Breaking Beauty (Devils Aces MC): Vegas Titans Series (2 page)

As the night crept towards dawn, the handsome man kept
winning, kept winking, and Romy remained unable to place him. At one point he
rose from the table “for a walking break,” and Romy watched him (and his high,
tight ass) saunter towards one of the side roulette tables. He placed the whole
of his night’s winnings down on some lark.

Paulette appeared at her elbow then: “I want you to take
that young man home and do absolutely everything you can think of to him. If
you need help coming up with ideas, I’ve prepared a stand-by list.”

“Paulette, I’m working. Like you said.”

“Oh, shut it, Princess.” Paulette turned to address Romy’s
table: “MAMA TAKES A UNION BREAK. Table adjourned for five minutes, till we get
a sub in here.” When the men groaned, Paulette became a full-on mother hen. “Go
on. SCOOT,” she said. She walked Romy over to the unofficial employee break
table on the floor, where a few other dealers were attempting to stretch inside
of their leather bodysuits and bitching about the players over cocktails.

“Oooh, Romy, I saw you with that tall drink of water,” said
Kali, a beautiful Hawaiian woman who held the informal “Best Ass” title among
the pit crew. “Look at you. Got yourself a high-roller.”

“Mmm-hmm. He’s worth staying awake for, darling,” said
Annisette, another motherly supervisor with an expensive red weave and a temper
to match. “I see you drooling.”

Romy took the affectionate ribbing in stride. They were
entitled to a bit of gossip about her personal life. While the rest of the lady
dealers and cocktail waitresses were an aggressive division of chatty Kathy’s
by nature, Romy had always been notoriously quiet about her personal life at
the casino. There’d been the single one night stand, the six months’ worth of
breaking up with Lewis, her ex...and that basically brought everyone up to date
on her “sexy Vegas back story.” Romy was private, she was wary, and maybe most
of all, she was busy—it wasn’t as if she had time to primp and fret over a boy
when there were sixty page labs due for her math and science courses every
week. Her co-workers’ concern brought the fatigue back: nothing was going to
happen with her handsome stranger. And why? Because this was Earth, not Heaven.
This was Vegas, where fortunes and the privilege of other people’s beds were
gambled, gained and lost in the quick roll of a die. Better to shake it off and
stay professional. Stop thinking about the mystery man.
Get a grip,
Adelaide,
she told herself.
Get a grip.

She saw him approaching from the corner of her eye before
the other women did. A small hush rippled through the party as he planted
himself before her. His arms still jittered, though perhaps his evening’s
winnings had gifted him the confidence to sit a little easier in his expensive
suit. “Romy Adelaide. Silver Spring High School, class of 2006. I know you,” he
said. She was speechless, until:

“Bryson. Vaughn. I
knew
you looked familiar!” The
name appeared in her mind’s eye like something from a dream, and was attended
by a flood of memory.

“I knew you knew I looked familiar,” Bryson said coolly. He
leaned towards her, slipping what she could feel to be a fat hundred-dollar
chip into her sweaty palm with a measure of coyness. “Listen, I just won five
grand. So that’s yours to keep. Now I’ve got to run, but Romy—” and here he
drew back and looked her full in the face, his blue eyes dizzying as they
seemed to suck her in, “—how about you don’t forget about me again.” He winked
once more, before making for the exit.

The other women had already begun to fan themselves like
schoolgirls, but Romy watched Bryson’s retreat as far as her eyes could follow.
She saw him peel off his sport coat and flex his powerful body just outside the
casino lobby. She watched him don a pair of black aviator sunglasses, despite
the morning hour. She watched him pop an unlit cigarette into his mouth and
toss the coat over a shoulder, before striding away into the bright night.

He’d looked different in high school. No suits in his closet
back then.

The Bryson Vaughn of Silver Spring Secondary had been
something of a contradiction: a baseball star, a basketball forward, and a bad,
bad kid. The kind of guy mothers warned their daughters about. The unsupportive
legend went: “a kid like Bryson could turn a valedictorian into a teenage mom
in ten minutes.” At least that’s what Romy’s foster mother had liked to say, as
she sipped her teetotaler’s soda with lime through perpetually pursed lips.

Back then, he’d worn only leather jackets and grimy t-shirts
when not in uniform. He’d yet to get his first ink, but was never without a
bona fide diamond stud in his left earlobe. Plenty of cheerleaders had harbored
secret crushes on the brutish Vaughn—his greasy hair always falling into his
eyes in
just such a dream-beau way
—but he wasn’t what any lady with self
respect would ever consider “boyfriend material.” She remembered that he used
to take girls out to the abandoned quarry on the edge of the city. The girls he
took out there would never give any juicy details about what went on at these
“dates,” but after the fact, they did tend to smile smug little smiles to
themselves—like members of an elite club.

Before Romy had really known what sex involved—she’d been
two grades behind Bryson in school—she’d overheard a beautiful upperclassman
girl make a befuddling remark of the swaggering Vaughn: “He was so well
endowed, I almost couldn’t. But then...well...a lady shouldn’t say…”

When he wasn’t deflowering homecoming queens, Bryson got
into fights with other boys. These dust-ups were often in the name of what had
then seemed like vague concepts: honor, integrity, “a man’s good name.” Then
again, this kind of behavior wasn’t so unusual when your whole family was a
part of the no-good hustling motorcycle club, the
Devil’s Aces
. She
remembered him on his own first bike—a fire-engine red Harley XR-1200 that used
to get a lot of complaints from the Neighborhood Watch about its conspicuous
lack of a muffler.

Romy’s recollection trailed here, because by the time she
was really old enough to start paying attention to Bryson Vaughn, he’d all but
drifted off the face of the earth. At the beginning of his senior year, he was
kicked out of varsity basketball when a coach found a dime bag in his locker. A
dishonorable discharge from the baseball team wasn’t far behind. Bryson rarely
went to class, but when he did, he slept. Girls started spinning elaborate fictions
about what he stayed up all night doing that made his daily life at Silver
Spring such a torturous bore.

In two years of overlap at a tiny high school, Romy and
Bryson had taken a single class together: Chemistry 101. They’d been
lab-partnered for a single assignment on nucleotides. She’d worn her best dress
to the library on that day when they were supposed to meet after school and
work on their lab together. She’d prepared a dozen veiled, nerdy come-ons...but
of course, Bryson Vaughn hadn’t shown up. She felt foolish that she’d even
imagined wooing the school hottie via homework. He was
Bryson Vaughn.
He
didn’t “show up” for chemistry labs.

And right around this incident, Romy met Kellan.

If Bryson was the bad boy, Kellan was the sensitive
artist—he was rarely spotted after sophomore year without the company of a
creaky electric guitar, which he played and sang along with in the courtyard
during lunch. Kellan’s hands were always covered with ink stains, thanks to the
doodles he fashioned through every single class. And where Bryson’s body was
athletic and ripped, Kellan’s was slender and sinewy. He wore band t-shirts and
skinny jeans as a rule. Lots of the hippie girls liked him. Oh yeah, he also
wrote poetry.

Romy had kept to a tight-knit bunch of ambitious, dorky
girlfriends while in high-school, and so Kellan was the natural object of a lot
of her friends’ affection. He was a kind of blessing: in their corner of Reno,
where a mere handful of women expected to finish college without winding up saddled
to some bum working for the city, here was Kellan: a boy who thought about the
world, had opinions, and loved art. Romy was drawn to him spiritually before
sex even factored in. The pair started having weekly meet-ups in the courtyard
during which he’d practice songs on his guitar and she’d talk to him about all
the novels she was reading. Together they hatched wild plans to leave Reno.
Then one day, Kellan brought in a song he’d written especially for her:

Don’t tell me you can’t feel it

with your body next to mine

wish I had you in my bedroom

wish you lived there all the time

He was no Shakespeare, but she wound up seeing the inside of
that bedroom. Though all of her girlfriends stopped talking to her once the
fling was “sealed.”

And for some reason, Romy Adelaide was the last person in
school to connect the dots. Bryson was never around, for one. Kellan, in all of
his sentimental reveries, never once mentioned having an older brother. Sure,
the boys shared a last name, a hunky jaw line and certain goading
expressions...but plenty of people were distantly related in Reno. It took two
weeks of going steady and a brief meeting with his parents to learn the
perfectly plain truth: Bryson and Kellan were brothers. Always had been.

The dalliance didn’t go much past a fumbling dash for third
base in his attic bedroom and a few more artistic courtyard meet-ups—Romy grew
preoccupied with school, while Kellan began to follow his brother’s academic
example. By school’s end, Romy was a rueful egghead whose only dream was
skipping town, while Kellan had followed Bryson all the way into the motorcycle
club’s inner circle. She hadn’t seen the younger brother in years. She hadn’t
seen either Vaughn boy, really, since graduation day.

“You
know
him?”

“My God—you
know
him?”

“Body that fine should have a nice driver.”

“Why didn’t you ask for his number?”

“Why didn’t
he
ask for
your
number?!”

“Trifling.”

“Men are scum.”

“But did you see his—”

Romy secured a moment to drift away from her “union break.”
The other women would be content to talk about Bryson for the rest of the
night. Truth was, Romy couldn’t stand to be the subject of their motherly pity
and unsolicited advice. She didn’t need another mother—mothers, in her
experience, were nothing but coincidental baggage. She far preferred to
navigate romantic waters alone.

Though then again, why
hadn’t
Bryson asked for her
number? What would be the point of his whole “remember me” act if he didn’t
want to see her again? Romy felt a feeling she hadn’t allowed herself to feel
for years: neglected. With a heavy heart, she began her binding trudge back to
the pit. At least her shift was almost over.

Before she reached her table, Romy felt a hand on her
shoulder. For an eighth of a second, she imagined it was Bryson—come back to
kiss her, to carry her out of the casino onto some waiting Harley, a madcap
adventure unspooling before them...but when she turned around, she saw only the
rodent-y little face of the pit boss. Lou.

“Where you going, sweetcheeks?”

“Back to work, Lou. I’m just off break.”

“I don’t think so.”

Ugh.
Lou Valentine was among the creepier of Romy’s
immediate employers. He ogled and pinched freely, and had uncanny skill when it
came to trapping people in unpleasant conversations. He was also a round little
man with a preposterous toupee and breath like the devil’s dog. “I’m taking you
somewhere.”

“I’m not in the mood,
sir,
” Romy said. She began to
pull away from him, but Lou merely tightened his grip on her forearm.

“And
I’m
not playing around. Seriously, Adelaide.
Boss wants to see you. Follow me.”

Romy’s stomach tightened. The boss? She knew of no boss
beyond Lou. She turned towards her co-workers, but the unofficial break party
had broken up at the manager’s approach. She imagined that Paulette and Kali
and Anisette were each furtively avoiding her gaze at their own tables, already
aware of some horrible truth in her future. Was she getting fired? Had the
mystery bosses been taking note of how tired she seemed on her feet lately?
Helluva
way to go
, Romy thought to herself, while Lou scurried through the crowd
before her.
Meet dream guy.
Don’t
get asked out. Lose job. Sounds
about right for my luck.