Love's Wager Read online

  “Only a little.”

  “I know you have a lot of concerns and you need to tell me. You’d be amazed at what I can help you with.”

  “What do you know about security?”

  “You’d be surprised. I can’t have some celebrity dying facedown in a toilet. The publicity would ruin me and whoever I’m working for. How can I spin that for TMZ?”

  “I want to talk about it, but not here.”

  “Oh, clandestine. I’m in,” she gushed. She paused. “You like cars, don’t you? Of course you do, you’re a man. Let’s go to the car museum. I’ll bet you’re a John Wayne fan. His Corvette is in the museum. And James Dean’s car from Rebel Without a Cause.”

  How could he say no to an invitation like this? Scott was an avid John Wayne fan. He didn’t advertise it because a lot of people thought it was silly. “Let me call my assistant and then we’ll go.” He glanced at the wall clock. “Lunch is on me.”

  “And we can work on your security worries.” Nina grinned at him, holding out her hand.

  He took her hand. Her skin was soft and smooth. A whiff of her perfume tickled at his nose. “I’ll meet you in the lobby in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll get my walking shoes on.”

  * * *

  Nina ran to the elevator and punched the button to take her up to her suite. A man entered with her. He grinned at her.

  “Going up,” he said in a flirtatious manner. “I’m Gary, head of security.”

  For a second, Nina was confused. Wasn’t Scott head of security? She tilted her head at him and his grin grew wider. He held out a hand and she noticed a small eagle’s head tattooed on the back of it.

  “Hello,” she said. “I thought Mr. Russell is head of security.”

  “I’m second-in-command,” he announced. His eyes darted up and down taking in her measure. “How about a drink later?”

  “No, thank you.” She didn’t like him.

  “Another time then.” The doors opened on the fifth floor. He stepped out, then turned to salute her as the doors closed again, taking her to her floor.

  Inside her suite, Nina kicked off her shoes and ran into the bedroom to grab a pair of shoes more conducive to walking. They were half the height of her normal shoes, but the daisies sprinkled around the outside always made her feel like she was walking through a field of flowers. She grabbed her purse just as her phone received a text from Carl.

  Where are you?

  What did Carl want? She read the text and could hear his voice in her mind whining. “If you hadn’t believed your own press, you’d have an Academy Award by now,” she said to the phone as though she were talking directly to him. “You’re an egotistical boy-man.” Her mother had told her on the day of her wedding that God was not done cooking Carl and was she certain she wanted to take on this project.

  Nina remembered the words, but her real thoughts had been on her Vera Wang wedding dress and what she thought was love for Carl. She’d brushed her mother’s words aside and married Carl anyway. She should have listened. Hindsight was always twenty-twenty.

  She put the phone in her purse. She’d answer him later.

  The elevator deposited her in the lobby. The second she stepped out of the elevator, she spotted him. Carl. What the hell was he doing here? How did he find her?

  Carl stood at the reception desk signing something. Tiffani with an i stood at his side, her blond hair hanging in luxurious waves down her back. Her black dress was too tight and the neckline much too low.

  “I recognize that look of panic on your face,” Celia Grantham said. As concierge, Celia was very conscious of the hotel’s image and was dressed conservatively in a beige skirt and dark brown blazer with a light yellow silk blouse. “What do you need?”

  “Ex-husband at three o’clock.”

  Celia glanced at the desk. “The one with the bimbo!”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Where do you need to go?”

  “I’m meeting Scott at the front door.”

  “Got ya.” Celia pulled her phone of her pocket and texted someone. “Thirty seconds.”

  Celia’s assistant appeared at the desk and a look of adoration filled her face. She started fawning over Carl and Tiffani and drawing them toward the concierge’s desk so their backs were to Nina.

  “You just earned yourself a little reward, Celia.”

  Celia looked surprised and then pleased. “Thank you. There’s no need for a reward. This is my job.”

  “You look like a Prada girl.” Nina could get a couple of purses for free. She’d send one to Celia and one to her assistant.

  Celia nodded at Nina who almost leaped at the front door just as Scott appeared in the arch that led to the casino. He saw her, his eyebrows arching up as she grabbed him and pulled him out the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Just keep walking. The bane of my existence just arrived.” She hustled him toward the parking lot.

  “And that would be?”

  She signed. “The ex-husband and his little piece of bunny fluff.”

  Scott unlocked his black SUV, opened the passenger door and helped Nina in. The hem of her dress rose up to midthigh as she hopped inside. She repressed a chuckle at the look on Scott’s face. Then she demurely tugged her dress down.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked after starting the SUV and putting it into gear.

  “Why would you be interested in my personal life?” And did she want to talk about Carl to the man she was interested in?

  “In the army we had to bond quickly in order to protect each other.”

  Nina stared at him. He was flirting with her. She liked being flirted with. She buckled her seatbelt and settled back against the cushion. “My story is a sad, but typical, Hollywood tale.”

  “Okay.” He turned out of the parking lot and merged into traffic.

  “My husband decided he didn’t need me anymore and traded me in for a shiny new model. He thought his career could survive without me because he was established. And now he wants me back. His career stalled because he didn’t understand how fickle Hollywood is. And I’m not quite sure, but I got the impression he wanted to start cheating on his present squeeze with his old one. Me.”

  Scott’s eyebrows rose. “Carl should run for a political office. He’d fit right in.”

  Nina burst out laughing.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Avoid him,” she replied. The hotel was big, the casino bigger. Carl was easily distracted and he did like to gamble. Not a lot, but enough to keep his mind occupied. She pulled out her phone. “I need to send a text to Celia to steer him toward the blackjack table. The casino might as well make some money off him.”

  “You’re bad, Nina.”

  She tilted her head at him. “In a good way. Right?”

  “I didn’t know there’s a good way to be bad.” Scott gave her a side glance, amusement on his face.

  “There’s always a good way to be bad, or at least a way to spin it.”

  He turned onto the highway. “So tell me. How did you get into doing what you do? Though I’m not certain what it is you do.”

  “Sometimes, it’s hard to explain. But I try to make people, places and things famous.” Her first big excursion into downtown Reno was eye-opening. She could fall in love with it.

  “And how did you get into that as a career?”

  “I majored in business at UCLA because I thought that was what I really wanted to do, but business wasn’t fun. I wanted to do something fun. I discovered I was more creative in public relations and media then I would ever be in business. My parents started their restaurant when I was eleven. They wanted something more stable so they didn’t have to be on the road all the time. And the log
istics of having seven children made the whole task doubly difficult. Even though their educations were in completely different areas, they intuitively understood what people wanted and understood how to give it to them. All I did was study my parents and it was a great springboard to start my own business.” And waitressing in the restaurant gave her untold contacts.

  Kenzie had always known what she wanted to do and never deviated from her goal, but Nina hadn’t been so focused. Her brothers and sister had also known what they wanted to accomplish. Nina had floundered for a bit until she realized she had a talent for creating buzz.

  “My first job was this tiny mom-and-pop sushi place. Mr. and Mrs. Takada were the nicest people, but Sushi Joe’s wasn’t going well...”

  “There’s a Sushi Joe’s in DC. I’ve eaten there.”

  “Was the food good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They have the Nina Roll.”

  Scott shook his head. “How did you propel them to national prominence?”

  “I had this idea of hiring a down-and-out actor who used to come to my parents’ place and I had a firestorm of a promotional idea, threw together a video highlighting Sushi Joe’s and used the actor as the spokesperson. Sushi Joe’s took off and so did the actor’s career. I relaunched two careers for the price of one.” Douglas Jameson had shown his gratitude by steering other clients to her. By the time she graduated from UCLA she’d already had a growing business. “I’m a schmoozer.”

  “I noticed that about you.”

  The drive to the museum was quick, but in the short span of time, Nina was deeply conscious of the man next to her. She found the subtle scent of his aftershave attractive. Despite the depth of seriousness he projected, she sensed a more sensitive side. She would just have to find a way to bring it out.

  Scott found a place to park. They stepped out into the afternoon heat.

  “Ninety-five percent of my job is a handshake or an air kiss,” she said, tucking her hand around his elbow. The feel of hard muscles beneath her fingers sent a shiver through her as they walked up to the entrance.

  “They have events here.” Nina read a sign next to the ticket booth. “We should have something here. Men like cars, it shouldn’t be too hard to get them in the door so they can drool over these classics.”

  Scott paid for two tickets. They wandered through the various rooms. Scott stopped to pet a Corvette.

  “You’re looking a little glazed over.” Nina was enjoying the practiced nonchalance as he pretended to be so casual about a car he was definitely lusting over.

  He patted the Corvette again. “This is one of the best moments ever. This is John Wayne’s Corvette.”

  Nina gave the car a critical look. “He was a big man. How did he fit in that little car?”

  “I’d make myself fit in this car.” Awe showed in his tone and face.

  “I feel the same way about fashion. When you order couture, you don’t alter it to fit you—you alter yourself to fit into it.”

  They meandered through another room that was made to look like a turn-of-the-century street with early nineteenth-century cars parked at the curb. Another area contained a theater marquee with Gone with the Wind being advertised. The Duesenberg parked in front of it had been owned by Sammy Davis, Jr.

  While Scott drooled over the cars, Nina found herself attracted to the displays of vintage clothing. She was particularly enchanted with the children’s pedal cars from the 1920s to the 1960s. The little cars looked like fun and she could imagine tooling around the cul-de-sac where her parents lived.

  Caught up in the spirit of the exhibits, Nina realized she had to host an event here. It would be a challenge to schedule, with it being so late in the year, but she could talk her way into anything.

  * * *

  When Scott and Nina left the auto museum to have dinner at a restaurant a few blocks from the museum, he was still in raptures over the cars. Having Nina with him today had made the visit more than fun.

  The restaurant was tiny with barely a dozen tables squeezed between a row of glass windows and a snack bar. The interior was a cheerful yellow and white with the waitresses in matching yellow-and-white uniforms. His brother, Hunter, had brought him when they’d been on some errands and Scott had truly enjoyed the family-style fare.

  They sat at a table against the window. Scott wondered if he’d done the right thing in bringing Nina here. She didn’t quite fit in, with her fashionable dress and weird daisy shoes. She was the kind of woman who needed to be seen.

  A gum-snapping waitress slapped menus on the table covered in large square sheets of white paper. When diners were done, the paper was scooped up to reveal a clean one underneath. Easy-care dining.

  “Ooh, meat loaf. I’m in,” she said after scanning the plastic-coated menu with bent corners. “I haven’t had meat loaf in ages.”

  “Meat loaf! I just don’t picture you as a meat loaf kind of girl.” He liked that she ate. And that she appreciated regular-people food. Nina was turning out to be quite a pleasant surprise. Normally he didn’t like surprises but he certainly found himself liking her.

  “Meat loaf is comfort food. And I don’t always have the time to cook for myself, but if I did I’d eat meat loaf five days a week.”

  “Your life is that stressful?”

  “Not stress-stress, but fun stress.”

  “There’s a difference?” She was a curious mix of playfulness and seriousness. He found his thoughts straying to her too much during the course of a day. When he was on a job, he didn’t like being so easily distracted—and Nina was definitely distracting him.

  “My stress normally involves the people I have to deal with. They think that if someone is wearing the wrong bracelet with a particular type of dress, the world is going to come to an end. While that’s truly funny, it’s still stressful.”

  “And this is coming from the woman who looks like—and I am a man, so don’t tell anyone I know this—she’s straight out of the pages of Vogue magazine.”

  She laughed. “I won’t tell anyone, except for maybe Kenzie...your grandmother...your brothers. But I won’t tell anyone else. How does a big, tough guy like you know about fashion?”

  She now had leverage on him, but it didn’t make him nervous; it excited him. “There’s a lot of downtime in security work. And sometimes the reading material is thin.”

  “So in other words, if you run security on upper-class divas, Vogue is all you have to read?”

  “And Essence, Marie Claire, and on occasion, Teen magazine. I wish they spotlighted guns and ammo, but they only use them as props.”

  Their conversation was interrupted when the waitress returned to take their orders.

  “You have a smartphone,” Nina said once the waitress left their table. “You can get reading material on that.”

  “Smartphones take a lot of power and I never know when I might have to make an emergency call to someone’s hairdresser.” And he’d been forced into doing exactly that more than once for Anastasia.

  “You sound like you really didn’t enjoy being a bodyguard.” She sipped her iced tea after swirling two teaspoons of sugar into it. He’d already noticed she liked sweet drinks.

  “I love it. I just don’t love the people I sometimes had to work for.”

  “Can you give me some detail?” She leaned her elbows on the table, leaning toward him, her eyes directly on his. “Start with Anastasia Parrish.”

  He almost choked. She looked completely captivated. Damn, that was sexy. “I can’t talk directly, but I can give you examples. A lot of people want to treat their bodyguards as their personal go-to staff. How can I protect someone if they insist I walk the dog or fix a martini? I refuse to be an errand boy and have a clause written into my contracts that I do not provide any services other than security. I’ve had
clients who felt I needed to discipline their children. No disciplining children, no doggy day care, no bartending.”

  “They really wanted you to walk the dog.”

  “I’m sure some stalker was out there planning how to take out Fido, despite the fact that Daddy was a high-ranking member of some influential committee and the theft of a dog was going to influence a vote.”

  “I’d give up a lot to save Kong.”

  “My favorite client was a high-ranking official who wanted to bring his family along on a tour of Iraq and Afghanistan. Thought it would be a fun family vacation. He asked me if I knew where to purchase Kevlar for an eight-year-old.” That had been a nightmare for Scott. He’d flatly refused to allow the senator’s family to accompany him. The senator had thrown a tantrum, which totally disgusted Scott and he’d refused to work for him after that. He was constantly amazed at the number of times people voted over and over again for politicians who were so obviously incompetent.

  The waitress brought their food. Scott had ordered a sirloin with baked potatoes and no vegetables. He was amused that Nina’s meat loaf had vegetables and no potatoes. The waitress refilled their iced teas and left them to their food.

  Nina took a tentative bite of her meat loaf and suddenly forked a large chunk into her mouth. “This is absolutely delicious. The chef is going to be my future ex-husband. And I have to bring my father here.”

  “And when my brother Donovan shows up, this is going to be our first meal the second he gets his luggage. Your father likes food?”

  Nina didn’t answer. She was too busy eating. And from the look of total adoration on her face, this tiny place was going to be one of her favorites, too.

  “My father,” she said, “is the odd man out in his family. He broke away from five generations of restaurateurs to be a musician. And the irony is, he ended up owning a restaurant eventually. He discovered that he loved cooking as much as he loved music and that he could be both.” She sipped her tea and ate a little more meat loaf. “You do know you and I are going to find common ground and make Casa de Mariposa the finest resort in the whole world, don’t you?”