Hard Way (28 page)

From the corner of the table, a woman with a pole chattered in a strange gaming language that flowed by Sunny like a confusing waterfall. Nearly a dozen people circled in wait, including a man in a giant cowboy hat who tossed two dice down the middle.

Deliberately, she leaned against Dash. He was so solid underneath tonight’s extra layer of polish. “This is a stupid game,” she said, looking back and up.

His hawkish expression, however, was intent and calculating. Anything but stupid.

“Probably,” was his only concession.

He scooped an arm around her waist and held her close. Even with his chin against her cheek, he watched the play at the table with his usual eagle-eyed control. She knew it for sure when he leaned over and stacked chips on a big section labeled PASS.

She frowned. “It’s complicated.”

“It is.” She felt him smile against her skin. “That’s part of the point. It’s a lot like pinball. Kind of rigged. The odds are in the house’s favor. There’s no real way to win. You have to stay in control and know when to walk away.”

She washed over with a chill. Was that what this was about? This date? A formal means of walking away? He was the other half of this marriage. He could just as easily make the decision she’d been wrestling with for weeks.

She tightened her hands on Dash’s wrist. She didn’t like that. A bitter pill after so much goodness—weeks of little moments that added up to more than hopelessness, despite the surprises and arguments.

She didn’t want Dash to walk away from her. Not now. Maybe not ever.

Yet she’d been the one to say it first.

Her tongue was like sandpaper when she tried to wet her lips. Her voice came out whispery. “Is it time to walk away?”

He stilled in a way that went down to her soul. His jaw firmed and his fingers dug into her stomach. Shifting his grip, he circled her waist and grasped her opposite hip. The move yanked her to his unyielding body.

“No. No, it’s not.” His words ground out one by one.

Sunny refused to shake apart. She
could
not shake apart, because of his impossible hold on her emotions and the reassuring strength of his body.

“It’s just craps?”

“It’s just craps, Sunny.” A muscle twitched in his tight jaw.

“Okay. Good.” She took a deep breath. “Then win us some money.”

“Will do.” Picking up the rest of their chips, forty dollars’ worth, he pushed them toward the uniformed woman with the stick. “Six the hard way, please.”

She nodded and shifted the chips table with a deft move. “Your choice, sir.”

“Why the one that pays ten to one?” Sunny asked. “If we’re sticking it out, why not go for thirty to one?”

He kissed her again, this time below her ear. The sensitive skin sucked up every bit of feeling. She shivered and her breasts felt full and heavy.

“Compromise,” he whispered.

Sunny shivered and was thankful that Dash couldn’t see the way tears welled in her eyes. They were happy tears. The night had become a never-ending refrain.
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

He twisted so that she could catch his cheeky grin. “Besides, we always like things the hard way.”

She laughed.

“That has to be the first time you’ve laughed at one of my puns.”

Magnetic blue eyes held her enthralled, which meant she missed when the cowboy threw the dice. He let out a whoop, so he must have got what he wanted.

Sunny turned and looked at the numbers. Two sets of three dots turned up to the ceiling. Her heart tumbled. “No way! We won? How much is that?”

“Forty-dollar bet, means the casino pays out nine-to-one. We won three hundred and sixty bucks on a single roll.”

“That’s impossible. Fucking impossible.”

Dash laughed as the dealer pushed stacks of chips toward them. “It most certainly is not impossible. It’s just our luck.”

She shook her head. “We haven’t had much luck lately.”

“It seems like that’s changing.” He kissed her. Fast, hard, so that her senses were completely overwhelmed. Never mind the lights and the noise and the crowd—and never mind the stack of chips at her hip. There was only his kiss. “But like I said, when you hit big, it’s sure as hell time to take the money and run.”

“Then let’s get out of here.”

Thirty minutes later, they were standing outside the casino with a lot more cash in Dash’s wallet. Sunny felt absolutely giddy. She rocked up on her toes.

He looped his fingers with hers. “So, money gets you this happy?”

“Free money does,” she said with a laugh. “Doesn’t it for everyone?”

He was smiling down at her, but he wasn’t the same sort of happy. More like he was happy
at
her. Because she was?

It felt damned good. She beamed back at him. “Now what? Though you won’t be able to convince me you planned that one. That was pure odds.”

“This.” He waved a hand over the street before them. “We’re going to watch the light show. Remember back home? That time we saw the aurora borealis when we were first dating. We drove out past the lights of Portland and settled in for the night. This was as close as I could manage from here.”

“Are you serious?”

“Completely.”

She looked out across Fremont Street. A digital canopy stretched over the entire expanse for several blocks. Asphalt had been replaced with concrete patterned in giant swirls. People milled through the space, walking from casinos to buffets, until the PA system kicked on and music started. Then most froze in their tracks and looked up. Classic rock split the air. The giant LCD screen lit up with swirling colors and images in time to the music. A red biplane seemed to fly through the screen.

Sunny laughed. “Man, that’s pretty awesome. I can’t believe we haven’t been down here before. Makes the Strip seem too…tall. Dissipates all the light.”

“Come on.” He tugged her by the hand into the middle of the street. “I’m guessing there’s a better way to watch this. More like how we did for the aurora borealis.”

“Flat on our backs? No way. Your suit! My dress.”

“Do it.” He crouched down, holding out one hand. He looked so damn graceful, though he knelt in the middle of a street. “Come down here with me, Sunita Christiansen.”

She laughed helplessly. “We’ll be a spectacle. My skirt is too short.”

“Are you wearing panties?” He wiggled his eyebrows.

“Yes.”

“Not that it’d matter.”

“Oh, fine.” She accepted his help so she could join him without flashing those panties to several hundred people. “Fine, fine.”

Laughing the entire time, she lay down on the warm concrete. She’d be filthy. They probably looked ridiculous. But when she looked up—her vision was filled with the amazing spectacle of lights. Nowhere, not even at her periphery, was devoid of splashing color.

Her lips parted on words that were completely inadequate. “It’s beautiful.”

Liam’s fingers twined with hers. His wedding ring was warm from his body. “It is.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The night was turning out as perfectly as Dash had hoped, with everything according to the plans he’d made. The most erotic and daring were yet to come. That’s why he stayed in the middle of Fremont Street, lying next to Sunny, holding her hand. It was a perfect moment. No matter what happened, they would have this for the rest of their lives. Maybe they would look back with nostalgia or pain or regret or anger, but they would always look back. If they managed the sort of luck he’d found at the craps table, they would think of this glittering, gaudy evening as a breathtaking swirl of light in the middle of a dark storm—a light to signal their new beginning.

Someone stepped on his free hand. Dash snapped out of his reverie and shook the pain out of his fingers. Sunny was chuckling, hiding her smile by biting her lower lip.

“What?”

She let the laugh free. “Serves you right!”

Dash thunked his head back onto the swirls of concrete and closed his eyes, soaking up the music of her laughter. Yet every moment of connection was still clouded by uncertainty. If she’d said anything…he could breathe again.

I made a mistake and I want to give it a shot.

We’ve both been wrong but we can get past this.

I don’t know what’s going on either.

Anything.

He missed his partner. He missed his other half, even as he recognized that he’d been missing her by slow degrees for years. If he had a partner in admitting their marriage was worth repairing, he could’ve looked on those lights and seen the aurora borealis again, when they’d been hopeful and so damn stupid. They’d trusted that life wouldn’t lead them to such a beautiful, dangerous precipice.

“I have a hotel room reserved,” he said hoarsely.

Her laughter had cooled. “I thought you might.”

“Do you want to stay with me?”

“We could sleep at home.”

“We could fuck at home too. We could make love. We could fight.” He turned his head so that they looked at one another beneath a canopy of light. Colors brushed her cheeks in a fluid rainbow. “But we could do all that in a hotel.”

“Why?”

“Cuz the maids would pick up after us?”

Sunny laughed again. “Then take me to your den of sin.”

He stood and pulled her up from the street. For entirely selfish reasons, he helped brush grit off her silk dress. “You said something about sleeping.”

“You said something about fighting and fucking.”

With pain he hadn’t expected, especially considering what he planned, he cupped her face with both hands. “Does that mean you’re passing on making love?”

Her smile appeared as sad as he felt, even beneath all the cotton-candy happy they’d spun. “We’re coiled too tightly for that.”

“Then let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later, they’d wound through the crowd and into the Golden Nugget. Sunny only raised her brows when he fished a keycard out of his wallet. “You’re all very Boy Scout about this.”

“You should be thankful,” he said with a smile that felt uneven. Half himself yet gathering intense focus. “I’m the one who does the planning while you get to lie back and take it.”

“You never want me to lie back and take it.” She stopped in the hallway that led to the room. Faced him. Kissed him softly. Her breath was a sweet benediction against his lips. “Make it good, Liam.”

After keying the lock, he ushered her through the door to the suite and turned on the entryway light. He found himself holding his breath, wanting her to approve. More than that, because of what he had planned, he half-expected to walk into the den of sin Sunny had joked about. Black walls. Racks of exotic apparatus. Accessories that screamed dirty, depraved sex.

He felt that depraved.

Yet he’d only brought four items. They would be more than enough.

Earlier that afternoon, he’d picked up his suit from the tailor and checked into the Golden Nugget. He’d wanted to see what he would have to work with. The room looked like a desert in its best light, all earthen-colored walls and warm-toned colors. The curtains were dark red. A built-in bar/vanity combo lined one wall. An L-shaped leather couch faced a TV in the corner.

The giant king-sized bed drew his attention in the middle of the room. The same sight must’ve affected Sunny because her fingernails dug into the meat of his palms. Christ, he wanted to know what she was thinking. He hoped she was seeing possibilities.

Not that her ideas would matter. There in the hallway, she’d kissed the daytime version of them goodbye. Now he was in charge. Even that prospect gave his cock a twitch of anticipation.

He passed her and opened the black mini-fridge beneath the bar. “Do you want something?”

She stood in the entryway, her breathing pronounced enough to see. Small, perfectly shaped breasts pressed against the blue watercolor silk of the skimpy-as-fuck dress. Sunny managed to make it look classy. How did she do that?

“No, thank you.”

With steady hands he hadn’t expected but was gratified to see, he poured a miniature bottle of liquor into a glass tumbler. He watched her over the rim as he sipped. “You’re already panting.”

“Can’t help it.” She hiked her hands onto her hips. “I know you’re hunting me. You’ve got that edge. You’re going to…”

He grinned. Fucking hell, he needed this. At one point, weeks ago, it had been about the violence, about his need to hurt her because she’d hurt him. Fighting had been easier than losing her. Then it had been about solidifying an unexpected way of connection. The odd turn of their sex life had granted a few weeks to rekindle something softer, sweeter, more lasting.

Tonight felt like a combination of those impulses. He wanted her happy and satisfied, but he also wanted to bend time and space. He wanted to stop time and take it slow. That was impossible. Instead, he planned to steal her ideas and force his own into their place. Shape her. Own her. At least for the night.

“I’m going to what, Sunny?”

Her throat audibly clicked when she swallowed. That he could have such an effect on this woman remained beyond his comprehension, but it was as true as the way she fidgeted with her silk dress. The nervous twitch of one thumb may as well have been a neon sign.