by Lisa Plumley
“I’m sorry about that, ma’am!” He shoved the ticket in his pants pocket, then wiped his palms on the wide bottom of his sweatshirt. “I’ll, uh, take care of the ticket myself.”
“Good idea.” Pulling out his wallet, Dylan withdrew two ten dollar bills and gave them to the driver. “That ought to about cover it from the Renaissance to here, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” mumbled the driver, counting the money. He pocketed it, started to walk back to his taxi, then stopped and looked over his shoulder. “What about the extra fifty bucks?”
Dylan’s hand stilled midway through folding his wallet. “Extra fifty bucks?”
Beside him, Stacey seemed to shrink a couple inches. “I, umm, promised him a little extra money.”
“Fifty bucks?”
She bit her lower lip, twisting her purse strap tight enough to cut off circulation to her wrist. She nodded.
“Big tip.”
“It wasn’t…exactly…a tip.”
“Nah, it wasn’t a tip,” agreed the driver. “Well?”
Sighing, Dylan opened his wallet again. “What’s it for?” he asked Stacey as he counted out fifty dollars.
“Ummm…” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, looking like a kid caught red-handed with her hand in the cookie jar. “I paid him extra to get rid of you back there. When you were chasing the taxi.”
Dylan raised his eyebrows and handed over the money. No, he was paying extra to get rid of himself.
“Next time, just make sure you can fork over the dough before making a promise like that. Okay, Lovey?”
Stacey mumbled her assent—and something that sounded like “Tigerlips,” if he wasn’t mistaken—then buried her face in the roses.
With everything apparently in the clear, the police helped escort the driver and his taxi onto the street again, leaving Dylan and Stacey alone.
“Now that that’s taken care of,” he said, grinning, “it’s payback time.”
Stacey ducked into the crowd and bolted down The Strip.
“You’re fast,” Dylan told her an hour later, inside the conservatory at the Bellagio. He braced his hand on one of the low marble walls and gazed at the winter wonderland all around them, trying not to show he was winded.
He’d chased her down The Strip, past several casinos, into an array of shops, and finally to the Bellagio. An Olympic runner would be breathing hard after all that. “I almost caught up to you when you stopped to check out that shoe sale.”
Stacey grinned, but she was panting, too. “I had a pretty big head start on you by then.” She strolled beside him along the conservatory’s pathway, still holding her bedraggled bouquet of roses. “I figured I could always use a new pair of shoes. It was worth the risk. Besides, you didn’t catch me.”
Her eyes were shining, her face rosy with the aftereffects of their chase. Damp tendrils of chestnut-colored hair clung to the back of her neck. Still smiling, she turned her face to the conservatory’s display of thousands of poinsettias.
All around them, Christmas cheer abounded. Above the poinsettias, enormous ornaments—each one bigger than a Humvee— hung suspended from the ceiling on invisible wires, gleaming in shades of metallic red and green and gold. Lights twinkled everywhere. Magnificent fir trees sheltered an indoor ice pond, and around them stood caribou-shaped topiaries and a 25-foot-long topiary train—complete with a smoking stack. Apparently, in Las Vegas, no holiday spectacle was too over-the-top.
Stacey gazed at the lights and ornaments and flowers, her face aglow with wonder. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful,” Dylan agreed. But the view was ordinary compared with the way she looked to him now, relaxed beside him. She might have been a different woman than the one who’d greeted him warily at the door to the honeymoon suite earlier. No less beautiful but twice as appealing…because now she was beginning to feel comfortable with him. “So are you.”
Stacey laughed. She raised her hand to wipe away a streak of smudged mascara.
“Come on, Dylan. There’s nobody around to hear us.” She nodded her head to indicate the sparsely populated conservatory. She hunched her shoulders, fiddling with a rose petal. “You don’t have to be Mr. Honeymoon when it’s just us.”
“I’m not. I—”
“It’s okay. After all, you did your best to act like a honeymooner back at the Renaissance, and I kind of put the kibosh on that, didn’t I?” With a short laugh, Stacey twisted a rose petal from its place and smoothed it between her fingers. She stared up at the conservatory’s fully decorated Christmas tree. “I’m sorry about that, Dylan. I shouldn’t have run out on you the way I did.”
He couldn’t believe she was taking the blame for…for what? Dylan still wasn’t sure exactly what had gotten her all riled up during dinner, and at this rate he wasn’t likely to find out.
“I think you skipped a step.” He put his hand to her shoulder and smiled at her. She didn’t glance sideways to see it, though, so his good faith gesture was wasted. “I never—”
I never figured out what all the trouble was, he started to say, but before he could get the words out, Stacey twisted off another rose petal and interrupted.
“Please. I don’t want to keep fighting with you.” She looked into his face at last. “I can’t stand it.” More rose petals followed the first, twisted, scrubbed between her fingertips, then dropped on the growing pile beside her. “You were doing your best to pull off the honeymoon charade, and I…I overreacted. I’m sorry. Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”
Her gaze, brown-eyed and imploring, met his. Stacey might not want him there at all, but if they were going to be forced into cooperating on the honeymoon charade, Dylan realized, it was obviously important to her that they do it peacefully.
“It means a lot to you that people get along, doesn’t it?”
He placed his hand over hers to keep her from shredding the other two and a half dozen red roses he’d given her. She looked at his hand, startled, then at the pile of petals she’d made. Her cheeks pinked.
“That’s why you’re doing this,” he went on. “The honeymoon charade, I mean. To keep the peace.”
“Yeah. I’m a real peacenik.” Stacey offered him a rueful smile. “That’s why I bashed you with a blow dryer and almost got you run over tonight. If I were you, I’d get the heck out of Dodge before the real shooting starts. You might get really hurt.”
He was already hurt. Hurting without her. Only it had taken him too long to get it through his bone-headed brain. “I’m not going anyplace.”
“Oh, that’s right. I forgot. You gave your word to Richard and Janie, didn’t you?” She frowned sympathetically. “You’re honor-bound for the whole weekend.”
That wasn’t what he’d meant about staying, but he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to solidify his alibi.
“You’ve got it. The whole weekend. Especially now, with all those honeymoon surprises still to get through,” Dylan said, trying to fake a little resistance to having to go through with the charade for two more days. “We’ve got a full lineup tomorrow.”
“Let’s keep a low profile this time, okay?”
He raised two fingers. “Scout’s honor, remember? I’ll try to impersonate Richard a little more, umm, quietly, if you’ll agree not to get Janie arrested.”
He stuck out his hand for a deal-making handshake.
Stacey blushed at his mention of her run-in with the police but slipped her hand in his anyway. “It’s a deal. I never did thank you for rescuing me from the taxi driver, you know.”
She squeezed his hand gently. Dylan used it to pull her closer. She had no choice but to come, since her other hand was filled with the tissue-wrapped flowers.
“You can thank me now. You still owe me, remember?”
He raised his hand to her cheek. Beneath his fingertips her skin felt softer than the roses. The feel of it lured him closer.
“Thank you,” she said hastily, ducking her head. She tried to tu
rn her face away, but Dylan tipped her chin up with his knuckles and gently shook his head.
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, cradling her cheek in his hand. He stroked her again, and the roses Stacey held between them started to tremble, filling the air with their perfume. “My payback demand is a thank-you kiss.”
“A thank-you kiss?” She squinted at the few people standing near them. “But there’s hardly anybody here to impress. You know, with our just-married honeymoon bliss. We should wait until—”
“The charade isn’t why I asked. Kiss me.”
The faint rustling of the roses underscored his words. Was she afraid or excited? Her trembling could mean either one, and he didn’t want to scare her. He did want to kiss her…kiss her long and hard and make the past melt away so they could start again.
“Kiss me,” Dylan said, “and I’ll call it even.”
That reasoning she could accept, he saw. The roses stilled, and the hunted expression left her face. Stacey raised slightly, her hand still linked with his, and quickly pressed her lips to his. She started to lean back…and Dylan stopped her with a hand to the back of her neck. His fingers kneaded in her hair, and its softness sifted through his fingers like silk.
“You’re welcome,” he said. More, he thought.
Her eyes closed briefly, then opened again to focus on his mouth. “I…you’re welcome, too.”
The roses dropped to the floor. Heat passed between them, and Dylan hardly dared move for fear of scaring her away. An instant later Stacey’s mouth found his again, and it was as though nothing had ever come between them. She was Stacey, his Stacey, warm and tempting as he remembered. She brought both hands to his shoulders and kissed him harder. He was lost, falling for her all over again, and he wanted to tell her, tell her how he felt and how much he’d missed her, except just as he thought it he literally was falling. Backward.
She’d unbalanced him by leaning forward. Dylan tightened his hold on her and tried to keep them upright without breaking their kiss. Hell, he’d be nuts to end a kiss like this one. He slipped his arm around her middle and held her close.
“Mmm-mmm,” Stacey moaned, deepening the kiss. “Mmm-mmm…”
Briefly, Dylan wondered if she’d mistaken his maneuverings for increasing passion. He leaned forward, preventing them from toppling over. But then her kiss made him wild, made him forget where they were and who was around…and what was happening.
Teetering, he grabbed for leverage and caught an armful of woman instead. They both toppled backward into the bed of poinsettias.
Their mouths popped apart. Stacey sprawled atop his chest, looking disheveled, disoriented—and sexy as hell. Also confused. But she wasn’t jumping up off him right away, so Dylan decided to savor the experience.
He smiled, wanting to feel nothing except the curving softness of her body pressed against him. Something sharp poking into the back of his shirt changed his mind and sent his attention to less good-feeling parts of his anatomy. It felt like dozens of tiny needles stabbing him in the back, like cactus spines or midget shish kebab skewers or maybe even swizzle sticks, which somehow seemed more suited to the glitz of Las Vegas than anything else.
It felt like rose thorns working their way into his shoulder blades.
Because it was.
“Youch!” Rearing upright, Dylan rooted in the poinsettias for the limp flowers Stacey had dropped behind him. He held them out to her. “Let’s try that again. Without your instruments of destruction behind me this time.”
But it was too late. She was already getting to her feet, yanking down her dress as though it was supposed to come to her ankles instead of just above her knees, filled with apologies and the same damned misplaced modesty she’d given him before.
Hell.
“Sorry.” She took the flowers from his hand. They dropped in her grasp, several blossoms bending over the tissue paper with broken stems and crushed petals. “I didn’t mean to attack you like that.” Stacey tried to prop up one of the roses, then plucked a poinsettia petal from her hair. “One minute I was thanking you, and the next…”
She pressed her lips together and shook her head. Guiltily, she looked around the conservatory, as though expecting the kissing police to come skulking by at any second.
“For Pete’s sake,” she blurted. “I had us both sprawled all over the Christmas display! I just don’t know what happened.”
He did. They’d connected, really connected, for a minute. And it scared her.
“Let’s try it again,” Dylan offered. “Maybe we’ll be able to figure it out.”
As an attempt to lighten the mood between them…it didn’t. Probably because yearning still sounded in the sandpapery rasp of his voice, still showed in the shadows he felt in his eyes. He wanted her too much. No amount of kidding around would change that.
She shook her head. “We’d better just go.”
As though punctuating her words, snowflakes began drifting from the ceiling. Airy and magical, they floated over the conservatory’s fir trees like figments of his imagination.
Stacey cracked a rueful smile. “Look out. Apparently, I’m even capable of changing the weather now.”
“It’s okay.” Dylan stepped out of the poinsettia bed, then did his best to fluff up the crushed flowers. “I’m pretty sure that’s part of the attraction. It is supposed to be a winter wonderland, right?”
So long as Stacey was beside him, it felt as if it was, too. But apparently she didn’t feel the same way, because she fiddled with her purse and then the strap on her sandals and then the straps on her dress, as if any one of those things might have flopped down from the sheer force of their kiss.
Actually, as kisses went, that one might have been scorching enough to accomplish it.
But that was beside the point. He and Stacey might be on slightly more civil terms with each other now, Dylan realized, but as far as she was concerned he was still a danger to be reckoned with. The wary glance she sent his way told him that much. It looked as if he was back to square one.
The trouble with that was, their kiss had done nothing to satisfy his yearnings for Stacey. If anything, it had only brought back everything they’d ever shared and made him want that closeness more.
He put his hand to her waist to guide her toward the exit, wondering how he’d ever been dumb enough to let her go in the first place. They were right for each other. Dylan was sure of it. All that remained was convincing Stacey of that fact before the honeymoon suite charade—and especially his part in it—was discovered.
Chapter Five
Stacey sensed the morning sunlight on her face, screwed her eyes more tightly shut, and rolled over in bed. Something big, warm and solid blocked her path. Feeling muzzy-headed, she opened her eyes…and looked into Dylan’s face, only inches from hers on the neighboring pillow.
“Aaack! What are you doing here?” she shrieked, scooting madly backward. Her backside met empty air at the edge of the bed. With two feet of empty silk sheet between her and Dylan, she was able to relax long enough to stare back at him. “Well?”
He smiled. Actually smiled, first thing in the morning. The only time her ex-husband had ever smiled first thing in the morning was when they’d…no, never mind. The morning quickies Charlie had insisted on every Sunday definitely did not bear remembering.
“You’re supposed to be sleeping on the loveseat, remember?” She clutched the comforter to her chin. “We agreed!”
What had she put on to sleep in last night? She couldn’t remember. Was it her faded oversize Arizona Wildcats T-shirt or her more respectable, if boring and scratchy, flannel pajamas?
More importantly, what was Dylan wearing underneath the covers?
“I did sleep on the loveseat.” Casually, he angled one elbow on the pillow and propped his head in his hand.
The sunlight shining through the honeymoon suite windows captured the good-natured gleam in his eyes and burnished his dark tousled hair with lighter-colored h
ighlights. Why, Stacey thought grumpily, couldn’t Dylan have awakened looking like an ogre and smelling just as bad? And what was he wearing, anyway? He’d only pulled up the sheet waist-high, but she couldn’t catch a glimpse of anything beneath it.
She bet he slept in the nude.
“But I’ve been up for a while,” he went on, oblivious to her wonderings. “I had to smuggle Ginger out for a walk.”
He tossed a smiling glance at the dog sprawled, snoring faintly, near the honeymoon suite door.
“I can see it wore her out.”
“No more than last night did.” When they’d returned to their room, they’d found Ginger surrounded by colorful pieces of shredded Las Vegas attractions brochures, chewing up the M-Z section of the Yellow Pages. Obviously, they’d tasted better than the ordinary dog food and water Dylan had left for her.
“Anyway, I stopped and ordered breakfast from room service while I was downstairs. I thought it would look more honeymoonish if both sides of the bed looked slept in when the food arrived.”
“Oh.” So much for her plans to go out for breakfast at one of the restaurants nearby. How typically Dylan, to decide for her what she wanted to eat.
She’d just have to try to put a good face on it, for the sake of the honeymoon ruse, Stacey decided. But first she needed to get out of bed. And to do that, she had to be dressed.
Trying to seem casual about it, she stuck her hand under the comforter and touched her shirt. At the feel of the thin washed cotton in her hand, she remembered that she’d compromised last night and worn her Wildcats T-shirt plus her flannel pajama bottoms.
Too bad the latter were lumped someplace at the foot of the bed, discarded in the middle of the night when it had gotten too hot to sleep with them on. She was sleeping in a T-shirt and panties. Nothing special…except she’d never actually worn such a getup in the company of Dylan.
And she didn’t intend to now.
“Breakfast, huh?” Trying not to jiggle the mattress, Stacey fished around with her foot, hoping to hook her pajama bottoms. “Sounds good.”
“Mmmm-hmmm.” He didn’t sound like he was contemplating scrambled eggs. “I figured you’d rather sleep in than wrestle with the room service menu. I don’t know what you usually have for breakfast.” Dylan gave her an innuendo-laden grin. “But I think you’ll enjoy what I ordered. It’s special.”