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“You ready for tonight, Lucky Charm?” Mariela Donaldson, the manager of the Rosé Boutique, called as they walked in.
Ryan smiled at the striking silver-headed woman behind the ornate counter at the back. She’d managed this shop for a decade, and this wasn’t exactly his first visit with a woman that he was trying to impress. Except this time, he wasn’t worried about impressing Lisa—just taking care of business. But he didn’t have time to tip off Mariela. And on top of that, explaining his true feelings about today’s whole mess would simply come across as rude. He decided just to stick to poker talk. “The fun doesn’t really begin until tomorrow.”
“Then what are you doing in here?”
Ryan turned and looked for Lisa, who hadn’t made it more than two steps inside the door. “Mariela, meet Lisa Fleming. Lisa, you’ll be in good hands with Mariela.” Ryan looked back at Mariela. “She needs a new dress for dinner tonight at the Mona Lisa.”
“With you?” Mariela dropped her voice a bit. Her eyes took in Lisa’s jeans and sneakers, then focused on the hair clip holding up a riot of curls.
Ryan shook his head. “Not really. A friend of the family, you could say.”
Lisa seemed to pay their conversation no mind as she walked over to a rack with a beaded red dress and studied the lacy layers as they fell from the hanger.
“She’s definitely not who you usually come in shopping for, Lucky Charm.”
Ryan thought about making a joke but remembered his earlier resolve not to get into it. He decided on another non-descript shrug of his shoulders. “That one’s history. They all come and go around here, anyway.”
He’d been dating Erin Sjostrom, a tall Nordic beauty from the European poker circuit off-and-on for the last two years. She liked being seen with him, and Ryan never turned down the chance to be caught with eye candy—it took the pressure off him. When people got what they expected—poker player with hot blonde European girlfriend—they lived with their grand assumptions and rarely pressed him with questions.
Endorsements and magazine covers on the pro poker circuit didn’t go to guys who preferred to stay home with their grandpa and dog.
When Erin took up with a professional golfer in a tournament around Christmas time, Ryan simply closed out the account he’d opened in her name here in the boutique. They were more of a mutually beneficial business transaction than a relationship, anyway.
But just like everyone else in Vegas, the only details Mariela knew about the poker circuit’s so-called most eligible bachelor came strictly from what she saw on the surface.
And Ryan didn’t see any reason to change the general school of thought. He wasn’t going to be putting on the act much longer. He could live up to everyone else’s expectations for a few more hours.
In his heart, he’d known it was time to make a change, and it felt right that the Shamrocks for Students tournament would be his last time behind a poker table. He didn’t know what he’d be doing next, but he’d been holding ‘em and folding ‘em for almost a decade now.
He could feel that inner restlessness for the next challenge deep in his soul.
And being restless in Las Vegas rarely led to anything good.
The road to retirement would start in a few hours with easy few rounds of play in the company of some celebrities and high rollers who were giving money to the Shamrock Foundation, a fund that supported schools and students. The Foundation would collect the money from this tournament, culminating on St. Patrick’s Day.
He knew there would be some silly photo ops with people who all wanted a piece of the phenom who’d won the last four Global Poker Challenge rings. Then Saturday morning, the real work would start when he sat down at the table and took the first look at the cards dealt to him.
And then, by Sunday, it would all be over.
And so would the only career he’d really ever known.
It took more than luck to win at a poker table. It took skill. And one of the greatest skills Ryan McBride had cultivated was to not give anything away unnecessarily.
“Lisa? Do you see anything you like?” Ryan stepped away from the counter.
“I’m honestly not sure where to begin. I haven’t dressed up in a while. Being a high school drama teacher tends to keep you low-key. Lots of late nights and rehearsals.” She wiggled the left half of a ratty pair of Chucks in his direction.
“I see that.” The casual, canvas shoes branded her—loudly—as a tourist. “Well, Mariela can help you with whatever you need.”
Lisa crooked her finger and wiggled it in the age-old sign for “come here.” Ryan walked over to the rack closest to her. She looked at the red dress again, then picked up the heavy cardstock with the price tag and quickly dropped it from her fingers.
She leaned in and spoke in a whisper. “Is there any other place nearby? This stuff is all beautiful, but dresses with price tags that show numbers before a comma are just way out of my budget.”
“Not any shops that you could get to and back in time for the dinner reservation.”
He wanted to tell her it wasn’t really his problem. He wanted to tell her he had to get ready for his work obligations tonight. He wanted to stick to his plan—drop her off and keep on moving.
But something about the look on Lisa’s face stopped him.
Her eyes were wide, the same deep color as a sweet golden candy he used to take out of a jar next to Pops’ recliner so many years ago. Her gaze darted around the room, unable to land on any one rack or dress with any kind of focus. As Ryan studied Lisa a little more closely, he noticed that her breathing was coming in a fashion that registered as a little shallower than a person’s normal rate of inhalation and exhalation.
He’d seen it across the table more times than he could count.
The onset of panic. The moment when someone realized they were in over their head. In a poker match, he’d stare an opponent’s fear down, and then ride it to a tall pile of colorful chips coming his way.
But he couldn’t just stare Lisa down. Whatever this mess was, she was also the great-granddaughter of a long-lost friend of his grandfather’s. And while he didn’t really care what this woman or her great-grandmother were up to—as long as it all came to an end before anyone exchanged an “I do”—he did care what Pops thought. A lot.
And for his sake, Ryan would at least treat this woman the way his grandfather would expect.
He reached in his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, then turned toward the marble counter at the back.
“Mariela!”
The impeccably coiffured woman looked up as Ryan shattered the silence in the small boutique.
“Heads up.” Ryan tossed his credit card through the air. It landed on the slick stone in front of Mariela with a small smack. “Anything she wants. You know the deal.”
She nodded. “Indeed, I do. Glad to have you back in the store, Lucky Charm. I’ll take care of her.”
“Ryan, that’s not necessary. Really.” Lisa started to say more, but Ryan cut her off. It was just money. One dress from this boutique wasn’t going to break him. It never had before. And there had been plenty.
Plenty of girls. Plenty of gifts. Plenty of swipes on that card.
Ryan McBride didn’t have to do anything. Except when it came to the man who’d raised him and taught him everything he knew—about life and poker.
“Look, your great-grandmother is marrying my Pops. That makes us siblings or cousins or something. I’m an only child and I haven’t seen my cousins since I was probably five years old. So, Merry Christmas or something, Cuz.”
Ryan raised an eyebrow and gave Lisa a big grin, then checked his watch. He needed to get going. He needed to get ready for tonight. He had rituals he always went through before sitting down at a poker table.
But most of all, he needed to not get rivered—losing on the last card, in Texas Hold ‘Em terms—by unchecked thoughts of a honey-haired pseudo-relative before he walked into the last big tournament he would ever play.
He decided to let that be the last word, to head back out to the grand, light-filled, ornate Italian renaissance-style hallway before Lisa could disagree or show gratitude. Either would have bothered him. He didn’t want the gesture to take on any kind of life of its own.
It just was what it was. Another swipe on the limitless credit card.
Lisa’s room wasn’t ready yet, so after Mariela gave her the full Vegas shopping treatment, Lisa boarded the express elevator and found herself whisked up to the top of the Renaissance Grand. The elevator’s swift motion made her stomach flutter just like it had with the sight of every price tag in the Rosé Boutique.
And every time she thought about Ryan McBride.
Thankfully, Lisa stood alone in the elevator—because she wasn’t about to talk about that.
Not even with that annoying little voice in her head.
Actually...absolutely not with that annoying little voice in her head. It had a tendency to not shut up. And she’d never make it in Vegas with that voice telling her to check out Ryan McBride one more time.
As Lisa reached the door, Nana walked out with Bill, who’d come by to slowly escort her to dinner. They clearly wanted some alone time before sitting down to eat.
That suited Lisa just fine, as she wanted some alone time of her own.
She wanted to be alone with her thoughts, and a quick shower before dinner seemed the best way to do that.
But despite her resolve in the elevator, as Lisa washed the shampoo out of her hair, she realized she wasn’t actually alone. Lisa had to admit she was outnumbered. By her own stupid, scattered brain. Everything ran around in her mind like hungry ants at a summer picnic. Even though she taught drama for a living, she knew she didn’t need any more unscripted drama in her own life, for Pete’s sake.
Lisa stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Damp curls brushed her shoulders and her face glowed with the recent application of moisturizer. A dress that cost a month’s worth of her salary hung on a hook just behind her.
It all felt surreal, this shiny, slick stone and bright lights experience. As she smoothed foundation on her face, then dusted blush across her cheekbones, she remembered her years in New York, trying to catch a break on Broadway.
Back then, she’d craved this—the spotlights, the elegant dresses, the ability to dress up and chameleon yourself into someone at the far rainbow end of your imagination.
But today it just all felt very fake, like discovering an heirloom ring held cut glass instead of a diamond.
She’d grown up in the years since she’d returned to Texas. She’d invested in the lives of her students, and seeing their confidence had begun to give her a lasting confidence of her own—not something manufactured for a performance on a stage.
Lisa dried her hair, then arranged it on her head in a twist, securing the base with a handful of bobby pins and spraying the curls on top with a liberal sheen of hairspray. As she played with the placement of the curls and the sharper edges of her thoughts, a knock sounded at the door.
She looked down with hesitation at the plush white terry cloth robe she was still wearing, then shrugged her shoulders. Likely it was just someone coming to offer turndown service. This was Las Vegas. Renaissance Grand staff members had probably caught guests in things far more risqué than the hotel-provided bathrobe.
A second round of rapping sounded at the door.
“Hold on! I’m coming!” Lisa shouted. The suite was so large it reminded her of her college apartment.
Well, the size did, anyway. She didn’t see any particle board-based, some-assembly-required furniture or thrift store finds.
Lisa opened the door a crack.
It wasn’t turndown service. If anything, what she saw in the sliver of space made her heart rate turn up a few clicks.
Ugh, there went that voice in her head again. Couldn’t the fire alarm go off and drown this voice out?
The fire alarm is about to go off. Look in front of you. That’s a solid three alarms, right there.
Black hair.
Black button-down shirt, open at the neck and crisp with a sheen of starch and precision under a tailored black sport coat.
Dark lightweight wool pants came to an end atop a pair of black leather shoes that reminded a documentary she’d watched the other day on the Riviera.
And a set of midnight blue eyes that reminded her of nothing she’d ever seen before in her life.
Alarm.
Alarm.
Alarm.
Lisa fought a battle on multiple fronts, trying to make the voice in her head shut-the-craps-table-up, as she simultaneously tried to speak through a throat gone dry the instant she realized he wasn’t here to turn down the sheets.
She wasn’t sure she’d turn down anything Ryan McBride suggested when he was looking like that.
“Pops panicked and called me, thinking you wouldn’t know how to get to dinner. He wouldn’t settle down until I promised I’d come get you.”
She tugged the lapel of the bathrobe upwards. Her throat still felt like the sandy Nevada desert all around this town of lights.
“Can I come in?” His voice sounded flat, the exact opposite of the current flips and dives of Lisa’s heart rate. Of course, he was in control. He lived here. He was used to seeing beautiful people all the time.
It wasn’t her fault she lived on an island in Texas and only saw teenagers with acne problems all day.
Lisa didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to speak. Anything she could do right now was only going to embarrass herself somehow, she just knew it.
But...she couldn’t just leave him out in the hallway.
Lisa stood behind the door as she again pulled it open, suddenly self-conscious of standing there in her bathrobe—in spite of her earlier nonchalance when she thought she’d just be encountering a member of the hotel staff.
Channel someone braver and prettier, Lisa. You can do this. Play the part.
“Sure, come on in.” She tried to affect a nice, cool, Grace Kelly tone to her voice. Absently, she smoothed a stray wisp of hair behind her ear, once, twice, three times.
She could not let him know she gave a rodent’s hindquarters about any of this.
He walked in swiftly, then stopped abruptly and looked out the window across the back of the suite. “Glad they took care of you and Gina Mae. That’s a pretty great view. Mine’s similar.”
“You said you live here?” Lisa crossed her arms tightly, hugging her ribcage. Her gaze fell on Ryan’s arms, hands pressed nonchalantly in his pockets, and a crazy thought scurried across her mind, like a squirrel darting for an acorn across a yard.
She remembered how toned his arms had looked earlier. And suddenly, she wondered what it would feel like to have them pressing around the white, fuzzy cover-up instead of her own slightly self-protective gesture.
“In the condo tower over there.” He pointed at a building that sat off at a forty-five-degree angle from the main hotel, across an expanse of pools and clubhouses and fountains below. “That’s mine up there on the top left corner.”
With her eyes, Lisa followed the trail Ryan created with his finger. The windows were twice as tall as the rest of the floors and an oversized porch wrapped around the corner.
“Wow. I bet you do have a great view.” Clearly, Ryan lived in the penthouse suite. She didn’t even want to think about what that would cost. Probably more than her teacher’s salary would generate for...oh, the next hundred years or so.
“I’m not there much.”
Lisa detected a hint of something that sounded an awful lot like regret in his simple sentence. She’d been analyzing and coaching others in the art of tone and voice for a long time. The subtle pauses between syllables, or a catch of breath at just the right time, or a particular inflection always caught her ear’s attention.
What she’d never quite mastered was the art of inquiry. She’d never be an investigator. She wanted to ask why; wanted to find out what he meant.
And then she heard another voice in her head.
One she never listened to, no matter what.
Her mother’s voice.
Lisa never thought about her mother. Annelle Fleming never had much wisdom to spare for her young daughter. But she’d said one thing so many times that Lisa couldn’t help but hear it in her mind, over every other sound in Las Vegas. Some memories were just that powerful, no matter how tightly you tried to keep them locked away.
Some secrets are just best kept, Lisa, the inner drawl locked inside her head said.
Lisa learned early not to ask questions of her mother. Not even so much as a why on the day Annelle left for good.
While Lisa fought it out with her internal deliberations, Ryan spoke again, cutting off her opportunity.
“It takes a few minutes to get down to the restaurant. How much longer do you need to get ready?”
In a way, the shift in conversation relieved Lisa. She shouldn’t care what Ryan McBride thought or why he was never home. All she really had room to care about was making sure Nana was happy tonight and subsequently solving how she would get her great-grandmother out of this crazy engagement and back home without breaking her heart.
“About five minutes.” She patted the bottom of her twist of curls. “All I need to do is get my dress.”
Ryan turned away from the window. “So, you found something? Was Mariela helpful?”
“Oh yes. She had some great ideas.”
The serious look on Ryan’s face made Lisa tighten her arms once again around her torso. She could feel his stare fall on her like the closing of the curtain at the end of a play. The bathrobe had been made of thick, plush material, and yet, she felt as exposed as if she’d been wrapped in nothing but a cheap sheet with a bad thread count.
Lisa took a step backward, then another. “I’ll just go finish dressing.”
She turned away from his heavy gaze and headed back toward the expansive bathroom. The more distance between her and that stare, the better. She closed the tall wooden door and leaned back against it for a moment.
This morning, she’d gone to school to teach one last round of classes before Spring Break. She’d planned on coming home and working in the backyard, getting her landscape beds ready for a season of blooms and fragrance. She’d longed for a week of tranquility, a change from the hectic pace of being around high school drama and drama students all day.
Instead, she’d been greeted with the news of her great-grandmother’s Internet-enabled engagement and a pair of plane tickets. A few hours later, she found herself in the newest, fanciest hotel in Las Vegas, surrounded by non-stop lights and glitter, about to slip on the most expensive dress she’d ever owned, paid for by a man she’d just met.
It all seemed like something out of a movie.
Only this time, she wasn’t acting.
There was no script telling her what to say. No stage directions telling her what to do.
Lisa Fleming was on her own.
And she couldn’t tell if Ryan McBride—with his cool James Dean air and eyes that looked at her as though he’d knew what she was thinking—was a villain or a hero in this scene she’d been inadvertently cast in.
Lisa walked to the hook on the closet door and raised the bag containing her dress. She took a step back and looked at it with a slightly skeptical eye. It was so different than anything she’d ever worn before.
But Mariela insisted she’d needed the dress. Lisa had tried to explain that it was too short, too sheer, too frivolous for her. The playful wisp of a skirt, made entirely of a riot of foot-long black ostrich-style feathers, reminded her of a sassy little number she’d seen in a recent celebrity gossip magazine.
“This is Las Vegas. Everyone’s playing a part. No one wants to be themselves, Cara Mia,” Mariela explained in heavily accented English, silencing Lisa’s requests for something more simple, more tailored.
Lisa knew all about playing a part. She’d spent her entire adult life on one stage or another.
What she didn’t know, as she slid the dress over her head and tugged her arms through the lacy cap sleeves, was how this story would end.
Lisa slid her feet into a pair of towering satin heels and threaded a pair of long, chunky gold earrings in her ears. Then she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to imagine the lights on the stage.
Tonight was no different than any other time she’d stepped in front of an audience.
She was playing a role.
Lisa Fleming, Las Vegas bridesmaid. Audience of one—Gina Mae Fleming. It didn’t matter how unsure she was of this dress. It didn’t matter how she didn’t want to be indebted to Ryan McBride for paying for it with one practiced flick of a black plastic rectangle. It didn’t matter that she had no idea how she was going to get Nana out of here without saying “I do.”
All that mattered was that Nana enjoyed tonight and enjoyed her time with her old friend, even though it could go no further than a few days of reunion.
Lisa took another deep breath and forced it up into the corners of her mouth. Shoulders back, eyes ahead. Hand on the door, she smiled brightly.
It was time for the performance of her life.
