“Forget what I said about him being mysterious,” Kenny quipped. “Everything he’s thinking is right there on his face.”
More laughter. But the buzzing in his skull was already drowning them out.
Elias watched the blonde’s high heel fall out of her arms and flop sideways on the casino floor. He was on his feet before it stopped moving, abandoning his hand at the table without a thought so he could scoop up the shoe and follow. He didn’t have a choice in the matter. Going after her was a requirement, searing him, compelling him.
And a moment later, when she looked up at him from her seat at a slot machine, his world righted itself with a grinding snap. He hadn’t even known it was off kilter.
The blonde crossed her impossibly sexy legs and his body reacted swiftly, hardening.
“Well?” she said in a husky Russian accent. “Make it good. I only have five minutes before I wreak the havoc.”
CHAPTER TWO
Five minutes earlier
Roksana squinted at her reflection in a passing taxi window to make sure the flashing lights of her LED light-up bra weren’t showing through her sweater.
It’s August and you’re in Sin City.
The multitude of passersby on the strip’s sidewalk were more likely to find her cardigan odd, rather than the flashing pink lights of her bra.
She dodged a couple of girls in minidresses, catching the attention of her childhood friend Kira across the street, who was in similar attire and visibly flagging in the stifling heat. They’d come up with this plan to make their best friend, Olga’s, bachelorette party memorable, but if they didn’t commence Project Rump Shaker soon, tomorrow morning’s front page headline on all the Vegas newspapers would read: Five Semi-Drunk Russian Girls Melt into Flesh-Colored Puddles.
They’d come up with this plan on her apartment floor in Moscow, blissfully unaware that this level of heat even existed. Upon boarding the plane two days ago, they’d checked the weather and decided the three-digit temperatures probably had something to do with the conversion of Fahrenheit to Celsius and would probably be fine.
This was not fine.
Roksana waved her limp arms at Kira and pointed to her wrist.
How much longer?
Kira looked at the screen of her cell phone, cradled it between her chin and shoulder, holding up both hands with her fingers splayed.
“Ti cho ebanuti?” Roksana shouted across the noisy strip, safe in the knowledge that none of the Americans crowding the sidewalk were aware that she’d just yelled are you fucking crazy at her best friend.
Seriously, though. Ten more minutes of waiting to kick off the plan?
She wouldn’t make it that long without getting heat stroke. The champagne they’d drunk for breakfast, lunch and continuously in between was gurgling ominously in her stomach. Any ounce of bounce had been sucked out of her blonde hair, leaving the jagged edges of her bangs in her eyes. And she could almost hear her skin sizzling under the force of the great Western sun. Time to take cover.
Cringing over the charges likely piling up with the international texts, she shot her friend a quick message. Going to cool down. Be back in ten.
Roksana toed off her metallic gold high heels, cradling them to her chest, and kicked into a jog on the sidewalk, the promise of sweet air conditioning beckoning her toward the entrance of the closest casino, Circus Circus.
Thanks to the expensive airfare from Moscow and the cost of being a bridesmaid—all on student budgets—they were staying on the lower rent end of the Vegas strip. Considering the hijinks Roksana and four of her best friends planned to pull off in ten minutes, being a little removed from the more concentrated crowds was probably a good thing.
Hopefully it meant the police would take longer to arrive.
Did Roksana and her friends celebrate their early twenties boisterously, as if consequences were naught but some distant possibility? Yes. And she reveled in it—maybe the most out of all of them. She and her girlfriends had met as children in Moscow, though Roksana was never free to play in the park or cheer at local hockey games, her mother forcing her to keep close, to learn the family business after nightfall. It wasn’t until Roksana turned eighteen and started making her own decisions that she and her friends became inseparable. And she’d made up for a lot of lost time since embarking on adulthood, spending her nights laughing and her days being taught normal subjects at university.