24. Erin
CHAPTER 24
ERIN
F riday night, and Kelsey was riding in a black Mercedes town car, chauffeur-driven. I sent the licence plate to Alexa, and two minutes later, she pinged back a reply. The vehicle was registered to the Neptune, which didn’t help much. Jace Fuller could be in the back seat with her, or the hotel could have comped the car as part of her stay.
We followed the car along the Strip until it turned off near the airport.
“Maybe she’s going home?” Rusty suggested.
“I guess it’s possible.”
But the Funhouse was also over this way. I’d googled the place after Ari sent me notes on the Fuller Group. Five-star food and fun, the website claimed, although Tripadvisor scored it at four overall, mostly because it was overpriced. The blurb promised gourmet American food, retro gaming, and a dance floor. The town car pulled up outside five minutes later.
Rusty cracked his knuckles. “Ready to play pinball?”
“Is it hard?”
“Not hard to play, but hard to win. ”
“Huh. How about bowling? They have four lanes.”
“You enjoy bowling?”
“In the Promised Land, I was the skittles queen.”
“Skittles? Like the candy?”
“No, like bowling, but with nine pins instead of ten. It’s a European thing. The Prophet lived in Germany for a while. He said he left because Europe is full of heathens, but it turns out he actually got deported after he served two years in prison for scamming his followers.”
“How’d he scam them?”
“Sold some potion that was supposed to cure cancer, except it was just urine mixed with pomegranate juice.” I caught the look of disgust on Rusty’s face. “I know. Gross, right?”
“He pissed in a bottle and sold it for money?”
“Hundreds of bucks. And they don’t know for sure it was his product. I mean, it could have been anyone’s.”
I’d begun telling Rusty a little more about my past, and he’d surprised me by not laughing. Most people laughed. Most people thought I was a fool for not seeing the light sooner. But when you’ve never known anything else, when your access to information is limited and someone who’s a pro at scheming and manipulating does a number on your head, accepting the truth isn’t so easy. Life had been simple in those days, simple but cruel. You did whatever the Prophet or your husband told you to do, in that order. If you were a woman, you spent your days growing food, cooking, cleaning, and raising the children. Men went out to work—People’s Promise ran a bunch of businesses—and most of their income was tithed to the Prophet. Houses, spouses, and jobs were allocated, not chosen. Until I left, I’d never seen a TV, and airplanes terrified me.
In some ways, Rusty’s upbringing hadn’t been so different from my own. He’d worked on the family farm, growing food, but without the safety net of communal funds to fall back on. The money he’d earned from his first three years in the hockey league had gone to paying off his family’s debts and sending his little sister to college. Only after signing his new contract had he actually kept any money for himself.
He slipped an arm around my shoulders. “Okay, I’ll let you beat me at bowling.”
His touch didn’t make me nauseated anymore. No, now I craved it. He’d kissed me every night before we went into the house to eat dinner with Sin and Trooper. And I felt… Well, I didn’t hate it.
I wanted him to do it again.
And I also wanted Florence to fall off a cliff, but obviously I couldn’t say that out loud.
Eighties music pumped out of the front door, and Rusty grimaced. “This isn’t my idea of fun.”
“Don’t forget your glasses.”
He put them on and took my hand, then we stepped into the Funhouse. Prices aside, I’d knock off a star for the volume of the music. I could hardly hear myself think. Head throbbing, I checked the place out, and there she was. Kelsey looked frankly horrified, and I wondered if Jace had told her where they were going. Or had he just billed the outing as a surprise?
Rusty leaned in, and his lips brushed over my ear as he whisper-shouted, “I’ll get the drinks.”
Oh, man. This has been one weird week.
While he elbowed his way over to the neon-clad bar, I found a poseur table where we could spy on the not-so-happy couple through the drooping leaves of a potted plant. Guess it wasn’t a fan of the ambience either.
Jace kept invading her space. Kelsey kept backing away. It was painful to watch. She gulped down her bright blue cocktail with the desperation of a woman who wanted to get out of there as fast as possible, but Jace had other ideas. He’d clearly booked a table.
“I’ll take care of it,” Rusty said when we realised they were staying for dinner. Despite my initial misgivings, he’d turned into a great partner.
Jace had dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, while Kelsey wore tailored pants, a blouse that buttoned right up to her neck, and boring flat shoes. Rather than studying the menu, she fished a tablet out of her bag and faced him, hands on the table in front of her. Ah. She thought this was a business meeting. Jace did not.
Kelsey skipped the appetiser and checked her watch seventeen times during dinner—I was counting—and shook her head when the server brought dessert menus. Which meant I couldn’t eat dessert either. Boo.
But still Jace persisted.
“What’s that old saying?” I murmured. “The customer is always right?”
My old boss at Sin City—the strip club, not the actual city—used to tell me that all the time, which was probably why I’d been fired for emptying a pitcher of water over a patron. No regrets. The guy had totally deserved it.
“In matters of taste,” Rusty said. “The full quote is ‘the customer is always right in matters of taste.’”
Huh. Never heard that before. “Well, Jace Fuller definitely isn’t Kelsey’s taste.”
He ordered more drinks. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back for ten minutes. I pictured her crying in a stall and considered hurrying in there myself to offer a hug and a few words of support.
But I couldn’t.
And where was Jace’s wife in all this? Her name was Selene. Alexa had found a photo of her—she was a super pretty blonde, but real dainty—and she didn’t seem to get out much. Her social media hadn’t been updated in years, but she appeared in pictures occasionally with Jace.
I felt sorry for her too.
Rusty reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I’m not a violent man, I swear, but I really want to punch that fucker.”
No, he wasn’t violent, not to people who didn’t deserve it. He’d shown kindness in every action since I’d met him. After I left the Promised Land, I swore I’d never get involved with another man, but when I found one like Rusty, how could I stay away?
Sure, he’d ruin me when he left, but he’d also teach me more about what I wanted from life.
“They’re…heading for the dance floor?” he said as if he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Under duress.”
Jace tried to wrap his arms around Kelsey. She pushed them away, and he just laughed. Rusty’s lips pressed together in a thin line, and it was my turn to put a hand on his.
“Don’t make a scene. I know it’s unpleasant, but she’s here of her own accord, and he can’t act like a complete monster in a room full of people.”
“Someone needs to tell Silas about this.”
“Him flying to Vegas to kill a man won’t do the Raiders’ Meadows Cup chances much good.”
“He can call her, convince her to come home.”
“And then they’ll find out you’ve been spying on her.”
“I’ll tell him I was in Vegas with you and I spotted her by chance.”
“If you tell him you saw her with a guy, he’ll assume she’s cheating, which she’s not, but you can’t tell him that without revealing we’ve been following her for weeks.”
“So I’ll tell him it looks like a fucking hostage situation.”
“Talk with your friends in the morning. Get their opinions, seeing as they know Silas better and they were the ones who sent you here.”
“Okay.” Rusty blew out a breath and glanced across at the dance floor again. “I don’t like it, but okay.”
Rusty had come to Las Vegas to find out if Kelsey was cheating, not to question her poor life choices, and he’d achieved the goal. He should be reporting back, not going renegade and potentially impacting Kelsey’s career. If she wanted to suck up to a sleaze to land a contract, that was her decision to make, although I was still worried she didn’t know quite what she’d gotten herself into.
I forced a smile. “Seeing as this might be our last night together, can we try bowling?” The lane closest to Kelsey and Jace was open.
“What do you mean, our last night together?”
“If Kelsey leaves Vegas, you won’t need to stay here, will you?”
“Yeah, I will need to stay, but for a different reason.”
“Really? What reason?”
He just stared at me. Wait a minute…
“Me? I’m the reason?”
“I need to take you out for a meal that isn’t part of a surveillance operation.”
“But…but…”
“But what?”
“But what about Florence?” I blurted, inviting the elephant into the room. The elephant who probably danced like a ballerina and didn’t put her foot in her mouth the way I did.
“Since I met you, I’ve barely thought about Florence. It’s been cathartic, you know? Like wiping the slate clean.” He fixed those soft brown eyes of his on me, and my stomach turned to mush. Which, when added to a hundred decibels of bass, left me feeling oddly queasy. “It’s time for a fresh start. ”
“What about hockey? You’ll be playing again soon.”
“Fresno is only three hours from Santa Cruz, so you’d better learn to drive. What, did you figure I’d just leave and we’d never see each other again?”
Yes, exactly. “I hadn’t really thought that far ahead.”
“Liar.”
“Well, what do you expect? You’re a hockey megastar, and I’m a nobody who didn’t even graduate high school.”
“I’m just a guy from backwoods Minnesota who happens to be pretty good at hitting pucks into goals. And you might not have your GED, but you’re whip-smart. Plus you have a good heart, which is way more important.”
“I can’t put that on my résumé,” I muttered as his words sank in. Rusty Bolt liked me. He actually liked me. “But this won’t work. It can’t.”
“And why not?”
“Because of the…” My cheeks burned. “We can’t have this conversation here.”
“You’re talking about the sex?”
“Shut up.”
“Last week, you didn’t think you’d like the kissing either, so I figured we’d work it out as we go along.”
My turn to stare.
“Am I wrong?” he asked.
About the kissing? No, he wasn’t. And in that moment, I understood that even if I hated the sex, even if it hurt the way it always had in the past, I’d have to pretend I liked it because I liked him.
“I can take the bus to Fresno.”
He barked out a laugh. “You’ll get your licence. Have faith in yourself.” A glance to the side was followed by a longer look and a flash of anger. “He has his hands all over her.”
I turned to watch, and yeuch, Jace was groping Kelsey’s ass. Why wasn’t she pushing him away as she had every other time? Then I realised—he was moving in time to the music, but she wasn’t. She’d slowed down completely.
“How much did she have to drink?” I whispered to Rusty, and he understood where I was going with that.
“A cocktail and a glass of wine? Two glasses? Maybe she’s a lightweight?”
“Or maybe he dropped something in her drink while she was in the bathroom.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I mean, it would explain why she can barely stand.”
We both watched in horror as Jace half carried Kelsey to the edge of the dance floor and then continued on toward the door. His family owned this place; nobody was going to stop him.
“Fuck,” Rusty muttered under his breath.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
I jumped up and grabbed his hand. “Follow my lead.”
Kelsey was not becoming another one of Jace’s victims—and at that moment, I didn’t doubt there had been more. I marched across the room, pulling Rusty along behind me.
“Ohmigosh! Kelsey? Kelsey Dorrias? I thought I recognised you. We met at Nathan’s party in Richmond last year, remember?”
She mumbled gibberish, and I grabbed her shoulder as she lurched sideways.
“Wow, you’re super drunk. Are you going to puke? We should get you to the bathroom.”
I tried to take her by the hand, but Jace tightened his grip. “We’re going home.”
“Home? But Kelsey lives in New York.”
“She’s staying at my place.”
“Who are you?”
“Her boyfriend.”
Oh, he didn’t …
Jace Fuller might have been rich, but his expensive sneakers and designer jeans couldn’t save him from six-feet-one of pissed-off hockey player with murder on his mind.
“The fuck you are.”
I made the most of the impending bloodshed to tug Kelsey free and manhandle her toward the parking lot. Boy, was she heavy.
“Kelsey’s dating Silas Armstrong, motherfucker. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m—” Jace’s eyes bugged when Rusty took a step forward, putting them chest to chest. “A mistake. It was a mistake. She told me she was single.”
“Bullshit.”
Jace ran. Like, he literally sprinted out the door, which was the best option for everyone at that point in time. If I was stopping Kelsey from choking on her own puke, I couldn’t be bailing Rusty out of jail, could I? I noticed some of the staff staring, but they didn’t step forward, so presumably Jace’s bossing skills were as bad as his dating ones. Ari needed to hear about this—she’d flown to California for a couple of days because she had Zach withdrawal symptoms, but she’d arrived back this afternoon.
Rather than chasing after Jace, Rusty turned his attention to Kelsey.
“Hey, do you remember me? It’s Rusty Bolt—I’m a friend of Silas’s.”
I was holding Kelsey up with an arm around her waist, and her fingers dug into my shoulder as she clung on with a death grip, her purse in her other hand. She leaned forward and squinted, then slurred something incomprehensible.
Finally, our server stepped forward from the gaggle of staff watching us. “Uh, is everything okay? ”
Was she genuinely worried about Kelsey, or just concerned we might dine and dash? I couldn’t totally blame her if it was the second—one time, I’d had a boss who made us pay the full cost of the meal out of our own wages if a diner left without paying.
“We think she’s been drugged,” I explained.
The server glanced back at a colleague. “You want I should call an ambulance?”
“Yes,” Rusty said at the same time as Kelsey mumbled, “No.”
Then she leaned to the side and heaved the contents of her stomach over the floor. Better out than in, I guess.
The server leapt back, more horrified by the mess than by Kelsey’s predicament. Which made sense when I thought about how she’d looked concerned but not shocked when she saw Kelsey stumbling along with Jace.
“Has that guy done this before? Left with an incapacitated woman?”
Her silence said it all, but then another employee, a woman with flawless dark skin and braided hair, spoke up.
“Just tell her, Sandi. I don’t care about this damn job anymore, do you? If he fires us, he fires us.” Then to me, “Yeah, he’s done it before. He owns this place, and he’s done it before. You should take that girl to the hospital and call the cops.”
Sandi tried to shush her. “I need this job.”
“Minimum wage, and you know damn well they keep most of the tips.” The Black woman took off her apron and dropped it in the pool of vomit. “I’m sick of this shit. Twice before, I’ve seen him take a woman home in that state, but usually he picks them up here instead of bringing them with him.”
“How does his wife fit into this?”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s married, hun.”
Kelsey groaned, then retched again, and I held back her hair as she brought up the rest of dinner. A crowd had gathered, and several people were filming on camera phones.
“We need to get out of here,” Rusty muttered, keeping his head down.
I held the door as he picked her up, bridal-style, and we quickly made our escape in Maverick’s truck.