Chapter 3
JENNIFER
There's something nobody tells you about hitting rock bottom in Vegas.
The drinks are free, and somewhere between losing your last chip and finding yourself leaning into the warm hand of a tattooed alpha who smells like the Mediterranean, you stop doing the math on how badly your week has gone and start paying attention to what is actually next to you.
Pinching yourself wondering if this is a dream.
Or just one of those fantasies that I used to have after Ricardo dumped me.
Either way, I'll take it. If it happens in Vegas to someone like me, I'll take it even more.
My three hundred dollars evaporated somewhere around the fifth spin, because the wheel took a brief but thorough interest in black, and in the wreckage of that I looked left and found a stack of chips being slid toward me by a quiet blond man with glasses and the kind of jaw that belongs in a museum next to a small card that says do not touch.
I touched the chips. Obviously.
That was forty minutes ago.
Now there is a finger tracing a slow line down the center of my back and my entire nervous system has filed a formal complaint about it, because it has not stopped and I have not told it to.
"Are you boys trying to take advantage of me?" I ask, without turning around. I have enough composure left for exactly that much dignity.
The laugh that lands against my ear is warm and low and has never once in its life worried about whether it was welcome.
"Believe me." His voice has the quality of someone who learned English on top of something more musical, the accent sitting underneath the words like good furniture under an expensive rug. "We're far from being boys."
I believe him. And the way he's moving me closer to his stool, I can feel him too.
Definitely not boys.
"And we would never take advantage." The finger reaches the small of my back and stops. Not pressing. Just resting, as if it lives there and has done for years. "Your scent." A pause with texture in it. "Your body." I am going to need a moment. "Those lips."
My scent does what it always does when I am trying to hold a position while my body is actively defecting.
Strawberry, yes, always, but warmer now, the rose going soft where it's usually sharp, my omega biology essentially texting everyone in the room to let them know the drawbridge is considering its options.
Great. I love being transparent.
I pick up my drink, some pink thing the server was handing out, the important thing is that it was free, and I take one sip and let the sweetness sit on my tongue and then I turn around.
Big mistake. Enormous. Iconic mistake I will think about later in the privacy of my own brain.
Because up close, in the warm gold light of the casino with the floor noise a comfortable blur around us, he is something that the word handsome has absolutely no business being applied to.
Handsome is for male models, and wedding announcements.
This man has a jaw with opinions, a wicked curve to his mouth that suggests he has never once been boring, and a tattoo creeping up the left side of his neck that I want to follow with my finger just to see where it ends.
His watch catches the light when he shifts his arm.
He is looking at me like he wants to take his time with me, and my omega and my absolutely ruined panties are telling me that he can take all the time he wants.
The situation in my underwear has gone from significant development to full emergency in approximately thirty seconds.
My omega isn't purring anymore, it wants me stripped with my legs wide open on the roulette table.
I shift on my stool and take another sip and maintain eye contact because I am a woman of composure.
Also because if I look away I will need to fan myself, and I refuse to do that with witnesses.
Calm down, girl.
"Is this your first time in Vegas?" The blond one, quiet, glasses, the lean careful stillness of someone who builds things in his head before his hands touch them, asks from my right.
"No." I turn just enough to include him without fully leaving the orbit of the one behind me. "But I don't even know your names."
They glance at each other. One of those exchanges with a whole conversation in it.
The one behind me moves first. Steps around to my left, and I feel the absence of his hand at my back like a small rude surprise.
He leans against the table then, extends one hand, and hits me with that wicked self-aware smile, as if he already knows what the next few hours of my life look like and is generously allowing me the illusion of discovering it myself.
My face is probably the same color as my dress right now.
"Santos," he says.
His grip is firm without performing anything. His thumb moves once across my knuckles, just once, barely there, and I feel it in my collarbone. It's as if everyone in this casino has disappeared and it is just us, and my omega who is already wanting to ask them their suite number.
"Jennifer," my voice trembles.
The dark-haired one, tall, broad, straightens up and does something with the cuffs of his jacket that is so quietly elegant I almost miss it.
"Matteo," he says.
He doesn't smile. Not exactly. But something in the line of his mouth shifts, and I find it more interesting than a full smile would have been.
His eyes are the particular blue of something very cold and very still, and I have the brief disorienting sensation of being read by someone who does not advertise that they are doing it.
"And I am Tomas," says the blond one, and when I look at him fully the glasses are doing something genuinely problematic to the overall situation.
Three of them.
I look at all three in sequence and feel my strawberry scent bloom outward like it has been waiting for permission.
"Well," I say, picking up my drink because it gives my hands somewhere to go. "That's a lot of beautiful to have standing in one place."
Santos lights up like I've handed him a gift. His fingers brush my wrist as he leans in, warm and deliberate.
"Sei incredibile [You're incredible]," he says.
The way he says whatever he just said, hypnotizes me.
My expression changes and Matteo does the not-smile again, one dark brow lifting, and Tomas gives a rough little laugh, like he didn't mean to.
"Sorry," Santos says. His thumb strokes once over the inside of my wrist before he lets go. "Italian. It comes out when I'm—"
"When you're what?" I purr.
"Affected," he says, his gaze dropping to my mouth.
I hold his eyes for a second. "Say something else."
"In Italian?"
"Yes."
He tilts his head, considers, and then says something low and unhurried, and again he doesn't translate, because the sound of it moves through me like warm water and my rose scent does something so obvious that Santos closes his eyes for one brief moment as if receiving information.
"Madonna," he says quietly, to the ceiling.
"I love French," I tell him. Because I do, and also because I am enjoying this more than I should and I want to see what happens.
All three of them look at me.
"French," Matteo says.
"Oui." I say it with the accent my high school teacher would have approved of, the one I practiced for two years because languages are the kind of thing I collect the way other people collect shoes, and I watch something shift in Matteo's expression that I find very gratifying.
"Tu parles francais?" His French is flawless and slightly formal and has the same quality as the rest of him.
"Un peu." I let the pause do work.
Santos looks between me and Matteo with an expression of pure delight.
"You know three words of French and used them to short-circuit Matteo," Tomas says. "He hasn't spoken French in nearly four years."
Matteo says something in Italian that sounds like a correction.
"Cinque," Santos says cheerfully. Five.
"Five years," Tomas translates, without being asked.
"Bonsoir, Jennifer," he says.
His accent is better than it has any right to be.
My scent goes completely rogue. Full strawberry, warm and open and embarrassingly honest, the rose beneath it dropping every pretense of restraint and broadcasting my interior weather to anyone with a functional nose, which at this table, is everyone.
One inhales slowly, his scent sharpening in a way I feel against my skin before I properly smell it. Another reaches me next, dark and controlled, grounding and insistent. A third shifts almost imperceptibly on his stool, his scent barely there, cool and clean, trying very hard to stay quiet.
I wrap both hands around my drink.
I focus on what led me here in the first place, being dumped by an alpha who ran off with an omega I hired to help him with the business.
Also an omega in a Vegas casino at what has to be near midnight, wedged between three gorgeous alphas who smell like a coordinated case for bad decisions.
My three hundred dollars is gone. They've been feeding me chips for the last forty minutes.
The wheel is spinning. None of this is heading anywhere I didn't agree to, on some fundamental level, about forty minutes ago.
The ball drops.
Black.
I watch the croupier sweep the last of the borrowed chips from my side of the table with the calm efficiency of someone performing a mercy.
"Well," I sigh. "That's that."
Santos looks at the empty felt. Then at me. Theatrical sorrow, clearly performing, somehow still charming. Impressive range.
"Tragic," he says.
"I had a system."
"Red," Tomas says.
"It was working."
"You picked red every time," Matteo says, and there it is again, that almost-smile.
"Consistent," I say. "That's the only way to do it in Vegas."
I look at the empty felt and feel the tail end of the evening arrive. That particular quality of lateness where the magic hour either tips into something real or tips into a cab home and a long, very sober consideration of your recent life choices.
Here is the thing. For one hour, I didn't think about Ricardo, or the truck, or the baby, or the envelope on the coffee table in the suite the airline paid for out of guilt. For one hour I was just the woman in the red dress having a good time at a roulette table.
Santos reaches across, unhurried, and tucks one loose strand of hair behind my ear with a single finger. So gently it almost doesn't register as a touch.
Almost.
"Stay," he says.
I look at him. Then at Tomas, watching me with that quiet that doesn't push but doesn't look away either. Then at Matteo, simply present the way he is always simply present, patient in a way that feels like it could outlast most things.
My rose scent does one small, decisive thing.
"Stay where?" I ask.
Santos smiles. "We have the presidential suite," he says.
I take a slow breath through my nose. Immediately regret it. Also do not regret it at all. Saffron, sandalwood, silver musk. All three of them, hitting me at once like something I didn't know I was hungry for until it was right in front of me.
I look down at my empty clutch. Three hundred dollars gone. Chips gone. Dignity, negotiable. Red dress, still excellent.
I slide off the stool, smooth the dress over my hips with both hands, and look at all three of them in a row.
"Presidential suite," I say. "How many bedrooms?"
"Four," Tomas says.
"Good," I say. "I like options."
Santos laughs. Matteo makes a sound that is the closest thing to a laugh I have heard from him yet, low and brief, doing something very specific to my pulse. Tomas simply stands and holds out his hand.
I look at it for one second. It is the hand of someone who doesn't waste a movement.
I take it.
Santos falls into step on my left and his warmth comes with him like weather. Matteo takes the outside right, one hand arriving at the small of my back, light and certain, and I feel the three of them arrange themselves around me with a naturalness that my instincts register before my brain does.
The casino floor slides past. All that noise and gold light, the slot machines and the voices and the spinning wheels and the collective hope of being a winner.
I realize as we reach the elevator doors that I haven't been lucky at winning chips on the roulette table, even if all the chips weren't mine. They gave me some, they said to help me. But I know they did it to flirt, and pay me the attention I craved my whole life.
I've never been with two alphas.
Let alone three.
Tonight is going to be a night of new beginnings and I can't wait.
Neither can I, says my omega.