Skintight

by Susan Andersen

  The old bitter sense of inadequacy swept over him, and he blessed the waitress who arrived to take their order. What the hell did he expect, he wondered as he ordered. He was never anything but an embarrassment to the old man, so did he truly think that would have changed because he’d been gone for years? He’d outgrown such unlikely hopes years ago.

  It wasn’t like he gave a rat’s ass, anyhow. He’d left off looking for Big Jim McCall’s approval half a lifetime ago.

  Now he only had until the end of the month to charm his way into Treena’s good graces and find the autographed baseball that had been his father’s most prized possession. God knew that if anyone had earned ownership of that valuable little collectible, he had. And he meant to claim it through fair means or foul. Before Sergei Kirov set the dogs on him.

  At the same time he had to reserve part of his concentration so he could win the Las Vegas leg of this poker tournament. Ideally he’d have the former all wrapped up before he had to worry about the latter. Even so, he found his shoulders tensing and he rolled them as the waitress flipped her order pad closed and walked away.

  Then he relaxed. You’re thinking too much. He’d built in plenty of wiggle room, and he didn’t expect to spend much effort seducing one showgirl. He flashed Treena a smile, and watched one side of her mouth curl up in response in that kiss-me-daddy smile of hers.

  Oh, yeah. It was just a matter of time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TREENA WAS SWEATING her way through another interminable set of pliés when Carly suddenly appeared in front of her. “Hey,” she said in startled greeting as she sank down, her knees turned out and her back erect. She surged back upright, ignoring her screaming quadriceps. “What are you doing here?”

  “Are you kidding me?” Reaching out a hand to rest her fingertips lightly upon the barre, Carly pliéd in sync with Treena’s next repetition. “You didn’t come home from your class!”

  She blinked. “They had an opening in the schedule here, so I took it.” She often grabbed unscheduled time, and Carly knew it.

  “Yeah, well, that would be fine any other day.” Her friend waved the explanation aside. “But not after your date this morning. Like I could wait to hear? So, spill! How did it go?”

  Memories of her date with Jax, which she’d been firmly repressing in order to focus on her class and the extra studio time she’d finagled, washed over her. She smiled.

  “Ooh, God, that good, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I knew it! There was just something about that guy—”

  Treena paused mid-plié, throwing off their mirror-image synchronization, then resumed the rhythm. “That’s exactly what I thought—that there’s just something about him. But I can’t seem to pin down what it is.”

  “Maybe I should have said there was something about you and him together, because chemistry would be my guess.” Carly shrugged. “Does it really matter?”

  “Yes. Why him, why now?” She looked at her friend. “The timing sucks—Big Jim’s only been gone a short while. And Jax probably isn’t going to be around for very long, anyhow. Turns out he’s a professional gambler.”

  “No shit?” This time it was Carly who broke the rhythm. “That’s the last thing I would’ve guessed. He doesn’t have that shiny-shoed, greased-back-haired, mobster look that pops to mind when you hear the word gambler.”

  Treena laughed out loud, tickled by the description since it so closely echoed how she might have described the profession herself before she met Jax. “He’s part of the big poker tournament that’s going to be starting over at Bellagio next week. Or maybe it’s the week after—I’m not real clear on the time frame.”

  “Ah, that’s different, then—he’s legit. Not to mention big, built and in town for a while. And he obviously likes what he sees when he looks at you.” Carly tilted her head to one side. “Considering he’s the first guy you’ve accepted a date from since Big Jim, I’m guessing you like him, too. So I don’t see the problem.”

  “I know, I know—there shouldn’t be one. Maybe it’s just…too soon.”

  “Aw, hon, it’s not.” Carly reached out and gave Treena’s shoulder a quick, fierce squeeze. “You and I both know your time with Big Jim wasn’t even close to what most would expect from marriage.” She reached out to brush back a curl that had managed to escape the sloppy French twist Treena had screwed her hair into. “Besides, there’s no rule that says you have to jump into this thing feet first,” she said, her blue eyes soft with compassion. “You can take it as slow as you want. But I’d sure hate to see you blow this off entirely.”

  Treena smiled fondly at her friend. Carly’s breezy don’t-mess-with-me attitude, flawless figure, and spiky blond hair often fooled people into assuming she was a cynical die-hard party girl. Her friend might look like the last of the red-hot mamas, but in Treena’s opinion she was actually the original free-spirited earth mother, nurturing and fiercely loyal. “Then you’ll be happy to know,” she said, “that I have another date with Jax after the ten-o’clock show tonight. I also gave him my phone number.”

  Carly whooped. “That’s my girl!”

  “Well, I’d hardly classify her as a girl,” said a third voice from across the room.

  Treena sighed and knew before turning around who she’d see. “Eavesdropping again, Julie-Ann?”

  Irritation crossed the younger woman’s face as she strode across the hardwood floor toward them, but she swiftly disguised it. “Trust me,’ she said coolly, “your pitiful life is the last thing I’d find interesting. Overhearing Carly was strictly inadvertent.”

  “Inadvertent,” Carly murmured. “My, what big words we know.”

  Julie-Ann ignored her, and said to Treena, “If you’d bothered to check the schedule you’d have seen that I have the studio for the next hour. I’ve been chosen to be part of a documentary on Las Vegas showgirls and I want to give them my very best.” Then she looked her up and down and added with false sweetness, “Still, if you’re not finished yet, please, feel free to share the space with me. I know you can use the practice.”

  Instead of bitch-slapping the little twit Treena smiled. Failing to react as predicted drove the younger woman up the wall more than anything. “Why, thank you, Julie-Ann. How very…kind. What do you think, Carly—you up for another hour?”

  “Absolutely. I can’t think of anything more lovely. We can always benefit from Julie-Ann’s expertise, can’t we?”

  “Indeed.” Whatever else could be said about the young dancer, Treena had to admit she wasn’t stupid, and she watched in satisfaction as frustration flickered across her face at their acceptance of an offer she’d only tendered for the annoyance factor. Then she turned to Carly. “On the other hand, I’ve already done a class plus the additional time Suse let me squeeze out of the schedule. And the babies are probably ready to climb the wall, waiting for you to get home and feed them.”

  “That’s true.” Carly flashed Julie-Ann a friendly grin. “Not to mention Treena has a date to get ready for. You remember what that was like, don’t you, dear? I mean, it hasn’t been that long since you’ve been out on one yourself, surely.”

  Julie-Ann smiled tightly. “You’re so droll, Carly.”

  Treena laughed. “Isn’t she?” she agreed and excused herself to pack up her dance bag. Carly strolled over to join her and the two of them said a breezy goodbye to the young woman and let themselves out of the studio.

  The smile dropped from Treena’s face the moment the door swung shut behind them. “What is the deal with that girl?” she demanded as they emerged onto the street. A blast of furnace-hot, dry desert heat hit them. “What on earth have I ever done to make her dislike me so?”

  “Been a better teacher than she’ll ever be.”

  She stopped dead and stared at her friend. “Say what?”

  “You’ve got an easy way of instructing that gets the point across without making people feel like clumsy dolts. But when Julie-Ann compliments someone
, you find yourself patting your back in search of the knife. And everyone is sick to death of hearing how she’s done this, that or the other thing, each one more marvelous than the last, according to her. Hell, who knows, it may all be true. But when it comes to dance captain, the troupe liked you better, and she knows it.”

  “So, big deal. They like me better.” She started down the street again. “Life’s a trade-off—and as much as it pains me to admit it, she’s a better dancer than I am these days. Can’t she be happy with that?”

  “No. The kid’s got a killer competitive streak, and nobody gets to be better than her at anything.”

  Treena wondered what it must be like to grow up in a world that allowed such behavior. She was raised in a steel town that was constantly downsizing. One counted oneself fortunate to have steady employment and certainly no one had the leisure to develop a superiority complex. They were too busy trying to earn enough money to put food on the table. “I just don’t understand that,” she admitted aloud.

  “That’s because you’ve got one of the best work ethics I’ve ever seen—I don’t know anyone else in this business who’s worked two jobs from the time they were old enough to land any kind of employment at all.”

  “My folks needed my contribution, and I needed those dance classes.” Dancing had been the only escape she’d ever had—the single bright spot in a tungsten-colored world—and it had been worth every penny she’d scraped together. Her early classes had transported her out of that dreary town for one brief, shining hour at a time.

  Her parents had never understood that. They still didn’t. They loved her, but they couldn’t understand why she didn’t marry someone like Billy Wardinski next door and settle down to the kind of life they knew. Neither her two sisters nor the other girls in town had had a problem marrying young and cranking out the kids. It was simply the way things were supposed to be. Good Polish-American girls didn’t run off to Sin City. And they sure as hell didn’t wear next to nothing and do splits and high kicks on a stage.

  “What on earth are you thinking about?”

  She shot her friend a crooked smile. “How grateful I am that my folks only caught the eight-o’clock show that one time I got them to visit me out here.”

  Carly grinned. “Yeah, the costumes we wore in that show appalled them enough as it was.”

  “‘Almost wore’ is how Pop put it. Can you imagine his reaction if he’d seen me without my top? Never mind that I was thirty-two years old at the time. He probably would have dragged me home by my hair.”

  “Speaking of costumes—or sort of, anyway—did I tell you what Rufus did to my brand-new character shoes?” Carly launched into a story about her newest baby, an abandoned mixed-breed puppy she’d rescued from the side of I-15 near the California border. They chatted about him all the way to the garage.

  Treena forgot Julie-Ann’s enmity, her parents’ baffled disapproval of her lifestyle and her own steadily growing financial and professional woes. Instead, her lips curved up, remembering the way Big Jim had once asked her if she and Carly had ever run out of things to talk about. Because the fact was they hadn’t, not from the first moment they’d met more than eleven years ago, at an open audition for la Stravaganza. They’d simply clicked and their only real problem during the intervening years had been narrowing down topics for discussion.

  When she was alone in her car a short while later with nothing to distract her, however, Treena’s problems came crowding back in on her. She managed to ignore them for a while when she arrived home by launching straight into one of her periodic cleaning frenzies. Then she found the baseball atop one of the piles in her messy coat closet. Picking up the Plexiglas box in which it was ensconced, she sat back on her heels and gazed at it with disparate emotions.

  The antique baseball had been one of Big Jim’s most treasured possessions. It was a rare collectible, a 1927 World Series home-run baseball that his then-twelve-year-old father had snagged out of the air at one of the games and gotten autographed by everyone on “Murderers’ Row,” the famous New York Yankees lineup. It was worth a small fortune, but it was remembering Jim’s pleasure in it that elicited the true surge of satisfaction. For him, the ball’s value had lain more in its sports history and the fact that it was a family heir-loom.

  A greedy little kernel inside of her was anything but satisfied, however, and setting the case carefully back where she’d found it, she left the cramped space for another day’s cleanup and backed out of the closet, firmly closing the door between herself and temptation. For what felt like the hundredth time, she rehashed the phone call she’d received a week ago from a lawyer named Richardson. He’d been authorized by an unnamed client to make her an offer for the ball, and the amount tendered had simply boggled her mind.

  The prospect of all that money had been more seductive than anything she could ever remember. As Carly had pointed out earlier, she had worked hard her whole life, and even after she’d left home at eighteen, she’d continued working two jobs. She hadn’t dropped the second one until she’d built up a little nest egg after landing the la Stravaganza gig at the Avventurato Resort Hotel and Casino. Unfortunately, she’d used up most of her savings this past year, which made the kind of money the lawyer offered so hard to resist. All she had to do was sell that ball and her financial worries would be over.

  The idea of failing the upcoming annual la Stravaganza audition really preyed on her. She detested that she was starting to lose something that had always been special to her, that she was approaching the end of a professional life she’d worked so hard to make a reality. Far worse, though, was the idea of being thrust back into financial insecurity. And a little voice kept whispering in her head that it didn’t have to come to that. The cushion Richardson had dangled in front of her would give her the start-up money she needed for her dance studio, and she’d have enough left over to see her through for several months while she got her business off the ground. She knew she could make a go of it, for as Carly had said she was a good teacher. It had therefore taken every bit of fortitude she possessed not to leap at his offer.

  The only problem was she’d known Jim’s wishes all too well. And he’d wanted the baseball to go to his son.

  Her teeth clenched at even the fleeting thought of Jackson McCall, for she could wrack her brain all day and all night long and still never come up with a less deserving recipient.

  Then she drew a deep breath and let it out. She’d not allow that lousy excuse for a son to ruin what had been a truly decent day so far. The last thing she needed between now and the audition was more stress, and she shook out her hands while practicing additional calming breaths. Her time and energy would be much more productively spent by concentrating on positive images like the memory of this morning’s breakfast date with Jax and their upcoming one tonight. Gradually her tension began to dissolve, and she blew out a sigh. Things would work out.

  Why waste time dwelling on a rat bastard when she could think about a really great guy instead?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JAX FELT GREAT. His plan was proceeding according to schedule, the prospect of sack time with a Las Vegas showgirl was a promising glimmer on his horizon and he was up forty-eight grand from his original stake when he’d sat down to play a little poker at the five-thousand-dollar-limit table three hours ago.

  Life was good.

  He studied his fellow players. The woman to his right had a good, stoic poker face. So did the Asian man sitting in the small blind position. The guy next to him had been an All-Star pick for three years running, but while he might knock ’em dead on the baseball diamonds, he had two definite tells. His left eye narrowed slightly when he was bluffing, and he compulsively fanned open and snapped shut his cards when he had a good hand.

  A good portion of the stack of chips sitting in front of Jax were courtesy of Mr. All-Star.

  The cocktail waitress offered him a drink and he refused it with a smile. Catching a flash of red hair across the casino,
he straightened from his slouch and craned to see over the crowd before he caught himself and relaxed his forearms, draping himself over the table once again.

  It wasn’t Treena. The woman whose hair he’d seen across the room didn’t share the same pale flame shade of hers. Its deeper color had merely caught his eye for a minute and he decided that it was natural for Treena to be in the back of his mind. She was, after all, the object standing squarely between him and his goal.

  The fact that his heart had begun to beat a stronger, more rapid rhythm merely meant he was a red-blooded guy. It would be a hell of a lot more unnatural if the thought of a sexy showgirl didn’t rev his engine a little. He didn’t mind admitting that he was looking forward to taking her to bed. But he also knew he wouldn’t let pleasure get in the way of the program.

  Realizing his concentration was broken, he cashed in his chips for the day, bought himself a club soda and took it over to watch the action at a nearby Gai Pow poker table. There was a decorative post not far away and he leaned his shoulders against it while he watched the action going on at the table.

  “Where’s my baseball?”

  Shit. Jax dropped the foot he’d propped against the post and straightened with a lazy show of indifference. But if there was anyone who could bust his mellow mood, it was Sergei Kirov.

  “I haven’t got it yet,” he said evenly, looking at the Russian. “I told you it would take a while.”

  “Tick tock,” Kirov said. “Clock is counting down.”

  The two beefy men flanking him laughed as if he’d just uttered something witty, but Jax merely looked at him and thought, You fucking freak.

  Sergei’s appearance wasn’t as startling in Las Vegas as it had been on the rest of tour. Black pompadours and sneering mouths were a dime a dozen in a city where one was just as likely to find an Elvis impersonator officiating at a wedding as a regular minister. The same look in Europe, however, had made the millionaire Russian stand out like a hooker at a Baptist wedding.