by Kaye, Nikky
My reply was automatic and totally fake. “Fine.” I looked down at his chin again.
Oh, now I was shy? I just did a nosedive off a brocade bench.
Dev’s hands went to my shoulders, holding me up. Supporting me. Pulling me in. “It’s been a while,” he said in a low voice. “We should catch up.”
Somehow the innocuous suggestion made my panties—which everyone could probably see—damp.
“Definitely.”
I knew I should get up, but I was pretty damn comfortable. And with the way my head was spinning, I wasn’t sure that testing gravity would be a good idea.
“Guys, we’re in the lobby!” my big brother reminded us, exasperation in his voice. “Security’s coming!” He was such a worrywart.
Somehow we were disentangled and put upright.
I held on to Shannon while I slipped my foot back into the shoe that had come off. Yeah, I was still unsteady, but I wasn’t about to walk through the casino in my bare feet like a child. Keeping my head high was my number one goal at the moment and it was easier to do in four-inch heels.
“Thanks,” I said to Shannon as I half-hugged her, half-used her for support.
She rolled her eyes at me, but the smile on her face was genuine. God, she’d been so amazing. My brother truly was lucky to have her, and she’d been beyond understanding about me moving back in with them. Recently, she and Brett had looked at me with concern and pity, not indulgent amusement, so I must be making progress.
I looked around for my little suitcase. Swallowed hard. “Whoa.”
The wine was now dancing in my bloodstream, and dizziness and sleepiness overtook me. I needed to get to my room, pronto, and take off these death traps.
“Are you checked in yet?” Brett asked, his hair standing on end as though he’d been pulling it out with his fingers.
“Yep, just have to find my—” I spotted my purse on its side under the bench, with the room key folder falling out.
My carry-on bag was a few feet away, close to where my future sister-in-law’s friends were standing and chatting. At least they didn’t seem like mean girls. Hopefully, this Vegas wedding weekend wouldn’t be the horror show I’d been afraid of.
My stiletto heel skidded on the polished floor when I went to retrieve my stuff, making me stumble. A hand went to my waist to steady me, and I instantly knew it was Dev. That I instinctively recognized his touch caused me to stumble again.
“Careful.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled.
Definitely time to retreat to my room. I didn’t want him—or anyone—to see me less than… well, amazing. It took a lot of effort to be fabulous these days, and I was tired. I’d promised myself that despite the cloud I’d been under I would be positive and cheerful for my brother’s wedding, even if it killed me.
If the shoes didn’t kill me first.
His hand remained on my hip, branding me through the fabric of my skirt. My blouse had come untucked, and if his fingers splayed out and reached up just a little, he would probably touch my skin.
“I got it. I’m good,” I told him as I stepped out of reach.
His dark eyebrows drew together, his hand still outstretched. “You sure?”
“I’m—”
A blonde girl wedged herself between us, her back to me. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said to Dev. “But would you mind doing a selfie with me?”
“Uh, sure,” I heard him say as I rolled my eyes and hiked my purse over my shoulder.
A small flash mob gathered, like moths around a porch light. Suddenly Dev was surrounded by half a dozen women wanting pictures.
I couldn’t blame them. He looked a little disheveled after our collision, but it totally worked for him. He looked like he’d just been interrupted in the middle of an epic make-out session, or at the clothes-tugging stage of foreplay.
Not wanting to get in the way of his fan club—and not trusting any of them not to just push me aside to get to him—I wheeled my little bag over to my brother to pin down dinner plans. Later dinner plans. Right now there was a bed and some painkillers with my name on them.
Before I broached the casino to make my way to the guest elevators, I looked back at Dev. A woman pressed her shoulder into him, prompting him to put his arm around her for the selfie. If he was uncomfortable, he didn’t show it.
Dev didn’t just ooze charm—he practically squirted it.
When our eyes met, though, the photogenic smirk on his face dropped.
His gaze burned with something that made my ankles wobble once more. I took a deep breath and turned to walk away from him and his followers.
I was just one in a million.
* * *
After a quick nap and extortionate coffee from the coffee shop, I was ready to go out again.
Shannon’s parents were arriving in the morning, and there was some kind of big dinner planned for the next day. This evening, the kiddie table was partying. Heaven knew what that would entail.
In Vegas, there were a lot of things that didn’t seem worth pointing out—such as non-smoking laws around the world, clocks and the general concept of time, personal morals, and what anyone was wearing.
It was a special place where one could literally dress up as Wonder Woman, put a cigar out on someone’s baseball cap at eight o’clock in the morning, and not be arrested. Sure, people would notice, but mostly they would just shrug and move on to the next piece of performance art masquerading as reality.
That was Vegas for you.
It was a city built on illusions, greed, cheating—really, it surprised me in retrospect that Darren had never brought me here. It was like his spiritual home. But maybe he was afraid I’d cramp his style with the hookers or con him into getting married.
Oh wait, he was going to marry me—until the “I can’t imagine my life that way, Audrey” speech.
Suddenly the coffee I’d sucked back earlier threatened to reappear—along with the champagne and the expensive appetizers we’d just eaten. If I wasn’t careful, the bitterness would overcome me and I’d just head back to my room to crawl into bed.
The latter part of that plan sounded amazing, but now was the time to suck it up and put on my big girl panties for the sake of my brother and his fiancée. So, I smiled until it felt like a grimace and giggled until it sounded fake, even to me.
Brett wanted to take a tour of some old-fashioned dive bars downtown, so we piled into a couple of cabs and headed north. Somehow I ended up sandwiched between one of Shannon’s friends and Dev.
Dev.
I could—I would—put on an act for him, most of all. The last thing I wanted was for my childhood crush to see me as a pathetic mess. I was in luck though. At that moment, in the taxi, he wasn’t seeing me as weak or broken.
He was more focused on the way my skirt rose up my thighs.
In my peripheral vision, Shannon’s friend was engrossed in her phone, her fingers flying as she texted someone. On the other side of me, model-tastic Dev Sharpe was engrossed in the soft, knobby point where my knees touched. When I shifted nervously, his fingers drummed out a staccato rhythm on his black pants.
I tried to puzzle out what tune he was playing on his lap. Jingle Bells? Despacito? Maybe it wasn’t a song, and he was just fidgeting. My forehead creased with the problem, but anything was better than focusing on his gaze on me.
I’d never felt this kind of laser-hot stare before. Direct, penetrating, burning. It made me want to squirm, but I didn’t want to draw even more attention to my thighs brushing against each other.
We were locked in a silent battle of dropped glances and raised guards. Who would be the last man standing? We were getting off the freeway when I gave up the fight.
“Okay, Dev, just stop it already.”
Both of us inhaled sharply as I grabbed his hand to still it.
Once, at one of my childhood birthday parties, Dev had rubbed a balloon against my head. It made my hair stick up and the balloon stick to the
wall, which I thought was awesome until I touched the doorknob. That same feeling of wonder and shock went through me now.
“Stop what, Audrey?” he growled as he twined his hand with mine.
He closed my fingers up in his hot palm. My heart thumped wildly to a new tune.
I tried to laugh it off. “Did you always have that nervous habit?” I asked him, acutely aware of our connection. Did he feel that, too?
Slowly his hand opened, like a child showing off found treasure. We both stared down as he hummed and said, “No, that’s a new, uh, tic.”
“Do you have a lot of those? I remember you used to shove your hands in your pockets a lot.”
He opened his hand wide before flipping it over to rest his palm on his knee. But I didn’t move my hand yet. My fingertips nestled in the grooves between his knuckles.
Why wasn’t I moving my hand away?
“No,” he said, “but you used to twirl your hair.” His head tilted as he considered my hair now. “And chew on it.” He made a blech noise.
I blushed. “I was ten!”
“And I was a teenage boy,” he retorted. “My hands were always in my jeans.”
His hand splayed out, displacing mine as he swept his palm up his thigh. Leaving mine on his knee, feeling his warm, hard leg underneath the fabric of his slacks. He leaned toward me as the car turned a corner, but didn’t lean back afterwards.
“Tell me, Audrey,” he murmured softly in my ear, “what’s one habit you wish you could break?”
Half a dozen things other flashed through my mind—using a fork and knife for my pizza, flossing my teeth at night while watching TV in bed, other things that irritated Darren. Maybe the biggest habit I needed to break was falling for the wrong men, but even that wasn’t a habit. Once. It happened once. I just happened to do it Olympic-style and lost everything.
I bit my lip—another habit—before blurting out, “I wish I was more spontaneous.”
Once my life didn’t go to plan with my parents’ death, I made damn sure I planned the rest. It hadn’t worked out. Was it karma? Fate? The gods laughing at me?
“You seemed pretty… free-spirited earlier.”
Was this flirting? “Well, you know.” I laughed uneasily. “What happens in Vegas…”
My earlier show in the lobby with the champagne bottle was the craziest I’d probably acted since… well, ever. I couldn’t deny that it was liberating.
Maybe I needed to be a little wilder.
Maybe I needed to have a fling.
Maybe I needed to remind myself that one of the hottest men in the world was sitting close enough to irradiate my brain cells and make me think naughty thoughts.
The car wasn’t so small we needed to sit hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder. His breath was hot at the top of my ear, and I knew that if I turned my head and tilted my chin…
I shook my head slightly, unable to even look him in the eye. I didn’t have the guts. Dev wasn’t an adolescent boy anymore. Now he probably dated supermodels and movie stars. And me? I had no game.
My hand crept back into my lap, tugging down the hem of my skirt. A glance out the window told me we were slowing down, close to getting out.
“What about you?” I asked him as the car stopped.
Shannon’s friend tapped her card against the reader to pay and slid out of the cab.
“What about me?” he replied.
He pressed closer, reminding me I needed to get out of the car before he could. I wriggled over, trying to keep my skirt down and my shoes from slipping off. On the sidewalk outside a dubious-looking tiki bar stood Brett, Shannon and her friends.
Then I made the mistake of turning my head and meeting his gaze, like a kid who can’t help but look at the sun during an eclipse. His lips curved as he pressed his body into mine to make for the door.
My voice was needlessly breathless when I asked him, “Do you have a habit you wish you could quit?”
“Compulsive kissing.”
3
Dev
Where did Brett find these places? I wondered. We were at the third bar on our tour of old, downtown Vegas. Most tourists were on Fremont, drinking out of huge novelty cups as they walked down the street. We’d found the unbeaten path, however, and it was beating me down.
I was tired, and after an evening of watching Audrey carefully I was pretty sure she was the same. Her drink of the night had been a vodka soda, increasingly “heavy on the soda.”
She did her best to have fun, but as Brett and Shannon loosened up, I noticed Audrey becoming quieter. When she thought nobody was looking both her smile and her shoulders slumped as she stared into nothingness.
What was she thinking about? Her engagement? Their parents? Cat videos on YouTube?
As I had made myself her unofficial bodyguard for the evening, I followed her closely. If she stood at the bar, I stood behind her. If she went to the restroom, I watched her return without interruption from some drunken jackass.
It was no hardship. In fact, the more I spent time with her, the more intrigued I became. Who was this grown-up Audrey?
My phone buzzed in my pocket, tearing me from my thoughts. I fished it out. My agent. I answered the call and gave him a distracted greeting while my internal compass sought Audrey. She was with Shannon and should be safe for a few minutes.
“What’s up? Any word from Hessa?” I said as I stepped outside. The air was warm, the sidewalk still radiating heat from the day.
Steve sighed. “Sort of. They keep hedging. They seemed so interested before. I don’t know if it’s the time difference with Delhi delaying things or that they don’t want to commit or…”
“Or what?”
“Or they just don’t want you.”
I gasped loudly in mock shock. “Not want me?”
“Yeah, yeah,” he chuckled. “You’re all that and a bag of chips, Dev. But they keep talking about traditional values and shit like that.”
I frowned. “I’m not exactly living an alternative lifestyle, here.”
Unless seven months of celibacy counted.
After my last “girlfriend” I’d grown more wary of meeting anyone. She’d been pretty great, actually, even if she was a little too happy to receive expensive gifts and parade me around as her arm candy. Things didn’t really go south until she tried to convince me she was pregnant. It took two torturous months for me to find out she was faking.
I didn’t have a problem with kids. I had a problem with liars.
“So what should I do?” I asked Steve. “Take the lime green out of my hair? Remove the genital piercings?” I joked. Yeah, right. The only metal that would ever come near my dick would be some kind of dental work.
“I’m not sure. It’s Asian culture, Dev. You should know something about that, don’t you?”
Sure, something—like taking your shoes off in the house, and how to defer to your elders. I hadn’t been to India since I was a kid. “Not enough, clearly.”
I could send them fruit. Or some mithai, Indian treats that guaranteed a diabetic coma. I should text my mom and ask her, but I hadn’t even told her about this possible contract; I didn’t want to get her hopes up.
“Maybe they think all male models are gay or something,” Steve sighed. “You know they follow you on Instagram, right? Maybe they weren’t crazy about pictures of you in Vegas.”
Sigh. “Well, let me know if anything changes.”
“Will do.”
I shoved my phone back in my pocket before pinching the bridge of my nose. I’d had “auditions” before where I was assessed like a piece of meat. Where they wanted bodybuilding poses and see how I looked when I ran, jumped, did crunches, that kind of thing. You know, the Men’s Health magazine kind of image.
Normally I wouldn’t care if a client were interested or not. But this could be a big deal. Not all the important designers were in Europe anymore. Asia and the Middle East was a huge market.
Hessa was a luxury conglomerate based
in India that included fashion, luggage, high-end hotels, and even a small airline. It reached out to a billion people who were obsessed with money, social media and looking good. The contract would mean an international presence and a metric fuck-ton of money. And bonus, it would rock my mom’s world. The more the company delayed making a decision, the more I coveted the job.
I had the look they wanted. I had the background they wanted. I had the availability and enthusiasm they wanted. What was the problem?
As I went back into the bar, I automatically scanned the room for Audrey. Distracted and disappointed that I didn’t see her, the tug on my sleeve made me jerk in surprise.
“Can I get a picture?”
I put on the requisite smile for the woman and let her tag me on Instagram. I knew it would be up on Facebook and Twitter shortly as the pictures from earlier probably already were.
Social media was a double-edged sword. It was hard to get away from—and god knows I wish I could sometimes—but I had a good job partly because of it. I didn’t want to call modeling a “career” because I couldn’t see myself doing this forever.
“Does that ever bother you?”
I startled, not realizing that Audrey had snuck up on me. “What?”
“People like that. Invading your privacy.”
My eyebrow lifted immediately. I glanced around to make sure that the fan wasn’t close enough to hear what Audrey said. Even if I occasionally felt that way, the last thing I wanted was for people to think I was an asshole. Thankfully, she was on the other side of the room, giggling with her friends.
I spun to face Audrey where she was perched on a wooden stool, her arm brushing against the bar rail.
“Do I seem bothered?” Photos didn’t bother me. The stalkers, on the other hand—they bothered me.
Her head tilted to the side as she examined me. Then she lifted her glass in a silent toast. “That’s not your real smile.”
I blinked. How would she know that? “It’s not?”
“Nuh uh.” She used her straw to stab the lime wedge in her glass a few times before finishing her drink. “I don’t think so. It’s not in your eyes.” Her glass made a small clunk as she placed it back on the bar.
