“I’m not drunk. We just got here.” Away from the smell now, my stomach calmed. I straightened up, finally.
“True.” Nadia sighed, sounding dejected. “And now, we won’t be either. Come on, let’s get you back to your place.”
“We don’t have to go…” I looked back at the cantina.
“I think we do.” Lupita eyed me sideways. “I want to ask you something, but it might be better to ask you at your apartment.”
Groaning, I let them nag me into going home. To be honest, I was too tired for much else now.
Nadia left.
Lupita didn’t.
She made some soup, despite my insistence that I wasn’t hungry.
Of course, the moment she put it in front of me, I realized I was indeed famished. I practically devoured the bowl in two giant gulps. When I looked up and found her watching me with a faint smile, I checked my shirt. “What, did I spill anything?”
“No. I’m just…well, you said I have this big brain, Angel. I think you have a big brain, too. So, I’m going to ask you a question. If you answer it the way I think you will, maybe you’ll realize something about this stomach bug.” She sat down across from me at the table and folded her arms. Her cheeks were a faint, dusky pink and she shifted uncomfortably in the chair, looking embarrassed. “I know we’ve talked about my boyfriend before.” Her eyes fell away and she closed her eyes. “Andrew died. I came back to Mexico to be with my mother.”
I went to say something, but she held up a hand.
“This is about you. You say you don’t have a boyfriend, but have you slept with anyone?”
I blinked, caught off guard. Images of Mac flooded my mind, and my face turned hot. I was sure it was redder than hers. “Why would you ask that?”
“You throw up when you smell food. You fall asleep at the drop of a hat and sleep for hours. I think your bug is something else.” Her eyes dropped to my midsection and she made curved up and down motions with her hands.
I stared at her blankly.
“Angel, I think you’re pregnant.”
9
Mac
Three Months Later
I woke up with my hand around my cock and the image of Angel in my head, the taste of her on my tongue.
It had become a fairly common way to start the day. I couldn’t complain, except every dream made me want the reality that much more. And those dreams weren’t going away. I was at the point where I craved the reality of Angel more than I wanted my next breath.
I’d sunk so low that I’d poked around in the hotel scheduling database and found out who had booked her room.
Sadly, it wasn’t Angel.
It was her friend.
I knew that because I’d sunk even lower and run a background check on the name registered on file. The dark-skinned African American woman was gorgeous, but she wasn’t Angel. It was Angel’s friend. Thankfully, I didn’t give in to the urge to phone her and ask for information about Angel. That was too much in the way of stalking. Even I wasn’t that bad.
Although I wished I were.
The alarm next to my bed went off again, and I sighed, reaching over to smack at it. That didn’t shut it off, so I hit the fucker. It was still beeping. With more profanity, I sat up and grabbed it, punching at all the other buttons until it finally went off.
I dropped back onto the bed, still clinging to the fraying edges of the dream about Angel.
I was piecing it back to together when a fist thumped on my front door.
Each of us on the team headlining my show had a suite on different wings of this level, plus there were a few extra suites for our invited guests, celebrities, visiting family and such. We lived at the hotel during our show season. We performed daily for a period of three weeks every month from December through February, then on weekends from March through July. We let newer artists use the theater during the week during that time, and every day during the month of August. We took that month off. Who the hell wanted to spend August in Las Vegas?
In September, we came back together, alternating with weekly shows through to November, with the fourth week of each month being a joint show.
There were times where we all wanted to perform nonstop, but we needed our downtime.
All this week, we were gearing up for one of the final group shows. Sly, the taskmaster, was working us into the ground. Last night, LeVan and I joked about murdering him in his sleep, or maybe rigging one of the illusions he mastered to just…fail. It was so easy for something to go wrong. Of course, Sly had heard the whole thing and he told us there was no way we could successfully make it go wrong without his help.
But if that was him pounding on my door, I wasn’t going to settle for a seemingly accidental death.
Groaning, I got up and started toward the door. My muscles ached and my eyes were still bleary with sleep.
I opened the door to Sly’s smiling face.
Then I slammed it on Sly’s smiling face.
“It’s too damn early to listen to your shit, son,” I shouted through the door as he started to pound again.
“Are you awake?”
“No.” I went to the bed and dropped down face first.
“If you don’t open up I’ll use the master key and come in there to drag you out of that fucking bed, sunshine.”
Grunting, I rolled onto my side and shoved a pillow over my face to block out the light. And his hollering.
“Good luck with that.”
I no longer had a lock that could be bypassed with a master key. Dumbass. A minute later, Sly started to knock. Again. Much, much louder. Grabbing my phone, I said, “Music on.”
After a split second, music began blasting from the speakers. I fell asleep to the raging sounds of Metallica.
An hour later, I walked onto the practice stage we used for rehearsal. It was identical to the theater we used for the main show. In a few more weeks, we’d start having rehearsals there instead.
Sly and LeVan were already there waiting for me. When LeVan caught my gaze, he mouthed, “Run. Run now.” Then he rolled his eyes and grinned.
Sly glowered at LeVan, whose face was now set in a hard glare, one meant to match Sly’s. Because LeVan didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Smirking at them, I got my gear, tossed it onto the stage, then braced my hands on it and leaped up.
Sly stalked over to me. “Are you gonna half-ass your way through this rehearsal, or actually put some effort into it this time?”
“I don’t half-ass anything,” I said calmly. “That’s why I grabbed some extra sleep. I can’t put shit into anything if my brain is still foggy from lack of sleep.”
Sly snapped, “I don’t always get enough sleep. But I push through. That’s what the professionals do. We push through.”
I stared at him, waiting for the rest of his usual lecture. This bullshit was getting old. “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t lower yourself chained, upside down in a tank of water with no breathing apparatus after getting no sleep for kicks.”
“You wouldn’t do your amped up fire tricks for kicks, either. You do it because you still seem to have half a mind to kill yourself.” Sly’s face was set in hard, ugly lines, his eyes spitting fire at me.
I knew what he was trying to do but I wasn’t about to bite. All this rage so early in the morning would fuck up the rest of my day. It was uncalled for, but my hand still slowly curled into a fist.
LeVan, ever the peacemaker, came over and stood between us, hands coming up to separate us. “Can you two yahoos remember that we’re here to get work done? Oh, and that we’re supposed to be friends?”
“Are we?” Sly glared at me, still addressing LeVan. “Is that why you and I are always left holding the bag while Mac here sleeps in, and while his PA gets stuck with the job of running interference when some bimbo from Mexico calls up and claims she’s pregnant with his kid?”
“For fuck’s sake, Sly!” My temper exploded. “I’m exhausted, okay? I’m not sleeping all that well. I saw
my old man in a press conference on the fucking TV, and my mind just…”
My mind just…
My mind.
“What did you just say?”
Sly’s face underwent a complete and total change over the next few seconds, but I barely processed it, because my brain was completely blank.
I turned away, shaking my head and staring out at the wall that mimicked the area where the audience would sit had this been the real theatre. I couldn’t see any of it.
I was picturing Angel. Over four months passed since I’d laid eyes on her. Our one-night hookup was back in late July. We were already days from the beginning of December now.
Over four months, yet I could still see her heart-shaped face and those big, blue eyes, clear as day as she stretched out on the bed, her head resting on my chest as she grinned up at me.
And we’d talked that night.
Well, she talked.
I listened.
I played with her hair, such soft, silky hair and told her something… something stupid, probably. Yeah, even I’d thought it was random shit. She just laughed, then told me she was going to Mexico. Mexico City, to be exact. To teach at a school there. A project to help the poor learn English.
She thought it was important work. That was the point where I prepared myself to turn her down if she asked me for money to help out.
But she hadn’t.
And as days went by, I wished I’d asked something more about the project so I could figure out where exactly she was. She wasn’t a bleeding heart. She was a woman who had a real heart. She cared about people. And I let her just walk out of my life.
She was gone.
But Sly just said…
Slowly, I advanced on him. His expression was different now, calmer, but it didn’t matter that he dropped the idea of provoking me into a fist fight. I was ready to rip his clean off.
“What the hell did you say about the woman in Mexico? You need to tell me now.”
“Look, it’s just another stupid…”
“Sly,” LeVan said. He wasn’t looking at Sly though. His unusual, golden eyes were locked on my face, reading me. “I think you’d better do what he says.”
Nearly forty-five minutes later, I sat beside LeVan in Sly’s office. Leonard, my PA, showed up too.
There were six letters in all, dating back almost two months.
All from Angel.
They’d kept it from me all this time.
Both Leonard and Sly were standing at the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring outside. Leonard’s face was in its perpetual scowl. Sly’s face was expressionless. LeVan and I went through each letter, and he was the one who suggested—no, insisted—that I should phone the contact number she added at the bottom of each note. Not that I needed convincing. There was also contact information for a lawyer, a firm with offices based out of Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada.
After months of dreaming about her, wishing we’d exchanged numbers and kept in touch, here I had a legit way to do just that. Except they decided to hide it from me. Bury it, because apparently, she addressed the letters to ‘Mac from Management’. They ended up in the hotel’s Human Resources department, and from there, Leonard got them. He only brought in Sly, and then gave our lawyers a heads up in case it turned into an issue.
They kept the details from me, as well as her reason for reaching out in the first place.
Her name was Angel Halliwell.
She lived in Canada.
Angel was just under four months pregnant. And according to her, she wasn’t attempting to sue me for child support or anything like that. She just wanted me to know what was going on. Sly laughed at that, but LeVan, being the practical one, went online on his phone and did a quick search of her name.
There wasn’t much on her, but her family was wealthy—just as I suspected. And by wealthy, I meant fucking loaded. Like I was. That was only figuring in the money we made from the hotel, casino and our magic acts. Shit, it was pocket change compared to what was sitting in a trust from my mother’s side of the family. I’d done my best to outrun it, outrun the lawyers, my mother, the fuck who was my father, my entire past.
All of it.
“She’s pregnant and none of you told me shit,” I said, voice hollow.
“You know her?” LeVan got up to get a drink from Sly’s bar.
At his words, I forced myself to look up. “Yeah. We had…” Forcing myself to clear my throat, I said, “We hooked up once.”
“One time?” Leonard asked.
And Sly added, “One fucking time?”
Before I could kick Sly’s ass and fire Leonard for what they did, LeVan was in front of me again, passing me a glass of whiskey. His calm expression moved from me to Leonard, and back to me.
“Look at me, man. Just forget about all that other shit. It’s done. Tell me about her—this Angel Halliwell. Is there a chance you’re the one who knocked her up?”
“Hell yeah. A big fucking chance,” I said. Dragging a hand down my face, I looked out the window from my seat. From the corner of my eye, I could see Angel’s face, framed by the dark golden ropes of her soaking wet hair. Then I’d glanced down…and there was the broken condom. The piece of shit latex that had snapped, and the gaping hole staring up at me from the floor of the shower. “The condom failed.”
Sly threw his hand up to cut me off. “That’s an overshare right there. But since you’re spilling your fucking guts, wasn’t she on the pill?”
“None of your damn business.” I got up and moved over to the window.
“This is our livelihood that’s being fucked with here—”
“It’s not.” I turned to face him. He glared at me and I returned his hostile gaze. “Do you question every single woman you take to bed? Have them fill out a survey? Tell you what, Sly, you must be damn charming. I know what kind of revolving door you’ve got going on with the long line of women you mess with. Don’t start getting all judgy with me.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to tell me you went to bed with this chick and you didn’t ask any of the basic questions? Like if she’s clean? Married? Some stripper with kids for seven different baby daddies she met on the job? You just gloved up?”
“You’re asking for it, you son of a bitch.” I stabbed a finger in the direction of his face.
He swatted it away.
LeVan was there between us before it could go any further, pushing Sly back a bit. “Can the two of you take a few deep breaths and cool off?”
Leonard came up and slung an arm over Sly’s shoulders. “You know, buddy. I think the two of us have screwed up more than enough for the day. Hell, the whole year. Maybe we should sit the rest of this one out.”
He gestured to the door as he walked, Sly left with him.
Once they were gone, LeVan got back to business. “Thea and I have dinner plans with Nicky,” he said, referring to his girlfriend and her brother. “I’ll be heading out to meet them in a few minutes.”
I nodded, hearing the message that went unspoken. That he was hoping I’d use the alone time to phone Angel.
“Her number’s in all the letters.”
“I saw it.” My voice was tight, clipped. I didn’t need to check the letters again. Her phone number was already imprinted on my memory. As soon as LeVan was gone, I planned to call it.
“Let me know how it goes, then.”
He left and I returned to the guest chair, smartphone in hand, the digits flashing through my mind.
Call, I told myself.
But I couldn’t do it right away.
Okay, so I was a little nervous. I was about to look like a piece of shit for taking this long to call. All I could do was explain and hope she understood, but if I were in her position, I’d still sound like an asshole.
“I need a drink,” I muttered. Getting up, I moved to the wet bar I rarely used and got some bourbon. Sly kept the bar stocked with his favorite brands of whiskey, including one where the manufacturer only produ
ced a hundred bottles a year. The really good shit. Well, when he got back here he was going to find that bottle empty.
It was good. I drank two fingers, then poured another serving—hell, that wasn’t enough. I filled the glass halfway full and swirled it around as I walked over to the window. I just needed to figure out the best way to handle this major fuck-up when I called her.
Then I had another glass.
By then I knew I needed to call her and not be a fucking coward.
Without letting myself chicken out, I unlocked my smartphone and dialed the number I’d memorized on sight. It was a knack I had and something that ran pretty strong on both sides of my family. It was one of those abilities I’d happily excise if I could. I would have, up until it proved useful in the career I’d chosen for myself. A career that caused embarrassment in my family. I knew that for a fact. My mother made a point to tell me when she made her yearly phone call on my birthday. Every year for the past few years since she tracked me down.
They could think whatever the fuck they wanted.
Magic freed me from them.
I took her calls because I figured that one of these years, her update would be the good news that my old man was dead—or better yet, that she finally took action and did right by me.
Angel’s phone rang.
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
Four—
I started to hang up.
“Hello?”
Her voice was a little breathless, soft and sexy, almost the way she’d sounded when I made her come.
“It’s Mac.”
10
Angel
Little butterflies were fluttering around in my belly.
I covered the slightly rounded area with my hand and in response, the largest of the butterflies, or Bump, as I’d taken to calling the baby growing inside, smacked against my hand.
Maybe Bump knew how pivotal a moment we were about to share.
Ruin Me: Vegas Knights Page 6