Blush (2 page)

He was a puzzle, one that she was suddenly dying to try to put together.

“Tell me, Maddy.” He wasn’t asking a question. His tone demanded a response from her. She raised her head to look at him, her mouth opening to tell him everything. She only just managed to stop herself. She dropped her head again bashfully, unwilling to look him in the eye, and shook her head.

When she looked up again, both of their wineglasses were full. Refusal was on her lips before hers was even offered to her, refusal coated with relief that he didn’t push.

“Oh, no. You’ve given me enough of a treat.” Not to mention her fear that a second drink would lead to a third, then a fourth and then into oblivion.

Though Alex looked disappointed at her refusal, making Maddy kick herself for her lack of social graces, he nodded, then gracefully slid off of his stool. He was tall, well over six feet, and for the first time in her life, Maddy felt small as she stood beside him.

She was a woman of average height and build, but she had always felt as though she took up more space than she should have.

“Well, thank you.” What else was there to say? It had been a strange encounter all around, and though she was still breathless from it, if she wanted to do what she’d come there to do—and she knew that she needed to—then she had to go. Besides, he hadn’t made that final move that she’d been expecting, hadn’t asked her to go home with him.

She would have said yes.

The man was silent for a moment, studying her. Nervously, Maddy twisted a strand of her mahogany hair around a finger as she was assessed, shifting her weight from foot to foot, feeling awkward as the handsome man nodded in acknowledgment of her thanks but said nothing.

Then he leaned in, close enough that his breath tickled her ear.

Maddy felt a small shudder pass through her as she turned her head and found his lips a whisper away from her own.

“It was nice meeting you, Maddy Stone.”

She closed her eyes, certain that he was going to kiss her—wanting him to. The touch didn’t come. Her eyes flew open to find him studying her face intently. She flushed a brilliant shade of scarlet as she realized her error. Before she could say something stupid, sticking her foot so far into her mouth that it hit her gag reflex, she booked it across the marble tiled floor of the bar.

The entrance to the casino itself was on the other side. Inhaling deeply, Maddy tried to will her feet to move her into the room.

“Would you accept a piece of advice?”

He must have followed her, because there was that voice again, low and sultry, whispering against her ear. This time she was irritated. She whirled and found Alex standing right there, right in her personal space.

While part of her noted how delicious he smelled—expensive cologne, musky soap, and something else primal and male—it did nothing to dispel her irritation.

If she was honest with herself, she was mad that he had turned her on, made her desire him, and then not followed through, but she wasn’t planning on admitting that to
him
. It was hard enough to admit to herself.

“Will you stop sneaking up on me, please?” A look of shock crossed over his face. Maddy wondered if he wasn’t used to being snapped at.

As he continued to examine her without speaking, she felt her drive to enter the gaming floor of the casino dissolving.

“Well?” Maddy tapped her foot, her high-heeled sandal clicking on the tile.

Alex looked down at her feet, then slowly back up to her face, his stare caressing her body on its way back up.

“Well?” he echoed, and she noticed that his right hand fisted and unclenched several times in rapid succession.

“Your advice. What is it?”

He raised an eyebrow, at her tone, she thought, before speaking.

“Have another drink. Just one.” His words sounded cautionary. She looked over his shoulder, at the half-full bottle of wine and the two glasses, where they still sat on the bar.

She had indulged in one drink tonight . . . She wasn’t likely to have another. But she was curious nonetheless.

It seemed like odd advice for someone to receive before a card game.

“Why?” Maddy intended for the word to be blunt, but he was still looking at her in that way, and it was making the nerves in her skin skitter around like someone was tickling her. Alex leaned in close and, irritation aside, she basked in that heat again, though he still didn’t actually touch her.

When his mouth was a mere whisper from her ear, he paused, and her heart stopped, then began to beat again, double time. She very nearly arched her neck toward him, wishing for his lips to brush her ear, for his teeth to nip at it.

“One drink has brought some color to your cheeks. Two will make you flush. This will keep the other players from knowing when you have a good hand . . . because your blush is very telling.” And after dropping that bomb on her, he walked away, leaving Maddy gaping after him.

She also drank in the sight of his spectacular ass, but that was neither here nor there.

Stupefied, Maddy watched as several people greeted him. It seemed odd to her, but maybe he was a regular there.

It certainly seemed that he could afford to be.

Your blush is very telling.
Well, she was blushing for real now, the ruddy tones painting her skin all the way to the roots of her tawny hair, she was sure.

What was
that
? Her body felt electrified, her heart was pounding, and that flush had spread over every inch of her skin. She had never reacted so intensely to a person in such a short time, and she was thoroughly flustered by it.

But in the end, it was the nudge that she needed. She stopped gaping after the gorgeous man who had whirled into her life and then just as quickly whirled out of it. Before he made her spill her cola, she had been on target to play a game of blackjack.

Having gained his attention, even if just for a brief twenty minutes, had given Maddy a surge of confidence.

She wasn’t leaving until she played that game.

It wasn’t until she took a deep breath and stepped onto the casino floor that the worry began to trickle back in. With a start, she realized that she hadn’t thought of her nerves, her angst, for nearly half an hour.

Alex, with his gorgeous smile and inquisitive nature, had made her forget all about it.

•   •   •

A
lex entered the casino floor through the far entrance with the express purpose of catching another glimpse of the little doe who had so captured his attention. In the drab floral skirt and cheap knit top, she was hard to spot, effectively camouflaged among the flash of bright satin, the glare of multicolored sequins, the glitter of sparkly baubles.

There . . . there she was. He watched as she wound her way through aisles of slot machines, pausing to peek over the shoulder of a tiny, elderly woman with purple hair who was playing one involving shirtless firefighters. He watched that rosy flush spread over her cheeks as she stared, seemingly fascinated, at what Alex knew was a rotating stream of very nearly lewd images that the cheeky machine featured.

He watched as she wavered, lured by the ease and relative anonymity of feeding quarters into a slot machine. Her fingers reached tentatively for the handle of the neighboring machine, and when she drew the length of one finger down the shaft of the handle, his eyebrows rose to his hairline at the seemingly suggestive gesture that he knew was actually entirely innocent.

“That’s a good girl.” Alex watched as Maddy squared her shoulders, then, with a deep, shuddering breath, deliberately marched her way to the card tables.

He could see her anxiety riding her like a monkey weighing heavily on her back.

“What has you so worried about a card game, babe?” He watched as Maddy, with little to no idea of what she was doing, headed for a table full of cardsharks who would eat her alive in one tasty bite.

“Dylan.” Alex caught the eye of his pit boss. He gestured to Maddy and shook his head just the slightest bit. The capable manager spoke a few words into his Bluetooth, and then the dealer—a new kid named Milo who was bright enough to count cards if he wanted to—looked up, around, and finding Alex, nodded at him. When Maddy approached the table, Milo shook his head, gesturing that the game was full, then pointed her in the direction of a blackjack table that might be more her speed.

Alex watched as her body tensed, poised to argue—he smiled that she had noticed there was still an empty chair at the shark table. He liked that she wasn’t pleased at being given the runaround. But when she looked across at the indicated table, the one that held a preppy-looking young executive type and an older woman draped in jewels, he could almost hear her sigh of relief.

“Damn.” The withering look that Maddy cast Milo was hot. Alex wasn’t usually drawn to brats, but something about the steel under the fragile exterior of this woman had pulled at him since he’d first looked down the bar and seen her sitting there.

At first glance, her downcast eyes and reservations called him in the way that a Dominant was drawn to a submissive—he wanted to protect, to take control so that she could stop worrying. Heaven knew the Dominant in him was rearing for
something
to control, ever since the call he’d gotten from Lydia earlier in the day.

He had never once been late in a payment to her. It was a point of honor for him. Still, she called every month, like clockwork, to remind him and to trowel on the guilt.

She wasn’t trying for more money; no, he gave her plenty, and didn’t miss it. Alex knew that she did it because it satisfied something inside of her to make him bleed.

Some months he was able to shrug it off. This time the woman had gotten under his skin, stuck there like an intravenous needle, feeding him a never-ending stream of poison.

Then he’d looked down the bar, had seen the sweet, intriguing face of Maddy Stone. The first look at her had wiped all of his negative thoughts away. Even if she hadn’t appealed to him on a gut-deep sexual level, he would have been intrigued by her simply because of that.

And
then
he’d seen that blush, the color of a perfect rosé wine, spreading over her creamy skin, and he’d had to clench his hands to keep from fisting them in her hair, lowering his mouth to hers, and claiming her in the most basic of ways.

The attraction between himself and the sweet, cheaply dressed woman had had a tangible pulse—a connection that was rare to find and, in his experience, had the potential for mind-blowing satisfaction for them both.

“What’s your secret, babe?” Fixing a scowl on his face that would discourage all but the bravest of souls from approaching him, Alex skirted the edge of the casino floor, searching for a vantage point that would let him see her face.

There—
there
. Maddy was settling herself at the table that Milo had indicated for her. The steel in her expression had him second-guessing his assumption that she was a natural submissive.

He hadn’t been able to resist buying her the wine, simply to see that blush spread over her cheeks again. When her skin heated, she radiated the faintest scent of freesia, and he’d have bet a good chunk of his empire that that was the smell of a body cream, activated by the warmth of her flushed skin. It had been intoxicating, clouding his senses.

But now he forced himself to turn away from the fascinating creature, made himself walk away.

Madeline Stone was a delicious temptation, but if she had any idea of what he wanted to do with her, to do
to
her, she’d run screaming into the night. He knew what he needed, and sweet women with visible baggage weren’t it, no matter how delectable they seemed.

Steeling himself, Alex headed back toward the exit of the casino. Just before he left—he needed to get back upstairs, for he’d left Rae for far too long already—he succumbed to desire and cast one more look back over his shoulder at Miss Madeline Stone.

Her lower lip was clamped between her teeth, and her features were set with concentration. She’d refused to tell him why playing a game of blackjack scared her, but he couldn’t help admiring the way that she was bulldozing through her nerves with steely determination.

Again catching his pit boss’s attention, Alex pressed his hand to the buttons of his Bluetooth, which he always strapped on when he entered the casino floor area. He was very tempted to arrange for Maddy to win her game.

He watched a flush of pleasure paint her face as she received a good hand. After a long moment, he released his Bluetooth and, turning back, continued on his way.

He wasn’t going to cheapen the reward of whatever triumph she so clearly needed. He couldn’t bring himself to darken the innocence that seemed to hover around her like a cloud.

“And that counts for more than just the game, Fraser.” No matter that watching her bite her lip had made his cock swell in the trousers of his made-to-order Italian suit, no matter that he wasn’t used to denying himself anything.

He knew he’d have to refrain from watching her from the balcony of his private office until he left, the one from which he could see the entire casino.

He didn’t know if he could, but Madeline Stone wasn’t for him, not on any level.

That was just the way it was going to have to be.

M
addy had decided to ignore Alex’s advice to have another drink—she wasn’t willing to risk it. But the sips of Alex’s expensive Bordeaux had warmed her stomach, giving her a flush of courage . . . and so had his words. Now she was seated at a blackjack table, and her fear was very nearly gone, replaced instead with the fizz of anticipation.

“Chips in.” Maddy slid a small black chip across the table. It seemed like such an insignificant token, yet it represented one hundred dollars, the minimum buy-in for the table. It may not have been much money to the health-club-fit thirty-something on her left, the one who was handsome and dressed well yet still left her cold. It might have been pennies to the predatory-looking woman to the left of him, the one wearing gold sequins and an expression of hawklike intensity.

The sharp suit on the man next to her, black wool accented with a deep purple tie, drew Maddy’s mind back to Alex and to the hardness of his frame beneath his expensive clothes. She must have looked drab in comparison, her floral skirt, black shell, and sandals all from Walmart.

She reminded herself that it didn’t matter. She’d never see him again. She had to focus on the game, or risk losing money that she really couldn’t afford to part with.

The dealer placed Maddy’s two cards in front of her. They weren’t very good, a six and a seven compared to the dealer’s ten. Anxiety blossomed in her gut. The man to her left had a jack and an ace, and the woman a seven and an eight.

The woman won the hand, and Maddy watched her hundred dollars slide away across the green table.

She had played a hand now—she could go. She
should
go. But Maddy found that she’d caught the bug . . . She wanted to win.

Reluctantly, she slid another black hundred-dollar chip across the table. She’d purchased more chips than she could really afford. She watched the woman slide forward two rounds of orange plastic, which Maddy had learned were called “pumpkins”—each represented one thousand dollars. Her knees quivered at the thought of losing so much money in a game. The man offered up a pumpkin and a barney, a purple token worth five hundred.

Maddy looked at her lonely black chip. As if possessed by someone else, her hand slid four more little black pieces across the table. Five hundred dollars, and she had already lost a hundred.

She blanched when she realized what she’d done, but it was too late. And even though the idea of losing that much money made her feel sick, the risk was . . . exciting. Yes, exciting.

It washed over everything else that she felt, tinting those thoughts a vivid, rosy pink.

The dealer placed a card faceup in front of her, then repeated the gesture for the man, the woman, and himself, though his faced down. The circuit went around once more.

When he gestured to Maddy, she was distracted
looking at her cards and working out her hand.

She didn’t immediately understand when the dealer said the magical word. “Blackjack.”

She very nearly groaned aloud, thinking that he must have meant one of the other two. But wait . . . the woman had a four and a seven. The man had a jack and a queen—a great hand, but not an automatic blackjack.

Slowly Maddy looked down at her cards. Lying on the felt before her were the glossy faces of a jack and an ace. A jack was ten, and an ace could be an eleven or a one.

Holy shit.
She had hit blackjack.

The dealer slid Maddy’s five hundred in chips back to her, plus another five hundred on top of those. She had won four hundred dollars, as well as winning back the five hundred that she had bet to begin with. The dealer said she got a bonus on top of that. It wasn’t a large amount, not at all, but the win felt absolutely glorious.

“Congratulations, sweetheart.” The suited man grinned at her salaciously. She smiled back, too excited to care about his leer, and contemplated playing again, just once more.

She couldn’t quite have explained why, but her gaze was drawn up from the table. Across the casino floor, way up high, was an ornate balcony, almost like what she imagined she would see in an opera house. It offered an unfettered view of the entire casino floor.

Standing up there, his arms braced on the balcony, was Alex Fraser. He was watching her intently, and when her eyes connected with his, she could feel her heart skip a beat.

His shirtsleeves were rolled up, his tie loosened. It was like getting a look at the more casual side of him, the one who had let that controlling persona, the one with the answers, slip just a bit.

He nodded at her solemnly, the whisper of a smile around his lips. Flustered, Maddy looked back at the chips that she had clutched in her suddenly sweaty palms. Moments later, she narrowed her eyes back up at the alluring man. Alex appeared to wink, just the tiniest movement, before his face returned to normal, as if they had just shared a joke that no one else knew.

“Do you know who that is?” Maddy hated to draw the man at the table, who had leaned in closer than she would have liked, into conversation, but at the moment she found she needed answers. She gestured with her head toward the balcony. She had hoped he would be subtle, but her seat-side companion turned and stared, unabashed.

Maddy could feel herself blushing furiously, well aware that Alex Fraser must have known that she’d asked about him.

The man beside her leaned back in, far too close. Maddy could smell scotch on his breath, one with extra peat, as well as the stench of cigarette smoke and sweat.

“That’s Alex Fraser. Bloody Irishman. Owns the place.”

Her mouth fell open as the enormity of the statement hit her. He owned the casino? Alex Fraser owned the whole entire casino?

The health club man chose that moment to place his hand over hers. It was clammy and pulled at her skin. She barely hid a shudder.

“I can take care of you just as well as that fucker.”

Maddy was repulsed by the man’s choice of language and couldn’t help reeling a bit at the knowledge that Alex owned the casino. No wonder he could afford to buy a seventy-year-old bottle of wine. Hell, he could probably afford to buy the entire vineyard.

“Thanks. I’m going to go freshen up.” Maddy extracted her hand from beneath the other man’s and knew that the first thing she would do in the ladies’ room was scour the flesh that he touched with soap and hot water. She gathered her chips, the little stack a satisfying weight in her hand. As she stepped away from the table, she dared to take another look up at the balcony, to see if Alex was still there.

He was there all right, and he was scowling at her. No, not scowling, glowering. After a faltering step—what had she
done
?—she realized that he wasn’t glaring at her at all, but at the man whose sweat felt like it still stained her palm.

Surely . . . Could he be . . . ? He wasn’t mad that the man had touched her . . . ? She shook the thought out of her head as soon as it made itself known.

She didn’t really know Alex Fraser at all, nor did he know her. She still didn’t know why he had introduced himself to her in the casino bar, and she probably wouldn’t ever know. But she did know that he couldn’t possibly have cared who touched her.

As she scurried across the casino floor to the door marked
Ladies
, Maddy reflected that even if he did care, he really didn’t have anything to worry about.

She hadn’t been touched, not in that way, for a very long time.

She thought of the wink as she walked, and it hit her out of nowhere. Had he arranged for her to win?

The suspicion made her angry, furiously so. How dare he? He might have been thinking that he was doing her a favor, but he had just undermined her entire experience. She didn’t feel as if she could cross this item off of her bucket list anymore—it wasn’t real.

Maddy wanted to go up there and yell, which was strange, because she never yelled. No, she swallowed her feelings, burying them inside.

She looked over her shoulder, one more glance at the balcony before she entered the ladies’ room. She wondered if she could signal somehow that she needed to talk to him, that what he had just done had upset her. Not that he’d care, but Maddy felt driven to do so anyway.

Also, she wanted just one more look at him, the sexy male who had aroused lust that she hadn’t even known she was capable of.

She caught sight of the back of him, walking away from the balcony. She also saw a wisp of golden hair, shades paler than her own, vanishing from the balcony in front of him. Someone else was up in that balcony with him, someone she couldn’t see. He followed that person back inside.

Then he was gone, and she would never see him again.

To shake off the overwhelming disappointment that hit her when she thought of never seeing such an alluring man again, she patted herself on the back for her blackjack win.

She’d moved to Paradise, Nevada, a year ago. She’d started seeing a new therapist a year ago, too—a clean break from her old therapist, who, while perfectly adequate, was a tie to her old life. Dr. Gill, her new doc, had taken great interest in her reluctance to try new things, and together they’d constructed a list of activities that scared her, ones that she nevertheless wanted to conquer her irrational fear of.

This had been number one, urging herself to enter a casino. Urging herself to have the courage to walk up to a table and play a game. Since she knew how to play blackjack, this had been the game that she’d put on her list.

For the woman who would drive ten extra miles on empty simply to go to the same gas station, it was a huge step.

She was thankful she hadn’t spilled her secrets to Alex when he had pressed her.

She didn’t need to explain it to Alex. She didn’t need to explain it to anyone, and she certainly didn’t need the distraction of a gorgeous, enigmatic billionaire casino owner. Doing things that pushed her out of her comfort zone was small steps that added together would give her some measure of control over her life back.

•   •   •

“A
lex, Massimo Santorini is on the phone.” Alex’s indispensable personal assistant, Kylie Anderson, stuck her head into the inner sanctum of his office without asking. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for her, so she took a full step back when she noted the expression on his face.

“Whoa. What’s got your panties in such a knot?”

Alex simply glowered in response, and Kylie raised an eyebrow at him. Though the curls of her red hair were wild, and the pink silk of her floaty gypsy skirt gave her the look of someone who was laid-back and ready to kick off her sandals at any moment, he knew that she was anything but.

“Don’t you have something better to do?” The scowl that intimidated the heads of international corporations had long ago ceased to even register with the scarily efficient Kylie. “Surely it’s been at least half an hour since you drove Declan crazy?”

Kylie raised an eyebrow archly; then, twisting her hair back, she secured it with the pencil she’d had in her hand.

“As a matter of fact.” Tapping away on her iPad, she made a note of something, then looked straight at Alex. “But seriously. A, what should I tell Santorini? Are we still trying to sweeten the deal? And B, do I dare hope that it’s a female who has finally gotten underneath your skin?”

Alex growled. It should have bothered her—it was a sound that scared every one of his employees besides Kylie and Declan and the sound that warned every submissive he’d ever been with that they were pushing him a bit too far.

Kylie leaned against the open door, tapping her bright blue nails on the screen of her iPad. She gave no reaction to his intimidations.

Feeling a headache coming on, one induced by relentless thoughts of Maddy Stone and that delicate pink blush, he frowned in the direction of the sparkly nail polish.

If Kylie weren’t so good at her job, he’d have insisted she make her appearance a little more professional. Instead, he’d found that her bohemian style was useful at disarming the business tycoons, distracting them while he went in and made the kill.

Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work on the phone.

“Put him through.” Alex pressed his lips together tightly. When Massimo had first approached him about purchasing A Casino in Paradise—the day that he’d met Maddy, in fact—something had seemed off about the man. But when he’d done his due diligence, he’d uncovered nothing incriminating.

Santorini liked to gamble, particularly in high-stakes horse games, and had made some poor choices starting a few years earlier, around the time his wife had died. He owed a lot of money to some bad people, and that was why he was quickly trying to liquidate one of his businesses. But everything on the casino had checked out clean, though Alex knew that he could get a better price, which was why he was trying to draw things out with the man, to make him anxious for the sale to conclude.

He had nothing but a gut sense that the man wasn’t telling him everything. Still, it strengthened his need to stall, both to make sure he’d examined every nook and cranny of the deal, as well as to put the squeeze on the seller.

He hadn’t become as rich as he was, as successful, by being a nice man. It was just another reason that he was all wrong for Maddy Stone.

“Hey, boss?” Unlike Declan, Alex had an almost never-ending supply of patience when it came to Kylie. But when she stuck that red head of hair back into his office one last time, he couldn’t hold back the snarl.

Thinking about Maddy—specifically, thinking about how he should stay far, far away from her—had put him on edge.

“I’ve never seen you worked up over a woman. That alone makes me like her. I’m just saying.” Her expression was serious, and she held his gaze for a second before she was off and running again, a whirlwind of movement. “Transferring the call in two!”

Alex’s hand hovered over the phone, waiting for Kylie to put the call from Santorini through. He wasn’t good at denying himself what he wanted, and Kylie’s words had just given him a push.

The report he’d had Declan prepare on the woman the day after he’d met her, while the memory of her heady fragrance still lingered in his nostrils, had told him that Miss Maddy lived in Paradise, Nevada, which was where Santorini’s casino was located.