Lightning Strikes (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy #3) (22 page)

“I don’t understand, Jack.  Why would you blame yourself?”

“I made him hand over the
keys
, doll.  He didn’t want to.”  Jack’s voice rose.

When he suddenly sat up, Nina jolted and reached for him, but he was too fast, standing from the bed with his hands covering his face.

“You know what?” he asked, moving toward the bathroom.  He turned his head just enough to give her a view of his eyelashes.  “I can’t talk about this.”  He quickly corrected himself.  “I don’t want to talk about this.”  A long silence passed before he turned just enough to meet her eyes.  “Okay?”

Nina, still curled into a ball in the middle of the bed, nodded, eyes still wide.  “Okay, Jack.”

“I’m gonna go and take a shower; then we’ll figure out what our next steps are.”  His eyes grew serious.  “We need to get back to New York.”

Nina took a deep breath.

Jack finished.  “Back to the real world.”

When Jack finished his shower, they switched places without a word.  Nina rushed through hers.  She knew it was time to get home.  Her divorce trial was coming up, and there was no more room for fun and games.

She stepped out of the shower and brushed her teeth in record time, pulling open the door of the bathroom.

Jack looked toward the door, where the steam from her shower was escaping, and met her eyes.  His smile was back to normal.  Not reaching his eyes.  Not genuine.  The freshly dry-cleaned slacks the maid had dropped off fit him like a dream, as always, and his fingers trembled as he worked each button of his crisp white shirt together.  Even after five days of madness, he was still wedding ready.  Still a complete picture.

The news played on mute on the TV screen in front of him.

He nodded toward it while buttoning his cuffs.

“Guess who called off the strike?” he asked, his smile growing.

That smile was real.  Nina was able to spot it in an instant now.  The real ones always sent her stomach turning inside out.

She looked away.  “Unbelievable,” she mumbled, crossing the room to her own clothes.  Her pants and top were both from Forever 21 and didn’t require anywhere near the kind of delicate care Jack’s did, but she still couldn’t help a smile as she pulled them out of the bag hanging from a hook on the closet door.

She dropped her towel and dressed while watching the news with Jack.  When she looked at him, a blush hit her cheeks when she saw he wasn’t watching the news, but her.  His fingers froze on his cuffs as he gave every inch of his attention to her.

She shuffled into her pants.  “What are you looking at, Aries?”

“You.”

She cut a look at him and drummed up all the courage she could manage to say her next words.  “Did you mean what you said to me last night?”

Jack’s eyebrows jumped, but his brown orbs remained hooded, showcasing his fight to keep himself from removing the clothes she was working to get on.

She responded to the question in his eyes, understanding that a man was only physically able to listen halfway when there was a half-naked woman in front of him.

“You said…” She snapped her bra into place, pulling the straps up her arms.  “That once we get back to New York, you wanted to be with me.”

Jack frowned, only able to finish buttoning his cuff when she got her black cami over her head.

“I said that?” he asked.

“You did.  Right before you finished. And being the wily sex goddess I am…”

He looked away from her with a laugh.

Her stomach flipped again before she continued.  “I’m well aware than a man has the tendency to say all
kinds
of things
when he’s on the verge of an orgasm—”

“I meant what I said.” His eyes met hers.

Nina stood tall, playing her fingers together, and held his eyes.  When the intensity ebbing between them became too much, she tucked her curls behind her ear and turned away from him, hurrying across the room to her purse.

“We should really get going,” she said, her voice and eyes hurried as she dug through her bag.  “We’ve still got to get these chips cashed. I have a feeling all the flights are going to be sold out.  If they are, we’ll get a rental car.  If we get on the road right now and hightail it the whole way, we could be back home in less than 48 hours…” She gasped when she turned to face him and found him closer than he had been a moment before, eyes deep with feeling as he approached.  She stepped back, running into the table she’d forgotten was behind her, nearly knocking it to the floor.  She turned away from him just in time to keep her bag from falling, but her eyes were back to him in an instant.

He nodded upward.  “And you?”

“M-me?”

“Did you mean what you said?  Last night?”

“Well, apparently, men aren’t the only ones with a tendency to forget what they’ve said when they’re on the verge of an orgasm.   Because I don’t remember—”

“You said;
it’s yours, Jack
.”  His voice lowered. 
“It’s always been yours
…”

She shook her hair out of her eyes.  “Of course I meant it.  And I think you’ve always known it.”

He shrugged.  “So what do we do?”

“What we’ve always planned to do.”  Her heartbeat picked up.  “We get ourselves home to New York, and we say goodbye.”

With all the will she could manage, she turned away from him and stepped out of his hold; reclaiming her bag.  She felt the heat of his body close behind her as she dug through it but, thankfully, he didn’t touch her again.

She knew if he did, she’d be a dead woman.

A few minutes of riffling around in her bag sent the small frown on her face deeper until she was full on cringing.  Soon, she upended the bag completely, emptying the contents onto the table.  Tampons, make-up, keys,
everything,
spilled out, clanking down on the table.  She sifted through it.

When Jack’s hand came around her waist, she wasn’t sure if it was his touch or the dread coursing through her that made her gasp.

“The chips,” she said, in response to his squeeze.  She upended the bag a second time.  A few pens and a runaway gum wrapper-tumbled out.  No casino chips.  “Oh my god, the
chips
.”

Jack came up next to her, his voice ever calm.  “When is the last time you—”

“Saw them?” she cried, giving him a pained smile.  “Why, why,
why
do people ask that question? If I knew the last place I saw them…” She took a deep breath when she realized she was panicked.  “Before we went downstairs to have dinner, I put them right here.  They were
right here
.”  She jabbed her fingers into the zippered pocket inside her bag.

Jack ran his fingers over all of the items she’d dumped onto the table.  He upended mini-tampon boxes, popped open concealer cases and sent nail polish bottles rolling in every direction, all with a steady hand.

“How can you be so calm right now?” she shrieked, shoving her fingers into her hair, eyes big.

“Because overreacting is not going to solve anything.” Jack snatched up her bag as she did that very thing, overreacted, and looked through it himself.  When he concluded that the chips, sure enough, weren’t in the bag, he upended it the same way she had moments before.

Nina paced all over the room, mumbling manically.  “You were right, Aries.  You were completely right.  I’m Hurricane Nina.  The karmic gods are
following
me, and they want to see me suffer!”

Jack peered into the bag, holding it open as wide as it would go.  “Maybe there’s some kind of hole—”

“There’s no hole,” Nina screamed, catching his amused eyes.  “And I swear to god if you smile right now, I’ll kill you.”

Jack’s smile vanished, but not because of her threat.

He pointed to the hook on the closet door.

Nina’s eyes followed his pointed finger, and when she found their empty dry cleaning bags, still hanging down from the hook, she looked back at him with fury clouding her gaze.

***

The only view in the hotel that topped the penthouse’s was Mr. Flynn’s. His office was grand, with dashes of solid gold finishes and a view of Los Angeles County that belonged on a postcard.

Perched in his leather office chair with his elbows cradled on the arms; Mr. Flynn held out his hands with a kind smile.

Neither Nina or Jack returned his smile, instead giving him the deepest scowls they could muster from where there were perched on the edge of their seats on the opposite side of his desk.

“They took it,” Nina insisted for the million time since they’d sat down.  “It had to have been your dry cleaning department.  No one else had access to our room last night but them.”  She cocked an eyebrow.  “No one that we
know of
anyway.”

Mr. Flynn cocked an eyebrow of his own.  “I hope you’re not insinuating what I think you’re insinuating, Miss Grammio.”

“I’m
insinuating
that if the pretend-they-don’t-speak-English, shady ass, thieving ass employees in your laundry department didn’t take those chips out of my purse, then
you
did!”  Nina took a deep breath when she felt Jack’s hand cover her knee from the seat next to her.  She shot him an apologetic look.

“We agreed you were done talking for today,” Jack whispered.

“I’m so angry,” Nina replied, jamming her eyes shut when he tightened his hold on her knee.  She knew what that hold meant. 
Shut the hell up and let me handle it.

So she did.

Mr. Flynn, leaning so far back in his chair it looked close to toppling over, gave Nina a pained look.  The two burly men standing on either side of him shifted as if Mr. Flynn had given them both a signal, one that was undetectable to outsiders.

Jack and Nina looked back and forth between them, eyes wide.  Their gazes shot back to Mr. Flynn as he spoke.

“First you insult my employees,” Mr. Flynn breathed, his tone low and slow.  “Then you insult my hotel… Then, worst of all, you question my
integrity
…” He pushed the beds of his fingers together, shaking his head with a squint.  “I cannot allow this.”

“ ‘
I cannot allow this’,
” Nina mimicked, squinting and pursing her lips while pressing her thumbs and forefingers together.  A moment later, her face sobered.  “This bullshit Scarface act you’ve got going might scare every other idiot who’s been through the doors of this office, but it doesn’t scare me, Don Corleone.”

“Jesus, Nina,” Jack breathed, widening his eyes at her.

“Well one of us has to speak the hell up,” Nina said, motioning to Mr. Flynn. “You’ve had every opportunity to jump in here, Aries.  Any day now would be great.”

“Just for the record, Don Corleone and Scarface are two completely different references.  Tony Montana was Scarface, and Don Corleone was The Godfather.  So your metaphor doesn’t really… work.  Just saying…” Jack’s words slowed to a stop when she looked about two seconds from clawing his eyes out.

“Do you realize we have just lost forty-five thousand dollars, in less than twenty-four hours?” she asked.  “Has growing up a spoiled little rich boy desensitized you toward money
so much
that you can’t even appreciate how fucking angry I am right now?  If you were in my shoes, you would be crushing skulls!”

“Nobody wants to crush anybody’s skull,” Jack said, speaking specifically to the massive men on either side of the desk.  “She’s just a little emotional…”

“I
know
it was you,” Nina spat, her eyes going back to Mr. Flynn.  She jammed her finger at him.  “I’ve heard about this hotel.  It’s been all over the news for years.  You’re bleeding money every single day trying to keep this shithole in operation.  You were never going to let us walk out of here, were you?  I doubt you’d let anyone walk out the door with the kind of money we won last night.”

“That’s a very serious accusation,” Mr. Flynn said.

“You can take my very serious accusation and shove it up your ass.  And stop
whispering
like that. You sound like an asshole.”

“Nina, are you
trying
to get us killed?” Jack grumbled.

She moved her accusatory eyes to him.  “I told you.  I told you we shouldn’t have taken that room.  I told you these guys were hustlers.  I told you, Aries.  But nooooo, the Greenwich pretty boy
needed
his five star room.  He needed his Egyptian sheets and his Evian shower.  Now we’ll never get home.”

Jack leaned an elbow on his chair, covering his mouth just in time to hide his smile.

But Nina saw it in his eyes.  “Are you seriously laughing right now?  This is all a big joke, right?  Because you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, or how you’re going to pay rent, or how you’re going to continue living your life with any shred of dignity intact.  You don’t have to worry about any of that, do you, Jack?”

Mr. Flynn sat taller, making his leather chair squeak.

Jack and Nina snapped their heads toward him with stunned eyes, as if they’d forgotten he was in the room.

“We’ve filled out the incident report,” Mr. Flynn said. “And I assure you, we will call you if we hear anything.”

Nina held his eyes, chest heaving before she snatched up her bag.  “Yeah, I’ll be sure to hold my breath on that one.  Because I’m
so sure
that the first thing someone who comes across thirty thousand dollars worth of casino chips will think to do, is turn them in!”

She turned away without waiting for a response, scoffing across the room as quickly as she could without breaking into a run.

Jack watched her go, and then turned back to Mr. Flynn, shrugging.

Mr. Flynn laughed deep, making his gut shake as he cut a look of sympathy at Jack.  “
Goooood luck
with that one.”