got into it. When he raised his head and smiled down at her, her heart was jackhammering inside her chest.
“Hello, wife.”
She gulped. “Hello, husband.”
He looked like he was about to say something else but the event planner intervened with an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, Major, but we’ve got another wedding scheduled on the terrace in fifteen minutes. Shall we move to the railing and take some pictures?”
Chelsea threw off her wrap and struck her best showgirl pose. Pink went to parade rest beside Ben. And, as if on cue, the fountains spurted and began dancing to Elvis Presley’s rousing rendition of “Viva Las Vegas.” Alex had to grin at the tableau they presented as the photographer did his thing.
The wedding planner was good. And quick! She accessed a nearby printer and slid copies of the best photo into silver-tinted souvenir frames, then gave one to Alex, Chelsea and Pink while the photographer texted the original JPEGs to their phones.
“You sure you guys can’t stay over for a few days?” Chelsea asked Alex as she covered her showgirl splendor with her wrap again. “I could get you an employee discount on the bridal suite at the Flamingo.”
Alex was tempted. So tempted. Her mouth still tingled from Ben’s kiss and memories of their nights together were crowding front and center in her mind.
“We’d love to but...”
“Yeah, you told me. Hubby’s unit is deploying early tomorrow morning. Not much of a honeymoon, kid. Guess you’ll have to make up for lost time when he gets home.”
“Not likely,” Alex murmured, “seeing as we’ll probably be divorced by then.”
“Ya never know,” the showgirl murmured with a sideways glance at Ben. “Ya just never know.”
Ben had considered several options to kill the four hours between the wedding and the flight back to Albuquerque. His first choice was a room right there at the Bellagio. With a little luck and a few smooth moves, he might’ve been able to convince Alex to forget her no-sex condition.
Although...
His gut told him she was right to keep their pseudomarriage platonic. By this time tomorrow he’d be sprawled in the back end of a C-17 with ten other aircrews being ferried across the pond as replacements for a squadron that had flown more than twice its share of combat missions. By the time he rotated stateside again, his brief stint as a married man would most likely be a distant memory. Going horizontal with his sexy bride might generate some happy memories to take with him. Unfortunately, a few hours between the sheets would also complicate an already weird situation.
His second choice to fill the four hours was to take Alex out to Nellis and give her an up close glimpse of his world. But that would generate too many questions about his supposed marriage if Pink or any of his pals got wind of it. The news that Cowboy was playing tour guide to his new wife instead of heating up a honeymoon suite would hit every Special Ops news feed around the globe.
His third and only viable option was to treat his bride to a lavish wedding feast before they headed to the airport. He pitched the idea when they were once again ensconced in the limo.
“I don’t know about you but I need more than airline peanuts to sustain me until we get back to Albuquerque. What say we celebrate our nuptials with a late lunch–early dinner at one of Vegas’s many eateries?”
“That sounds wonderful!”
The barely disguised relief in her response told Ben she’d been worrying over ways to fill their postwedding hours, too.
“Do you have a place in mind?”
Nobly, he left the choice to her. “Your town, your call.”
“Well...” she said with a quick grin.
Damn! Why hadn’t he remembered how her eyes gleamed with flickers of gold when she smiled. Probably because they hadn’t had much to twinkle about since they’d reconnected.
“There is one place,” she told him. “But it doesn’t exactly qualify as elegant.”
“Your town,” he repeated, thoroughly intrigued by those bright eyes.
* * *
Okay, Ben thought some minutes later, he might have made a serious error in judgment by turning the choice of eating establishments over to his bride.
He got his first clue when she leaned forward, tapped the window separating them from the chauffeur, and directed him to Pancho’s Cantina on East Hacienda Boulevard. The second was when they pulled in to a dirt parking lot and Ben surveyed a structure that looked like it had started life as a garage. Rusted sedans and a burned-out bus sat off to one side of the establishment. Dented pickups with gun racks decorating their rear windows crowded the front entrance.
“This is your favorite place to eat in Vegas?” Ben asked. “A city with as many four-and five-star restaurants as Paris or London?”
“Pancho’s green chili and sour cream enchiladas will melt your soul,” she asserted confidently before scooting forward to rap on the window divider again. “Have lunch with us, Ernie. You’ll be our special guest.”
The chauffeur’s glance cut to the rearview mirror. Ben endorsed the invitation with a nod. Why not?
Ten minutes later the three of them were seated in a booth and scarfing down what could only be described as fifty-megaton salsa. Ernie, they discovered, was actually Ernesto Constanza and a transplant to Vegas from south Philadelphia. Ben listened while he and Alex exchanged increasingly humorous tales of living and working in Sin City. Ernesto’s anecdotes edged closer to the mob than Alex’s, although Ben hiked a brow at the instances she sketched of strong-arm tactics by the unions.
When Ernie excused himself to hit the men’s room, Ben had to ask, “Did Chelsea really fork over part of her paycheck for a year to get her first break in Vegas?”
“It was either that or sleep with the slug who was doing the hiring.”
“What about you? Did they lean on you, too?”
She shook her head. “I was lucky enough to be hired right out of college by one of the really, really great guys in the costume business. Don kept our union steward in line. He was also openly, proudly gay. The only threat to my somewhat dubious virtue came from the aircrews who converged on Nellis for Red Flag.”
No surprise there. Red Flag was a massive combat training exercise that brought a host of air, space and cyber forces of the US and its allies to the Nevada Test and Training Range. The range’s fifteen thousand square miles of desert provided a target-rich environment, realistic threat systems and an enemy force that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else in the world. Ben and his crews had dodged more simulated surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles in the skies above Nevada than he wanted to count.
“I managed to resist the Red Flag crews.” With a rueful smile, Alex leaned forward and propped her elbows on the table. “Can’t say the
