Lucky (8 page)

With that, she walked away, leaving him alone in the huge crowd of people, with the truth of her words ringing in his ears.

“And she says she doesn’t gamble,” he muttered. “Finding someone special is the biggest risk of all.” He watched her progress until she’d reached the roulette wheel, and then he walked away, hating himself for not being able to take that wistful expression off of her face.

As Lucky struggled to push her way through the crowd around Fluffy, another man approached her from behind. Only he lacked the charm of Nick Chenault, and the finesse to ask for what he so obviously wanted.

When she felt a hand slide beneath her jacket and then fingers cupping the curve of her hips before giving an uninvited squeeze, shock gave way to fury. She pivoted and came face-to-face with Steve Lucas. He wore a smirk he should have been hiding.

“How dare you!” Then she lowered the strident tone of her voice and cast nervous glances around her to see if she’d been heard. In Lucky’s experience, being stared at came right before gossip. She didn’t need any more trouble in her life.

Steve grinned. He’d known that the crowd would hide his behavior and had easily dared.

“Don’t play innocent with me, honey. I saw you flirting with the boss. Forget him, baby. I’m better in bed…believe me.”

Lucky was so furious she couldn’t even answer. Her
anger was instantaneous and so intense that she had doubled her fists and was actually considering throwing a punch when she remembered where she was.

Steve thought he was on smooth ground. That she’d taken his gesture as the invitation he’d meant it to be. So when she answered, his first mistake was in believing that the soft tone of her voice indicated interest, and not the overwhelming fury that it actually was.

“I don’t flirt,” she said. “And I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing, if you ever touch me like that again, you’ll be sorry.”

He sneered. “Honey, you’re the one who’s gonna be sorry. Besides, you can’t do anything to hurt me.”

She took a step forward. Her breath hissed hot against his face as she whispered softly, “Oh, yes I can, Steve Lucas. I can, and I will hurt you. In places you don’t want to consider.”

Steve’s eyes widened. The threat was unexpected, but unmistakable. “You teasing bitch,” he said, and tried a smile to mask his shock. It never got past a grimace.

Lucky didn’t move, nor bother to answer. She simply stared, her green eyes blazing, until Steve started to wonder if she was as deadly as her expression supposed. When the color of her eyes turned to a glitter so cold they looked black, he began to sweat. Unwilling to admit that she’d rattled him, he managed a shrug, then walked away.

The moment he was gone, she began to shake. Her stomach tilted, and her legs went weak. Steve Lucas’s constant harassment was just more of the same from her life in Cradle Creek. Something she’d hoped to leave behind.
But this last stunt had brought back every memory of every bad incident she had ever endured. Only this time, she had no sisters waiting at home to back her up. She’s never felt as alone in her life.

Without giving Fluffy a second thought, she bolted for the ladies’ room, hoping for some solitude in which to recover her sanity. Her space had just been raped by a man who acted as if he would have liked to continue the act for real.

Just inside the lounge, Nick was talking to one of his father’s old friends, when a flash of blue caught his eye.

Lucky! And the way she was moving told him something was wrong. Instinctively, he followed, unwilling to give up on a woman who seemed to have given up on men.

“Lucky!”

The last thing she needed now was to hear her boss’s voice. Compelled by the command in his tone, she stopped, and then stared down at the pattern in the carpet beneath her feet as if she couldn’t get enough of the design.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She shrugged and stared more intently, unwilling for him to see her upset.

“Someday you’re going to have to trust someone. I wish it could be me,” he said softly.

It was the shock of what he said that made her look up. Trust a man? Not likely. Not after growing up within the debacle Johnny Houston had made of their lives as well as his own.

“I can take care of myself.”

He instantly took her statement to mean that something or someone had hurt her. Maybe not physically, but the invasion was written all over her face.

“What the hell happened to you?”

The urge to tell was overwhelming. To lay Steve Lucas’s harassment at the feet of Nick Chenault would be the height of luxury. But the years and the people in Cradle Creek had done a number on Johnny Houston’s daughters. Trust would not come easily.

“Nothing,” she finally said.

“You’re lying.”

Lucky drew back as if she’d been slapped.

“It’s none of your business,” she said shortly. “You’re my boss, not my keeper.”

“Then I am applying for the job,” he said, as anger deepened his voice. “Someone needs to look out for you. It may as well be me.”

Lucky couldn’t believe her ears. “You’re crazy. I don’t need looking after. Especially by a man who picks up his women at bus stations.”

Nick flushed. Her taunt hit home. He would never be able to live that stunt down.

“Believe it or not, I was waiting for my father’s valet. I’d been there nearly four hours. I was hot. I was bored. I opened my big mouth in a moment of weakness and I don’t seem to be able to put it behind me.”

Lucky’s eyes flashed wild and green. Steve Lucas was forgotten in the heat of new anger.

“Well my lord but you’re a sweet-talkin’ man,” she drawled. “So you got so bored that you decided to hit on
the hicks who crawled off the buses? Do you do that often…or was it a one-time experience?”

Nick groaned. This was getting worse by the moment. “That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he said, not realizing that his own voice was getting louder and louder with each word.

She glared. He stared. And Fluffy came hobbling into the hall and capped off the moment by announcing: “I heard shouts. May I join in, or is this a private fight?”

Lucky rolled her eyes and stomped past both of them.

“I’m going to call a cab. I’ll wait for you out front,” she told Fluffy.

Nick shoved his hands in his pockets and tried not to throttle her on her way past.

Fluffy grinned. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Nick.”

All he could do was nod.

Then Fluffy LaMont did something unusual: she meddled. “I don’t know why,” she said softly, patting Nick’s arm in a motherly manner, “but she doesn’t trust people easily. And she doesn’t trust men at all. If you’re interested, you’re going to need more than an attraction to keep it alive. You’re going to need a jackpot full of patience.”

Nick slumped against the wall and combed his hands through his hair. He should have been embarrassed by his lack of composure, but he was too far gone in the moment to care.

“I don’t know how I feel, other than the constant need to dodge,” he said.

“Do sparks fly like that every time you two are together?” Fluffy asked.

He shrugged. “So far.”

She smiled. “Sparks start fires, you know,” she said. Then she patted his arm. “I’ve got a friend and a cab to catch.”

Despair stole the light from his eyes. He could use a friend right now. Someone wanted him dead, and the first woman who had piqued his interest in years kept telling him to get lost.

Fluffy paused at the doorway and then turned. A mischievous smile lit her eyes as she put a hand on her hip and let the green silk jacket to her lounge pajamas droop just the least little bit.

“Oh, Nicky.” When she was certain she had his full attention, she finished with a bad rendition of an old Mae West line. “Come up and see us sometime. We’re in the book.”

With a dash of feathered plumes and green silk, she left Nick standing in the hall with a silly grin on his face. For now, the secondhand invitation was enough to get him by.

He remembered that he still hadn’t learned what—or who—had sent Lucky running from the floor in fear.

Hours later, Lucky was still pacing her apartment, mortified by the fact that she’d shouted at her boss, and had been near to an actual brawl with Steve Lucas.

“My God. I have the job I’ve always wanted, and I’m afraid to go to work. It can’t get any worse.”

“And now…the news at ten,”
said the voice on the television set. Her one and only purchase of the day: a nineteen-inch portable color television. It was new, and it was all hers.

She sighed with frustration and absently eyed it as the announcer’s voice caught her attention. She stretched her bare feet and legs out on the sofa, picked up the remote control to adjust the volume, and straightened the hem of the T-shirt she was wearing. It was old and faded from pink to near white, and suited her mood to a T.

With the sound low enough to cushion her headache, she picked up her hairbrush and began to pull it through the thick length of her hair, hoping that the repetitive massage against her scalp would do what hours of pacing had not been able to do: give her some relief.

Events of the program came and went without note until a man’s face was suddenly pictured across the screen. The reporter began to speak, but Lucky didn’t need to hear an identification of the man. They’d already met. In the hallway of Club 52. Right after he’d plotted Nick’s murder.

“Today the body of Woodrow Mosconi, better known as Woody the Wire, was found floating in the pool of the motel where he’d been staying. Though he had registered under an alias, the police were able to quickly identify the man due to his lengthy record. Believed to have been involved, both directly as well as indirectly, in more than twenty bombings over the last fifteen years, the hit man will go to his grave with the secrets of his accomplices’ names.

“Because of the large roll of thousand-dollar bills found shoved in the back of Mosconi’s throat, the police are speculating that Mosconi had either double-crossed someone or fouled-up on a job he’d been hired to do. In the old days, symbolic gestures such as this were intended as a warning to the next man who tried to cross the mob. In other words, people who talked too much paid a high price for the luxury.”

The hairbrush fell from Lucky’s hands as her heart hammered against her chest. He’d talked. And she’d told. And now the man was dead!

“Oh, God! Oh, God! It’s him. It’s him.”

The knock on her door coincided with a commercial for building materials. So for several seconds, Lucky thought that the hammering on her door was the carpenter on TV. It was when she heard someone call her name that she hit the mute button on the remote and then jumped from the sofa and turned out the lights. Her first thought followed the train of what she’d just learned.
He told before he died and they’ve already found me!

It only stood to reason that she might be right, because she knew that Fluffy wouldn’t climb these stairs in the dark, and there was no one in Las Vegas who should come calling on her. A spurt of fear accompanied her racing heart as she stood in the corner in the dark and listened…waiting for the sound of receding footsteps that never came.

But her efforts at concealment had been too little, too late. The lights had been on when Nick had walked up the three flights of stairs. He had knocked until his knuckles hurt and then he watched in amazement as the lights suddenly went out. And all during this time he’d heard not a peep out of her. Suddenly the anger and frustration that had been building up all day got to him.

“Dammit, Lucky, it’s just me. It’s Nick…your boss. Open the door, for God’s sake. I need to talk to you.”

Lucky’s bare feet danced in a little circle in the darkness as she tried not to panic. Oh, God! Not Nick Chenault!
What on earth was he doing here? She couldn’t face him. Not now. Not dressed like this.

“Lucky…please. I stopped downstairs and spoke to Fluffy first. She knows I’m here, so you’re safe. I’m not going to hurt you.”

It was the horror of the newscast and fear of being alone, accompanied by the fact that Fluffy knew he was here, that sent her to the door.

Nick was almost at the point of giving up when he heard the slide of a dead-bolt. He held his breath and waited as the door opened, an inch at a time. She was a darker silhouette against the room’s shadows, highlighted only from the intermittent flash of the light on the television screen behind her.

“He’s dead, Nick. The man who was going to kill you. He’s dead. I just heard it on the news. What if he told someone about seeing me before he died?”

“Sonofabitch.” The curse was an apologetic ramification of his anger. Regret overwhelmed him. The reason for his arrival was moot. She already knew.

Without thinking, he took two steps forward and pulled her into his arms. She was mute and shaking, and from what he could tell, near the point of collapse as she pressed herself against him like a leaf trembling in a gale wind.

He kicked the door shut with his heel and felt her sigh, as if she’d given up a fight he knew nothing about. And when he knew that she wasn’t going to rage at him for coming too close, he began to let himself feel the woman he was holding.

Hair. It was his first and strongest impression. It fell across his hands and down her back in a thick, satin veil. Unable to resist the temptation, he tested its depths with the flat of his hands, and groaned silently to himself. He’d known it would be as sensuous as the woman to whom it belonged. And then his hands raked over the surface of her arms and he had to stifle a groan.
Good God! Her skin is even softer
.

Lucky’s good sense returned when his hands started roaming her body. Every warning signal in her head went off. She had to put some distance between them, for more reasons than she cared to consider.

“Why did you come?” she asked, and pushed him away.

Her question shocked him. He’d lived with her image for so long, even before he’d known her name, that she’d long ago ceased to be a stranger to him. Regretfully, he acknowledged that she could not feel the same.