What the Gambler Risks

by Kristina Knight

  Even a horn-rimmed glasses-wearing, middle-aged woman was unlikely to be a virgin these days. He clicked on the link and began reading.

  Sabrina Smith, the Las Vegas relationship guru, has signed a new publishing deal. She’s agreed to write three more self-help books, but with a twist. Instead of advising women on their romantic entanglements, the “girl power” writer will be tackling the workplace, bringing her “women can have it all” mantra out of the bedroom and into the boardroom.

  Smith’s first two books hit the best-seller lists, giving women a combination of lifestyle and relationship advice geared to improving their personal lives. Her representative says the new books will help women tackle their work relationships, while creating a better balance in their personal and professional lives.

  The article went on about how long the first books were atop the best-seller lists, and the general fandom surrounding her, but the picture accompanying the article caught his attention. The self-help guru wasn’t a middle-aged librarian type, although she did have the glasses for it. She was a blond-haired, green-eyed siren, and she was most definitely not a virgin.

  Sabrina smiled at him from the computer screen, looking prim in a blazer and top, with her hair pulled back in a braid that lay precisely over her shoulder. The glasses, which were probably a prop used to make her appear smarter, only made the image sexier to him. He envisioned her sitting on his bed, one arm of the glasses tucked into her mouth as she ordered him to strip.

  Or, better yet, her dressed up in one of those librarian costumes, complete with the glasses, while he stripped her.

  Either or, really. Maybe both.

  And how interesting was it that the woman who’d walked out of his hotel room, the woman he’d had a one-night stand with, was selling herself as a virgin? She’d had no qualms about going to his room, no qualms about anything until he saw her on the plane yesterday morning. Then, on the plane, it was as if she didn’t want anyone to know they knew one another.

  Jase sat back in his chair, studying the picture and then rereading the article on Sabrina. He clicked through to a few more pieces on her, mostly fluff about book signings and things. He couldn’t find a single image or story about her that wasn’t related to her books, and for a celebrity in Las Vegas, that was saying something. There were no pictures of her living it up at casinos or getting caught out at a strip club. Odd, especially when her base of readers would be hitting those clubs and casinos in their search for the perfect guy.

  He clicked onto another search engine, just to test the results, but came away with many of the same articles.

  Jase checked his email, ignoring the one from Connor with a question mark as the subject line. It was time-stamped fifteen minutes before, and he didn’t want to have another conversation about his distraction at their meeting. He’d deal with his brothers some other time.

  Finally, he logged off of his computer. On his way out of the building, he texted his lead developer to schedule a meeting to go over their new game. Then he got into his truck and turned onto Las Vegas Boulevard.

  Traffic was beginning to bunch at the lights as more tourists poured out of their hotels and began their treks to the stores and restaurants along the Strip. A few costumed characters were staking out their spots along the sidewalks, but the card-flippers had gone home for the day.

  He pulled into the parking garage of the condo building, taking the elevator to the top floor and then inserting his key card into the door. He grabbed a beer from the fridge, made a mental note to thank Callie for the groceries, and began making calls. Somewhere in Las Vegas there was a woman he couldn’t stop thinking about, and now he knew how to find her.

  • • •

  “It wasn’t my plane, Mom, and it didn’t belong to my publisher. It was just a friend doing me a favor.” Sabrina sat at her kitchen counter, drinking her second cup of coffee. She’d been on the phone with her mother for the past half hour, trying to change the subject to anything but Jase Reeves and private planes. She was now going on … Sabrina checked the clock on the wall and sighed. Just over forty-eight hours since meeting Jase, and so far she thought she’d had a total of three hours of not seeing him, talking to him, or thinking about him, and since Melinda’s flight landed earlier this morning, she was now adding talking about him to that list.

  She needed a Jase break, or she would never get him moved firmly into the Nice Things from My Past column of her life.

  “I don’t see why you can’t give me his number; you know I wouldn’t abuse it.”

  She actually knew no such thing. Melinda didn’t think of herself as a user, but using people was what she was best at. Sabrina had no doubt that thank-you call to Jase’s pilot friend would quickly turn into questioning him about some of his clients. Having a connection, no matter how insecure, was Melinda’s favorite thing. She would use Jase’s pilot friend to get close to a new Mr. Moneybags and find herself right back in the same situation Sabrina had been rescuing her from for most of her life. God, she was tired of parenting her mother.

  “I have a thank-you card already in the mail,” Sabrina lied. “The pilot won’t think badly of you for not calling to thank him personally. Now, did you call your boss at the Timber?”

  Melinda was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t want to go back there,” she said finally. “There’s no future in being a cocktail waitress at a place like that.”

  “That place is one of the hottest casino properties in Vegas. They have the best shows, all the amenities. Maybe you should consider massage-therapy school again.”

  “I don’t want to be a massage therapist at a casino any more than I want to be a cocktail waitress.” Melinda sighed heavily into the phone, and then the laugh track from her favorite sitcom started in the background.

  “You have to do something.” Melinda had never been good at saving, and Sabrina would be surprised if she had more than $100 in the bank. Her mother sighed.

  “I can’t think about work right now, not when the man I love—”

  Sabrina tuned her out. Melinda was working up to an Oscar-worthy, brokenhearted performance. Listening would only annoy her, and all Melinda required when she was in a mood like this were a few well-timed uh-huhs and okays. Absently, she turned on her computer and put Jase’s name into a search engine.

  She knew who he was by reputation, but reputation was never the whole story in Las Vegas. She skipped the articles on the tournaments he’d won but clicked into another about a series of games he’d developed for the casinos. So he wasn’t just a player, he was a developer. He’d created a new kind of video poker, and its popularity had pushed his company into the Fortune 500. He was also part owner of his family’s ranch, and Reeves Brothers Entertainment had a solid reputation, too.

  The man had to be worth millions. No wonder he knew private pilots and acted as if arranging a private plane was no more difficult than renting a limo for an airport run. Sabrina’s stomach turned queasy. Her mother could never know Jase Reeves was her connection to the private plane. She couldn’t know Sabrina had had a one-night stand with the man, or that they’d been seatmates on the commercial flight back to Vegas, or that she’d spent hours playing cards with him. Especially, Melinda couldn’t know that since Sabrina laid eyes on the man she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Melinda could never, ever know that.

  “Are you even listening to me? I need time to get over Lorenzo.” Melinda’s voice choked up. “He was perfect. We liked the same things”—Melinda always liked the things her boyfriends liked—“we had the same politics”—not surprising since Melinda preferred to let men tell her what to think—“and he hates lima beans as much as I do.” That was a new one. Sabrina didn’t think her mother had ever mentioned food likes in connection to a man before.

  “I’m listening, Mom, and I’m sorry he broke your heart, but you have to pick yourself up—”

  “I don’t need one of your speeches about falling for the wrong men or putting myself first. I
’m not the kind of self-centered woman who can put her needs before her partner’s.”

  “Taking care of yourself isn’t selfish. How can you care for another person if you aren’t happy in your own right? You have to start taking care of yourself.”

  “I’m better at taking care of other people.”

  That much was true. As frustrating as it was to watch her mom go down the same dead-end dating and working roads, Sabrina knew her mother didn’t have a truly mean or selfish bone in her body. She organized birthday parties and baby showers for her coworkers, she always threw a few dollars in the cups of vagrants on the Strip, and she had never missed a parent-teacher conference when Sabrina was a kid. She just had no judgment where men were concerned.

  “You’re over fifty, Mom.”

  “Forty,” Melinda said in a huff.

  Technically, she would turn fifty-five next summer. Not that Sabrina was going to bring that up now. “Whatever. You can’t keep looking for a man to take you away from all of this. You have to take yourself away.” Her reminder buzzed on her phone. “I have a conference call in a few minutes. I’ll call you later, okay? We’ll go to dinner or something.”

  Sabrina didn’t call her mother back. After the conference call, she used her research skills to track down an address and phone number for Jase Reeves. She’d been determined to put the man out of her mind, but after talking to her mother, she knew there was something she had to do before she could forget about him: she needed to pay him back.

  She didn’t like owing people, not even people like Jase, who probably had solid gold showerheads and blankets made out of money. She wasn’t like her mother, who only thought about the immediate pleasure of a private plane and not the costs associated with it.

  Of course, getting hung up on a man just because he was good in bed didn’t make her different from her mother, either.

  Sabrina shook herself. She wasn’t like her mother in more ways than she was like her mother. Besides, what woman didn’t get a little hung up on good sex? She couldn’t think of a single one. That didn’t make her—or any other woman—a bad person.

  She got into her new Honda and pulled onto the highway. She’d mortgaged a cute condo in Henderson when she signed her first contract, and in another 150 payments it would be all hers. The beauty of Henderson was the location. Close enough to the Strip to see a show if she was of a mind to—which she rarely was—but far enough away from the congestion that she could get where she wanted to go without getting tied up in traffic for hours on end.

  Of course, in the middle of the week in the winter, there was traffic everywhere, as snowbirds and other tourists flocked to warmer climates. Still, it took less than a half hour to arrive at Reeves Brothers Entertainment.

  This was a bad idea. She didn’t want to be one of those women who tracked down a man at work, even if poker playing and game developing weren’t typical work environs. She pushed through the large front door. The main lobby held a snack shop and a newspaper vendor but no reception area. Hmm.

  She checked the glass-enclosed directory and found notations for a newspaper office and a property developer but nothing about gaming. Sabrina bit her lower lip, considering her options. Reeves Brothers Entertainment owned this entire building on Fremont; it stood to reason that all three businesses would be housed here. So where was Jase’s office?

  A man in a suit and another in jeans exited the elevator, and they looked enough like Jase that Sabrina was certain they were the two brothers. Connor and Gage, although she wasn’t sure who was who. On principle, she didn’t follow the tabloids in town. In truth, she didn’t follow much of the local media, preferring newspapers from outside Las Vegas. And did that make her a snob, or what?

  Sabrina turned away from the directory, but not before one of the men asked, “Can I help you?” It was the man in the suit. He stood about a head taller than her and had blond hair and blue eyes that should have made him look very different from Jase. But all she could see were the sharp cheekbones and strong jaw that were near mirror images of the man she’d met just a couple of days before.

  The man she couldn’t get out of her head.

  She shook her head. “No, I, uh, have the wrong building,” she lied, looking from one strong-jawed, tall man to the other. “I was just leaving.”

  “What building were you looking for?” the other man, with brown hair like Jase’s and the same hazel eyes, asked.

  Name of a building, name of a building. Any name of a building. “Binion’s,” Sabrina blurted the first building name she could think of and immediately wanted to sink through the floor. There was no way anyone would mistake this building for Binion’s and its stories of blue-and-white neon and huge sign hanging on the front of it. By comparison, this building was more Midwest-downtown, with its not-neon signage and bricked facade.

  “You’re way off course. Binion’s is a couple blocks down, in the middle of the Fremont Experience.” Both men watched her closely, but neither pushed for a better explanation.

  “Right,” Sabrina said, shaking her head and feeling like an idiot. “I just … got turned around. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No bother,” they said at the same time, making Sabrina smile. Their voices, too, were echoes of Jase, although his seemed deeper in her memory. More growly. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking. She turned to go and stopped dead. The third brother, the brother she’d come here to pay back or maybe just to see one last time, stood in the entryway to the building looking as dumbstruck as she felt.

  “Sabrina?”

  “Oh, hello,” she said, pasting a bright smile on her face. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Who did you expect to see here?”

  “The ghost of Benny Binion, probably,” said the brother with darker hair. “She seems to be a little lost. Came here looking for a casino.”

  Sabrina kept the smile plastered on her face. “I just got a little turned around.”

  “Easy enough to do in Las Vegas,” the blond brother said. “I’m Connor, by the way, and this is Gage. You obviously already know Jase. His name has never been on the directory.”

  She blinked. “Why not?”

  “He claims odd working hours, but an aversion to foot traffic is more likely,” Gage said. “At least, that’s always been our assumption. Connor and I, we like foot traffic. Jase is a little antisocial.”

  Sabrina wasn’t sure she believed the antisocial bit; he’d seemed social enough in Atlantic City and then again on the plane back here. Jase frowned.

  “I’m about to be anti-brother.” He turned his attention to Sabrina. “Do you want to walk with me?”

  She should just ask him for a total and write a check for the plane. “Sure.”

  Jase led her out a side door and crossed the street onto Fremont. Sabrina didn’t look back, but she had a feeling his brothers were watching them, and from the stiff set of Jase’s shoulders, she didn’t think he liked the idea of being watched.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For coming to your work. I wanted to pay you back. For the plane. My mother arrived safe, if somewhat heartbroken, this morning. I was a bit of a jerk and didn’t offer to pay you back while we were at the airport, and I didn’t have any way to reach you, so I looked you up online.”

  “See, if you’d given me your number, you wouldn’t have had to come all the way downtown. I could have told you over the phone that paying me back wasn’t necessary.”

  The crowd on Fremont surged around them. Tourists in flip-flops and tennis shoes, employees on their way to deal cards or serve drinks, street vendors selling cold drinks and sandwiches. Fremont was one of Sabrina’s favorite streets, despite her aversion to casinos and crowds. Somehow the open-air feel of the place was totally different than the closed-in feel of the casinos on the Strip.

  “It is necessary. I pay my own way.” She paused. “And sometimes my mother’s. I can write you a check if
it’s under the $1,000 mark. More than that and I’ll have to do a little transferring.”

  “I’m not taking your money, Sabrina. The pilot is a friend, and he happened to have an empty seat on a charter. The plane was paid for by a number of other customers, not by me.”

  “Then will you give me the pilot’s information so I can send him the money?”

  Jase shook his head. “It isn’t necessary.”

  “It is to me.” Frustrated, she blew out a breath. If she hadn’t felt so harried at the airport, she would never have agreed to him playing the part of rescuer for her mother. Melinda could have waited until this morning for a flight or, barring that, could have rented a car and driven back to Las Vegas. She’d just wanted to put a little space between them and not have him witness—even by phone—Melinda’s latest meltdown. “Look, I make it a point to pay my own way. I realize you have more money than a Saudi oil prince, and that one chartered flight isn’t going to bankrupt you, but I don’t like owing people. Not money, not favors. I don’t like it.”

  “So don’t think of it as owing me anything. Think of it as a friend making a moment of your life easier.”

  She narrowed her eyes and glanced at him. “That sounds a lot like a favor disguised as altruistic friendship.”

  “I’ve never been described as altruistic before. I kind of like it.” They turned off Fremont onto the sidewalk of the main road.

  “I don’t actually think you had altruism in mind.”

  “What did I have in mind?”

  “Bargaining with me. The plane for my phone number.”

  “Surprise, surprise, I still don’t have the phone number.” He shrugged. “I guess you’re wrong about me.”

  “Except by not giving you my phone number, somehow you got me to chase you down at your place of business. Your brothers seem like a hoot, by the way.”

  “What can I say? They think of themselves as the Blue Collar Comedy Tour. At least, when they’re not considering rearranging each other’s faces.” Jase put his hand on Sabrina’s arm, and the contact sent a shiver through her body. “Do you want to have dinner?”