Crushing Beauty (Harbingers of Sorrow MC): Vegas Titans Series (19 page)

ONE

Romy was tired. Well, correction: she was always tired;
today she was
exhausted.
First, she’d been up till  four in the morning
proofing a friend’s biology thesis. She’d gone on to spend her waking work day
shuffling between Professor Hinegart’s office hours and the library. Now—having
had barely enough time to secret a granola bar from the common room vending
machine on her way to the car—Romy found herself bopping from foot to foot
under angry casino lights. She’d hastily changed from her college-girl gear
(five year old Sofi pants, old boyfriend tee) into the glorified bustier and
black leather knee-length “business skirt” which made up—of all things—her work
uniform. She shuffled two letter-thin stacks of plastic KEM cards between her
aching joints, sneaking the subtlest peak possible at her watch: 10pm. A mere
hour
into her shift.

“Look alive, Blondie,” muttered Paulette, sauntering by on
yet another of her stealthy strolls about the pit. Paulette Nagle (“Used to be
Nagle-Brownstein, but whaddya gonna do?”) was Romy’s immediate supervisor and
closest alliance here at The
Windsor
—a.k.a. the ninth most popular
casino on the Sunset Strip. Two years ago, fresh off the boat from a small
college in Arizona, Romy had put all of her belongings into a guitar case, put
the guitar case in an ex-boyfriend’s third-hand Thunderbird, and high-tailed it
to Vegas; hoping to make a brand new name for herself at the research
university there. Neither the boyfriend nor the dream had lasted the year, but
today a much wiser Romy Adelaide was a mere two credits away from a Masters in
Statistics, paid for in part by dozens of weekends spent shuffling KEM cards at
the ninth-swankiest spot in all of Vegas. She was a blackjack dealer.

“I’m serious, Ro. They’ve been watching us like
hawks
lately,” Paulette said. She made a meaningful face at an innocuous spot in the
ceiling which, everyone agreed, was the site of the pit’s largest security
camera. “So I’ll let you back at it.” Paulette wiggled away, flashing a toothy
smile at the motley crew of mid-level-rollers who’d been waiting all this while
for their cards.

Romy took a deep breath. Seven hours, plus breaks. She could
do this.

“Are you full up?” came a voice from by her elbow. Romy
lifted her eyes from the deck and stopped short.

Typically, handsome clientele at The Windsor fell into the
‘Silver Fox’ category—they tended to be older gentlemen, vacationing from the
East or West coasts. The SF’s were dapper, old-school—their suits were cut from
Savile Row, their chips were stacked in perfect, guarded rows. They were
well-groomed and appointed. They didn’t grab ass the way plenty of the
local-yokels or bachelor parties liked to do; they were polite, reserved,
sensitive. They’d render you smitten with a George Clooney grin or a Sean
Connery cocked-eyebrow before offering to buy your shift drink. You’d hear them
talk a little nonsense about the NASDAQ and feel like a respected adult. But as
compelling as these gentlemen could be, the Silver Fox seduction ended the same
way any other seduction seemed to in this town: buck naked, sharing a cigarette
in a “Basic Luxury Package” room upstairs, the TV on low and the shower
running. There was something endlessly grimy about sleeping with customers, and
Romy’d made sure to fall for even the top-shelf stuff only once. Because odds
were, the lady lost face.

But
this
face was different. The man in front of her
now was cut like a sculpture. The fabric of his black button-down shirt was working
impressively hard to contain his straining muscles. There was a swatch of
curling chest hair—not too much, just enough—leaking out from the space at his
throat where his two top buttons lazed open. A series of interlocking tribal
designs rendered in the thick black paint of Serious Tattoos crept up the man’s
neck, framing a perfectly symmetrical face bearing an indolent expression.
Though he was wearing a nice suit (if not Savile Row, something
comparable),
Romy knew immediately that this man wasn’t a Fox. He wore his blazer like
someone who’d have preferred to be naked than confined, which was to say he
seemed slightly on edge. He kept squinting about the room, shaking his arms to
and fro. God, and now she couldn’t not think about him naked...it took a heft
of professional willpower to keep her eyes from dancing down to the stranger’s
crotch.

His eyes were the kind of eyes she’d only heard about from
Paulette’s weekly soap opera recaps: these eyes were so impressively
penetrating, so impressively blue, that she simply could not hold his gaze for
long. A dusting of artful stubble camped along his jaw line (which was
Herculean…). His hair was what her foster mother might have called “shoeshine
black,” and it was thick as a horse’s mane. His nose was aquiline, nearly
Roman, but looked to have been broken at some point in the owner’s history.
Something about this fact excited her.

“Are you full up?” he asked again, granting Romy a glimpse
of two improbable rows of white teeth. While the newcomer seemed patient, even
playful, her assembled table of gambling grumps were starting to fuss.

“LADY!” yelled a fat man in a checked suit, his tone the
twangy drawl of a Long Islander, “Get the ball moving, why don’tcha?”

“Have a seat, sir,” Romy said, scrambling to regain her
composure. She motioned to the last open seat at the game. The man leaned into
it, like a wind.

Romy began shuffling again. “Bets, bets, bets,” she
muttered, eyes still locked on the late arrival. There was something about him.
The way he wiggled his arms reminded her of...someone.

The men around the table lodged their bets; most numbers
drifted just inside of a hundred dollars. When she landed her panorama on the
stranger, he forced her to meet his gaze before moving ten green $25 chips
neatly on to bettor's circle in front of him. Then, the man winked.

A high-roller with neck tattoos? Well, Vegas was a city of
surprises. It was also a city of fools—at the bottom of her heart, Romy had a
certain disdain for people who could throw money around like it was nothing.
All her life, these mens’ “chips” had been the grinding necessity of her toil,
the source of all struggle, the tenuous mark of her independence. Dealing at
The Windsor furnished her with just enough to stay afloat: she paid for school,
she lived alone, and could just barely afford monthly insurance payments on the
decrepit Thunderbird she’d inherited from her last relationship. And here came
an admittedly roguish, classically handsome biker type throwing caution to the
wind simply because he felt like it. Puffing out the span of her chest as far
as the bustier would allow, Romy dealt the first hand.

The Long Islander squealed early; his tell was something
terrible. “Blackjack, motherfucker!” he whooped, moving two bejeweled hands
towards his chips. Romy sighed. This was one of her least favorite parts of the
job.

“Please don't touch the chips, sir, or the cards.” she said,
tapping the back of his knuckles with a handy cue. “Would you like Even Money?”

The man looked confused, then upset. “What the fuck is Even
Money? I thought if I got 21 on the first deal I won automatically, 3:2 odds,
one-and-a-half times my bet?”

Romy sighed. “No sir, not if the dealer also has blackjack
on the first deal, then you'd push, unless you wish to take even money 2:1 odds
instead. Or you can gamble that I
don't
have blackjack, and if I don't
you'll get the 3:2 payout, otherwise you'll push and get nothing.”

The Long Islander seemed bemused, then flustered, then
angry. How was it possible that people managed to get this far into the casino
without knowing how to play the games? Some days, Romy couldn’t wait to have a
degree and be a high school math teacher. She’d lead whole lessons on How Not
To Look Like An Idiot in Vegas.

“He’s not from around here, I guess,” mumbled the stranger
beside her. He had a sly grin on that could just about melt. Fiercely,
unbidden, Romy pictured the stranger clearing the chips from the table in one
elegant
swish
of his hand before scooping her up and setting her down on
the green felt. She pictured his hot breath on her neck. She pictured her
shaking fingers rooting through his chest hair, then plunging downward, picking
their path through walls of muscle towards the elastic of his expensive boxer
shorts…

“Are
you
from around here?” the mysterious man asked
her now, the edge of a laugh in his voice.

“Me? I’m from Reno. Why do you ask?” Romy said.

“Because you’re a complete fucking space cadet,” muttered
the wounded Long Islander. “Like I don’t know how to play blackjack? Nobody can
take a joke?”

“I’m from Reno, too.” said the handsome man.

“What?”

“Yeah, I’m from Reno.” The man leaned back in his chair, and
seemed to size Romy up with a different set of (equally imperturbable) eyes.
“Hey, what high school did you go to?”

“What is this, fucking Love Boat? I wanna play the game!”
chirped the thinnest man at the table, a gaunt fellow with a clip-on tie and a
ghoulish complexion. A few of the others nodded in unison.

The Long Islander frowned down at his slice of the action,
“I don't want Even Money, I don't think you have a ten under that Ace.”

“Would anyone like insurance?” Romy asked the men.

“Sucker bet.” said the thin man.

No one took insurance. The game ended fast after Romy
checked her hole card and flipped  over a Queen, that made 21. From the ways they
did and didn’t keep their cool, Romy determined that there were few men at the
table tonight with much experience playing cards. She pegged them for ambitious
vacationers all, the kind of men who jumped at business trips to anywhere, the
kind of men who slid off their weddings rings at the first sign of willing
flesh-for-sale. People who pretended to be other people when out of town. And
something about the typical grumble-gamblers’ affect drew only more attention
to how effortlessly cool, how frank the mystery stranger was. Though he might
be loose with cash, and he might be wearing the hell out of a borrowed
suit...something in his manner told her that he wasn’t really pretending to be
anyone he wasn’t. They’d still barely exchanged hellos and she remained
convinced that she knew him in some way. Had they maybe met before?

After the next deal—as a new crop of lower executives
rotated on to the table—the stranger got blackjack. Collecting his reward, he
flipped Romy a green chip with a deft move of his wrist. It was then that she
got a glimpse of his palms, which were not the padded manicure jobs of any
typical high-roller. His hands were rugged, beset with calluses. She wondered
what he actually did for a living.

“This is really a lot,” she whispered under her breath in
the stranger’s direction. “You don’t have to—”

The man just pressed a finger to his lips and smiled the
melting smile again. When he looked at her, Romy felt it in her base. Her belly
seemed to seize up, and she felt the inside of her thighs turn slick. Her face
grew hot...she was in trouble and she knew it.

Two more games passed at the table the same way: the man
stayed pinned to his corner, betting two hundred fifty a hand, and he nearly
always came up winning. It would have been statistically suspicious were it not
for the choice crop of goonheads playing tonight—besides, Romy was in no
position to shirk the now tidy pile of twenty-five dollar chips in her dealer’s
corner. When Paulette came by on one of her rounds, she waggled her eyebrows
above the handsome man’s head, nodding assent. Paulette was pretty intent on
fixing Romy up with a high-roller, having made her young, blonde friend into
something of a test-daughter over the past two years.

It crept towards dawn. The handsome man kept winning, kept
winking, and Romy remained unable to place him. At one point he rose from the
table “for a walking break,” and Romy watched him (and his high, tight ass)
saunter towards one of the side tables. He placed the whole of his night’s
winnings down on some lark.

Paulette appeared at her elbow then: “I want you to take
that young man home and do absolutely everything you can think of to him. If
you need help coming up with ideas, I’ve prepared a stand-by list.”

“Paulette, I’m working. Like you said.”

“Oh, shut it, Princess.” Paulette turned to address Romy’s
table: “MAMA TAKES A UNION BREAK. Table adjourned for five minutes, till we get
a sub in here.” When the men groaned, Paulette became a full-on mother hen. “Go
on. SCOOT,” she said. She walked Romy over to the unofficial employee break
table on the floor, where a few other dealers were attempting to stretch inside
of their leather bodysuits and bitching about the players over cocktails.