The Marriage Dare

He lifts a cup of coffee to his lips, and just like last night when I watched him drink the whiskey, I’m fascinated by the motion. It’s so simple and so graceful, and yet it holds that restrained power that radiates from every inch of him.

He sees me standing in the doorway, and I’m suddenly aware of how little I’m wearing. His eyes take me in from head to toe, slowly. The feeling is almost visceral, like he’s dragging his fingertips from my scalp down the back of my neck across my shoulders and down my ribs and thighs to my toes and all the way back up. My nipples harden beneath my nightgown, and there’s no way he doesn’t see it. The fabric is far too thin to hide anything.

He raises an eyebrow. “Good morning.”

“Morning.”

“How are you feeling?”

Awkward. Insecure. Embarrassed. Utterly unsure of what you want from me. I don’t say those things out loud, though. “Okay, I guess.”

“I’m sorry that I haven’t ordered you clothes yet,” he says. “I wasn’t sure of your sizing, and I don’t know what kind of clothes you like to wear, so I figured I’d just let you choose.”

“From where?”

He shrugs. “Anywhere you like. There are boutiques in the hotel— like the one I ordered from last night— that will deliver here to the suite. And you know Las Vegas is filled with stores. Most of them know who I am and will send a selection over if that’s what you want.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand.”

Daniel grins at me, and impish grin that does strange things to my stomach. “Which part?”

“You’re just going to buy me clothes?”

He looks at me again, taking in my appearance. His eyes dark, in a way that’s familiar and arousing, but he doesn’t make a move toward me or say anything about it. “Do you have any?”

I do. But they’re not nice clothes. I sold all the nice ones. And the ones I do have are at my apartment forty miles away. So I shake my head. “No, I guess not.”

“Then yes,” he says. “I am buying you clothes. I can’t have my wife walking around like that. Though you can feel free to walk around here like that anytime you want.”

I walk over to the table and sit down in a chair close enough that I feel like we can still have a conversation, but far enough away that I don’t feel that gravitational pull toward him. “So I suppose that dream I had last night where I bet that I would marry you and you won wasn’t a dream?” I know it’s not a dream, but I still have to ask anyway.

“No, it wasn’t a dream. I have a lawyer coming here in an hour to draw up the papers.”

“Okay.” The conversation that we had just before he left my room last night is coming back to me, and I don’t want to go over it again even though I still don’t get it.

“I’m assuming you have your passport and other important documents at your apartment?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Honestly, there’s not much left there, but I should probably get that stuff.”

Daniel stands and goes into the living room for a second. When he comes back, he’s holding my purse, the one that I had completely forgotten about. He holds it up. “Are your keys in here?”

I nod.

He reaches inside and grabs the keys and then taps out a quick message on his phone. Elsewhere in the huge suite, I hear a door open. The huge bouncer that I remember from last night, guarding both the door of the poker room and me when he left me here, enters the dining room. Devon. I flushed bright red in embarrassment, because I’m only wearing lingerie. But neither Daniel nor Devon seem concerned in the slightest. Devon barely glances in my direction. “Mr. Argent?” he asks.

“Monica, what’s your address?” Daniel asks me as he hands Devon the keys to my apartment.

I give it to them. There’s nothing there worth stealing, and Daniel has no reason to steal.

“Get a crew together, and go to the apartment. Empty it of anything left of belonging to Miss Blast and have those things sent to my home. Have her important documents—passport, birth certificate, Social Security— anything like that, here within the hour.”

“You got it,” Devon says. And then he exits the apartment without another word.

“He’s your go-to guy?” I asked.

Daniel nods. “He is one of them. I found it’s not good to have just one go-to guy. If you give someone that kind of power, they are likely to abuse it.”

How true that is. I remember when I was a kid, my father employed a man named Matthew. Matthew was in charge of almost everything directly below my father. Though I haven’t had the guts to voice this opinion or ask the question, I deeply suspect that Matthew was the source of my father’s corruption. That he saw an opportunity to make more money than he had ever dreamed of and thought nothing of the consequences of the people he was hurting.