Lucky (23 page)

“Oh, my God,” she said, holding it first one way and then the other, watching as the late evening sunlight beamed through the windows and caught the thousands upon thousands of translucent glass bugle beads covering the semisheer, nude-colored fabric. The dress was sleeveless, and nearly strapless save for two thin strips of jeweled fabric, and its neckline plunged dangerously downward. Once on, it would make the wearer appear to be clothed in nothing but glass. The suggestion of the body beneath would be startling and sensuous as hell. It was perfect. And it scared her to death.

“Of course you can’t wear anything beneath it, you know,” Fluffy said. “Bra and panty lines would ruin the effect.”

“Of course,” Lucky drawled, tongue in cheek. “God knows we wouldn’t want to ruin the effect.”

“You’d better borrow this too,” Fluffy said, unzipping a long garment bag. “You don’t want to get arrested before you get where you’re going.”

Lucky’s eyes widened as a full-length fur coat fell out onto the floor at their feet. The fur was but a few shades lighter than her own hair.

“Is that…?” She couldn’t even finish the question.

“Russian sable. A
friend
gave it to me years ago. I have it cared for yearly so it’s still in good condition. I’ve even been known to wear it now and then.” Fluffy shrugged. “I forget the occasion, but it was a gift all the same.” Then she winked. “I was quite a honey in my day.”

Lucky hugged her tight. “You still are, Lucille. You still are.”

The plan was in motion. There was only one person Lucky had left to notify. And that was done the next day, in the form of a letter addressed to Nick Chenault at Club 52.

“What’s this?” Nick asked, holding up the envelope that he had just found in the middle of his desk.

The pale blue envelope bore only his name. No return address. No stamp.

“A messenger service delivered it this morning before you got here,” Manny said. “I signed for it and swore on
mi madre’s
grave that I would see that you got it personally.”

He fidgeted, hovering in the doorway, waiting for Nick to open it up.

“Want to help?” Nick asked, grinning at Manny’s impatience as he ran his finger beneath the flap and ripped it open.

Manny didn’t bother to answer. Yesterday, Lucky had been relatively quiet on the way back to Las Vegas, but the few things she had let drop told him that something like this would be forthcoming. Intently, he watched Nick’s face for a reaction.

“What the hell does this mean?” Nick growled, and tossed the letter onto his desk. Without waiting for Manny’s answer, he stuffed his hands in the pockets of his slacks and stalked toward the window overlooking the Las Vegas strip.

Manny grabbed the piece of pale blue paper. Even he was surprised by the briefness of the message. But there was no mistaking who it was from.

I will be at your office tomorrow at 10: 00
P.M
. Bring the watch.
It was signed,
L
.

“I don’t understand,” Manny said.

“What else is new?” Nick muttered, rubbing the back of his neck in a weary gesture. “Did she tell you anything? Anything at all?”

“Only that she was glad to be home.”

Nick’s heart surged. That she considered Las Vegas “home” was something for which to be thankful. Maybe that meant she had no plans of moving elsewhere.

“Well hell. Why try to outguess a woman? Tomorrow night I’ll know what she’s up to. And believe me, giving back that watch will be the happiest day of my life…as well as my dad’s. I haven’t seen him this depressed since the year after my mother died.”

“But he is well?”

“As well as Cubby can keep him,” Nick said. “That man hovers like an avenging angel. Sometimes I think he’s keeping Dad in good health by sheer will alone.”

“It is good to have a friend like that,” Manny said.

“That’s what I hear,” Nick said. Then he walked out of his office, unwilling to reveal his true emotions. Inside he was a mess of nervous anxiety. He’d been terrified that he’d never see her again, and now that the meeting was imminent, was scared to death for it to happen.

“Ah…Nicky. You have more friends than you know,” Manny said. “Even your own Lady Luck. What more could a gambler ask for?”

The day had gone from simply cold to bitter. It was a fitting accompaniment to Lucky’s mood. Inside she felt
as cold and dead as it looked outside her windows.

While she believed that what she was doing was right, the fear of seeing Nick again and not being able to throw herself into his arms was tearing her apart. The only way she was going to be able to get through it all was to stay as emotionally removed from the meeting as possible.

“Think of Johnny,” she said to herself as she paced her bedroom, going from dresser to mirror and back again. “I can’t think of myself. I have to remember Queenie…and Di. All of the bad things that might never have been if Johnny had kept faith in himself.”

And yet as hard as she struggled to retain her anger, another feeling kept pushing it aside. The memory of Johnny’s weak excuses. The money for their food that he often gambled away. The constant threats of social services coming and taking the girls away from him…and from one another. Of having to move constantly, until finally there’d been nowhere else to go. Cradle Creek had, literally, been the end of Johnny Houston’s road.

Rationally, she knew that the presence of a family heirloom, no matter what it had been, would probably have made little difference in their world. He was what he was—a man with an addiction he couldn’t kick.

But it was her heart that remembered the promise to her father that she’d made. Because Johnny Houston’s daughters had lived on broken promises, it was beyond any of the three not to keep their word. It being their only possession, once given, they would have died rather than take it back. And so she faced the night with trepidation, praying for a miracle.

Because so much of her body was going to show be
neath that dress, she had rubbed lotion into every inch of her skin. She’d swept her hair into a shining crown of intricate loops, then pinned them loosely upon her head. With every motion of her body, the vagrant curls bounced and teased the lights that reflected off of it. Her borrowed shoes, made years ago to match the dress, were the nearest to Cinderella’s glass slippers Lucky Houston would ever come.

From the living room, she heard the clock chiming the hour. Nine o’clock. In sixty minutes she would see Nick again.

And although the urge to leave now was overwhelming, she could not be early. Timing was everything. An entrance was paramount to pulling off this stunt. While she had less than thirty minutes to dress, she still dawdled, picking up her room, hanging up laundry, letting her mind resurrect the image of Nick’s face, because it was all of him that she had left.

It took little effort to remember those dark, passionate eyes, or the full, sensuous cut of his lips that could pull a cry of delight from her soul as easily as they could smile. Despite everything she remembered, there was one thing she would like to forget: the shock on his face as she’d walked out of his life.

“Oh, Nick, Nick. I wish it hadn’t happened. I wish none of it had.” But the emptiness inside her heart was a constant and miserable reminder that it had. She shuddered, and then she threw a shoe across the room. “If that’s all you can do, Lucky Houston, then it’s time to for you to get dressed and finish what you have started.”

She began to dress with the ritualistic motions of a
bullfighter about to go into the ring. Each movement of her body was enhanced by the rapid pounding of her heart. And when, a short time later, a car honked on the street below, she looked out to see that her cab had arrived. The waiting was over.

The last thing to go on was the coat. It felt sinful. She’d never experienced anything like it before…except maybe the feeling she got when Nick Chenault took her body by storm.

She stepped out onto the third-floor landing and said a prayer as she locked the door behind her, then turned, staring down the long, steep flight of steps stretching far below her like a cold, dark invitation to hell.

The bitter night air bit at her cheeks like an angry lover. Instinctively she wrapped Fluffy’s sable tighter around her shivering body. But it didn’t help, because she was shivering from fear, not from the cold.

Moments later the cab sped away, carrying her toward her destiny. From a ground-floor window, Fluffy watched as the cab disappeared around the corner.

“Good luck, my darling,” she murmured. “I have a feeling that you’re going to need it.”

The club should have been deserted at ten o’clock on Christmas night, but it wasn’t. Christmas was, after all, a Christian holiday, and Las Vegas was a recreation harbor for people of all persuasions, from all over the world.

The long, flowing robes of Arabs dotted the areas around roulette and baccarat tables. People passed…dark, slanting eyes slid past the gaze of round blue ones. Every casino in Vegas was like a Tower of Babel. Thou
sands of people with the same intent, often unable to understand the person standing next to them. They had only the international language of money to get them through.

And so the holiday visitors played, going from table to table, from the quarter slots to the dollar slots, doing a little holiday shopping of their own. The massive fir tree that had been decorated in Christmas fashion graced the mezzanine above the ground floor in added brilliance to the everyday opulence that was Club 52. And yet in spite of its beauty, few took the time to look up and appreciate its presence. The “strike-it-rich” season of Las Vegas was year-round and took precedence over whatever else might interfere.

Only the employees who worked within the frenetic world of the casino had lives of their own. Most of them were the kind of people who went home after their shifts, who loved more than the sound of cards being shuffled and the clinking of chips.

In the thick of it all, Nick paced the floor of his office, trying to outguess the gambler’s daughter as to what hand she was going to play. But he might as well have wished for the moon. There were too many variables in a game of chance.

The watch lay on his desk like a fat gold snake, coiled and ready to strike. Its head was the clockworks, its tail the long gilded chain. The ticking from within was the death rattle warning its prey. Nick stared at it from across the room, silently cursing its existence. Had it not been for that watch, his lady would not hate the sound of his name.

He checked the time and tried to ignore his growing
fear. Any minute she would arrive. Then the waiting would be over. Within the hour he would know what it would take to get her back. “Come on, baby…don’t keep me waiting,” Nick said. Impatiently, he walked out of his office.

The constant movement of people and the hum of their voices on the floor below vibrated through the soles of his shoes. He leaned over the railing, gazing intently into the crowd, searching for a woman with a dark head of hair and a slow, easy walk that translated from sauntering to sexy with the sway of her hips.

He looked down and saw Manny looking up, shrugging as if to say “don’t ask me,” when the crowd at the door seemed to part, making way for an elegant woman to come through. She was covered from neck to ankle in a rich, dark fur. It was her!

Unable to look away, he could only marvel at her regal bearing and remember that this gambler’s daughter had come a long, long way from Cradle Creek.

“Welcome back, baby,” he whispered beneath his breath, and blinked as a film of tears blocked the rest of her from his view.

Unwilling for the rest of the world to see his misery, he retreated to his office. It was time for Nick Chenault, the ultimate gambler, to pull himself together and prepare for whatever she’d come to say.

The watch was there. Right where he’d left it. He’d never realized it was possible to feel hate for an inanimate object, but it was inside him all the same as he looked at the watch.

“Any minute now, you sonofabitch, you’ll be back
where you belong…and so, I hope, will my lady. She can have anything she wants, as long as I get her.”

His whispered vow went unheeded, and the watch continued to tick.

On the floor below, Lucky paused as Manny waved and hurried toward her.

“
Querida
, you look fantastic.”

Her only response was a cool order. “Manny…get a new deck of cards, then come to Nick’s office.”

The shock on Manny’s face was his only response before he hurried to do her bidding.

The stairs had never seemed so steep or so long. But Lucky made it, thankful for the mental protection of the fur that she wore. In a way, a little of Lucille LaMont’s outrageous spirit seemed to have come along for the ride. Lucky was grateful. She needed more than backbone to get through the ordeal ahead of her.

Seconds later, she was at the door to Nick’s office. Without knocking, she pushed it open and walked inside.

His back was to the door, his shoulders braced as he stared out the window, as if waiting for a death blow to fall. It made her sick to know that she’d caused him so much pain.

Remember your promise
, she told herself.
Remember your promise
. Her mantra would be the only help she would get to make it through the next step.

If he hadn’t heard her swift intake of breath, he would never have known she’d arrived. He spun in place, and then he watched her pause in the doorway and stare at him like a starving woman before a feast.

Lucky could not look away. From his dark hair to the
cut of his black Armani tuxedo, he was just as she’d remembered. Until she looked into his eyes and saw the pain. And the shadows. And the hope. It was this last that drew her further into the room.

Manny bolted in behind her, out of breath, clutching the cards that she’d asked for.

“I have what you requested,
chica
. I will leave them on the—”

“No. Stay. We will need a witness.”

Manny complied, shutting the door behind him and the trio inside, away from the chattering crowd below.