Play Me (3 page)

It only takes a couple minutes before he's barking something in Russian. Two naked girls come out of the bedroom. They look barely legal and though neither of them are currently wearing bruises, both look like they're coming down from a week-long bender. They settle on the couch next to him and he pets them like a normal person would pet his dogs.

I'm smart enough to know he's putting on a show for my benefit and still it sets my teeth on edge, has my shoulders tensing. Because while they look like they're here of their own volition, I can't be sure. Not with Todd's words about how Rubinov makes his money running through my head like a ticker tape.

He picks that moment to speak. “I want the waitress fired. And my limit raised at the tables to twenty million a hand, unsecured. I'd like to stay an extra week—my girls have grown fond of this suite.” He shifts his hand a little, squeezes one of the girl's nipples. She doesn't flinch from his touch, instead arches into it, smiling, and I feel a trickle of relief make its way through my veins. I might be disgusted at how he treats these women, but at least they don't seem to mind. It's one less thing for me to worry about controlling in an already untenable situation.

“And my girls, they like pretty things. Jewelry, lingerie, the like.” He shrugs like the concept baffles him. Like he's not wearing a hundred grand in gold and diamonds on his own work-hardened fingers. “It would make me very happy for them to have whatever they want from the shops on the promenade level. And, of course, the spa as well.”

He looks me in the eye. “Whatever they want. If this is what happens, I am sure I'll be able to forget the unfortunate incident that occurred last night.”

“Unlimited access to the shops and the spa,” I repeat. “An extra week at my hotel, comped, of course. A higher, unsecured limit at the tables. Do I have your demands correct?”

“Requests,” he tells me with a smile that says they are indeed demands. And that he is sure he is in control—all of which shows what a fool he really is. “That whore. She needs to be fired. I was assured by your employee that this has already taken place, but I want your assurance as well.”

I take a minute to decide what tack I want to take, but honestly, I'm out of patience with this bastard and his bloated sense of self-importance. It might be fun to play with him a little, to bat him back and forth like a cat does with a mouse, but I've never really had the stomach for games like that. Even when it comes to jerks like this.

So, instead of letting him twist himself up even more in his demands, instead of letting him think for one more second that he's got the Atlantis—that he's got me—on the run, I look him straight in the eye and say, “No.”

It takes a moment for the word to register, for the complacent and avaricious look to fade from his eyes and confusion to take its place. “I do not understand.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, as I thought no was fairly self-explanatory.”

He looks like a fish, his mouth opening and shutting like a guppy's as he gapes at me. Then he's barking at the girls in Russian and they're jumping up from the couch, running back into the bedroom and slamming the door behind them. Not that that's exactly a shock. Ego is always the place to hit guys like this.

“I assume you are joking,” he tells me after the sound of the door slamming fades.

“You assume incorrectly. But since you seem to be having trouble understanding me, let me spell things out for you. No to the extra week. No to the raise at the tables. No to the comped visits to the stores and spa for your `girls.' And definitely no to firing the cocktail waitress, whose name is Aria, by the way, for doing what any number of my employees should have done. Does that make my position on this situation clear?”

Rubinov's face is bright red by now and it's only basic human biology that is keeping steam from coming out of his ears. “You think this is a game?” he demands. “You think you can fuck with me on this? I'll destroy this casino.”

“You're welcome to try,” I tell him. “I don't think you'll get very far—I saw the film of what was happening when my waitress hit you. She was very definitely trying to stop an assault that was in progress.”

“That's ridiculous—”

“It's not. I wish it was, because the idea of anyone treating a woman like that anywhere, but especially in my casino, infuriates me. But it's not ridiculous. And you know what else isn't ridiculous? The fact that when I had my chief of security call a few other casinos, he found out that this isn't the first time you've been mixed up in something like this. In fact, you're already banned from the Bellagio, New York–New York and the Venetian for incidents very similar to what happened here last night.”

I push to my feet, give him a look that tells him I'm not dicking around, that I'm in control of this situation and have been from the beginning. “So, to be sure that there is no misunderst​anding about what's going to happen, let me spell it out for you. You're going to pack up your bags and your girls, and you're going to get out of my hotel. Today. If you leave in the next hour, you won't be charged for the four days you've already spent in this suite and the four million dollars you currently owe the casino will be forgiven.

“If you choose not to accept what I'm offering you, then I will have you removed and you will be billed for every penny you've spent in this hotel in the last four days. Now, it's your choice which way you want to go, but I strongly suggest you take the first option.”

I turn away then, very deliberately giving him my back even though I know it's a risk. Still, for guys like this, the humiliation of being ignored, of being dismissed, is about a million times worse than having a punch thrown at them. Which is why I can't resist showing him just how unimportant I think he is. About as unimportant as he feels Aria and that woman last night are. As unimportant as all the girls—and boys—he's built his empire on.

He's cursing in Russian, a bunch of words I don't understand. But I don't need to understand them to figure out that he's gotten my message.

“You aren't going to get away with this,” he tells me, his accent suddenly ten times stronger than it was five minutes ago. “Don't you know who I am?”

I do look at him then. I can't resist. But I make sure my stare is flat and unimpressed as it rakes over him from the top of his half-bald ponytailed head to the tips of his bare feet. “I know exactly who you are,” I tell him after a minute, making sure he can see precisely how unimpressed I am by who, and what, he is. “It's why I never want to see you anywhere near my hotel again.”

With his curses ringing in my ears like music—it's early but still I can consider my day complete now that I've ruined his day so absolutely—I let myself out of the suite.

“One hour,” I remind him before closing the door behind me. Somehow I don't think it will take that long.

“I'll be over later, Lucy. I have a few errands to take care of first,” I tell my sister as I climb out of my car and start the long trek toward the Atlantis, through the hotel's employee parking lot.

“Do you promise?” she demands. “Because Mom has gone crazy and won't even let me get out of bed. I'm losing my mind here.”

“She's not crazy. She's just…overp​rotective. You did have major surgery less than a week ago.”

“And I survived it just fine!” Lucy harrumphs. “Just like I've survived all the other ones. But we all know it hasn't fixed anything, that it's just prolonging the inevitable. And I don't want to spend the rest of my inevitable lying around in bed when I could be doing things!”

It's a punch in my gut to hear her talk about her own death so flippantly. There's a part of me that knows it's good that she isn't in denial, that she's fighting this damn disease with everything she's got. That she's as healthy as anyone with a severe case of brittle bone disease can be. But there's another part—the part that keeps me in Vegas even when I want to be far, far away—that gets ripped open just a little more every time she talks about it. Every time I have to face the fact that my little sister won't be around forever. That she might not even be around for ten more years.

“I know, I know,” I soothe, glancing at my watch as I all but speed-walk across the parking lot. It's almost two, damn it, which means if I want to get over to the house to see Lucy before my father gets home, I need to hustle. I should have come first thing to pick up my damn paycheck, but I spent the morning online, looking at want ads and trying to find another job.

Unfortunately, it's summer and most of the jobs I'm qualified for—even if I wasn't keeping my Vassar degree in philosophy under wraps along with my real last name—have already been taken by college students wanting to spend their summer vacations partying in Vegas.

All of which means I'm pretty much screwed, at least if I don't want to go running back to Daddy for help. Which I absolutely refuse to do.

I have a little money saved, not much, but enough to last six weeks without getting paid. Two months if I cut out my weekly therapy sessions—which I really don't want to do. But considering the alternativ​e—going home with my tail tucked between my legs—a few weeks without seeing Dr. Collins is a small price to pay.

It's one hundred and twelve today and I'm sweating by the time I reach the casino/hotel and I pause for a moment, right inside the doors, to soak up the air-conditioning and say good-bye to my sister.

Then I wind my way through the casino with its blinking lights and ringing slot machine bells, heading for accounting to pick up my check. By my calculations, it should be about forty-eight hours' worth—a full week before my five days off—and then a full day yesterday. Which sounds like it should be a decent amount, but really isn't when you think about how long this paycheck has to last me since there won't be any more tips until I find another job.

I figure it will be a relatively quick procedure—I've been fired, after all. It's not like that requires an exit interview. But when I get to accounting, they send me over to human resources and when I get to HR, they send me upstairs to Mr. Caine's office.

Which totally pisses me off. I mean, come on. Yes, I hit a high roller but the jerk totally had it coming. Plus, I've already been fired—what the hell else does the old man want to do to me?

I'm tempted to duck out, to say to hell with the whole thing. But I need that paycheck—it's the only thing standing between me and asking my father for money—and I'd rather hook on the Strip than ask him for a cent. Not because he wouldn't give it to me, but because he would. The only problem is it would come with about a million strings attached to it and I am so done with that. It took me twenty-four years to cut those damn strings and gain control over my own life and when I did, it was messy as hell. No way am I voluntarily tying myself back up in them.

My stomach is roiling a little by the time I get to Mr. Caine's office on the thirtieth floor. Not because I'm nervous about meeting with the big boss—I don't get nervous like that anymore—but because I'm afraid of what he's going to say. This is Vegas and these guys have all the power. If he doesn't want to pay me because the high roller has suddenly decided to sue or something, there's nothing I'm going to be able to do about it. Not without an attorney that I can't afford anyway. And not when I'm the one who's so clearly in the wrong.

Not that I'm about to admit that to him or anyone else. No, I need that damn paycheck and I'm not walking out of here without it.

When I get to his office, I check in with his secretary—an older woman with short hair and a sour expression that reminds me of the nuns at Our Lady of Lourdes, the all-girls Catholic school I attended all the way through my senior year in high school. She tells me to take a seat, but I ignore her. Instead, I wander over to the window and look out at the Strip far below me. From here it looks almost magical—the dirt and porn pamphlets and desperation are a million miles away.

I can't help remembering a time when they were always a million miles away, a time when the glitter and the glam was all I knew of Las Vegas.

But that was a long time ago and there's no use looking backward. Or at least, that's my philosophy and I'm sticking to it. As soon as I can get this damn paycheck and be on my way.

I brace myself for a long wait—I can't believe a fired cocktail waitress is exactly high priority to Richard Caine—but barely a couple minutes pass before the nun in civilian clothing tells me to go in.

I head to the door leading to the office's inner sanctum, but before I can so much as touch the knob, it swings open. And reveals a tall, well-built man with the broadest shoulders I've ever seen. A man who is very definitely not seventy-year-old Mr. Caine is standing there.

Our eyes meet as I cross the threshold, our bodies brushing in the narrow doorway. And for long seconds I can't think, can't breathe. Can't do anything but stare as my carefully constructed don't-give-a-shit attitude comes crashing down around my ears.

I don't want him to see it, can't let him see it, so I look him in the face, straight in the eyes, just like my mother taught me. But this time, it doesn't work. This time all it does is make me shakier. Not because he's a letch like that Russian bastard from last night, but because he isn't.

I blink, try to focus, but all I can see are his green eyes. Lush, verdant and filled with a darkness that seems to echo the one inside of me. It's a darkness I've worked hard to ignore, a darkness I've spent so much time trying to pretend isn't there.

The fact that I can so readily see it reflected in him is terrifying. I should be looking away, pulling away.
Running
away. But instead I just stand there for several long, quiet seconds. Spellbound. Captivated.
Enthralled.

I don't move. I don't blink. Hell, I'm not sure I even breathe. It's only the wild galloping of my heart that proves to me I'm still alive.

There's a small part of my brain—the only part that's still functioning, it seems—that is horrified by my fascination with this man. It's the same part that is screaming at me to walk away, to get out now while I still have a modicum of control and to hell with the forty-eight hours of pay that they owe me.

And still I don't move. Still I stand there in that doorway, my breasts only an inch or two from his chest, my face much too close to his for comfort. And I watch him as he watches me.

But then something shifts in those gorgeous green eyes of his, something opens, and for a moment—just a moment—I can see as deeply into him as I suddenly fear he can see into me.

It's the scariest thing about this whole damn encounter, the idea that he can see with a glance what I've worked so hard to cover up. Just the idea of it snaps me out of the weird fugue state I'm inhabiting and straight back into my fucked up present.

“Excuse me,” I say, bowing my back and pressing my spine against the doorway to ensure that I don't touch him again. “I'm here to see Mr. Caine.”

“I am Mr. Caine.”

The blatant lie helps me get myself a little more under control. Narrowing my eyes at him, I inch my way back out of the doorway, sliding into the reception area. “I've seen Mr. Caine and you look nothing like him. Not to mention, you're about fifty years too young to pass for the guy who runs this place.”

He smiles then, and just that easily he goes from dark and good-looking to absolutely gorgeous, so gorgeous that if I hadn't felt the heat of his body against my own, I wouldn't believe that he was real. Wouldn't believe that he was anything but a god of Atlantis stepping out of one of the paintings in the art gallery located twenty stories below us.

But he is real, and that smile makes the most of his sharp cheekbones and full lips and suddenly my fingers itch to tangle themselves in the wild black hair that frames his fallen angel face. It's not a feeling I normally have—not a reaction I normally have—and it makes me nervous in a way few things ever do.

“People say I look like my mother. And I'm actually forty years younger than my father, but thanks for the compliment.”

“You're Richard Caine's son.” I have a hard time believing that considering I haven't heard anything about him being back. It seems like an awfully big secret to keep, and a totally unnecessary one.

“I am. Sebastian Caine. My father's been ill, so I came in last week to take over some of his duties,” he explains, answering the question I didn't ask.

But that explains why I didn't know he was back—I was off all last week, hanging with Lucy in the hospital when the gossip would have been at its most rampant.

“Please,” he says, stepping out of the doorway and gesturing toward his desk. “Come into my office.”

Says the spider to the fly. Except that had something to do with a parlor, didn't it? Still as he waits patiently, watching me with those laser green eyes of his, I can't help but see the parallels. There's a part of me—that part in charge of self-preservati​on—that wants to run as far and as fast as I can from this man, this office, this moment. But I've already run once. I promised myself then that I wouldn't do it again and I don't plan on breaking that promise. Especially not over something as ridiculous as a little sexual attraction.

And so I do the only thing I can do—I step into his office. And pray I'm not letting pride get in the way of common sense.

But I've barely made it past the threshold when my heel catches in the thick shag carpet and I pitch forward, my balance completely gone. Figuring I'm done for, I stick my hands out in front of me, brace myself for the fall. But it never comes. Instead, a strong arm winds itself around my waist, pulls me back sharply.

Just that easily I'm upright again, but I'm also right back where I started—pr​essed against Sebastian Caine's long, lithe, lethal body. Only this time it's not a little brush of chest to chest, hand to hand. No, it's full-on body contact—my back to his front—and I'm not sure if I'm startled or aroused by how good he feels.

Maybe both.

At least that's the excuse I'm giving myself about why I don't immediately leap away. Why I stay there, pressed against him—sheltered by him—for far longer than I should.

Not that he seems in any hurry to let me go. No, his hand is curved around my hip, his thumb stroking my waist. My nerve endings spark at his touch, heat sizzling through me with every back and forth brush of his thumb.

“Are you all right?” His voice is low, primal, with just enough gravel in it to send shivers down my spine. It's a strange, new feeling, one that calls to mind tangled sheets and long, sweat-drenched nights. With him.

He's intense, powerful, and so darkly sexual that I find myself reacting physically to him. To the authority he exudes simply by breathing. My pulse speeds up, my nipples tighten, and my breath comes in short, harsh pants that I desperately try—and fail—to control.

“I—I'm okay,” I tell him finally, my voice much shakier than I'd like it to be.

I feel him nod, his chin brushing the top of my head as he uncurls his arm slowly—almost reluctantl​y—from around me.

“Why don't you have a seat,” he tells me, gesturing to the two chairs in front of his desk.

It's the reminder I need to shock my brain back into focus. Finally. Sticking my chin in the air, I make sure I sound firm—or as firm as any woman can after she's just been caught, held and caressed by her boss's boss's boss's boss. “I don't think that will be necessary. I'm just here to pick up my paycheck.”

He lifts his brows then, a quick up and down motion that makes my belly flutter. “Sit down, Aria.” He sounds accommodating but at the same time, I know an order when I hear one. I want to object on general principle—the woman I am now doesn't follow orders well at all, but I need that money. And a not terrible evaluation. Which is why I bend my knees and sink slowly, painfully into the chair.

He closes the door and I expect him to circle his desk, to sit in the huge, imposing chair that faces the one I'm currently sitting in. But instead, he drops down onto the chair next to me before reaching into his pocket and handing me an envelope.

“I believe this is what you came for.”

I nod without bothering to open it. Instead, I slide it into my purse and move to stand. His hand flashes out, rests gently on my arm as he applies just enough pressure to keep me in my seat.

Heat rushes through me from the contact, my nipples peaking despite my determination to keep this professional. He smiles then, a dark curving of his lips that sends shivers of electricity through me. That makes my body tremble and my breathing erratic.