Lucky (14 page)

The low, even timbre of his voice rumbled against her nerves like a soothing balm.
His pleasure
. She shivered. She suspected Nick Chenault knew a lot about pleasure.

“I’d better get back to work,” she said, almost expecting him to try to get her to stay.

But when he walked to the door and opened it, then stepped aside to let her exit, she was so surprised that she left without another word.

Nick’s pasted-on smile lasted until he could no longer see her, then he sighed and shut the door with a none-too-gentle thump, cursing all the way back to his desk.

“Woman…you’re trying every ounce of patience that I possess and then some,” he muttered, as he gazed long and hard around the empty room.

In the days that followed, Nick’s emotions went on red alert. He stayed one step ahead of his own lust, telling himself over and over, like a mantra, that she would be the one to make the call. But the more he saw her, and the quicker she broke into a smile upon his arrival, the more difficult it became each time he said good-bye. He’d never wanted a woman as much, or denied himself as constantly, as he did Lucky.

Lucky, on the other hand, was in limbo. Part of her felt as if she’d been uprooted and then stuffed back into the hole upside down. Everything she’d based her life upon was ceasing to matter. She went to work, going through the motions like a robot, coming alive only for the hours when she was in Nick Chenault’s presence. She’d completely forgotten the warnings Queen had constantly given her as she was growing up.
Don’t give a man more
than he’s willing to give back. Don’t trust a man with a handsome face and a handful of money. Don’t love a man who makes no promises.

Everything she’d been taught was worthless against the constant and growing need she felt, that she had to belong, completely, totally, to Nick Chenault.

She watched him when he wasn’t looking, gazing her fill of the way his features changed as his emotions ran the gamut. Imagining what it would be like to have nothing between them but the heat of their bodies, then trying to imagine what it would be like to lie naked in his arms.

And always, when she got to that part of her fantasy, she forgot what came next, because she didn’t really know what came next. She just knew that she knew peace when she was with him, and ached when she was not. It was a vicious cycle of need that could only come to one swift and certain end.

But there was a nearly forgotten onlooker to their stalled romance who hated, and resented, and wanted revenge.

Steve Lucas walked the streets of Vegas, his broken jaw wired shut, jobless and penniless, blaming all his misfortunes on the woman behind the man.

In his estimation, Lucky Houston was a bitch. He told himself that she’d played him for a fool and then chosen the man with the money. He couldn’t or wouldn’t face the fact that Lucky Houston had never, not once since her first day on the job, even given him the time of day.

Steve Lucas wasn’t a man who understood rejection. He was on a mission, and word on the street was that
someone big wanted Nick Chenault to suffer. The number he’d been given was burning a hole in his pocket as he hurried to make the call. He knew how to make Chenault suffer. Hurt the woman…and you hurt the man.

“Lucky…this is for you,” Manny said, and winked as he handed her a note while she and Maizie sat in the employee lounge on a break.

Maizie grinned and poked Lucky in the ribs as Lucky’s face turned red. “So read it,” Maizie urged. “I’ll even turn my head if it’ll make you feel better.”

Lucky stuck out her tongue and then opened the note and scanned the sparse lines, unaware that with every word she read, her mouth was turning up at the corners, and her eyes got a dreamy expression that delighted Maizie no end.

Would you consider having dinner with me at the Hacienda, dancing at the Mirage, and making love in the backseat of my car for dessert?

Lucky laughed aloud. Nick’s sports car didn’t have a backseat. His request was so outrageous that she couldn’t find it in herself to be offended and suspected that he knew it.

“What?” Maizie begged. “For Pete’s sake, don’t go all gooey-faced and dreamy on me and then leave me hanging. I’ve got to go home to an empty bed and two babies, remember?”

Lucky’s sympathy for Maizie’s situation was deep. The Houston girls had never known a parent who stuck by them. By the time Queen had turned two, her mother was dead, and her only parent was an untrustworthy father.
The woman who came after stayed only long enough to give birth to Diamond and Lucky, and then walked out one day and never came back. At the tender age of nine, Queen had been left with the responsibility of raising her baby sisters, as well as their father. The girls eventually grew up, but Johnny didn’t.

“Your bed is empty because you keep ignoring that cute bartender, Mike Bernard, and we both know it,” Lucky teased. “And you love your babies beyond words and can’t wait to get home to them.”

Maizie grinned. “So…that still doesn’t mean I can’t live vicariously through you.”

“It’s just an invitation to dinner that I may or may not accept,” Lucky said, and stuffed the note in her pocket to keep Maizie from seeing the part about dessert.

“Damn funny invitation, if you ask me.” Maizie pouted. Then she glanced at her watch. “Break’s over. And thank goodness! That means only one more hour and I’m gone for the day. See you later.”

“Yes, later,” Lucky mumbled, as she felt for Nick’s note in her pocket.

She thought about what she was going to do only as long as it took to get to the house phone and call Nick’s office. He answered on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“I might consider the dinner…but I don’t think I’m up for dessert.”

His chuckle sent shivers up her spine. “One of these days, pretty lady, you’re going to eat those words.”

“I might, but tonight, I’ll settle for a steak instead. Pick me up at the apartment at eight. I’ll be ready.”

Lucky hung up the phone with a breathless sigh that made Nick’s gut knot.

“You’re ready? Oh, hell, lady, you don’t know the meaning of the word,” he muttered, well aware that she couldn’t hear a thing that he said, then dropped the phone into the cradle.

Ignoring his unquenched libido was becoming an everyday practice, just as the constant phone calls he made on his home to Cubby or his father. Even though nothing serious had happened since the bombing attempt, Nick still took precautions each time he moved from location to location, making sure that someone could reach him at a moment’s notice. Tonight would be no exception. He made the call home and then watched the clock, counting down the minutes until he could hold his lady in his arms.

By the time night came and dinner was over, Nick was in want to the point of misery. He’d had his fill of food he couldn’t taste, as well as the fleeting glimpses he had of the shape of her body beneath the wispy blue fabric of her dress. Her arms were bare, and her hair was pulled back and then up in some intricate knot he desperately wanted to untie. The skirt of her dress flared to a stop just above her knees. Glimpses of something lacy just below her top button kept teasing his senses until he thought he might burst.

After they left the restaurant, instead of driving toward the club Nick had mentioned, he turned in the opposite direction on another street.

“I thought we were going dancing,” Lucky said.

“We are,” Nick said, as he lowered his window and
changed lanes before accelerating. “But later. Buckle up, honey. I need to cool off before I’ll be able to get out on a dance floor with you.”

She eyed the elegant cut of his trademark silk suit and tie, the short wisps of his thick, dark hair blowing across his forehead, and casually remarked, “Maybe if you took off your coat, you’d be cooler.”

There was recognizable sarcasm in his answer. “Honey, the only thing I want to take off are your clothes. And since that’s not about to happen anytime soon…”

“Oh.”

Even in the darkness, he could see her blush. He chuckled and grabbed her hand as he reached across the seat.

“I’m sorry, Lucky. I shouldn’t have said that, but hell…you wanted honesty in a relationship. That’s as honest as I can be. The last thing I’m ever going to deny is that I want to make love to you.”

Lucky sighed and folded her hands in her lap like a schoolgirl, which is what she constantly felt like in Nick’s company.

“Maybe I should be the one who’s apologizing,” she said. There was a firmness in her voice Nick had never heard. “Maybe I’m the one who’s been teasing. Not intentionally, but nevertheless…”

“Hell no!” he said. “I’m thirty-six years old. Not some eighteen-year-old male who’s overdosed on hormones. When you get older, you realize that some things are worth the wait. You, my love, are one of those things. I don’t just want to take you to bed, you know. I like you, girl. A whole damned lot.”

Lucky grinned as Nick’s car took a corner on two
wheels and then fishtailed slightly before aiming down the freeway with the unerring speed of a bullet.

“Then what, my dear Nick, are we racing to see…if not my naked self?”

Nick laughed, then bared his teeth and growled at her playfully. “You keep putting ideas like that in my head and I’m going to lose my cool. Then, my sweet lady, you’ll need more than your Lady Luck namesake to keep you out of my arms.”

Lucky angled herself in the confines of the bucket seat until she was more or less facing Nick as he drove. Every day he was becoming more and more important in her world.
But do I let him all the way in? And if I do, will he stay?

Lucky wondered what she was waiting for. What sign did she need to see to prove to her that he meant what he said? He was in her dreams, in her head, in her heart. There was only one place he hadn’t been. She wondered if it wasn’t past time she let him in there too.

“Where are we going?” she asked, wondering how to say what was in her heart.

“I want to show you what Las Vegas looks like at night from the foothills. All the lights look like precious jewels tossed on a bed of velvet. Every color…everywhere. It’s a prettier view of my city than the view from across a blackjack table, believe me.”

The casualness of her attitude did not prepare him for the question she asked. “Are we going to neck?”

Nick skidded around a dark, secluded section of one of the streets and braked to a sudden stop. His hands were gripping the steering wheel with the determination of a
race car driver. His eyes had narrowed, and his lips were firming with every breath that he took.

“What the hell are you playing at?” he growled, pulling her so close that he could see the lights of the city below reflecting back at him through her eyes.

Lucky took a deep breath and made the final move alone. Their lips met. Their hearts raced. There was a moment of resistance in his response before Nick’s mouth went soft, then opened, and the groan that slid from him to her was an indication of his need. Before Lucky had time to tell him what was on her mind, he’d unbuckled her seat belt and pulled her across his lap.

“Be still,” he warned. “And don’t tell me the goddamned steering wheel hurts your back, because it can’t be anything to the pain I’m in.”

As angry as he sounded, his touch was a lesson in opposites. One hand cupped the back of her neck and tilted her head in perfect alignment to his mouth. The other hand was somewhere down the side of her hip and traveling south across fragile blue fabric. Lucky moaned and then sighed.

“Nick, I’m afraid to tell you what I feel. I’m so afraid to get hurt.”

“Ah God!” For a moment, their foreheads touched, and Nick closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, trying to calm his racing pulse. “You’re the last thing on this earth that I could bear to see suffer. It isn’t in me to do you harm. I swear it, lady.”

“I can almost believe you.”

“It’s you that you don’t trust, sweetheart. Not me. You need to learn how to take a chance.”

“I don’t gamble, Nick. You’d do well to remember that.”

His nostrils flared and the short intake of breath told Lucky she’d struck more than a nerve. From the look on his face, there was a very good chance that she was about to see him come unglued.

“I don’t know whose whipping I keep taking from you, but it’s damned sure not mine. I don’t deserve that, Lucky, and you know it.”

Lucky wanted to cry. “I didn’t mean…I never realized…” She turned away, looking out the window beside her, and refused to see herself in the reflection of the glass. It might be too revealing to ignore.

Nick sighed, and slid a hand beneath the heavy knot of hair at her neck.

“I’m the one who’s sorry, sweetheart. I pushed when I should have stayed put. Forgive me?”

She nodded and the movement sent tears running down the middle of her cheeks.

“Are you ready for that dance?”

She sighed. At this point, being held in his arms might be more than she could handle. But she’d promised him. “Sure, why not?”

Nick frowned, then started the car and pulled back onto the street. It was because they were so involved in their own thoughts that they missed the persistent glare of lights from the car that had been behind them off and on ever since they’d left the Hacienda.

He was to wonder later if anything would have been different had he seen the car. But it was simply a “what if” thought. Unbeknownst to them, the hand had already been dealt. The play was in progress, and it was only a
matter of time before somebody won…and somebody lost.

Minutes later, he wove through a knot of traffic, angling for the exit that would take them back to the strip and the Mirage. Accelerating, he turned off the highway and pulled into valet parking.

He skidded to a halt just inches from one of the uniformed attendants and handed the young man his keys. He waited for his parking stub while another attendant helped Lucky out of the car.

She stretched, observing the frenzy of guests coming and going inside the club, and then stepped up on the curb while she waited for Nick to finish. Looking up, she stared at the vastness of the western sky and thought how different the world had looked from the valley of coal surrounded by the Smoky Mountains where she’d grown up.