Dangerous Tease (2 page)

Snips stood just shy of her personal bubble.

“Okay, how much does Cy owe?”

“Forty K.”

Her blood pressure exploded. “Why in the hell would he need forty thousand dollars?”
Please God, don't say he's found a craps game that would take him.

Snips shrugged. “Don't know. Don't care. I just want my money, but your brother dropped off the radar. That does not inspire
my confidence. If he doesn't show up soon, I'm going to have to track him down as a message to the rest of my clients.” It went without saying that Snips' threats involved baseball bats and brass knuckles. “So where is he?”

Her stomach clenched. Something was off. Way off. After Mom got really sick, Cy had cleaned up his act and joined the military. He’d left the Corps a few months ago, but was
being all mysterious about how he was supporting himself. Warning sirens blared in her head.

“I haven't heard from him in a few days. I don't know where he is.”

“Well, I hope you have an extra forty thousand stuffed between those big tits of yours.” He raised up on his toes and leered at her.

“I bet you do.” She crossed her arms to block his view.

He guffawed, an ugly, mean sound. “You'd
better find my money or your brother. I'd hate to have to go introduce myself to your parents. Haven't seen your mom since high school. She still in the wheelchair? I really should stop by and see how her kidney dialysis is going.”

Panic buzzed inside Josie's head like a kamikaze bee on a suicide mission. Her mom would give her last penny to help Cy. Shit, she'd already done it about a million
times, that was why Josie had come home from L.A. Well, one of the reasons. But Mom couldn't afford to do it now, not with a foot-high stack of medical bills and a mile-wide stubborn streak pushing her to refuse any financial help from Josie.

No, she'd have to take care of this before her parents even heard about it.

“Look, I don't have it all, but I'll get it. I just need some time. Come by
the diner during the lunch shift tomorrow and I'll give you five grand.” Just saying the words was like watching her dreams curl up and die.

Snips' eyes lit up, no doubt at the prospect of getting his grubby hands on her hard-earned cash.

That money was her entire life savings after she'd paid for her stay at the Rose O'Neill Dry Creek Artist Colony, but if Cy was desperate enough to borrow
money from Snips, he really needed it. The fact that he'd dropped out of sight meant something had gone very wrong and he was in real trouble. Damn, why hadn't she followed up on his last cryptic text? He'd promised to never leave her to clean up his messes again—unless something awful had happened.

“I need it all.” Snips snuck across the invisible line separating her space from his. “Of course,
you're such a hot piece of ass that I could be persuaded to give you a few extra weeks, if you asked in the right way.”

The ants double-timed across her skin and she took an involuntary half-step back. “Come on, we've known each other since middle school. I've told you a million times, no way, no how.”

Anger flashed in his beady eyes. “Yeah and in all that time, Miss Tight Ass, you've never
given me a second glance or the respect I deserve. I was never good enough for you. But guess who needs me now?” He raised himself on his tiptoes and jutted his face into hers. “Who's hot shit now, bitch?”

His hand shot out so fast it must have broken some kind of land-speed record and clamped onto her left breast.

Shock stopped the moment in time. Her brain emptied until it was a vast white
space with only one thought: What. The. Fuck?

He kneaded her tit like a baker with a loaf of unformed dough.

Rage and disgust rattled and climbed up to her throat, her cheeks flamed. She gritted her teeth and shoved his hand away, her knee slamming into his steroid-shrunken balls. He bent over with an
oomph
! She grabbed the metal serving tray in both hands and swung it with everything her
five-foot-eleven-inch body could give. The tray made a heavy boing sound on the side of his head.

He went down. Hard.

Lungs heaving, she tried to bring her breathing and heart rate back to normal while her brother's loan shark—the man who held Cy's kneecaps in his hands—wriggled on the ground in agony.

The other poker players, waitresses and even the new bartender let out a collective gasp.
Pandemonium broke out as the crowd converged around them. Mr. Tall Drink of Water hung back, but he tipped an invisible hat at her. Shouted questions bounced off the walls.

“What the hell happened, Josie?” Her boss, Clive, picked that moment to appear.

“He grabbed my boob.”

“Aw, hell.” He swiped his fingers through his hair and aged about ten years in a breath. Snips dropped a ton of cash
at the casino on a regular basis. “Go change and then let's talk in my office.”

Clive went to work dispersing the gawkers.

Fuckity fuck fuck
. And this was why Cy rolled his eyes at her whenever she called him out about his temper.

Snips staggered up, holding his junk with both hands. An apricot-sized goose egg deformed his round head.

“You fuckin' cunt.” Spittle sprayed from his angry mouth.
Hatred and pain twisted his face. “Forty thousand dollars. I want it all. Tomorrow.”

He limped to the door and out to the Paris Casino's general gambling floor.

Well, she'd taken the bad and made it about twenty times worse.
Way to go, Josie
. She had less than twenty-four hours to find Cy, or cash out her life savings and find an additional thirty-five thousand dollars. Bile rose in her throat.
The tray slid from her clammy grasp.

She could sell her car. Work extra shifts in the poker room and at the diner. Forget about Dry Creek. Maybe she could get a refund.

Her shoulders slumped. Exhaling a deep breath, she headed for the employee locker room. There was no time for feeling sorry for herself. As her dad, a lifelong plumber, said, life doesn't always give you copper pipes, sometimes
it just gives you shit.

Swiping the diary from its hiding spot, she gave herself a mental shake then marched out of the poker room.

Sinking down onto a metal folding chair in the employee locker room, she tried to steady her shaking hands enough to unbuckle her shoes. It took three tries, but she finally got them undone and tossed them into her duffel, then wriggled out of her miniscule uniform.
So much for the bonfire she'd been planning. Josie sniffled back a tear. She couldn't stop her bottom lip from quivering, but dammit, she would not actually cry. It wouldn't change anything.

Pulling on a pair of dark denim jeans and tugging a soft cotton T-shirt over her head, she contemplated her next task: persuading Clive to give her some more shifts in the poker room. It would take a whole
lot of fast talk to get him to agree. Lately, he'd been overwhelmed with requests for overtime from everyone and Josie had three things working against her. She stuffed the diary in her backpack and swung it over one shoulder, grabbed her duffel bag in her other hand and cataloged the negative marks.

One, she'd already quit.

Two, unlike most of the waitresses, her twenties were a fast-fading
memory.

And three, she'd just whacked a high roller and kicked him in the nuts.

Desperation tightened around her neck with each step on the short walk from the locker room to Clive's office. She had better odds at the slot machine than she did sweet-talking her boss into giving her more hours. Good luck with that.

He answered her knock before Josie's knuckles even broke contact with the
door. A red blotch colored his Adam's apple. Clive only got the hives when he'd been on the business end of a reaming.

“What a way to end your last shift.” He scurried around his desk and flopped into his chair.

“About that—”

He held up his hand. “You already handed in your notice. This was your last day.”

Even though she’d expected it, her stomach sank. “Something came up. I changed my mind,
can't you—”

“Jimmy 'Snips' Esposito went to the top. Shit, he dialed the CEO before he even hit the front door. They assured him tonight was your last night.”

“But he grabbed me!”

“He disputes that and no one witnessed the incident.”

“The security cameras—”

“Won't have seen anything. They
never
see anything when it comes to him.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I'm sorry, Josie, but it is what
it is.”

Her body ached, every organ and limb hurt. A bone-deep sense of exhaustion swamped her. She didn't even have the energy to be pissed off. Everything had tumbled down on top of her like a house of cards. Just like L.A. The memory of that betrayal struggled to emerge from a lockbox in the back of her mind but she had enough practice ignoring the pain to force it back. She'd find a way out
of this mess. She'd done it before. She'd do it again.

Josie spun on her heel and walked out the door, leaving her tacky-ass uniform in the duffle bag on the floor in front of Clive's desk.

T
wenty minutes later, Josie sank back onto a barstool near the casino's off-track betting room, desperate for a little girl talk with her best friend, Mike, who was tending bar. He’d handed her the usual vodka gimlet and hurried off to tend the customers at the other end of the bar. She twisted away from the raucous trio of blondes at the other end of the room whose last sober moment
must have been hours ago—if not days.

Lucky them, everything was perfect in their lives. Damn, she sure sounded like a bitter little muffin with a forty thousand dollar debt tied around her neck.
Must be the gimlets
. She snorted at her own bad joke.

The first crisp, ice-cold vodka with a hint of lime in the had gone down way too easy. Josie really didn't care as she accepted the second that
Mike slid her way. She'd already left Cy four voicemails. Her texts had gone unanswered. No one in the family had heard from him in a week. Not since Cy had e-mailed that he'd hooked up with a construction crew for a two-week job in Reno. Her twin vibe would be going mad if something had happened to him, like it had when he was shot in Iraq. She'd known hours before the call came. But this time,
baby bro just didn't want to talk.

“Hell, if I owed pond scum forty thousand, I'd probably be ignoring my phone too,” she mumbled into her drink.

Still, a nugget of worry sat like a brick in her stomach. Why would Cy need to borrow money, let alone that much?

Stymied in her search for the answers, she took refuge in another gulp of vodka. After everything that had happened in the past few
hours, some adult beverages and a bitch session with Mike were in order. Hashing it out with her best friend always seemed to set things clear in her head.

She'd accomplished step one, having a pair of vodka gimlets. Step two had been a bust because of the bachelorette party. The small casino bar was normally deserted at this time since most games had finished hours ago, but tonight Mike had
slid the second gimlet her way then gone back to making a trio of pink martinis. He set the drinks on the bar in front of the flirty blondes and made his way toward Josie on the opposite end.

“Sorry, doll, you know what bachelorette parties are like—high maintenance but with an equally big tip. All I have to do is pour the drinks and bat my eyelashes.”

“Don't you feel the least bit guilty?”

He shrugged. “For what?”

“Flirting with horny drunk girls when you're gay?”

Mike arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow and blew her a kiss with lips that had never touched female flesh, except to kiss his mother on the cheek at Thanksgiving. “Honey, when I flirt, it is a form of high art. They could care less who I go home with.”

Judging by the lust reflected in the bride-to-be's glassy eyes, she
just might.

“Oh, Mikey, I need some help.” The woman tilted her head and pouted.

“Well, I do believe I have just what you need.” He winked at Josie then sauntered down to the other end of the bar to earn an extra zero on his tip.

Eh, who could blame him? It wasn't as if Josie didn't do the same thing with the poker players. Scratch that. She used to do the same thing. Now she was an underemployed
waitress with only one job, a perv loan shark circling her for forty K and a brother in the wind.

Josie twirled the skinny brown straw in her second gimlet and the ice cubes clinked against the glass. She planned on savoring this one, as it would likely be her last frivolous purchase for the foreseeable future. Tomorrow, she'd track down Cy, pick up as many extra shifts at the diner as she could
and put a listing for her car on Craigslist. After that…well…she didn't have the energy to think about it but that's what family did, they saved each other when the situation called for it. She'd find a way.

The stool next to her slid back.

Except for her, Mike and the bachelorette party, the entire bar held nothing but empty chairs. Yet someone had to pick the barstool right next to her? She
really was not in the mood to deal with a chatty tourist right now.

Determined to wallow alone in her own misery for at least one more gimlet, she kept her head down and her body turned slightly away.

Then, out of the corner of her eye, she watched Mr. Tall Drink of Water from the poker room sit down.

Her heart started doing jumping jacks and, all of a sudden, hanging out alone feeling sorry
for herself lost much of its appeal. Josie's pulse jackhammered in her throat and she squirmed on her barstool. Keeping her face angled down, she used her peripheral vision to scope him out. Tall. Strong without being a musclebound goon. Light reddish-brown hair worn long enough to show the beginnings of a slight wave. He smiled her way and her cheeks blazed at being caught.

“You okay after what
happened?”

His voice slid across her skin like warm, poisonous honey, dangerous but oh so sweet.

And, poof, gone was her vodka-induced acceptance of her current no-win situation. Anxiety and anger one-two punched her in the solar plexus as hard as she'd whacked Snips with the serving tray.