Vegas With Dad's Best Friend

I’m admiring a photograph of him that looks to have been taken years ago, around the time we first knew one another. He’s standing there with my dad and a few other friends, their arms around one another as they smile for the camera. He looks handsome, just like I remember. But thinking of him now, I think the years might have improved his looks even more.

I’m just returning it to the shelf when I hear his footsteps behind me, and I turn to see him padding barefoot across the carpet. He, too, has thrown on a robe to cover himself, though that only gives me the temptation to pull it off him.

“Good morning,” he says, his voice low and rumbling with the roughness of sleep.

“I was just admiring your suite,” I say, smiling.

“Do you like what you see?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say, but then I hesitate. Would it be rude to ask? But I want to know. “But is this your only home? You don’t have somewhere else, more permanent?”

“No, this is where I live full-time,” Jonas says, leaning against a shelving unit beside me. “I’m hardly ever here, and it’s close to the office. It has been everything I need, so far.”

“Really?” I ask, glancing around. There’s one thing which is conspicuously absent from this place, a sign of anyone else besides him. “What about… don’t you have any family?”

Jonas chuckles. “My parents passed away a while ago,” he says. “And I never had any siblings.”

“But, I mean…” I pause again, unsure how exactly to put it.

“Are you asking whether I’ve ever had a live-in girlfriend?” he asks, his expression teasing. “Or a wife?”

I feel myself blushing – but, after all, he’s right. That is what I wanted to know. “Well, have you?”

“No,” he says, reaching out to tuck my hair behind my ears and then drawing me closer to him. “I’ve been waiting for the right person to come along.”

Our eyes meet, and for a long moment, I can barely breathe.

The right person?

What does he mean by that?

Could he possibly mean… that the right person could be me?

“Come on,” he says, turning with an enigmatic smile and taking my hand to lead me back across the suite. “There’s a shower with our name on it.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Jonas

There are four days left before Savannah has to return home to Texas.

The number weighs over my head like an anvil ready to fall. By the time we spend the rest of the day exploring one another's bodies, ordering room service, and taking showers under the hot spray of water, there are only three days left to go.

I don't know whether she will get on the plane. I don't know whether she will come back again. But if she does leave, no matter how temporary it might be, that means we will have to part. And the more time we spend together, the less I can even contemplate the possibility of that happening. It can't. I need her beside me.

Now that I’ve tasted her, how could I ever bear to be alone again?

And so, in the last two days that I have her fully to myself before she has to prepare for a flight home, I make sure to spoil her as much as I can. In my own way, I shower her with love and affection, in the form of not just kisses but also the best treatment that money can buy.

I show her the best side of Las Vegas, the side which is all VIP sections and favors from friends and quiet corners. We eat gourmet meals, shop in designer boutiques, and take in the best nightly entertainment. Through it all, she is a queen resplendent in the clothes I bought for her, shining more than ever like the jewel she is in the kind of garments that befit her beauty.

And, of course, there is plenty of time spent in my suite back at the hotel, and not just there. There are evening shows where the lights go down completely and no one can see what we do in the dark, where I make her gasp and moan quietly and try to hold it back, taking pleasure in her pleasure. When we return, and there is no one around but the two of us, we inevitably fall into bed for a long night and wake to find our clothes strewn across the floor of the suite where we left them.

I do everything I can, everything to persuade her that this life is better than the one she has left behind. Better than the one she imagined she was returning to. If I can’t convince her of this, I know that I’m done. Finished.

When it comes down to it, I don't know if I will still be able to run my business if I return to Texas. But it doesn't matter. None of it does. I will sell all of it, go home with her, and find a new way to make money. Make investments, buy a new business. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that we can stay together.