Four days later, Kylie stationed herself outside the Old Homestead Steak House in the Borgata casino, one of the most expensive restaurants in Atlantic City and even pricier than B Prime, and pretended to look around as if she were waiting for someone.
Her gown that night was dark blue, also a pawn store find, and she’d coiled her long hair into an updo dripping curls. Her makeup was darker, more dramatic. She’d applied garnet lipstick and smoked out her eyes like a tire fire.
The vast majority of men wouldn’t recognize her as the jilted innocent from B Prime, and her targets were the type of self-absorbed men who wouldn’t look too closely at someone they thought was vulnerable.
After fifteen minutes of supposed waiting, Kylie began to frown and look concerned. She scanned the crowd and pouted prettily after another glance at her phone.
More men watched her as she leaned against the wall, growing increasingly agitated.
She stretched her leg to the side through the high slit in her dress, showing skin from her self-manicured toes peeping through her strappy high-heeled sandal to the top of her thigh.
Several men at the closest poker table folded their cards and turned away to stare at her leg.
Why hadn’t he texted her back? ran through Kylie’s head. Was he going to stand her up again? Was he still seeing that other woman, what was her name, Miranda?
Her body tensed at those thoughts. The words became energy, became knives in her head, slicing at her at the mere wisp of a thought of being abandoned.
Even by a guy who didn’t exist.
She thumbed her phone, her red-painted nail swiping over the screen. I’m outside Old Homestead. I’ve been waiting for 20 min.
Rita texted back in a few seconds. I’m at Harrah’s. Real estate convention. Lots of fish in the sea here if pickings are slim at the Borgata.
A few more minutes, a few more texts, and Kylie’s eyes began to burn. The flickering lights on the ceiling and slot machines smeared through the air as tears wobbled on her lower lids, and Kylie slapped one drop away before it could fall on the lines of text on her phone screen.
A man’s velvety voice said, “I beg your pardon, miss. Are you all right?”
The man’s dress shoes beside her leg were brand new and shined, and the fronts of his suit trousers were pressed with a sharp crease.
Attention to detail. Kylie might have to throw this one back.
She didn’t look up as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes, I’m fine. Thank you.”
He said, “I think you might need this.”
A folded handkerchief intruded into her field of view, nearing her phone. It was his right hand, so she needed to look at the other one before she pounced.
Tears traced hot lines down her cheeks and dropped onto her hand and phone. “I’m not crying.”
The handkerchief encroached farther. “I hate to mention it, but you might be. It’s no trouble.”
Well, if the fish was going to jump onto her hook, she might as well see if he was worth reeling in. The guy had been standing there too long, anyway. Other guys would be put off if she shooed this one away after too long.
Kylie accepted his handkerchief but didn’t look up. “Thank you.”
When she took the handkerchief, his arm rolled over as his hand withdrew, and his watch’s blue face and titanium rim caught her attention.
Even though she only saw a third of the watch face, she recognized it. The timepiece was a Patek Phillippe Complications with a subtle ring of diamonds around the edge. The previous weekend when her mark had been picking out her diamond tennis bracelet, he’d also looked at watches for himself, asking her opinion on which overpriced wristband he should pretend that he might buy. There was no way he could have afforded one of those.
That elegant watch was worth sixty thousand dollars minimum, right there on his arm.
The pawnshops would probably give her twenty large for it.
But she wasn’t a thief.
But he might give it to her as a gift.
That ostentatious watch was a flashing signal to Kylie that this man could afford her little swindle and that he had money to give her.
The man turned away from her and leaned against the wall.
Most guys crowded her at this point or blocked her off to stake their claim.
And then he did it, the bastard. While standing there and thinking she wasn’t watching him, he grabbed his left hand with his right, went for the ring finger, and tugged at his finger for a second before shoving his hand in his pocket.
Cheater.
So he was fair game as far as Kylie was concerned.
Although she hadn’t looked up yet, she got the impression that the guy was tall because his deep bass voice rumbled from far above her head. “Relationship troubles?”
Aha! An opening. “I can’t believe he stood me up again.”
“I apologize for my entire gender.”
His accent, or lack of one, was different. He spoke slowly, but the effect was that every word was purposeful and edited, almost like he was giving a speech in front of a crowd.
Methodical.
Deliberate.
But she didn’t hear any regional accent in his perfectly neutral American inflections.
She hadn’t even meant to ask, but she blurted out, “Where are you from?”
“Around,” he said. “Where did you grow up?”
“Here, and that’s why I can usually tell where people are from. Tourists from all over the country and the world come to Atlantic City. I can even tell what parts of states people are from, like North Jersey or West Texas. But your accent is from nowhere. I mean, it’s American, but it’s neutral like a newscaster or an actor. Are you from California, maybe?”
At the periphery of her vision, the hem of his dark blue suit jacket moved as he shrugged. “You’re very perceptive. Are you always so sharp?”
Fluster. Impostor syndrome. Shame-spiral. “Oh, I don’t know. I mean, it’s nothing.”
“I’ll bet that you often see things others don’t.”
Kylie was a born con artist. She saw a lot. “Well, sometimes.”
“And you’re sensitive. You feel more than others.”
Like when her father’s mangled body had been fished out of the Schuylkill River up in Philly when she’d been twelve, or when she’d walked into her house when she was sixteen years old and found her mother and little sister had moved out while she’d been in school and were just gone, she’d felt like her whole body had been slashed apart. “Maybe.”
“And yet you’re more responsible than other people. You take on their needs and help them.”
Kylie stopped like a needle scratch and looked up at the guy for the first time, asking, “Do I know you?”
He looked down at her.
No, she didn’t know him.
If she’d ever met this man before, she would have remembered the sharp angle of his jaw, his thick ash-blond hair, neatly cut above his collar and falling over his forehead, those broad shoulders filling out his impeccably tailored three-piece suit, and his eyes.
Dear Lord, dear Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, his eyes.
The guy probably had to fill in on his driver’s license that his eyes were gray, but that didn’t do justice to the dark ring and silvery sheen of his irises and the sapphire blues, aquamarines, and pale grays surrounding an amber center flecked with black.
She could drown in his eyes. She wanted to drown in his eyes.
The clanging of the slot machines and shouts and mutters of the poker tables faded away like the world was disappearing. Even his light skin didn’t seem marred by the flashing lights around them.
She would have remembered if she’d ever met him before.
No, she didn’t know him.
The man looked straight at her, and his arrogant posture made what he said next seem like a dare. “Would you like to?”
Yes. Yes, she did. She wanted to know him biblically.
Her panties metaphorically hit the floor.
Kylie stammered, “Well, I don’t know. I was just asking if we’d met before.”
“I think I would remember if we’d met,” he said, his amazing eyes steadily looking into hers. He didn’t rake his gaze over her body like every other lascivious asshole she’d met.
His intense stare into her eyes never wavered.
“Yeah. Maybe,” she allowed.
Her voice sounded breathless.
He said, “You’re perceptive and sharp and beautiful. That significant other of yours doesn’t deserve you. Break it off with him.”
Oh, yeah. Her con. She broke eye contact with the guy and gestured with her phone. “I think he’s cheating on me with Miranda again. Are you in a relationship?”
Kylie always used the name Miranda as the other woman. It was easier to keep track of than to keep making up names, like passwords.
The man looked down at the floor between their feet, sighed, and then looked into her eyes again. “Cheaters are not worth your time, love. You should leave him. You’re worth so much more than that. You deserve someone who will treasure you like the prize you are.”
His opalescent eyes didn’t waver.
Longing knifed through her.
But the moment passed, and Kylie fell back into her own life. She wasn’t a prize to be treasured. Kylie was a raccoon in human form, the soul of a trash panda, scurrying through the darkness to filch what she could out of the garbage bins of society to hide and survive in the night.
But she did survive.
To survive, she had to provide for herself and her friends.
And several shadows huddling on the boardwalk at night depended on how much she could take off guys like this one.
Kylie blinked up at the man, pretending that hope shined in her eyes. “Do you really think so?”
“Yes, love. You do deserve it. You seem to have perked up, so I’ll be off. I hope your night improves.”
The man pushed off the wall beside her and stepped forward, beginning to walk toward the poker tables.
As he strolled away, the soles of his shoes flashed red, contrasting with the blue carpeting on the floor.
The man was wearing actual goddamn Louboutins, and their pristine scarlet soles meant he sure as hell hadn’t found those nine-hundred-dollar shoes in a pawn shop.
Damn, this guy could be a real catch.
Excitement stirred her stomach. She might be able to take enough off this guy to make rent for two months, plus Alma had said her toddler needed a doctor’s appointment. Kylie could even budget a little extra money for the homeless folks on the Boardwalk.
And he was going to give it to her willingly, and he wouldn’t go to the police about it because he wouldn’t want his wife to find out afterward. It was hard for the police to ever prosecute anything she was doing because she wasn’t a thief or a prostitute. Kylie convinced men to give her money and gifts again and again and again, and it was tough to write a law against persuading stupid people to give you cash.
But he was sauntering away from her, his long legs covering the carpeting with each stride. His trim form moved athletically.
Him walking away from her wasn’t part of the goddamned plan.
The mark was supposed to pursue her, to think he was taking advantage of her.
Marks didn’t walk away from her.
Kylie trotted after the guy. “Um, as you were saying, um, hey! Wait for me!”