“You’re hired.”
Wait?
What?
Hired? I’m hired?
Mr. Domenico Bonetti of BCL Enterprises, whose dark gaze drilled me so intensely that I had to wipe a dab of sweat from my temple, had just offered me a job.
This was the same man I’d only just met, and spoken with for ten minutes.
Actually, not even ten minutes.
And to be honest, I wouldn’t even say he’d exactly offered me the job. He just told me I was hired, like it was a foregone conclusion I’d show up there the next day at nine a.m., coffee in hand, hoping I didn’t have a run in my panty hose.
“Excuse me, Mr. Bonetti?”
I was sure I’d misheard. No one got a job this way.
Unless that was how they did things in Las Vegas. I mean, it was a pretty strange place.
My presumptive new boss, Mr. Bonetti, was likely called Mr. Hottie behind his back by his female employees. I knew the type. Devastatingly handsome. Women at his feet. He might wear blue jeans to the office to show he was a ‘cool’ guy, but he topped them with custom cut dress shirts with monogrammed cuffs barely hiding an obscenely expensive watch.
I’d bet money he got his hair trimmed at one of those fancy hipster barbers who charge guys a hundred dollars plus for a fifteen-minute trim.
I checked out his nails, expecting to see the clichéd man manicure.
They were perfect. Of course.
It wasn’t like I was some sort of expert on men. I came from a podunk town in West Virginia where most of the men didn’t even trim their nose hair.
But Len did. When we’d first met, I’d thought he was one in a million. A smart, funny guy who’d just blown into town, capturing the attention of every female for miles. He was well-groomed and well-dressed—by West Virginia standards, anyway—and swept me off my feet.
For some reason, out of all the women in town, he zeroed in on me. And I ate it up. In all my twenty-six years, I’d never had someone pursue me like he did. Actually, I’d not really had anyone pursue me at all.
Sure, I’d had the infrequent date to play darts at the local bar, and the occasional attempt at casual sex, but nothing ever held my interest for long. I had my sights set on getting the hell out of town at my first opportunity.
And Len wanted to come with me.
What a shitshow that turned out to be.
Mr. Bonetti cleared his throat to get my attention. “Miss Simmons, I just said you’re hired. For the PA job.”
Okay. I had heard him right.
I knew that ‘PA’ meant personal assistant, thanks to good old Google. But what I didn’t know, and what I planned to keep from Mister Hottie, was that I had no idea what a PA was. Or what a PA did.
When I’d arrived for my interview-that-was-not-an-interview, an impossibly sexy receptionist in a tight dress showed me to Mr. Bonetti’s office. That is, after she’d looked me up and down with a sneer.
Thanks, lady.
Mr. Bonetti and his partners ran a hotel and casino and some other businesses I supposed I’d hear about at some point. Their offices were reached from the side of the hotel via a separate entrance from where the guests came and went. But the huge glass window behind him overlooked the hotel atrium. Good way to keep an eye on things.
And because his office sprawled the width of the building, the windows on the other side looked across Vegas to the mountains, as far as the eye could see.
There was so much to look at, I didn’t see how he got anything done.
He sat behind a massive glass and chrome desk with oversized computer screens on either side, of course, because that’s what guys like him did, right?
Cliché number two.
The middle of his desk was empty, save for a few papers and things, so he could see between the two monitors to the person sitting opposite. In this case, that was me. So friendly.
I’d taken the seat the receptionist had pointed to before she’d floated from the room, sinking my ass so far into some modern creation I didn’t know how I’d get back out of it.
“Cool chair,” I said, to cover my clumsiness.
“It’s an Eames. An original.”
Did everyone know what an Eames was, because I didn’t.
But I smiled and nodded like I did.
“So Miss Simmons, what brings you to Vegas?”
I was dreading this question. It wasn’t like I could tell him that I’d come to get away from a creep boyfriend, who’d found me here anyway. Or that I should have just stayed in my shitty small town because what was the point in running away if what you’re running away from just follows you?
I smiled brightly. “I wanted something new. A fresh start.”
Now I was a cliché.
And naturally, he looked at me like I was full of shit. But he was polite enough to cover it. “Yes. I can relate. Sometimes you just need… a new point of view.”
We were connecting. Cool.
The interview, such as it was, continued like that—vague questions from him and vague answers from me—until he’d wrapped things up by telling me I had the job.
I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t even know what the job was. But a job was a job, and I needed one. Badly.
He knew nothing about my employment history. Didn’t seem to care. Which was a good thing. If he had, he’d never have hired me.
That’s how it goes when you have a police record.
Yup, I had a police record.
I’d stolen from my previous employer, a hardware store owned by the family I’d grown up next door to.
We’d been neighbors and friends. Until I stole from them.
Len had needed a seventy-dollar drill to fix the front steps of the house my sister and I had inherited from our aunt. Naturally, we didn’t have seventy extra dollars for it. But Len had a solution. Just bring one home.
Take it. Nothing will happen.
Um, yeah. Thanks.
I felt like shit stealing from some of the nicest people I’d ever known and even as I stuffed it into my backpack, I vowed to find a way to pay them back. It was a terrible thing I did, but I told myself it was really just a loan against future paychecks.
I might even bring it back when we were done with it.
I made my move at closing time. There were no cameras or other security in the back of the store. I thought I was in the clear. But as luck would have it, I got just outside the door when the manager and his son grabbed me and pulled me back inside. They not only fired my ass, but they also called the police.
Our steps never got fixed.
But mister good-looking behind his big, Las Vegas desk didn’t seem to give a crap about what I may or may not have done that day. Or any other day of my life. Thank god.
The shame of stealing from them was overwhelming, and I can guess the owners didn’t feel too great about the way I’d betrayed them. They’d given me an opportunity that I’d thrown back in their faces.
A week later, when they’d dropped the charges, I bought a bus ticket to Vegas. I got a ride to the station while Len was out of the house and called my sister, who was off at college.
I didn’t need a boyfriend who sat around the house and asked me to steal shit he couldn’t afford.
But that wasn’t the end of my dumb mistakes.
I’d told a girlfriend where I’d landed in Vegas. Len followed me by a few days, having driven his old Toyota.
He told me he had plans. He was going to make it big, playing poker.
He played a lot with his buddies and among them, he was usually the winner.
But a small town poker player does not a Vegas winner make. He borrowed against his credit card for the cash to get started.
And lost it just as fast.
