Staying in Vegas (Vegas Morellis 1)

I’m paranoid he’s going to come inside, so I hurry through the shower and wrap a towel around my body, just in case. I don’t have my own brush, so I finger comb my hair and grab my emergency make-up out of my purse.

A knock sounds, then Sin’s voice. “Almost done?”

“Almost,” I assure him. “Two more minutes.”

I can’t do much in two minutes, but I coat my lashes with mascara and brush some color on my lips.

When the door opens, I’m fully dressed and just bending to slide my heel inside the pretty white boot. Fortunately, it fits like a glove.

Sin pauses, his dark eyes traveling over my body from head to toe and lingering on my boots. They make another trip up, but he’s paying more attention to my body—or the dress?—than me, I think.

I start to speak, but I feel like I’m interrupting, so I stop. He finally concludes his perusal, sighs quietly, then turns around and heads down the stairs.

I flip the light off and cradle all my stuff in my arm as I follow him. “Do you have a bag I could put my clothes in?” I ask him.

He goes to the kitchen and comes back with a balled up grocery bag. I straighten it out, murmuring an absent thank you, and dump my clothes inside.

Sin takes my cell phone out of his jacket pocket and hands it to me.

Eyeing him warily, I take it. It’s fully charged now, so he must have plugged it in at some point, but I don’t know how; it was in my purse. My purse which I slept with. That means he must have opened my purse and rooted around for the phone while I slept—that’s vaguely creepy.

“There’s a message from Rafe,” he informs me.

My heart drops into my gut. “What? He doesn’t have my phone number.”

“I gave it to him,” Sin states.

Instead of the excitement a message from Rafe might have stirred in me yesterday, now there’s dread. I don’t want to read whatever mean shit he has to say to me. I don’t want more accusations that I’m lying, more flippant insults about my sister. He can fuck off, that’s what he can do.

Instead of responding to his message—or even reading it—I slide the phone in the pocket of my purse and look up at Sin. “I’m hungry.”

He blinks at me. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“Feed me,” I suggest. Gesturing past him, I indicate the kitchen. “There’s probably food in here, right?”

“Not really.”

“Then let’s go somewhere. Vegas must have lots of places to eat. Can we go to Caesar’s Palace? The mall where the ceiling changes colors? They probably have a food court, right?”

The man who kidnapped and cuffed me to his bed stares at me like I’m the freak. “Are you for real right now? You want me to escort you around a fucking tourist attraction and buy you food?”

I shrug. “I had to sleep with you last night; I think you owe me a meal.”

“I didn’t fuck you.”

“My stomach doesn’t care.”

Sin rubs his forehead, looking completely fucking baffled. He looks at me again—well, at my dress—then heaves a sigh, pats his pocket, and says, “Come on.”

12

Laurel

I didn’t understand why the waitress looked at me so strangely as I was ordering, but now that she brings out a tray overflowing with more food than we could consume if we had five more people with us, I begin to understand.

“Somebody must be hungry,” she states, lowering the enormous tray and moving a big plate of fried mozzarella and a similarly large plate of fried zucchini onto the table. Following that, she puts down two family-sized portions of two different pastas.

I look across the table at Sin. “This is a lot of food. Like, a lot of food.”