Lust (Vegas Nights 2)

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said, just loud enough for him to hear it.

Rough hair tickled my jaw with his barely-there laugh. “No, you won’t. You’ll question it even after that.”

“Am I that obvious?”

He moved as if to reply, but stilled. He released me and pulled his phone out of his pocket. The screen was bright in this dark corner of the casino—bright enough that I saw the way his lips curved up in a smile.

“Done.” He locked his phone and pushed it back into his pocket. “Target met. You ready to go?”

Chapter Nine

Adrian

She hesitated, despite the conversation we’d just had.

Her teeth crept out from between her dark-pink lips, catching the bottom one and releasing it in a slow drag I couldn’t take my eyes off.

Three hours. Three fucking hours I’d been by her side while she wore the kind of dress that could only be described as sure to be illegal in the fucking future.

Black and simple, it hugged her tight little body from her chest to her knees. The thin straps that curved over her shoulders only added to the deep ‘v’ of the neckline. How the fuck her tits stayed inside that dress was anyone’s guess.

Anyone’s guess, the thing I wanted to find out.

Fuck, why had I ever suggested this? It’d been mere days since I’d found her in a bar the same as so many others in this town. If I’d had any brains the next day, I never would have suggested this shit.

I knew why I did, though. I did it because I thought she’d be unable to resist the allure of the lifestyle she’d lived for so long. A part of me believed I could trap her back into it easily.

I didn’t expect I’d meet with resistance at every corner.

Resistance that came with the sexiest, sassiest mouth I’d ever encountered and the hottest goddamn body to ever cross my path.

I wanted to rip the fucking dress from her body.

Straps.

Bust.

Zipper.

Seams.

All of it.

“Let’s stay a little longer,” she finally said, pressing her hand flat against her stomach. “If…if we can.”

“We can stay as long as you need,” I replied. “Do you want to go somewhere else, or…?”

“Here’s good.” Her voice was small again. “I know there are more people here.”

My eyebrows shot up.

She’d just told me how much she hated this. Now she wanted to stay longer and in this exact place?

“All right. Do you wanna walk around, or…?”

“Lets.” She grabbed her glass of cranberry juice, tucked her purse against her, and tilted her chin upward as if she were looking for an empty space at a table. “Do you gamble?”

“Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

“I think so, but I’m unsure whether or not the conversation I had with you then was you being real or not.”

“It was real.”

She shook her head slowly, looking out over the busyness of the room before us. “Good to know. I just wanted to go somewhere different other than the bar. Sometimes it helps to wander.”

“So, let’s wander.” I pushed off the bar and touched my hand to her back. She stiffened, but it was more of a twitch than anything else. “Where are we wandering?”

“Just around. Your guidelines for arrest are pretty strict, you know?”

“I do know,” I confirmed, sliding my hand around to her hip and moving closer to her. “I can’t arrest someone just because of someone else’s assurance. It’s like a guy walking up to me in the middle of Wal-Mart and telling me he’s just seen the guy in a suit, looking at toasters, kill someone. Not only is it unlikely and improbable in that moment, but the DA would laugh the testimony out of the building.”

“Good to know that my word is worth nothing.”

Foot. Meet Mouth.

“No.” I pulled her off to the side, to a quieter corner where the only person who eyed us was a bouncer who nodded when he recognized me. “Listen to me, Perrie.”

She didn’t look at me. Her eyes were fixed firmly on the damn floor.

“Perrie.” I cupped her chin and forced her head back until we were eye-to-eye. “Your word is worth everything. You find our target and all we have to do is wait until we have a genuine reason to arrest them. Don’t think about it the way you are.”

She sighed, averting her gaze. “Fine. Can we just finish this?”

“I can take you home if you’re done.”

“Let’s do one last walk-through before we do that.” She extracted herself from my arms. Putting her half-full glass on the bar, she turned, leaving me staring after her.

How she could walk so fast in the shoes she was wearing, I didn’t know. They were at least four inches, and while they were the kinds of shoes I’d love to have wrapped around my neck, they were also the stuff of nightmares.