Raising the Stakes

by Sandra Marton

  “Thank you, Mr. Baron,” she chirped.

  Gray dressed in a black polo shirt and chinos, decided that shaving might be dangerous to his health and collapsed in one of the armchairs in the sitting area, determined to contemplate nothing more complex than his surroundings.

  His room—a deluxe minisuite, whatever in hell that meant—was big and handsome, done in shades of sand and taupe, and almost austere except for the billowing ocher-silk canopy over the bed. A tent, he’d thought with some amusement when he’d checked in the previous afternoon. He assumed the scheme was meant to be reminiscent of the desert though no stretch of arid land or oasis could ever have been this luxurious. He was on the sixteenth floor and the room overlooked the pool and its surrounding gardens.

  He’d spent a lot of time looking down at that pool last night.

  A knock sounded at the door. He opened it and a waiter bearing a silver tray greeted him pleasantly. Gray did his best to be pleasant in return. Maybe he could get some information. God knew he hadn’t come up with any on his own.

  “Going to be hot today,” he said, and winced mentally at the inane remark, though the waiter took it with grace.

  “Yessir,” he said as he arranged china and silver on a table near the window in the step-down sitting area. “Great weather for the pool.”

  “Or for the casino,” Gray said, and smiled. “But I guess it’s always great weather for the casino.”

  “That it is.” The waiter made a minor adjustment to the single champagne-colored rose displayed in a slender crystal vase. “Would you like me to pour your coffee, sir?”

  “No, that’s okay, thanks. I’m not quite ready.” Gray tucked his hands in his pockets. “So,” he said, after a second or two, “I guess a place like this employs a lot of people.”

  “Oh, it does. A small army, you might say.”

  “Must be hard to know everybody.”

  “Well, you get to know faces.” The waiter stepped back. “Some names, too. Not all of them, though. Just too many to deal with, you know what I mean?”

  “Absolutely.” Gray took a twenty from his pocket. “Here you go.”

  “Thank you, sir. Enjoy your stay.”

  “I’m sure I will. Oh, it occurs to me…”

  “Sir?”

  “A guy I know said he had a cousin he thought worked here, at the Desert Song.”

  “Really,” the waiter said politely.

  “Dawn something. Dawn Carter?”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t know her.”

  “She used to be a dealer.”

  “I don’t know many of the casino people.”

  “But she works in the hotel now, in something called Special Services.”

  “I know mostly kitchen staff, sir.”

  “Pretty woman, this guy says.

  “Sorry.”

  “She’s a strawberry blonde. Tall. Long legs.”

  “I don’t know anything about women, Mr. Baron.” The waiter’s tone had grown cautious. “All I do is deliver for room service.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks anyway.”

  “Have a good day, sir.”

  Shit. Gray stalked back across the room as the door swung shut. He’d certainly screwed that. Now the waiter figured the guy in Room 1664 was in the market for a hooker. For a man who made his living pinning witnesses to the chair with carefully worded questions, he was turning out to be one sorry-assed detective.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee, added a dollop of cream and stood looking out the window. It was early, barely seven, but people were already sprawled on lounges arranged around the freeform perimeter of the pool. Nobody was actually in the water, though a large woman in a suit a few sizes too small was sitting on the edge.

  Maybe he’d take a swim. Maybe he’d lie in the sun. Gray’s hand tightened around the cup. Maybe he’d fly back to New York, send Jonas a check and a note telling the old man that he could send some other sucker on this wild-goose chase.

  “Dammit,” he said, and drank some of the coffee.

  It wouldn’t be enough. Jonas had done him a favor he’d never asked for, he was stuck with repaying it, and he couldn’t do it with anything as simple as a check. The old son of a bitch was good at figuring people and he’d figured him to a T. The only way he could discharge this debt was by fulfilling his uncle’s request.

  He could feel his mood going from miserable to rotten. Nothing had gone right, not from the minute he’d hit Las Vegas.

  The woman he’d rescued had brushed him off faster than a broom whisked away dust. On a personal level, he didn’t much care. This town had two things in profusion: slot machines and good-looking women. She was no loss. It just pissed him off, the way she’d used first his muscles and then his car, and cut out without even telling him her name.

  Gray refilled his cup.

  As for finding Dawn Carter… He’d find her, all right. You could find anything, even a needle in a haystack, if you gave it enough time and effort. Any thoughts of cutting this little jaunt short were fast fading away. He’d walked through the hotel and the casino last night without spotting a woman who looked even remotely like Dawn. Admittedly the pictures he had of her were next to useless but still, he’d expected to be able to find some similarity. Her height. Her hair. Her eyes. He’d checked all the tables on the main floor as well as those in the special area set aside for high rollers on the assumption that Jack’s guy might have gotten it wrong. Maybe Dawn still worked them when she wasn’t providing those special services to special guests.

  No luck. She wasn’t around.

  The high stakes tables had been interesting, though. He’d watched players raising the stakes to unbelievable levels and decided they were crazy.

  He knew risk was exhilarating. Skydiving, mountain climbing, shooting class five rapids… Gray had tried them all and loved the adrenaline rush that came of dancing on the edge. You honed your body and mind in preparation, the same as you did for a courtroom showdown with a smart prosecutor or a tough judge. Risky, but you really were always in control.

  Leaving everything to fate? That wasn’t risky, it was crazy, plain and simple.

  Chance decided where the little roulette ball landed, which number on the die came up, how many coins you had to feed into the maw of a machine before you came out a winner, if you ever did. Along about midnight, when he was damn near punchy from lack of sleep, it struck him that it was the same with relationships. No matter what you tried, you could never count on how they would turn out. A man never knew what was coming. Women saw to that.

  Like that routine with Red. He didn’t care if he saw her again or not. It just rankled, how she’d played him for a fool. Push my car, thank you very much. Drive me to work. Thanks again. Oh, no, I’m not going to give you my name. It’s none of your business.

  Gray tossed back the last of the coffee.

  Basically, she was right. It was just that he’d felt stupid as hell, watching her bolt from the car and run through the rear entrance of the hotel. After a minute, he’d driven to the door, leaned out the window and spoken to the security guard who had let her in.

  “Damnedest thing,” he’d said, with what he’d hoped was a smile, “but the lady forgot to tell me her name.”

  “Really,” the guard had replied, and Gray tried another smile.

  “Yeah. Well, she was late for work.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  The SOB wasn’t going to give an inch. “I’d sure like to know her name,” he’d said, reaching for his wallet. “I’d be very grateful.”

  “Get lost, mister. You’re trespassing on private property.”

  Just what he needed. Legal advice from a rent-a-cop. Gray almost told him that but sanity had prevailed. He gunned the engine, drove around to the front of the hotel, handed the car over to a blue-jacketed valet and checked in at the front desk.

  A shower cooled him down. A meal helped, too. Then he’d started his trek through a casino the size of a small city a
nd never came close to sighting his quarry. When he’d realized he was also keeping an eye out for the lady whose car had died on the road, he felt his bad temper coming back. He had problems enough, trying to find one woman. Why double the number?

  At 1:00 a.m., with the slot machines and the tables still busy, he went to his room, stripped down and collapsed on the bed, tired by the endless day and his lack of success. He lay on his back, arms folded beneath his head, staring up at the silk canopy and wondering how in hell the fool who had designed the place thought a person would be able to sleep under a goddamn parachute without feeling claustrophobic.

  After a while, he sat up and rubbed his hands over his face.

  There was nothing wrong with the canopy and hell, he’d never been claustrophobic in his life. It was just that the silken tent was soft and sensual. It made him think about what it would be like to have a woman in bed with him, the draped silk enclosing them both in a world made up of whispers, tastes and touches. He closed his eyes and saw the woman, a redhead whose eyes were still a mystery, whose name he didn’t know, who had made it clear she wasn’t interested in him, and got a hard-on that sent him into the shower again.

  Afterward, Gray wrapped a towel around his hips, opened the minibar and took out one of those ridiculously small bottles of scotch he’d always figured were made for Lilliputians. He thought about swigging the stuff straight from the bottle, decided he wasn’t that bad off yet and poured it into a glass. He drank it while he stared out the window at the pool and at the sky that glittered with galaxies of neon, and told himself to get his head on straight.

  Forget the mystery woman. She wasn’t worth thinking about. As for Dawn… He’d find her. He wasn’t an impatient man. He liked things done on schedule, yes, but his profession—hell, his life—had taught him that sometimes the best thing was to wait. So what if he hadn’t located her right away? She was here; that was the bottom line. The probability was she worked a different shift, or maybe this was her day off. He’d figured five days. So what if one was already shot to hell? There were four yet to come.

  What was so bad about that? Nothing, he’d told himself, and hit the minibar again…and felt at least one of his promises fly out the window.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the woman he’d helped.

  He knew there was no reason for it. Yes, she was good-looking. At least, what he’d seen of her was good-looking, but so what? Actually she wasn’t even his type. He liked small, curvy brunettes; she was a tall, slender redhead. Still, there were things about her that were memorable. Great legs. A nice ass. Breasts that made his palms ache to cup them. A pink, soft-looking mouth.

  Just thinking about how she’d touched her sharp-little teeth to that tender flesh was making him hard again.

  Gray opened another scotch and polished it off. He was reaching for number four when he caught himself, took a mineral water instead and slid open the door that led to the balcony. The night was warm and sultry, like a woman’s caress. He closed his eyes and thought he could almost smell the desert and the distant mountains.

  He wished he’d been able to see more of the woman’s face. What little he’d seen haunted him. Her mouth. Her nose. Her small, resolute chin. Sort of like Nora Lincoln’s, or her granddaughter’s. Once or twice, she’d even lifted it in that same gesture of defiance. Maybe it was a female thing, that tilt of the chin. Something else he’d never noticed about women, some of the ladies who had swept through his life would probably have said.

  He wondered about her eyes. What color were they? Blue, he decided. Blue would suit the color of her hair and the creaminess of her skin. Would her eyes be filled with laughter? He doubted it. Coaxing a smile from her hadn’t been easy. He hoped her eyes didn’t hold the same shadowed sadness as he’d seen in…

  “For God’s sake,” he said with disgust.

  What the hell was with him? The lady had made it clear that she wasn’t interested. Was that the reason she was lodged inside his head? Or was it her seeming complexity that had piqued his interest? He’d sensed that a man would have to go through layers and layers to get to the truth of who she was, what she was; that she’d never fully revealed herself and the man who broke through the barriers would find something special…

  That had done it. “Baron,” Gray had said out loud, “you are on overload, man.”

  He’d put on sweats and sought out the hotel’s exercise room. Seven miles on a stationary bike followed by some fancy footwork with the body bag and he’d returned to his room a mental zero, finally ready to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. Unfortunately three hours wasn’t enough. That was why he’d awakened in such a foul mood, and with somebody playing the maracas in his skull.

  Gray turned away from the window. The coffee had done its job. He felt almost human. He shaved, slipped his feet into a pair of moccasins, scooped up his wallet and room card from the dresser, and went in search of the elusive Dawn Lincoln Kitteridge Carter.

  * * *

  Five fifty-nine, Dawn thought groggily, eyeing her alarm clock with distaste. Did she really have to get up at six? What was the harm in closing her eyes for five more minutes…

  There was no such thing as only five more minutes. “Up and at ‘em,” she muttered. She shut off the alarm before it could ring and stretched her arms high overhead. She hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Her own fault, really. It was the price you paid for eating pizza just before bedtime.

  She’d had bad dreams all night. Every now and then she’d dozed off, only to awaken abruptly in the darkness, heart pounding for no good reason at all, skin slick with sweat.

  It had to be the pizza. Either that, or she was back to where she’d been after she’d first moved in here, scared of each creak of the floorboards, shocked into wakefulness whenever the light from a passing car hit the curtained window.

  Her apartment was on the first floor. That had been enough to make her think twice about signing the lease. While the realtor talked about high ceilings and affordable rent, Dawn stared at the windows and their low-to-the-ground sills.

  “Great cross-ventilation from those windows,” the realtor finally said, and she knew he’d picked up on the way she kept looking at them.

  Great access to the street, Dawn had thought, but she’d kept the words to herself and pretended she was concerned about noise because the apartment was on the ground level.

  “Oh,” the realtor said, waving his hand as if to erase any concerns she might have, “that’s not a problem. This street’s a dead end. No through traffic.”

  She’d nodded, as if her real concern wasn’t that an intruder could break a window and climb into the apartment before anyone noticed. Something must have shown in her expression, though, because the realtor assured her that if she was worried about security, it wasn’t necessary.

  “Safest street in Las Vegas,” he’d said, with a little smile. “Hasn’t been a burglary in this area in five years.”

  Lying awake now, while 6:59 became seven and seven became 7:01, Dawn remembered how close she’d been to telling him it wasn’t burglars she was worried about. She was only worried about Harman, and looking up to see him coming through a window, his eyes black with hate, a little smile on his lips in anticipation of what he was going to do to her, but there was no point in dwelling on such things. The apartment was perfect. It was an easy drive to work. The neighborhood was quiet and safe. The rent was as reasonable as she could find.

  Right now, anyway, life was good. Harman was always there, but buried in her mind. Thoughts of him were sort of like the red-and-white hair ribbon she’d stolen from Ellen-Sue Bannister’s desk in third grade. Dawn took the ribbon because it was pretty and she’d wanted something pretty with all her heart, but once the ribbon was hers, she hadn’t wanted it anymore. Just looking at it made her feel sick, but she was stuck with it. She couldn’t give it back; she couldn’t make it disappear. So she’d wrapped the ribbon in a piece of old wrapping paper and buried it in the bottom of a
drawer.

  There had been entire days, weeks, even, when she’d been able to forget its existence.

  It was like that with Harman. Wrapped up, safely tucked away, she could almost forget what life with him had been like. She could even forget how his rage at her leaving must fill his life, but she couldn’t forget it all the time. Every now and then, something would remind her. A man speaking sharply to a woman; a woman with a cowed look in her eyes. Then it would all come rushing back and she’d remember that Harman was still out there, still thinking about her, still relishing what he’d do when he found her.

  Dawn sat up in bed. She thrust her hands into her hair, shoving it back from her face.

  These were not things you wanted dancing through your head first thing in the morning. She pulled on her robe—she slept in a T-shirt and panties but she didn’t like walking around the apartment that way because it made her feel exposed—and went into the kitchen. She plugged in the coffee she’d set up last night and ran a glass of cool water from the faucet.

  The only reason she kept thinking about Harman was because that man had helped her with her car yesterday.

  She took a sip of water, then rolled the cold glass against her forehead.

  It was an unlikely juxtaposition, to go from thinking about her cruel husband to a generous stranger, but she could see an awful kind of logic to it. She hadn’t stood that close to a man since she’d left Harman, hadn’t felt so vulnerable or so crowded by one, although—although, just for a moment, looking at his handsome face and his appreciative smile, she’d felt a stirring within herself that she hardly recognized.

  Then he’d asked her all those questions about where she was from and she’d wondered why he wanted to know, if someone had sent him, even as she’d told herself how crazy that was. A man with all that polish and charm wouldn’t be, couldn’t be, involved in any way with her husband.

  Dawn put down the glass and walked slowly through the little apartment, the worn linoleum early-morning cool against her bare feet.

  Back to square one, and wasn’t that pointless? She couldn’t go through life letting everything, even a fleeting attraction to a man, drag her thoughts in the same direction. The therapists she’d dealt with in Phoenix would probably say it was a healthy sign that she’d found a man interesting, although the women with whom she’d had whispered conversations in the safe darkness of the dormitory had all warned her to be careful if she ever felt turned on by a man again or she might find herself back in a relationship with the same kind of lying, deceiving, cruel bastard as the one who had sent her fleeing into the night.