“Both of which are dead,” I said.
“Only in real life.” Greyson winked. “In Vegas, they are still very much alive.”
Greyson continued to ramble on about his city. I loved listening to him. His passion for Las Vegas rivaled my passion for my career. His eyes were bright as he told me about the canals in the Venetian, reminding me of a little boy on Christmas morning. He was charming and easygoing, and everything he said made me smile. His energy was contagious, and soon, I found myself leaning forward, elbows on the table, chin on my knuckles, listening and watching him in awe.
“And the Bellagio Fountains.” He nodded, sitting back in his chair with his wine. “You must see the show before you go home. Promise me you’ll at least do that? I know it’s touristy, but it’s worth it.”
“Okay.” I laughed. “I’ll see it. I know Renee wants to go. Night time is best?”
“Night time is the only time,” Greyson said seriously.
“Okay, okay.” I held up my hands as the waiter came and cleared away our plates. “The Bellagio at night time. Got it.”
Greyson was smiling at me. I noticed a dimple in his right cheek that wasn’t there on the other side. “What are you so pleased about?” I asked, finishing the final mouthful of my wine.
He shrugged, but the smile remained. His bright blue eyes twinkled in the candlelight, and something deep in his stare made my skin tingle. “You’re going to fall in love with this place,” he said, “You just wait and see.”
I wanted to disagree with him. I wanted to tell him that Vegas was everything I hated. It was loud, it was bright, and it was busy.
But I couldn’t bring myself to tell him he was wrong.
It was three minutes to nine when the elevator stopped at the thirtieth floor. Greyson and I stepped out and began making our way across the royal blue carpet to my room. Once we arrived I slid the key card in the door, and it opened with a flashing green light. I pushed inside half a foot, then turned back to Greyson, the door resting against my shoulder.
“I had a really nice evening tonight,” I said. “Thank you for being so insistent. Sometimes, I need a bit of a push to leave my comfort zone, and I’m really glad that I did tonight.”
“Me too,” Greyson said, the blue carpet under his feet making his eyes look darker than they did before. “Can I see you again tomorrow?”
I felt my heart sink. I wanted to see him, but I had already committed to spending the afternoon and evening with my sister. “I can’t,” I said sadly. “I have to spend the day with Renee and Nikki.”
“The day, but not the morning?” Greyson asked deviously.
I didn’t have time to answer him.
“I’ll be here at eight on the dot. You and I are going out. Just dress normally. No need to get fancy. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He was speaking a mile a minute and had already retreated back a step.
I laughed at him as he gave me an awkward wave and made his way back down the hall. I watched him step on the elevator, and he waved again as the doors closed.
I retreated into my room, my smile hurting my cheeks as I closed and locked the door behind me.
Chapter 11
Greyson
As soon as the elevator doors opened, Meek was there. He was standing with his hands clasped in front of him, in his usual “Meek on the job” position, and he regarded me with a cool expression as I stepped off the elevator and began making my way down the brightly lit corridor toward my office.
“How was your dinner last night?” Meek asked, keeping up with my long strides with little effort.
“Pleasant,” I said over my shoulder. “Much more so than I expected. And you’d be surprised to know that no one tried to shank me in the middle of the restaurant.”
“Do people still say shank?” Meek asked. I could hear the humor in the undertones of his voice. “I thought that was more of a prison thing.”
I shrugged one shoulder in mild exasperation. “You’re missing the point. Forget it.”
“Oh, I didn’t miss the point. You’re trying to convince me that you don’t need me hanging around all the time, worrying for your safety.”
“Ah,” I said, grinning back at him. “You did understand. Well done, Meek. Well done.”
“I don’t appreciate the condescending tone,” Meek said with an arched eyebrow, but a lingering smile. “And for the record, I wouldn’t have to worry about you if you worried about yourself.”
I waved him off as I unlocked the door to my office. I turned to face him in the doorway and braced myself against it. “Will you be terribly annoyed, then, if I tell you to take today off?”
Meek crossed his arms. “I’m already here.”
“I’ll pay you for the day.”
“All right,” Meek said slowly. “What are you up to?”
“I’m not up to anything, but I’m not going to be here today, so I don’t see the need to force you to stick around. The security team has the floor. Go enjoy the day.”
“You should take someone with you,” Meek said.
I shook my head. “I can take care of myself. Go home. Or go do something fun for a change. Everything is okay.”
After Meek left, I made a few phone calls to let the managers of all the different departments in the casino know that I wasn’t going to be reachable for the day. They could contact me in case of an emergency, but I trusted them to make the right calls and handle any and all situations—to a point, of course.
Once everyone was filled in, I left my office and locked up. I made my way to the elevators, checked my wristwatch, and rode up to Skylar’s floor with four minutes to spare. I took to the blue carpet at a quick pace and arrived at her door. I knocked and heard her moving around on the other side.
“Just a second!” she called. Something fell with a clatter. She cursed, and I stood there alone, smiling like a fool.
When she opened the door, she was breathless. Her silky black hair was slicked back in a ponytail, and her cheeks were flushed.
“Morning,” she said with a cheery smile.
“Morning.” I nodded. “I hope you didn’t break something in there.”
She laughed. “No, I didn’t. I dropped my makeup bag all over the floor, though. Good thing I pack light. Only broke one bronzer. Which was cheap. So it’s—” She stopped talking and blushed the brightest shade of pink I had ever seen. “Not that you care at all about my makeup collection.”
She seemed much more nervous this morning than she had the precious evening. I gave her my best smile and stepped back to gesture down the hallway. “Shall we go?”
She bit her bottom lip and nodded. Since meeting her, she had never looked so beautiful. “Yes,” she said. “Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see,” I said as she pulled the door closed behind her.
She flipped her ponytail over her shoulder as she fell into step beside me. “A surprise, huh?” she asked, looking up at me with a wry smile. “I’ll be honest, I don’t usually like surprises.”
“Well, don’t let your expectations get too high. It’s not a surprise, really. You’ll like it, I think.”
“You think?” she asked as we stepped into the elevator.
I punched the button for the ground floor. “I’m fairly confident.”
I saw Skylar’s smile in the reflection of the closed doors as we rode down. Once we hit the casino floor, we switched from the public elevators to the ones that would bring us down to the employee parking area. We walked straight to the back of the parking lot where I had parked my Aston Martin Vanquish. The charcoal gray paint shimmered despite the lack of light in the underground garage, and Skylar admired its sleek lines as I unlocked it.
“Nice car,” she said, sounding a bit unlike herself. “I wasn’t expecting something so… wow.”
I had parked in Tara’s usual spot, knowing she had the day off. I wasn’t going to park under the one near the entrance that read, “Owner, Mr. Kline” for fear of scaring Skyla
r off. The Vanquish was one of the least flashy cars in my garage, and I had chosen it with the hope that she wouldn’t know its worth and wouldn’t be intimidated.
Although when she saw where I was taking her, it would be clear that I had more money in my pocket than she would have ever expected. If I was being honest with myself, I was a little worried to see how she would react.
I opened her door for her, and she slipped inside. Her eyes roamed over the black interior, trimmed in gray stitching, as I walked around the car and got into the driver’s seat.
“What is this thing?” she asked, shooting me a look I couldn’t read.
“Aston Martin,” I said as casually as I could manage.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful.”
“That she is,” I said, resisting an overwhelming urge to tell Skylar that she made the car look like a broken-down piece of junk. Clichés like that didn’t usually get a man very far.
I started the engine, and we pulled out of the underground. I took us out on to the Strip, where Skylar peered out the windows at the casinos and shops. I pointed out some of the attractions as we passed, and as we left the business of the city behind and hit the highway, Skylar admired the flat horizon in the distance.
A little jolt of nervousness hit me when we passed the signed that said “Welcome to Boulder City.”
I was even more nervous when I drove up my winding driveway. Skylar didn’t say anything as the dry desert soil was replaced with grass and lush greenery. We drove farther into my estate, and the house came into view; all windows and glass wrapping around the highest point of the property like a sleek, transparent snake.
I parked the car out front and got out. I opened her door for her, and she emerged from the car, one lean, sexy leg at a time. She stood in front of me and peered up at the house.
“What is this place?” she asked.
As I stood behind her, I tried my best not to take advantage of my position. I failed. Her ass in the tight jeans she was wearing was too hot. I swallowed, tore my gaze from the curve of her hips and her narrow waist under her black T-shirt, and looked back up at the house.
“This is my place,” I said.
She spun to face me. Her eyebrows were racing toward her hairline, and her mouth was hanging open. “You live here?”
“Yeah,” I said, scratching the back of my neck. “Got lucky. Came into a lot of money. Bought myself a little slice of paradise. Come on. I want to show you around.”
“A little slice?” she muttered as she followed me to the front door. “Your garage is bigger than my apartment back in Houston.”
I slid the key into the lock and tried to think of the best way to respond to that comment. “It gets kind of lonely having a place with this much space. It feels rather unnecessary. But there’s some cool stuff inside worth showing, and the view is unreal.”
We stepped into my home, and Skylar stopped in her tracks.
The place was open concept, as I had instructed when I had the contractors start building it. The entrance opened up into a living room, which was flanked by a dining room and the kitchen. Everything was bright, crisp, and white. The floor-to-ceiling windows provided natural daylight until dusk, when the place became even more magical than it was in the day.
Out the back windows, through the glass doors off the kitchen, was a sprawling patio littered in clusters of outdoor furniture. A pool and Jacuzzi were cut into the middle of the patio, and at night, the lights from beneath the water lit the kitchen with rippling reflections on the ceiling.
It was my slice of paradise, and I had never liked it more than I did as I watched Skylar walk in and admire it all. “I would never leave if I lived here,” she said.
“Like I said, sometimes it gets lonely.”
She went to the wall of windows in the living room. It overlooked the desert and Vegas in the distance, roughly twenty-five miles away.
“The view from the bedroom is better,” I said.
She turned back to me. “Is that a pick-up line?”
“No.” I chuckled. “But I would like you to see it nonetheless.”
She pursed her lips in thought. I could see why she was hesitant. A man had just invited her into his bedroom. A woman had to be careful. I was still a stranger to her. Although to me, she was far from a stranger. For some reason, it felt like I had known her for ages.
“Show me,” she said finally.
I took her hand and led her to the other side of the house down the only hallway it possessed. It broke off into the bathroom, a spare bedroom, and my bedroom. I walked her straight to the wall of windows. Her gaze wandered, naturally, over the gray walls and bedding, over the one wall comprised of organized closet doors and drawers filled with my suits and clothes, and over the covered patio outside hosting my workout equipment.
The wall at the end of the bed was the one that boasted the best view. We stood before it, gazing down at Lake Mead and part of the Hoover Dam.
Skylar’s hand was still in mine as she looked down the hill, over the grass, and over Boulder City and the lake. “This is something a person would never get tired of waking up to.”
“Never,” I said.
She looked up at me, eyes bright, cheeks pink, and full lips curved in a stunning smile. The girl had no idea what she was doing to me, and I was sure she was going to be the reason I had bad knees one day.
“I thought this might be more your pace,” I said. “I wanted to show you a part of Vegas that wasn’t just lights and slot machines and noise. A quiet place like this seemed more your scene.”
“It is,” she said. “It definitely is.”
We stood like that, hand in hand, staring out the windows until she let her hand fall to her side. I took her out of my room, not wanting to make her uncomfortable, and we went outside to sit on some of the lounge sofas by the pool. The reflection of the water on the side of her face made her look like a mythical creature as I asked her what some of her favorite things to do were. I wanted to know everything about this girl.
“Reading,” she said simply. “When I’m not working, I’m probably reading.”
“What do you like to read?”
“Anything and everything. Fiction, nonfiction. Fantasy is fun, sometimes, when work has been really crazy and I need to escape into another world.” She played with her ponytail and regarded me with curiosity. “What about you? Besides driving expensive cars around and entertaining at your mansion, what do you like to do?” There was a hint of teasing in her voice.
I chuckled and shrugged. “Ride my motorcycle, work, work some more. I’d like to travel, but I’m kind of tied down here with my job.”
“I know how that feels,” she said softly.
***
I brought Skylar back to her hotel room just after noon. When we stopped at her door, we could hear her sister and Nikki in the room beside her, giggling like high school girls and singing along to some terrible pop song they were blasting.
Skylar sighed and looked at her feet. “Well, I guess that is going to be the rest of my day.”
“It could be fun if you get into it,” I suggested.
“Maybe,” she said. She looked back up at me. She was biting her lip the same way she had that morning. It drove me just as wild as it had the first time I saw her do it. “I would like to see you again, Greyson.”
“Tomorrow?” I asked.
She smiled. “Tomorrow.”
The urge to lean in and kiss her was strong. I buried it, afraid of scaring her off, and took a step back. The heel of my shoe caught in the carpet, and I almost fell on my ass. Skylar reached for me as if to catch me. Her fingers closed on my forearm, and we were suddenly closer than we had ever been.
She was blinking up at me, her eyes flicking back and forth between mine. I could smell her. Coconut and citrus.
“I’m alright,” I said, a little embarrassed for being so clumsy, but pleased it had brought her so
close.
She blushed once more, and her hand fell from my arm. She slipped back into her room and rested her hip on the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
I nodded, and she closed the door. I caught her smiling to herself just as she disappeared from view.
It had been a long time since I felt the butterflies that were taking flight in my stomach.
Chapter 12
Skylar
The second knock on my door of the day came when I was cleaning up the makeup I had dropped all over the bathroom floor when Greyson arrived to pick me up. He had only dropped me off fifteen minutes ago, and a swirl of excitement rushed through me as I wondered if he had come back.
I tucked the lip gloss and mascara that had rolled under the sink into the bag and left it on the counter. Then, I hurried to the door. I ripped it open, smiling from ear to ear, and found my sister standing there, looking a little startled.
“Hey,” Renee said, looking me over. “You alright?”
“Oh, hey,” I said, my heart sinking. The feeling of disappointment worried me a little bit. Was I letting myself get too carried away with Greyson? “Yes, I’m alright. I was just cleaning up a bit of a mess I made earlier. I was in a hurry.”
Renee arched an eyebrow but left the matter alone. “Want to go grab dinner tonight? We’ve barely spent any time together since we got here. I want to see you.”
“You know, I don’t know if I’m up for it tonight—”
“Nikki isn’t coming. She made plans with a guy she met downstairs last night. It’ll just be you and me. Please, Sky? This is why we came in the first place, to spend time together.”
I chewed the inside of my cheek. There wasn’t a way I could turn down her invitation without hurting her feelings. It didn’t matter how badly I wanted to stay in my room and read. My sister had paid to bring me to Vegas, and all she wanted was for me to have a good time. And to my surprise, I was having a good time. Greyson had been more than unexpected, but I was so happy to have met him, and that never would have happened without Renee insisting we take a vacation.
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