Back in Black (11 page)

“Parker Pinelli.”

“Parker ‘The
Man
’ Pinelli,” Adam teased. The others chuckled and gathered around.

The woman fixed her a steady gaze on Parker, her face impassive. “I'll need to see some identification, Mr. Pinelli.”

Parker flashed his perfect smile again. The signs posted by the slot machines very clearly stated that you had to be twenty-one to gamble. He had this covered.

Even as he felt his friends' eyes on him, he opened his wallet. Removed a perfect falsified California driver's license he'd had made after his minor humiliation at Chippendales. Took three steps toward the desk and tossed it to her.

“Here ya go.”

The woman studied it—it identified him as Parker Pinelli of Beverly Hills, California, but gave his age as twenty-two. Then she looked up at Parker, who was deliberately rubbing his hands together. He thought that was probably what some guy who was just about to collect twenty grand might do.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

Parker didn't understand. “What does that mean?”

She held the driver's license out to him. “Your ID is fraudulent, young man.”

“No, it's not,” Parker blustered. “Ask my friends.”

“He's totally twenty-one,” Sam insisted, shoving in next to Parker.

“Uh huh,” Cammie agreed mindlessly, flipping through a copy of
Vegas Today
magazine that had been on the counter. Anna had taken one of the orange plastic seats near the door. Adam and Dee sat with her.

“According to Nevada gaming law, unless you can produce genuine identification attesting to your age, it is my obligation to deny you your payout,” the official droned. “Violation is a potential felony. For me. Not that you ever gave that a second thought.”

“But it's legit,” Parker insisted. He managed to keep his voice even, even though his insides were tied in knots. This bitch
was
going to pay him.

The woman motioned Parker closer. She flipped over the ID and pointed to a thin black strip on the back. “Let's find out.”

Shit.

She slid the ID through something like a credit card reader on her desk. “This talks to the DMV in Sacramento. They'll confirm all the information on your license electronically, and if the license is good, this light will flash green. If it's not good, it'll flash—”

The light blinked bright red.

“Ooh, that's gotta hurt,” Cammie quipped.

“Been here, seen that.” The woman handed Parker back his ID. “Why you kids keep trying to get away with this is beyond me.” She scribbled something on an official-looking pad, ripped off the top sheet, and handed him that too.

He peered at it. “You're giving me a
ticket?
”

“Pay the fine within sixty days. By certified check or money order.”

Shit, shit,
shit!

Parker slinked out of the office, his friends in his wake. Did he have the worst luck in the world or what? If one of his friends who
really
had money had managed to win twenty thou, no doubt they would have figured out a way to actually collect it.

“Sucks, man.” Adam punched Parker lightly in the bicep.

“Tell me about it,” Parker muttered. He was already starting to think about having to do his Las Vegas hustle. It wasn't much different from the Hollywood hustle. Find a female who looked rich, lonely, and insecure. Lavish her with attention. “Discover” that he had forgotten his wallet or his credit card or whatever so that she'd pay. Then make her so happy that she really didn't care that she never got paid back.

Dee reached up and put a tiny arm around his shoulder. “Wow, Parker, I'm so sorry that happened to you.”

“Me, too,” Anna agreed.

They turned a corner, heading for the glass doors that led outside. Dee frowned. “Have you been putting out bad karma, Parker? Because you know, whatever you put out into the universe is returned to you tenfold.”

“Come on, Dee,” Anna chided, shifting the strap of her vintage Louis Vuitton overnight bag to the other shoulder. “Sometimes good people have bad luck.”

Dee shrugged, unconvinced.

“Hey, whatever.” Parker stuffed his fake ID and his ticket into his back right pocket. He didn't dare say more. Truth was, he was close as he'd ever been to crying in public.

Cammie slipped on her new pink Bebe studded sunglasses. “At least it was only twenty thousand,” she said philosophically. “I mean, it's not like you won really big money. Now can we get out of this damn airport?”

As Cammie led the group to where their hired limo was waiting, Parker tried to process the insane events of the last fifteen minutes. He'd won, and then lost,
twenty thousand dollars.
He had a couple of crumpled dollar bills left in his wallet, a hundred-dollar ticket for illegal gambling in his pocket, and a pricey week ahead with no way to pay for it.

The whole situation could be summed up in four words: He was so fucked.

All Tease and No Please

C
ammie Sheppard switched to her silver cat-shaped Foster Grant sunglasses—she was already bored with the pink Bebe glasses, but fortunately, she always traveled with two pairs. The late afternoon sun was glaring off the road as the black stretch limo cruised from McCarron Airport to the world-famous Las Vegas Strip. And then, beyond it, to the Palms Hotel. She couldn't help thinking that this ride in from the airport did not offer a favorable first impression of Sin City. Lining the boulevard were cheap motels, cheaper places to eat, the same kind of tchotchke stores that you'd find in Hollywood, only with a Vegas theme instead of Tinseltown. Billboards—dozens of them—advertised big hotels and the various over-the-hill stars playing off their name recognition there, just to have a steady gig. Also touted were the extravaganzas that only tourists from Des Moines would actually pay to see: the Folies Bergere at the Tropicana, the Cirque du Soleil at the MGM, and their pathetic moral equivalents at the Luxor and the Rio. Skimpy costumes, big breasts, long legs, all tease and no please.

And who could forget the headliners? Cher, who kept promising to retire but couldn't keep her butt off a stage—Cammie was ready to
pay
the woman to pack it in. Tom Jones? Engelbert Humperdinck? Puh-leeze. They'd been washed up even when her father and his high school friends had come out to Vegas.

Still, Cammie knew that Vegas had always been happening for Hollywood's young and hip, who skipped all the over-the-top tacky cheesy tourist shit. Or else reveled in the joy of mocking the tourists, an art form unto itself. They were all about private parties at VIP locales, special unadvertised after-hours shows that you had to know about, things like that.

The limo was a stretch job. The buttery leather seats were arranged facing one another. In between, a bar was tucked into one side and a digital sound system connected to a library of thousands of MP3s into the other. Cammie had been in dozens of limos just like it—but not with Adam. Now they sat next to each other, her body fitting easily against his.

“Ready for a great time?” he asked softly.

Cammie nodded and smiled up at him. He smiled back, leaned in, and tenderly kissed her forehead. Nice.

Only one problem. “Nice” and “Cammie Sheppard” weren't often used in the same sentence. She liked Adam. Maybe even loved Adam. But lately she'd begun to feel like she was in sugar shock. There was no doubt that in Cammie's long career with the opposite sex, no boy had ever been so wonderful to her. True, some might have been better in bed (Adam had been a virgin until Cammie had relieved him of that burden), or richer, or all-around sexier. But none of them had had his genuine character, his depth, his sensitivity.

Character? Depth? Sensitivity? Gawd. She wanted to gag all over again. Adam was the definitive good guy; she was the proverbial bad girl. And the truth was, bad boys were just so much … juicier.

But. The “but” was a killer. Any time she gave even a passing thought to the notion of breaking up with him, she felt sick to her stomach. Anxious, stressed, and so alone. He was inside her skin. She needed him the way she needed to breathe, needed someone to see the best in her. Even when she couldn't see it herself.

One of the reasons she'd been psyched about this trip with Adam was to see if she could bring out his naughtier side. If Adam could be just a little bad, maybe she could appreciate that he was usually a lot good.

Or maybe he could even just play at being bad. Fun and games. She glanced up at him and he smiled. No, he would never pull it off. Her cutthroat über-agent father was fond of saying that character was destiny, and bad-boyness just wasn't in Adam's character. Anyway, he'd never know about any of the thoughts she'd been having recently. It wasn't like she was about to tell him the truth. He'd be hurt. He might even dump her. She'd lose him. No. The truth was definitely not an option.

The limo driver made a right turn.

“Welcome to the Strip,” Cammie overheard Sam tell Anna. “Where America runs away from its Puritan roots.”

The lights of the Las Vegas strip—the miles-long main street of hotels, restaurants, casinos, and attractions that made Las Vegas so famous—blazed so bright Cammie could feel them glint off her face. She leaned forward and brought one of the limousine windows down. She loved the energy of this place—the decadence and the insanity, where the poorest tour-bus octogenarian lady and the richest sultan from the Persian Gulf could both escape … well, whatever it was they were running from. The famed hotels—the Mirage, the Venetian, the Luxor, the Bellagio, and a dozen others—all had an otherworldly quality, illuminated against a sky that was not quite day and not quite night.

“This has to be the most intense place on the planet,” Sam observed, peering out the window. “It's over the top for the sake of being over the top.”

Dee, who sat opposite Sam, nodded solemnly. “‘Sound and furry, signifying nothing,’” she quoted.

Cammie shot Dee a withering look. “
Furry?
”

Dee nodded. “Shakespeare.”

“I
know
that, Dee,” Cammie told her, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “But it's ‘fury,’ not ‘furry.’”

Dee blushed the same shade of salmon as her Sass & Bide silk camisole. “Oh. Well, it could have been
furry
. Like how rich women here wear slaughtered animals' pelts on their backs. All in the name of fashion.”

Cammie bit back a blistering comment and leaned back into Adam's arms. It was hard work for her to restrain herself with Dee. The retorts were right there for her to fire back at her friend, and part of her longed to let them fly. Something like, “Dee, if I were you, I'd stick to quoting Dr. Seuss.”

“Oh, I love him!” Dee would probably squeal.

Cammie forced herself to keep her mouth shut. Why? Because of Adam, that was why. Adam wanted Cammie to be nice. There it was again. Nice.

“Whoa, check her out.” Parker pointed out the window to the crosswalk that led to the Aladdin Hotel. Cammie had stayed there once—it had a desert theme, and its Elemis spa featured treatments influenced by ten different ancient cultures. An apple-cheeked young woman with her platinum blond hair in a high, tight ponytail waited for the light to change so she could cross the street. She looked like she was sporting at least three sets of false eyelashes and wore the shortest of short red Daisy Dukes with black fishnet hose and black boots. Above the waist, a purple faux fur shrug hung over a purple bra top. Her implants—so artificial they made the new BHH principal's boobs look natural—threatened to trigger an avalanche at any moment. Still, all around her, tourists with cameras slung around their necks gawked to see if perhaps she actually was
someone.

“Damn. I was going to wear that today,” Sam joked.

The light changed and the limo turned left. It was just a mile or so to the Palms, a place too hip to be located on the Strip itself. Instead, it was to the north of the freeway, along with the Rio Hotel.

Seeing the tricked-out showgirl wannabe gave Cammie an idea. Her lips curled into a wicked smile.

“It's perfect,” she announced. “Absolutely and hilariously perfect.”

Anna turned away from the window. “What?”

Cammie took a moment to study Anna, who was sitting next to Dee and across from Cammie. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck and tied with a black ribbon. She wore very little makeup. Damn her to hell, she looked just about perfect. Not only that, but even though Cammie knew that Anna hated her, Anna had listened to her. Damn it to hell, that was
nice.

Cammie clenched her teeth. Anna Percy brought out the very worst in her, the part of her that always made Adam cringe. It had all started at Jackson's wedding to Poppy, when Anna had shown up on the arm of Ben Birnbaum. Cammie and Ben had been an item the year before. The sex had been sizzling. Cammie had actually thought it was more than that—Ben was the first guy she'd actually given a shit about. When he'd broken up with her, she'd felt confident that he'd come crawling back. After all, she was irresistible, wasn't she? Everyone said so. But he hadn't come back. And seeing him with Anna at the wedding … well, Cammie had seethed at the attention that Ben was paying to a girl he'd met on an airplane just a few hours before, a kind of total attention that he had never really paid to Cammie. At least with Adam, she knew she'd never have to deal with getting dumped.

Then she felt Adam give her a little squeeze. Cammie exhaled. This was definitely no time to scratch Anna's eyes out, much as she might want to do just that. She'd have to resort to plan B.

“Here's what I was thinking,” Cammie told Anna as Sam and Dee listened in. “We should have a tacky Vegas fashion contest. You up for it?” She raised one golden eyebrow that had been arched to perfection at Valerie's on Rodeo Drive.

Ha. Take that, she thought. Let's see if Miss East Coast Big Inheritance bows out on the grounds that it's beneath her station or something.

“Count me in,” Anna said easily.

This was the thing about Anna that bit Cammie's peach-shaped butt. Just when Cammie was most confident, Anna would slide right off whatever little psychological hook Cammie was trying to impale her on.