by Harley Slate
Table of Contents
Winner
Copyright & Legal
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
About the Author
Winner
A Lesbian Vegas Romance
by
Harley Slate
FORCED TO PUT HER FBI training on hold, Lana Jones finds herself working eye in the sky for the least glittering casino in Vegas. Running down slot machine scammers is hardly the pot of gold at the end of her rainbow.
Mel Lysander is a cut above the usual crop of shady characters that pop up in Lana's third-rate clip joint. But the seductive redhead doesn't seem to comprehend the first law of Vegas: The house always wins.
Whatever Mel's scam is, Lana's going to figure it out. And she's going to bring her down.
An enemies-to-lovers Vegas romance with a twist.
Copyright & Legal
All Rights Reserved © 2019
Except for brief passages quoted for reviews and/or recommendations in magazine, radio, or blog posts, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. A few scenes have been adapted with paid permission from a much shorter work by a fellow author and editor.
While Harley appreciates your enthusiasm for her work, please don't post this book on free, sharing, swapping, or pirate sites, as such activities can cause official retailers to stop offering her work.
This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to anyone, any time, or any place is not intended and is merely coincidental. The cover models appear for illustration purposes only and have no relationship to any events in this story. Brief mentions of real persons, places, or products are used fictitiously and in accordance with fair use. All trademarks remain the properties of their owners.
Prologue
A driving instrumental beat emerged from hidden speakers. Progressive house or maybe tech house, Lana wasn't sure. Did it matter what label you slapped on the music? All that mattered was the feeling.
And this feeling...oh, yes, this feeling...
Lana closed her eyes to focus. Her knees curled toward her ears.
Velvet lips descended slowly down her belly, planting kisses all along the way. The first few touches were feather-light. A testing.
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
Those magic lips sucked harder. The agile tongue swept into the folds, exploring here and there. Soon, the kisses grew more urgent, as if that hungry mouth was addicted to the sweet cream seeping from Lana's core. It felt as if this woman was literally sucking the orgasm out of Lana.
It had been so long. Too long.
How had Lana learned to live without this? How had she persuaded herself to do without lifting her eager pelvis to meet an equally eager face? Already, she was lifting up and up again.
Pleasure began to blur into pleasure, climax into climax. If tongues and lips grew tired, fingers and hands stepped in. If trembling hands became too clumsy, a strategic knee or thigh could find a place to press...
Soon the music was forgotten in the blur of pleasure. The only sounds that registered were moans and ragged gasps for breath.
Those lips. Those fingers. The sudden sense of utter peace.
A deceptive peace.
How could it feel so right to drift off to sleep in this woman's warm embrace?
Those warm arms, those skilled lips, those easy hips all belonged to a criminal. Lana shouldn't be here. Soon, she would have to walk away.
Chapter One
Like everybody else in this ridiculous century, Lana Jones always saw a hot stranger for the first time from behind a screen. And this redhead wasn't just smoke, she was the whole five-alarm blaze.
“That's money on two legs.”
The raspy croak in Lana's headpiece came from the casino's head of security. Salvatore Durrell was a salon-tanned salt-and-pepper fiftysomething who claimed he'd piloted somebody else's Mercedes two-seater from Jersey to Vegas thirty years ago. Lana wouldn't have asked, but he insisted on telling the tale of his larcenous youth himself. If he really had a record, he wouldn't have a gaming license, but maybe there was a grain of truth in there somewhere. After all, he was still working in this shithole instead of climbing the ladder on the Strip.
The shithole in question was the Dragonhoarde Casino, which featured a vague fairy tale theme and an unfashionable location far out in north Vegas. Whenever Lana had the misfortune of running into her old high school buddies― something that happened less and less now that she was twenty-seven― one and all they had the same comment about her employer. “No kidding. I thought they blew up that place twenty years ago.”
“You're thinking about a different dragon,” Lana always replied.
Durrell let out a good old-fashioned wolf whistle. Ugh. The shrill sound echoed in her headset, but you couldn't inform your Vegas boss he was acting like a creeper. Besides, it wasn't all bad that he treated her like one of the boys. She turned her attention to the monitor, where the thigh-high cut of the red dress under the hottie's red jacket demanded closer inspection. The woman was definitely worth a second look.
Hell, a third, fourth, and fifth look too.
“Money, money, money.” Durrell couldn't sing, but she caught the earworm anyway. The casino's playlist was filled with ancient music meant to appeal to its mostly ancient clientele.
Lana liked naked legs as much as the next guy, but hell. They were here to do a job. She studied the expensive redhead with her tumble of movie-star curls. The natural look was never natural, and skin that creamy never came for free, especially in a party town. This lady put in her time at the spa.
Durrell kept tracking the progress of Red's long bare legs through the casino. Never shy or subtle, he made obvious adjustments to various monitors to zoom in on the flex of calf and ankle. “Hey,” he'd said, the first time she caught him doing it. “Legit technique, Jones. You can disguise a lot of things, but you can't disguise your gait.”
In theory, he was right, but she doubted he was getting any information about the mystery woman's intentions from the dip and sway of her tight butt.
It was something of a surprise, Durrell being here today. He usually put in his command appearance during the night shift. After all, in the casino business, that's where the action was. Tuesday morning, not so much, especially in the ass-end of north Vegas. A lot of slow weekdays, the biggest hustle was some grandma pushing an expired buffet coupon. He wasn't going to pick up the general manager's job busting grandma.
“Agree she seems to be out of place,” Lana said. “A real chess piece on a checkers board.” She zoomed in to focus on the striking green eyes, then triggered the facial recognition program.
If Red had prior experience at pulling casino scams, she'd be in the records, and Lana figured her to have plenty. Nobody moved like that the first time she made a play. Even the coolest cucumber has nerves. Confidence comes from experience, and experience has a learning curve.
Sometimes scammers tested their new techniques in older places where they figured the surveillance technology and training wa
sn't up to date. It wasn't impossible that Red represented a fresh new face. But she seemed too sure of herself for that.
“That fucking jacket's fifty-two hundred dollars on the hoof.” Durrell had zoomed in too. “Saw it when I was shopping with my girlfriend the other day.” His girlfriends were always twenty years younger, and they always expected a visit to Crystals or the Forum Shoppes. Playing sugar daddy didn't come cheap.
Lana hadn't taken much note of the jacket before. After all, every casino regular wore a jacket, even if it was a hundred and twenty outside, which it probably would be later this fine August day. Just walking from valet parking through the front door was like walking into a meat locker. If people weren't shivering, they didn't think the place had the cash to pay off a big win.
Still...
Italian kidskin jackets the color of freshly spilled blood weren't often seen in the Dragonhoarde. Amend that. They were never seen in the Dragonhoarde.
Her fingers itched with the desire to stroke the luxury leather. It would feel as expensive as it looked. Soft as butter. Softer.
And yet it still wouldn't be quite as soft as that creamy, creamy skin.
Now is not the time. Focus. What's she looking for? Is she meeting someone? What's the play?
The red jacket meant she wasn't afraid of turning heads, wasn't afraid of being spotted from the sky. Whatever the game was, she wanted people looking at her.
“Escort?” Durrell asked. “Con artist scouting for a soft-headed old fool?” Despite the urban legends, prostitution was illegal in Clark County and always had been. You had to go out even farther from Vegas than this outpost to find the legal brothels. It didn't stop girls from working within the County limits, though. After all, that's where ninety-nine percent of the money was.
“Maybe,” Lana said. “But why here? Why not the Strip?” As soon as she said it, one reason sprung to mind. Maybe there was a BOLO circulating among the other casinos. Dragonhoarde didn't always make timely payments to their Be On the Look Out service. Maybe everybody already had the bad girl's picture except them.
Not a problem. If she's got an arrest record, the facial recognition program will give us the name.
Software didn't care about the legal niceties of “innocent until proven guilty.” If you'd ever been questioned, detained, or arrested in a casino, your picture was supposed to be in the database.
Lana glanced at the monitor in question, but the search wheel was still spinning.
Durrell, getting twitchy, phoned down to somebody on the floor. A few minutes later, an attractive male in his late twenties artfully arranged to bump into the redhead. Well, maybe it wasn't so artful, considering the place wasn't exactly packing them in. The various morning shuttles had already dropped off their loads, but they were light on a Tuesday near the end of the month. Most people's pensions and social security checks had already been gobbled by the machines.
Privacy law is a crazy thing. You could video anything you wanted outside the public restrooms, but you couldn't grab audio. Lana's lip-reading skills were still in an early stage of development. Didn't matter this time. A blind man could decipher that eye roll. Red's reaction was a straight-up nope.
Dragonhoarde's main clientele, females over sixty, loved nothing better than being accidentally-on-purpose bumped into by the hot young host. Red, by contrast, didn't even pretend to be interested.
“Ah, man.” Durrell walked up behind Lana to study the bank of monitors from her point of view. Thirty-seven of them showed the redhead's face, body, and stride from every possible angle, and every damn one of them was her good side. “All the hot ones are gay.”
“I think it's girls who are supposed to say that,” Lana said.
Durrell snorted.
The unprosperous Dragonhoarde didn't need more than one daytime host to write buffet freebies for Grandma. There was no hot girl on the floor to send in. Lana turned in her seat to look at her boss. “I'd be happy to go down and bump into the lady myself.”
Working upstairs, jacket off and draped over the back of her chair, she was dressed in a band tee-shirt and soft, faded jeans. She was a little young to fit in with the standard clientele, but so was the redhead. Lana wasn't the movie-star type, but people said she was striking.
Five feet eight. Brown and brown. Lean, hard muscles toned both with weight training and regular Muay Thai workouts. The brown hair wasn't quite buzzed, but it was short enough to make a frame for clean, makeup-free eyes.
Hell, it could work. All she would have to do is take off the gaming badge.
Chapter Two
“Maybe,” Durrell said. “I'll think about it.”
Maybe means no. Lana turned back around in her chair. The facial recognition wheel spinner finally stopped spinning.
NO MATCH.
“She's not in the system.” Not that she needed to tell him, since he was still breathing down her neck.
“So.” He reached over Lana to zoom in once again on the silken length of the mystery woman's mostly bare legs. “She hasn't drawn anybody's attention before. But now she's going for it. Why? To provide a distraction?”
Lana certainly felt distracted.
“Maybe it's all right,” he said. “We get class shambling into this old folk's home every once in a while.”
“The hell we do. Not since I've been working here.”
They were a long way from the Strip. The Dragonhoarde was a senior-oriented local's place that attracted people who still played bingo and could appreciate a buffet heavy on potato salad that included those bits of fake bacon. Not because they were vegan, but because bacon made out of soy instead of pigs was cheaper. The dessert offerings were less crème brulee and more a rainbow selection of Jello in all its infinite colors. There was a senior discount, as well as the ever-popular early bird two-for-one. Their business arrived on shuttles that performed a daily circuit between the Dragonhoarde and the nursing home.
That Italian jacket belonged in a place with a chef's tasting menu complete with a different wine for every course. Shuttle buses and two-for-one buffets wouldn't even be a footnote in their business plan.
“We need to get some ID,” she said. “Come on, let me go down. Chat her up.”
“This ain't the FBI, and we don't need no stinking badges.” His idea of a joke. “Seriously, Jones. Your job isn't playing undercover agent. We've got video, and she's clean on the facial. I don't know what more we need until she actually puts down a bet.”
“A name is what we need. I could get a name.”
“You'd get a hookup name. Four times out of five.”
“Nine times out of ten.” She hated that he was right, especially after that little dig about the FBI. When a place hires an employee who's a little bit too good for them, they always know they're getting a sad story. Lana didn't particularly enjoy hers. She would have made a great special agent.
Too late now.
She'd missed her chance.
Yeah, she'd missed her chance at a lot of things. And yet her mind was still turning things over, still plotting out ways she could make her sad story turn out all right.
How about this one? “Doesn't she look a little too young to you?”
To judge from the length of time he hesitated, Durrell almost went for it. Floor managers didn't like it when security did anything to slow down players getting into the game. Still, it was security's job to know who the hell was waltzing into their place. A common tactic was to pretend to believe the target was under twenty-one, forcing them to produce ID or else leave.
Lana would keep on the badge for that. She'd head down to the floor, engage the woman, swipe her license to see if it was legit. Easy as apple pie.
Her blood thrilled at the thought of meeting the redhead face to face. Of standing in her aura. She'd smell expensive. That was a given. The scent underneath the expensive designer perfume... what would that be like? A girl could dream.
But he ultimately shook his head. “She'll think you're hi
tting on her. Trying to engage her, trying to get her name...” He let the rest of the sentence trail off. If Red had been in Vegas for more than half an hour, she'd already encountered the tactic. Plenty of bored security guards stopped the pretty girls to check their ID. It was a perk of the job, talking to pretty girls.
Durrell was right twice in ten minutes. Annoying.
“I don't want to piss her off right this minute if she is legit. Hell, maybe she's somebody's grand-kid.” Amazing. He was already talking himself out of his first impression.
But, hell, maybe Red was somebody's grand-kid. The glossy curls bounced on shapely shoulders as she turned in the direction of one of their regulars.
Delia Grant, eighty-seven, clomped through the place at the speed of snail in her orthopedic shoes. No jacket for her. Instead, she wore a hand-knitted cardigan. Not the arty/expensive kind of hand-knitted that came from doughty European villagers who raised their own sheep. The kind that came from refusing to acknowledge the effects of time and arthritis. Mrs. Grant had knitted the cardigan herself, and it showed in every imperfect stitch.
The redhead offered her arm to Mrs. Grant. Matching her natural long-legged stride to the older woman's pace looked painful. And yet Red smiled as she escorted the older woman to the poker station. Good manners, or did they have a prior relationship? Hard to tell from here. If only Lana could hear what they were saying.
She regretted her lack of lip-reading skills more acutely now.
Red stuck around until a seat opened for Grant at the only one/two limit game running at this hour― a house game populated almost entirely by people over seventy. Everybody there would eventually lose every penny to the rake. But nobody cared since the buy-in was twenty bucks.
Lana finally shook her head. “If she's looking for a sugar daddy or a hustle, she has a weird way of showing it. There's no money to get from that crowd.”
Durrell's shoulders sagged. He was as bored in this job as Lana, and it didn't look like they were going to see any action today. “Grand-daughter.” A guess, but not a bad one.