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 knowswhat 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.