn’t seem tense in the slightest. Her anger at Brandon seemed to be burning off, and the alcohol she had consumed had combined with her excitement at being in Vegas to make her seem loose and happy.
Daniel scowled at her. “What do you mean I look tense? I’m not tense.”
“Not even with the unveiling tomorrow?” Lacy said.
“Okay,” he admitted. “I might be a little tense.”
He took another, longer, drink from Lacy’s cup, and then they caught the Fall of Atlantis animatronic show in the Forum Shops. Lacy noticed a Cheesecake Factory right behind the fountain where the show was, so they bought a slice of lemon meringue cheesecake and shared it on a bench while the crowds in their jeans and slogan Tshirts flowed around them like water.
Daniel pointed out that he wasn’t getting much of the cheesecake—Lacy was devouring it like a swarm of locusts attacking a wheat field.
“How can you eat like that?” he asked her. “There are about a thousand calories in that. What are you, a size four?”
“Six,” Lacy corrected him. “And I’m blessed with a fast metabolism. I don’t gain weight.”
Daniel guffawed. “That must make you a hit with your girlfriends.”
When they were done with the cheesecake, Lacy hefted what was left of her daiquiri and they headed out onto the Strip and walked north toward the Venetian.
Lacy wanted to go on a gondola ride. Daniel couldn’t see the point of riding a fake gondola on a fake canal through a fake Venice, but Lacy announced that she was doing it with or without him, so he grumbled a little and then climbed into the boat.
Daniel had regarded the gondola ride as a silly waste of money. But once they were underway, with the gondolier in his striped shirt guiding them along the waterways of the massive hotel, he had to admit it was worth it if it made Lacy this happy. She was looking everywhere—at the building, the shops, the other tourists, the gently rippling water—but Daniel found himself looking only at her.
The look of childlike bliss on her face was enchanting. And that wasn’t a word he would use lightly—or, usually, at all. But there it was.
He wanted to see more of that bliss, so he went along with whatever she wanted to do. So what if he didn’t like designer purses or fake European cities? She did, and that was enough.
“Ooh, St. Mark’s Square!” Lacy squealed when they got off the gondola. He could barely keep up with her as she took it all in, wandering through the shops, watching the street performers, and craning her neck to look at the architecture mimicking that of the real Venice.
“You ever been?” Daniel asked.
“Where?”
“To Venice. The real one.”
Lacy scoffed at him. “No. I’ve never been anywhere.”
Being in Vegas made Lacy feel like a five-year-old on her first trip to Disneyland. Except, Disneyland didn’t serve alcohol, so this was better.
She’d never been to Vegas before—hard to believe, considering that it was reasonably close and she was in her early thirties—but it was true. So the spectacle laid out before her—the lights, the sounds, the sheer audacity of everything that passed into her line of sight—was awe-inspiring.
She felt such giddy pleasure that Daniel’s question, which reminded her of one of the main flaws in her otherwise happy life, jarred her.
“What do you mean you’ve never been anywhere?” he asked.
They were standing on a bridge over the mock Grand Canal, Lacy with her elbows propped atop the railing.
“Well, I mean that I haven’t seen Venice. I haven’t seen anywhere in Europe. I’ve barely seen anything in America. I hadn’t even been to Vegas until today.”
Daniel looked dumbstruck. It would have been comical, if his reaction hadn’t been prompted by such a sad truth.
“How is that possible?” he said.
She turned to face him and leaned her back against the bridge railing. She swayed a little, but the walking and the sights and the activity seemed to have settled her head, and she felt less drunk than she had when they’d started this adventure, despite the yard-high daiquiri.
Throngs of tourists streamed past them, but she was focused only on him.
“When I was a kid, my parents weren’t all that interested in traveling. They said we lived in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, so why go somewhere else? I think that was partly true, but I also think that was easier than admitting they couldn’t afford it.”
“I know what your dad does. But your mom’s what? A teacher?”
“Yeah. Fifth grade. They did okay, moneywise. There was enough. But having enough to support your family isn’t the same as having enough for a vacation. Especially when you’ve got five kids.”
He shook his head in wonder. “Yeah, I get that. I can’t imagine taking five kids on a road trip to Walmart, let alone on vacation.”
“Right. And once I was old enough to travel on my own, I was too broke. I’m a barista. I can barely afford a trip to Paso Robles.” She looked down into the water and grinned as a gondola full of elderly women, cameras in their hands, floated by.
“Huh. Well, I’m glad you came on this trip, then.”
“How about you?” she asked, still looking at the water and at the people milling around on the other side of the canal.
“Which part? The family, or the traveling?”
“Both. But start with the family.”
“I’m an only child.”
“Oh, God,” Lacy said, sighing. “That sounds so peaceful. Nobody to fight with. Nobody to borrow your clothes without asking, or to make you take the blame for stuff they did.”
“Also nobody to play with when you’re a kid,” Daniel pointed out. “And nobody to commiserate when your parents ground you or take away your TV privileges.”
Lacy tried to imagine the loneliness of life as an only child, and couldn’t. Her memories of childhood were too full of noise, and chaos, and people.
“Now the travel part,” she prompted him. The alcohol had made the world soft around the edges. Listening to his voice amid the noises that surrounded them lulled her into a feeling of contentment.
“Well …” He rubbed at his chin. “I grew up in Colorado. Talk about your natural beauty. My parents were on this quest to visit all of the fifty states, so we did that. A lot.”
“That sounds like fun,” she said.
“It was, some of the time. The rest of the time it was hours and hours in the back seat of my dad’s station wagon, listening to him and my mom argue about whether to take Route 40 or Route 36 to get to whatever place was next on the list.” His mouth curved into a wistful grin as he lost himself in the memories.
“So, did they make it?”
“Make what?”
“All fifty states,” she reminded him. “Did they do it?”
“All except Delaware.”
“Why Delaware?”
He shrugged. “My mom got cancer, and that sort of put a stop to the whole thing.”
“Oh, Daniel.” Lacy put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry.”
“She’s okay,” he reassured her. “She got through it, went into remission. It’s just, I think that after a year and a half of cancer treatment, not knowing whether she was going to live or die, Delaware kind of lost its importance.”
“I can imagine,” she said.
She was swaying a little, gently, feeling the movement of the people around her, listening to the cacophonous sounds of the giant hall where the faux St. Mark’s stood.
“So, where would you go?” he prompted her. “If you had a chance?”
She looked around them, then grinned at him. “Italy.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
“Huh. Well, let’s keep walking around here, then. It’s not the real thing, but at the moment, it’s what we’ve got.”
Chapter Nine
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br /> When they finished wandering through the Venetian, Lacy and Daniel went back out onto the Strip and headed south toward the Bellagio. Daniel wanted to get one more look at the Dale Chihuly art glass ceiling installation that had prompted the commission for the job at Eden. Of course, since this was Lacy’s first trip to Vegas, she had to see the fountains.
They decided to walk instead of taking a cab or a shuttle. The evening was unseasonably warm for October, and the street was packed with cars and pedestrians. Some of the pedestrians were drunk; some were locals hawking shows, helicopter tours, or photo opportunities with showgirls or comic book characters; and some were families with backpacks and strollers.
As they made their way down the sidewalk, a guy held out a flyer and Lacy took it. She peered down at an image of a scantily clad woman along with the promise of fulfilled fantasies.
“Is this a prostitute? Did this guy just give me an ad for a whore?” Lacy inquired.
“Ah, jeez. Yes. Let me just …” Daniel, embarrassed, reached out to take the paper from her.
“No, I’m keeping it,” Lacy said, folding up the paper and putting it into her back pocket.
“Why?” He quirked an eyebrow at her. “Are you interested in her services?”
She smacked him on the arm. “Of course not, you idiot. It’s a souvenir.”
“Okay. But personally, I’d rather have a mug or a T-shirt.”
They walked amid the lights and the glimmering billboards, across bridges that spanned the busy street, past water features and moving sidewalks beckoning visitors into the casinos, where fortunes would be won and lost—but mostly lost.
When they got to the Bellagio, Daniel checked the time on his cell phone and saw that they had twenty minutes until the next fountain show. With a little time on their hands, they followed a walkway around the artificial lake and into the hotel, where they made their way to the lobby.
Daniel had seen Fiori di Como—Dale Chihuly’s two thousand–piece glass installation that adorned the ceiling of the hotel lobby—many times before. He’d studied it, pondered it, even dreamed about it in the time since he’d been commissioned to do something similar, but much smaller in scale, for Eden. But for Lacy, it was all new. As they emerged into the lobby with its gleaming floors, its graceful arches, its front counter that seemed to be a mile long, Daniel watched Lacy’s face as she tipped her head back, gazed upward, and saw Fiori di Como for the first time.
