Just turn and leave him standing here. Walk away and don’t look back.
But she didn’t budge. Instead, she opened her mouth and something stupid came out. “We’re here in Vegas. Stuff happens in Vegas and that stuff is meaningless. That’s all this is.”
He gave her the lifted eyebrow. “Meaningless, you mean?”
“That’s right. It’s just for now. Nothing more. Nothing changes when we go home. I have my life, you have yours.”
For way too many glorious seconds, they simply regarded each other. She had that sense she used to get with him, when they were together so long ago. The sense that they were the only two people on the planet.
Finally, he asked, “Hungry?”
She slipped her arm in his. It felt absolutely right there. “Starved.”
* * *
She never returned to the convention floor.
They had lunch and then they played the slots. She had a great time.
Was she being an idiot?
Oh, absolutely. She knew she shouldn’t give the guy an inch.
But he was so much fun—a lot more than he used be, now that’d he’d found the success he’d always craved. There was an easiness about him now, a confidence that made him even more attractive than before, if that was possible. She liked just being with him.
And why shouldn’t she indulge herself? Just a little. Just for this short time that they were both here in Vegas.
She got lucky and won a thousand-dollar jackpot. She collected her winnings.
Then he suggested a couple’s visit to the hotel spa, of all things. No way she was passing up an offer like that.
They took mud baths side by side and he told her all about the things you could make with a barrel, everything from cuff links to wall clocks, chandeliers to yard art. They got massages, their two tables pushed together. It was intimate in the most relaxing, luxurious sort of way. And she went ahead and allowed herself to love every minute of it.
After that, they had facials, then mani-pedis. Somehow, he looked manlier than ever, sitting in that pedicure chair as a sexy blonde took an emery board to his toes.
It was a little past six when he left her at the door to her room.
“I’ll be back for you at seven thirty,” he said in a tone that teased and warned simultaneously. “Be ready.”
She was ready, all right. In her favorite short black dress, sleeveless and curve-hugging with a cutaway back, her red hair pinned up on one side by a rhinestone comb, wearing killer black heels with red soles. His eyes darkened when she opened the door to him, and his gaze moved down her body, stirring up sparks. He wore a gorgeous graphite suit and she wondered how she’d gotten here, about to spend an evening that could only be called romantic with the penniless, dark, damaged boy she used to love, the boy who’d grown up to run his own company and look completely at ease in the kind of suit you couldn’t buy off a rack.
She grabbed her beaded clutch and her metallic Betsey Johnson wrap and off they went.
Down at the lobby entrance, beneath the porte cochere, he had a car waiting. She sat beside him on the plush leather seat and stared out the tinted side window as they rolled by one giant pleasure palace after another, the bright lights melting into each other, gold, green, red, purple, blue. Eventually, the driver turned down a side street and stopped in front of modest-looking restaurant with a red-and-white-striped awning over the door.
Inside, they sat beneath a stained glass ceiling with chandeliers shaped like stars. They had champagne and caviar, lobster bisque and the best filet mignon she’d ever tasted, the meat melting like butter on her tongue.
Okay, yeah. It was dangerous, doing this with him. Every moment she spent near him she could feel herself giving in to him, the sharp edges she used to protect herself leaving her, morphing into vulnerable softness that invited his touch.
He leaned across the table and so did she. She shouldn’t have, but she was full of a happy, giddy sort of longing—to savor every minute, to get closer.
And closer.
And then he touched her, so lightly, a brush of his index finger across the back of her hand, over the bones of her wrist, up her forearm, drawing the nerves with him, making a trail of pleasured sensation along her skin. She shivered, a hot kind of shiver, the kind that promised forbidden delights to come.
“It really can’t happen,” she whispered.
“Why not?” That voice of his, sweet and rough, was like raw molasses pouring out.
She was in trouble. Worse, she was loving it. “A thousand reasons. It’s over. You know it. It’s been over for years.”
“Nellie.” His finger at her elbow, sliding higher, over the bright tattoo that covered the evidence of what he had been to her. “It doesn’t feel over. That’s what I know. And you know it, too, whatever lies you think you have to tell yourself.”
She caught his hand, gently pushed it away. She sipped more champagne and treated her taste buds to another wonderful bite of buttery steak. “This is like some kind of dream. And I really need to wake up.”
A moment later, he somehow had her hand in his. He turned it over, smoothed open her fingers and pressed those warm, soft lips of his into the heart of her palm, his breath like a brand on her skin, his beard scruff tickling just a little. “Remember that first time?”
“Oh, God. In a tent.” They’d been seventeen. It was the summer between their junior and senior years, and they’d hiked up into the National Forest, to Ice Castle Falls, pitching the patched-up tent he’d brought in the center of a clear spot, a miniature meadow not far from the falls.
She’d told her mother that she was going camping with a group of kids. Willow might have been Frank Bravo’s accomplice in cheating on his wife Sondra for more than two decades, but when it came to her daughters, she had certain rules. No overnights with a boy as long as Nell was underage. So she’d lied and said she was sharing a tent with Shonda Hurly, a friend from school. Deck hadn’t needed to make up stories about his plans. His father had a lot of stuff going on and pretty much let Deck do what he wanted.
Across the table, still holding her open palm in his hand, Deck said, “I couldn’t believe I got so lucky, to spend a whole night with you.”
“Too bad about the ants.” She laughed and he laughed with her. And then the laughter faded. They watched each other across the table, the tender old memory fresh and new between them. They’d gotten down to their underwear before they realized they’d pitched the tent on an anthill. “I did a lot of shrieking, as I recall.”
“They were all over you.”
She’d slithered out of the tent, twisting and turning in the moonlight in her white cotton panties and sports bra, madly slapping ants away. Deck had followed her out. He’d put his hands on her shoulders and told her to stand still. And she had. She’d stilled—for him. And he had run his hands all over her, starting
