Hot and Bothered (4 page)

But the novelty of having him around would wear off soon enough for her. And, by that time, it'd be the end of the week, the end of his personal obligations, because, even if she needed an out-of-town BG, he didn't travel. Besides, Boomer was going to identify whoever had angrily crossed Rochelle's face out on that poster.

Gideon could last until then.

He extracted his shaving kit from his bag, tossing it on the bed. “Anyway, the saloon ain't dangerous. Not unless someone's looking for trouble.”

“Okay,” she said, tilting her head, checking out his gunpowder spot again. “We've established that no one there gave that mark to you. So how
did
you get it?”

“You gonna write a book about it?”

“If the story's interesting enough.”

It was, but he'd told only two people how he'd gotten the mark—Kat and Boomer. Rochelle wasn't about to be another. “What if I told you it's from a woman who got riled up because I left her high and dry, and then she drew a firearm on me?”

Her eyebrows shot up, and he laughed. Right away, she laughed with him, not missing his innate talent to bullshit his way through life.

“And what if,” she said, firing right back, “I guessed that this ‘woman' probably wasn't the first to use you for target practice?”

“Not the last, either, I'm sure.”

She smiled, and all the kidding died down. He reached into his duffel, continuing to unpack.

“Seriously, Gideon,” she said. “How did you get such a mark there?”

He clutched a pair of sweatpants. She wasn't about to let this go, was she? Then he'd do what he had to do. Lie.

And put the real reason in a box in the back of his mind.

“All right then. I got it on the job, wrestling a firearm away from a client's disgruntled business associate who paid him a surprise visit. He was a lawyer, and his buddy thought he did him wrong. Anyway, during the struggle, the barrel got too close to my face, and when he fired, I got some residue scorched onto me.”

That was close enough to the truth, at any rate.

She didn't gasp like a lot of people would've. She didn't even offer a “wow.”

“I did end up getting a real nice bonus on that job,” he said wryly, “so it was worth it.”

“Why didn't you ever try to get the burn removed?” she asked.

Research.
Was
he about to become a character in a book? “Because it adds character to my face.”

“That's not the reason, and you know it.”

“Okay. Would it make more sense to tell you that I don't give a shit if I'm pretty? Also, women seem to like it. Makes me seem dangerous.”

She grinned, narrowing her eyes like she was reading him, trying to find deeper meaning between all his blurred lines.

Was she learning again that he was more like a pulp novel than a classic?

He could tell she was in that observer mode she'd mentioned, feeding her creative mind.

“You know,” she said, “I never would've expected you to be a bodyguard. A rancher? Yes. But a BG is just so . . . random for you.”

No kidding. But he'd become a bodyguard because of this black mark on him. After he'd gotten it, he'd searched for a way to prevent shit from happening instead of letting it happen, and when the opportunity to be a BG came to him, it'd seemed natural—and cathartic—to take it.

He lied a little less this time. “Well, my dad pounded into my head more than once that I should always have a backup plan. Good thing I did, too, because my parents lost the ranch a few years ago.”

“I was sorry to hear it.” Again, she tucked a wave behind her ear, a girlish habit she'd never gotten rid of. “So this was your backup?”

“Nah, more like happenstance. But it was only after I got out of the military that I started to think of what I'd be doing with the rest of my life. Truth to tell, I thought being a firefighter would be appealing, mostly because . . .”

“They get a lot of tail.”

Yup, she was reading him thoroughly, and she still had that most unaffected way of talking straight.

He tried to keep his smile in check. “One day, though, a limo pulled into Rough and Tumble, and Charles Hightower, accompanied by a BG or three, strolled out and into the saloon.”

“Charles Hightower, the billionaire? Was he slumming?”

“Just like a lot of them slum.” Just like Ben Hughes, who used to hang out at the R&T nightly before he got married. Deserter. “Vegas is full of richies who like to get in touch with the common people every once in a while.” He tossed his sweatpants onto the bed, next to his shaving kit. “Anyway, I got to talking with one of his BGs, and he told me about how he made his own hours as a freelancer and how my military experience would probably make me a more desirable hire after I got the kind of training a bodyguard needs, like learning how to disarm people, anti-ambush procedure, psychology . . . all that. I took martial arts and criminal justice classes, too.”

“But I'll bet all you had to be told was that you were desired, and you were all over the BG thing.”

That wasn't it at all, but he grasped at the explanation, holding on to it, making it the story of his life, at least for her.

Rochelle seemed to sense she'd overreached. But was it because she realized that she'd said something best left to herself or that she'd crossed the personal line they'd been toeing all night? She sighed, backing away from the door.

“Okay then,” she said. “I just wanted to see if you . . .”

“Needed anything.”

A do-over from all those years ago? A chance to show her that he could wipe away the awkward memory of that night in the barn?

A chance for him to lose himself as he buried himself in her?

After a laden pause, she raised her hand in good night, then disappeared from his doorway.

As if Gideon could get any sleep after
that
.

But he still got ready for bed, threw on his sweatpants, then explored the room, every nook and cranny. That didn't chase away any of the restlessness, though, so he thought he'd explore what was in the fridge downstairs, and he wandered into the hallway, passing by Rochelle's closed door.

No light underneath the crack. No gape of her doorway.

No invitation at all.

But he hadn't been expecting one, so he moved on, putting distance—a lot of it—between him and her and managing to avoid Harry downstairs on his way to the kitchen.

He was almost there when he came to the box of books he'd seen in the foyer earlier. He bent down, lifted a copy of
Cherry Red
out, and thumbed through the pages, still thinking of how useful this would be in profiling the creeper. And thinking of how Rochelle had been reading
him
and how he'd love to read her, too.

He brought the book up to his room, took possession of the bed, and started at chapter one. Before he knew it, he was at chapter two.

Why Cherry?
he kept thinking. What had really drawn Rochelle to her?

It wasn't until chapter four that he started to read Rochelle much, much better.

***

“Do you like it, Tommy?”

Cherry stood at the door of her apartment, preening and showing off her new strawberry-blond hairdo for her very best friend in Vegas. True, she'd met Tommy Rhodes only a few days ago while she'd been wandering around the Sahara, hoping to catch Elvis's eye since he was staying there, but it wasn't as if she was a long-timer in the city herself, after having moved here with Jason Vandecamp. Yet the kid with stars in his eyes and the ambition to raise money for producing beach movies in LA had gone broke at the craps tables and left her with a tacky apartment and a thirst to show him that she'd make it without him.

She had been this close to moving back to California so she could find her big break with someone else when . . .

Viva Las Vegas!

She'd only won a role as an extra, but Cherry was twenty-one, tan, long-legged, and determined to make bigger things out of a bit part. She always did.

Tommy looked confused as he stood in the doorway dressed in his light blue collared shirt and tan trousers, his wheat-colored hair slicked back. When Cherry had buddied up to him at the Sahara after seeing that he was a bellboy and probably had the inside scoop on guests, she'd thought he was cute—but in a nonthreatening, handsome lifeguard way.

“Your . . . hair,” he finally said.

“Isn't it fab?” She modeled the new 'do for him some more. “Just like Ann-Margret, right? She went strawberry blond for her role in the movie, so I figured why not me?”

Now Tommy seemed pained to come up with anything good to say as he scanned her new hair. “Why do you want to look like her?”

“I heard from other extras that there's someone on the camera crew who's caught up in Ann-Margret's pretty little web, so he gives her great camera angles and all that.” She primped again. “Any actress with ambition should want to be Ann-Margret—they should want to look like her, act like her, imitate her. She's a force of nature.” Rumor even had it that, at first, Elvis himself hadn't been too happy about the force of nature and her smitten cameraman—and about the fact that Ann-Margret might steal the spotlight in the movie altogether—but that hadn't lasted long.

“What I meant,” Tommy said, “is that Ann-Margret is Ann-Margret and you're you.”

Cherry stopped fluffing around. “Yes, that's the point.”

“What's the point? I'm asking you why you'd want to be anyone but you.”

What a sweetie, but that wasn't what she'd been driving at. “Tommy, I'm not getting anywhere as me. Okay, sure, I was in the background of a pool scene or two when the production was filming at the Flamingo, but no biggie.” She'd been this close to Elvis and Ann-Margret as their characters had flirted and sung to each other around the water, close enough to notice how they looked at each other between takes and murmured things that no one else could hear. And this, even though he had a girlfriend back in Memphis.

But that girlfriend, Priscilla Beaulieu, didn't have a certain actress' va-va-vroom that she'd brought with her from
Bye-Bye Birdie
. Ann-Margret had it, Elvis obviously wanted it, and Cherry was determined to show him she had the right stuff as well.

If she could ever stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Tommy was gazing at her in a different way now, like the artist he'd told her he was when she'd bought him a beer after his bellboy shift that first day. She primped again.

“Definitely not,” he said, shaking his head. “This look is really not working for you. You should make your hair actual blond again, Cherry.”

She didn't even know him well enough to tell him that Cherry Chastain was a stage name. It was just that “Julie Tatum” sounded like such a snooze.

“You don't think Elvis is going to notice?” she asked wistfully.

Tommy stuck his hands in his pockets. “Just because he and Ann-Margret are supposed to be seeing each other doesn't mean he's on the prowl for a girl who looks like her. Besides.” His grin sideswiped his mouth. “Ann-Margret.”

Yes, damn Ann-Margret. Tommy didn't need to tell Cherry again that she was one of a hot-to-trot kind.

Cherry whipped off the wig, tossing it to the side of her door. Tommy's eyes almost popped out of his head while she tousled her long, straight, very blond hair. His male attentions made her feel much better.

Someday she'd go red, but tonight maybe Elvis would be in the mood for something different from what he already had. Maybe platinum blond would do the trick.

“Let's split,” she said, closing the door behind her.

Tommy took a moment to appreciate the cut of her light pink sundress, with the way it squeezed in at her waist, making her figure curvier than ever. She liked having a friend whose gaze lit up at the sight of her. She also liked that he wasn't a talker or interrupter since she frequently had quite a bit to say herself.

Also, he had a bitchin' car—a shiny used Cadillac—and he used it to drive them through the sweltering night to the Sahara. On the radio, the Beach Boys sang about surfin' in the USA and the Angels warned an aggressive suitor that their boyfriend was back.

After they parked, they went inside, where the gaming tables were in full swing. Tommy left her at a bar while he checked in with his pals on staff. They knew where Elvis's room was, and once Tommy came back with the scoop, she would figure out phase two: how to capture Elvis's attention. Cherry knew that if she could just have a chance without the perfect Ann-Margret around, he'd like what he saw. Didn't everyone?

She had drunk a sloe gin fizz and had even duped a blitzed businessman into buying her another when Tommy reappeared.

Turning her back on the businessman, she leaned toward her inside man. “So?”

“The guys on room service told me he's in his room with the Memphis Mafia, watching TV, joking around, hanging out like they usually do.”

The Memphis Mafia was a gang of pals from home that kept Elvis company. They were known as his very own Rat Pack.

Cherry's brain had already started churning. Her heartbeat tapped at her, and she thought she heard it telling her that if she got into that room, her life would change forever.

“Tommy,” she said, “you know what this means.”

“Yeah. That I don't want to get fired because you're going to try to sneak into that room.”

She pressed a hand to her chest. “Who me?”

“Yes, you.” Tommy slicked back his hair, clearly a little nervous about what Cherry might do. “God, you're going to make real trouble for me one day. Why do I even listen to you?”