Kylie asked the front desk what name Micah’s hotel room was registered under.
The receptionist guy took her very seriously and made a big show of looking it up before announcing the name was Micah Shine.
Yeah, she felt like an idiot, but she wasn’t going to let a little embarrassment make her a sucker twice.
The suite was large and airy because the Ocean Resort was hoity-toity, and Kylie flung her backpack on the dresser in the bedroom.
She’d grabbed some clothes and basic toiletries from her apartment. Having Micah Shine sitting on the trash couch she’d found on the sidewalk with her unmade twin bed in one corner of the room and her hot plate and buzzing half-size fridge in the other, wearing his tailored designer suit and swinging the car keys to an expensive car around his finger while she stuffed her thrift shop clothes into a ratty backpack from high school, was just so damned mortifying that she could barely see.
In the bedroom of Micah’s suite, a much larger suitcase occupied the luggage stand. When Kylie flipped it open, it was half-filled with men’s socks, tee shirts, and underwear.
Four suits in dry cleaning bags hung in the closet.
A toiletry bag sat beside the sink in the bathroom, and a shaver was plugged in and charging.
She emptied his toiletry bag on the counter and shook it, spilling floss, toothpaste, and matte hair pomade on the marble counter.
No wedding ring.
She went through the pockets of his suitcase and found poker chips from three other casinos but no wedding ring.
Back in the suite’s living room, Micah was pouring himself a drink at the wet bar beside the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the dark, glittering view of Atlantic City. “Satisfy yourself that I’m really staying here?”
“You can’t blame me,” Kylie said. “I’m probably going to sleep with one eye open to make sure that you don’t try to run out on me again.”
“What can I fix for you?”
“Vodka tonic?” she inquired.
“I can do that.” He bent and removed a bottle of soda water from the bar’s refrigerator. The bottle hissed in the quiet hotel room when he unscrewed the cap. “Don’t sleep with one eye open. We’re allies now.” He walked over to her, holding out her drink and one of his own. “Accomplices. Partners.”
“Going into crime together is the oldest con in the book. I have ample evidence to suspect that you might try to ditch me again. Don’t gaslight me.”
“I’m reassuring you. Do you want me to sign a contract or something?”
She stared at him before cracking, “I am not going to sign a contract that says we are going into crime together. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, do you think I’m that much of an amateur?”
Micah laughed. “I can have my business lawyers draw up a contract that says you’re my traveling secretary, but the money would be the same.”
Kylie was still trying to shoot laser beams out of her eyes at him to pin them against the wall, but it wasn’t working. His loose posture was absolutely relaxed as he stuck one hand in his pocket and used the other to bring his highball glass of dark liquor to his lips. She asked him, “Why would a con man have business lawyers?”
“I’m not a con artist,” he said.
“Could have fooled me.”
“I really am in business.”
She quipped, “The waste management business?”
Micah shot her a look out of the corners of his eyes. “No, I’m not in the garbage business.”
A hint of his Brooklyn accent whispered in the word garbage, making it sound like gawbige.
With that accent and sharp look from him, it was apparent that Micah knew the term garbage business was a euphemism for old-school Mafia dealings.
Which wasn’t a shock. Lots of people knew it. You could even look it up on Wikipedia.
It didn’t mean anything.
“So then, what kind of business are you in?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “It’s just your usual run-of-the-mill type of place. I’ve got a couple of co-investors, and we’re making enough money that we’re not sorry we made the investment.”
“And yet you’re still pulling cons, even though you tried to go straight.”
Micah continued with the sip of his drink and stared at the lights of Atlantic City far below where they stood. When he spoke, he asked, “How did you get into pulling cons?”
He was smooth, the blond Italian, no matter what he said his name was. Kylie wasn’t conning him anymore, so she didn’t need to tell them a sob story.
Yet, he was asking for one.
She sat on the long couch in the living room and sipped the vodka tonic he’d made her. The drink was strong, heavy on the vodka, and the wedge of lime in the bottom perfumed the air in the glass as she tipped it toward her mouth. The soda’s fizz and citrus scent tickled her nose.
After Kylie had swallowed, she said, “Accidentally.”
Micah sat on the other end of the couch, resting one arm on the back and looking over the nighttime city. “That’s not an answer I expected.”
“After my dad died when I was twelve, things were hard for my mom. Eventually, she couldn’t handle it anymore, so she took my sister and left.”
His voice was gentle, as if he was trying not to scare her. “How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
Micah’s head swiveled toward her, his pale eyes suddenly worried. “And how old are you now, really?”
She flapped her hand to indicate he could stop worrying. “Twenty, but my ID says I’m twenty-seven. When I was sixteen, I needed a fake ID that said I was twenty-one to work as waitstaff. Those tee shirt bodegas on the boardwalk don’t pay enough.”
He reached for her highball glass. “So, you needed one that said you were twenty-one so you could work.”
Kylie laughed and held her drink out of his reach. “I’ve been living like I was in my twenties for years. I’m an old soul by now. Besides, I thought you already knew everything about me.”
“I thought I had some dates wrong, and that’s why the numbers didn’t line up. I didn’t think you were only twenty. I suppose I should be glad that you aren’t actually seventeen and I just committed a crime. You are actually twenty, right?”
His sparkling gray eyes were flared wider, and he wasn’t smiling. He was nervous.
She laughed at him again. “I have lived twenty years on God’s green Earth, I promise. And how old are you? You don’t look like you’re forty or anything.”
Micah chuckled, then he pressed his lips together, throwing her a glance before he said, “I’m twenty-five.”
Wow. A specific answer. Would wonders never cease? “Yeah, I thought you were older than dirt.”
He raised his eyebrows for a moment before he sipped his drink again.
Kylie asked, “So, when are you going to tell me the deets about this job?”
Micah sighed. “Look, you don’t have to know everything about it, and it’s probably better if you don’t. Like I said, the soldiers shouldn’t know the whole plan.”
“But this isn’t a big job with lots of people. It’s just us doing something about art but not stealing it. If one of us snitches, the other person will know who it was.”
“It’s better this way.”
“But it’s not. It’s you holding all the cards and me being in the dark. It’s being able to walk away without looking back and me not knowing where you’ve gone again because I don’t know the whole plan. If I’m going to do this, I need to know what we’re doing. We need to be in this together. We need to do this the right way, like it’s our thing.”
Micah drained his drink and set the glass on the coffee table. “It’s late. It’s almost two a.m. Let’s sleep, and we’ll continue this conversation in the morning, okay?”
“I don’t know, Micah. I don’t know if I want to do this thing if we’re not in it together.”
“That’s not what I—Look, it’s really late. You can change your mind and walk out in the morning as easily as you can right now. Let’s get some sleep.”
Not that Kylie was going to let him bolt out on her again.
But she traipsed after Micah toward the bedroom of the suite.
She wasn’t going to even shut her eyes when this Micah Shine might abscond and stick her with an exorbitant bill again.
She dug a long jammie shirt out of her backpack. Micah let her shower first while he was busy doing something, but if he thought she was going to go to sleep and let him con her again, he had another dang thing coming.
No one fooled Kylie twice.
Nope.
Nuh-uh.
The hotel bed was so much softer than her decades-old twin mattress in her apartment, and she sank into the cuddly pillows and fluffy comforter in the cool room.
Kylie was not a Southern Jersey hick who grew eggplants on her daddy’s farm and had never met a man before. Kylie had grown up in Atlantic City and was as cynical as an IRS auditor.
If Micah Shine thought that gentle kiss goodnight with his fingers tangled in her hair and holding the back of her head and then a warm smile while he gazed into her eyes—his eyes really were like opals, silvery gray and awash with tides of blue and teal that caught the light—before he turned off the lamp and then sneaked his ankle under hers for a leg hug that felt like affection as his breathing smoothed out to a slow, steady whisper, if he thought all that was going to placate her and allay her well-founded suspicions, well, he was wrong.
Going to sleep would be just asking for this scammer to grift her again.
The bed was really soft.
And warm.
But she definitely wasn’t going to—