Of course, I had no idea if the man was straight, bi, gay—and there was no way in hell I was ever going to ask.
“Esca?”
“Boss,” I said, touching the weird snow globe on his desk. It was the oddest thing. It looked like Cinderella’s castle in the winter. It was so out of place.
“Four days in Vegas, Esca.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get it done.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Everything you need is in the file.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I want a status update on Thursday,” he ordered and then hung up.
It was lucky I didn’t crave communication or anything.
And now, on the tarmac, waiting, I was certain that this was going to be the longest four days of my life. If the damn plane ever left the airport.
I closed my eyes and prayed for a freak blizzard.
Two
Brigham Stanton had booked the Chairman Suite at the Bellagio, which sat atop the Spa Tower and had two bedrooms, one for him and his girlfriend and one for me and his friend, the guy who’d just made partner, Chase Baldwin. The rest of his crew, as he called them, were staying in the three-thousand-square-foot Entourage Suites on the same floor. His brother, Nolan Stanton, was staying in the Presidential Suite one floor below.
When I reached the front desk, after I was given the VIP access card and an entire folder of information, I was informed that there was another person going up to the suite with me.
Waiting for the concierge, shouldering my garment bag on my left and my duffel and laptop bag on the right, a bellman appeared and asked if I would like to set my things on the cart already overflowing with luggage.
“Thank you, no,” I assured him as a stunning redhead stepped around the cart. Her chunky chartreuse wool topcoat came to mid-thigh and had a wide lapel that highlighted the delicacy of her features, making her appear fragile in a porcelain-doll sort of way. She was wearing torn jeans and black heels high enough that I had to wonder how she walked in them without falling and breaking body parts. “Good morning,” I greeted her.
She turned to me and didn’t speak, but deigned to raise her Jackie O sunglasses, looked me up and down, and did something with her face that I guessed was supposed to be a smile, but came off more like she smelled something distasteful. “Good morning. You must be Brig’s mysterious friend.”
Her tone was flat, stilted, and downright cold. Okay. That reaction usually didn’t manifest until people were around me for a few days.
“Not so mysterious,” I said, shrugging and slipping into my cover story. “We went to Choate together, and then he went off to Harvard while I went west, to Stanford.”
She nodded slowly.
“I got sick of the cold, which is funny since I ended up in Chicago.”
There was a pause before she put her hand over her heart in mock surprise. “Oh, you’re planning to speak to me?”
“Pardon?”
Her chuckle as she reached for my arm was surprising. She used me as a brace as she took off first one Christian Louboutin heel and then the other. “They don’t all speak to me, you see,” she rushed out, her limpid cornflower blue eyes lifting to mine as she set the heels carefully on one of the hanging bags, between the straps. I understood her caution; they were expensive after all. “Not to me.”
What she was saying clicked in my brain then. “His other friends, do they not speak to you much?”
“Only Lan, who’s going to be family, so he doesn’t count. He has to be nice to me.”
She meant Nolan Stanton, of course, Brigham’s younger brother.
“It’s lovely that Brig knows at least one nice person. I wish you’d been on the ski trip in December. You would have made Vail less of a horror.”
“How do you know I’m nice?” I asked, watching in amusement as she dug a pair of flats out of the top of her tote bag and, leaning against me, put one on, and then the other.
“Well, I can already tell you’re not one of his douchey frat friends who have absolutely squat to say to me.”
I grinned at her. “That’s because it was supposed to be a bro weekend, and so why were you, the fiancée, there?”
“No, no,” she said quickly, clarifying, wagging her finger at me. “Not the fiancée. We’ve never had that conversation, and I don’t have a ring.”
It was interesting how she felt the need to make that clear for me. Not that she seemed heartbroken or sad or angry. More…wistful. She wanted it, that was obvious, but it was like she was coming to terms with it never happening.
And this was what Jared meant, I suspected, when he said I needed to practice empathy. If I was being honest, I was less interested in why she seemed wistful than if I was right that that’s how she felt.