Las Vegas, Nevada
He'd known all day that something was about to go down,
something life-changing and entirely new. The knowledge had
prickled in his gut and shivered in the fine hairs on the
nape of his neck throughout the marathon poker games played
in his favorite seedy, back-street gambling joint. He'd
ignored the subtle mind-buzz as a minor distractionโit
didn't have the usual elements of actual danger. But now,
with a wad of folded billsโ his winningsโshoved into the
shaft of his left boot, Dylan Creed knew he'd better watch
it, just the same.
Down in Glitter Gulch, there were crowds of people, security
goons hired by the megacasinos to make sure their walking
ATMs didn't get roughed up or rolled, or both, cops and
cameras everywhere. Here, behind the Black Rose Cowboy Bar
and Card Room, home of the hard-core poker players who
scorned glitz, there was one failing streetlight, an
overflowing Dumpster, a handful of rusty old cars and, at
the periphery of his vision, a rat the size of a raccoon.
While he loved a good fight, being a Creed, born and bred,
Dylan was nobody's fool. A tire iron to the back of the head
and being relieved of the day's takeโfifty-odd thousand
dollars in cashโwas not on his to-do list.
He walked toward his gleaming red extended-cab Ford pickup
with his customary confidence, and probably looked like a
hapless rube to anybody who might be lurking behind that
Dumpster, or one of the other cars or just in the shadows.
Someone was definitely watching him; he could feel it now, a
for-sure kind of thingโbut it was more annoying than
alarming. He'd learned early in his life, though, just by
being Jake Creed's middle son, that the presence of another
person, or persons, charged the atmosphere with a crackle of
energy.
Just in case, he reached inside his ancient denim jacket,
closed his fingers loosely around the handle of the
snub-nosed .45 he carried on his frequent gambling junkets.
Garth Brooks might have friends in low places like the Black
Rose, but
he didn't. Only sore losers, crooks and
card sharps hung out in this neighborhood, and Dylan Creed
fell into the latter category.
He was within six feet of the truck before he realized there
was someone sitting in the passenger seat. He debated
whether to draw the .45 or his cell phone in the split
second it took to recognize Bonnie.
Bonnie. His two-year-old daughter stood on the
seat, grinning at him through the glass.
Dylan sprinted to the driver's side, scrambled in and lost
his hat when the little girl flung herself on him, her arms
tight around his neck.
With his elbow, Dylan tapped the lock-button on his armrest.
"Daddy," Bonnie said. At least, in
his mind the
kid's name was BonnieโSharlene, her mother, had changed it
several times, according to the latest whim.
"Hey, babe," Dylan said, loosening his grip a little because
he was afraid of crushing the munchkin. "Where's your mom?"
Bonnie drew back to look at him with enormous blue eyes,
thick-lashed. Her short blond hair curled in wisps around
her ears, and she was wearing beat-up bib overalls, a
striped T-shirt and flip-flops for shoes.
I'm only two, her expression seemed to say.
How
should I know where my mom is?
Dylan turned, keeping one arm around Bonnie, and buzzed down
the window. "Sharlene!" he yelled into the dark parking lot.
There was no answer, of course, and he knew by the shift in
the vibes he'd been picking up since he stepped through the
back door of the Rose that his onetime girlfriend had
bailed. Again.
Only this time, she'd left Bonnie behind.
He wanted to swear, even pound the steering wheel once with
his fist, but you didn't do things like that with a kid
around. Not if you'd grown up in an alcoholic cement mixer
of a home, like he and his brothers, Logan and Tyler, had,
jumping at every thump and bump. And there was more to it
than that: besides the fact that he didn't want to scare
Bonnie, he felt a strange undercurrent of exhilaration.
He seldom saw his daughter, thanks to Sharlene's gypsy
waysโthough she always managed to cash his child-support
checksโand being separated from Bonnie, never knowing what
was happening to her, ached inside him like a bruise to the
soul.
Bonnie settled into his lap, laid her head against his
chest, gave a shuddery little sigh. Maybe it was relief,
maybe it was resignation.
She'd probably had one hell of a day, given how the night
was shaping up.
Dylan propped his chin on top of her head for a moment, his
eyes burning and his throat as hot as if he'd tried to
swallow a red-ended branding iron. He leaned forward, turned
the key in the ignition, shifted gears.
Logan. That was his next thought. He had to get to Logan.
His brother was a lawyer, after all. And while Dylan had the
money to pay any shyster in the country, and he and Logan
were sort of on the outs, he knew there was no one else he
could trust with something this important.
Bonnie was
his child, as well as Sharlene's, and by
God, she deserved a stable home, decent clothesโthe getup
she was wearing looked as if it had doubled as a dog bed for
a year or twoโand at least one responsible parent.
Not that he was all that responsible. He'd been a rodeo bum
for years, and now he was
a poker bum. He had all
the money he'd ever need, thanks to a certain shrewd
investment and a spooky tendency to draw a royal flush once
in practically every game, and he'd done some high-paying
stunt work for the movies, too.
Compared to Sharlene, for all his rambling, he was a
contender for Parent of the Year.
He didn't find the note and the shabby duffel bag on the
backseat until he got out to South Point, his favorite
hotel. Holding a sleepy Bonnie in the curve of one arm while
he stood waiting for a valet to take the truck, he read the
note.
I'm having some problems, Sharlene had scrawled in
her childlike handwriting, slanting so far to the left that
it almost lay flat against the lines on the cheap notebook
paper,
and I can't take care of Aurora anymore.
Aurora, now? Jesus, what nextโOprah?
I thought
giving her to you would be better than putting her in foster
care. I went that route, and it sucked. Don't try to find
me. I've got a boyfriend and we're hitting the road.
Sharlene.
Dylan unclamped his back molars, shifted Bonnie's weight so
he could take the ticket from the parking guy and then grab
the duffel bag. He'd have his own gear sent over from
Madeline's place, where he usually crashed when he was
passing through Vegas. Madeline wouldn't like it, but he
wasn't about to take his two-year-old daughter there.
South Point was a sprawling, brightly lit hotel. Dylan
stayed there whenever he came to the National Finals
Rodeoโif Madeline, a flight attendant, was on one of her
overseas runs or seeing somebody else at the timeโ and the
establishment was family-friendly.
He and Bonnie were family.
There you had it.
After he'd booked a room with two massive beds, he ordered
room-service hamburgers, French fries and milk shakes. While
they waited, Bonnie, only half-awake, lay curled on her side
on the bed farthest from the door, her right thumb jammed
into her mouth, her eyes following every move he made.
"You're gonna be okay, kiddo," he told her.
She looked so small, and so vulnerable, lying there in her
ragbag clothes. "Daddy," she said, and yawned broadly before
pulling on her thumb again, this time with vigor.
"That's right," Dylan answered, turning from the phone to
the duffel bag. Inside were more clothes like the ones she
was wearing, a kid-size toothbrush with the bristles worn
flat and a naked plastic baby doll with Ubangi hair and blue
ink marks on its face. "I'm your daddy. And it looks like
we'll be doing some shoppin' in the morning, you and me."
There were no pajamas. No socks. No real shoes, for that
matter. Just two more pairs of overalls, two more
sad-looking T-shirts, the doll and the toothbrush.
Rage simmered midway down Dylan's gullet.
Damn it,
what was Sharlene
doing with the money he sent to
that post office box in Topeka every month? He knew by the
way the substantial check always cleared his bank before the
ink was dry that her grandmother picked it up for her, the
day it came in, and overnighted it to wherever "Sharlie"
happened to be.
He had his suspicions, naturally, regarding Sharlene's
spending habitsโcocaine, animal-print spandex, tattoos for
the fathead boyfriend du jour, if not herself. Bonnie, most
likely, had subsisted on fast food and frozen pizza.
Dylan's jaw tightened to the point of pain; he consciously
relaxed it. None of this was Bonnie's doing. Unlike him,
unlike Sharlene, she was innocent, forced to live with the
consequences of other people's mistakes.
Not anymore, he vowed silently.
Much as he would have liked to put all the blame on
Sharlene, he knew it wouldn't be fair. He'd known whoโand
whatโshe was when he'd slept with her, nearly three years
ago, after a rodeo, in a town he couldn't even remember the
name of now. They'd holed up in a cheap room and had sex for
a week, then gone their separate ways. A few clueless months
later, Sharlene had tracked him down and told him she was
expecting his baby.
And he'd known it was true, long before he'd even laid eyes
on Bonnie and seen her resemblance to him, the same way he'd
known he wasn't alone in the parking lot behind the Black Rose.
Listless with fatigue and probably confusion, Bonnie merely
nibbled when the room-service food came, and then fell
asleep in her overalls. Was she still on formula or
something? Should he send a bellman into town for baby
bottles and milk?
He sighed, shoved a hand through his tangled hair.
In the morning, he'd take Bonnie to a pediatricianโafter
buying her some decent clothes so the doc wouldn't put a
call through to Child Protective Services the minute they
walked inโfor a routine exam and to find out what the hell
two-year-olds actually
ate.
When he was sure Bonnie was sound asleep, the bedspread
tucked around her, he called Madeline. She'd be expecting
him, though to her credit, not at an even remotely
reasonable hour, since theirs was a
sleep-over-when-you're-passing-through kind of arrangement.
He needed his clothes, and his shaving gear, and his laptop.
"It's Dylan," he said, to Madeline's hello.
"You winnin', sugar?" She'd cultivated a Southern drawl, but
every once in a while, the Minnesota came through, with its
faintly Scandinavian lilt.
"I always do," Dylan murmured, looking at his sleeping child.
"Then we ought to celebrate," Madeline crooned. "Find us a
sexy movie on pay-per-view andโ"
"Look, Madeline, I can't make it over there tonight.
Somethingโerโcame upโ"
"Where are you?" There was a snap in Madeline's tone now.
She wasn't possessiveโhe'd have driven fifty miles out of
his way to avoid her if she had beenโbut she had turned down
other offers for the duration of his stay in Vegas, she'd
made that abundantly clear, and she clearly wasn't happy
about being stood up.
"I'm at South Point," he began.
"Damn you," Madeline said, downright peevish now, "you
picked up someโsome
woman, didn't you?"
"Not exactly."
"What do you
mean, โnot exactly'?"
"I'm with my daughter, Madeline," Dylan said, patient only
because he didn't want to disturb Bonnie. "She's two years old."
The croon was back. "Oh, bring her over here! I just love
babies."
Dylan actually considered the offer, for a nanosecond. Then
he remembered Madeline's penchant for impromptu sex, the
smell of stale pot smoke that permeated her condo and the
bowl of colorfully packaged condoms in the middle of her
coffee table.
"Uhโno," he said. "She's pretty tired."
He sensed another huff building up beneath Madeline's drawl.
"Then why did you bother to call at all?" she purred. In a
moment, the claws would be out, poised to rip him to bloody
shreds.
"I need my stuff," Dylan admitted, ducking his head a
little, the way he had on the playground when he was a kid,
in anticipation of a blow. "If you'd just put it all in a
cab and send it this way, I'd be obliged."
"I wouldn't
think of doing that," Madeline said.
"I'll drop it all off on my way to the club." Her slight
emphasis on the last two words was a clear messageโ if he
was going to be a no-show, far be it from
her to
sit home alone watching pay-per-view.
"Madeline, you don't have toโ"
"South Point? That's where you said you are, isn't it?"
"Yes, butโ"
She hung up on him.
Dylan sat down on the edge of his bed, opposite Bonnie's,
and propped his elbows on his thighs. Madeline would want to
come straight up to the room, probably to see if he'd lied
about the company he was keeping, and he didn't want her
waking Bonnie. But unless he could talk Madeline into
sending his things up with a bellman, which didn't seem
likely, he'd have no other choice.
He'd have to leave Bonnie alone to go downstairs, and that
wasn't an option.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang, causing Bonnie to stir
in the depths of some baby-dream, and he pounced on it,
whispered, "Hello?"
"I'm downstairs," Madeline said. "What's your room number,
sweetie?"
Dylan suppressed another sigh. God, he hated being called
"sweetie." "Twelve-forty-two," he said.
Madeline, a leggy redhead, almost as tall as he was, at six
feet, whisked her shapely self to his door with no
measurable delay. Looking through the peephole, he saw that
she was flanked by a bellman with a loaded cart. Her shiny
mouth was tight, and her eyes narrowed slightly.
Reluctantly, Dylan admitted her.
She immediately scanned the room, her gaze landing on
Bonnie, while the bellman waited politely to unload some of
the stuff from the cart. Dylan handed him a tip and brought
in the laptop, his shaving kit and his suitcase himself.
"She is
precious!" Madeline enthused, looming over
Bonnie's bed.
"Be quiet," Dylan said. "She's had a rough day." A rough
life was more like it. As soon as he got rid of
Madeline, he'd bite the bullet and call Logan. They'd made
some progress lately, he and his older brother, but the
ground could get rocky at any time, and asking big brother
for help was going to be hard on his pride.
Madeline put a
shh finger to her plump mouth and
batted her false eyelashes. Put her in a big Vegas
headdress, with feathers and spangles, a skimpy costume,
high heels and fishnet stockings, and Bonnie, if she chanced
to wake up and see a stranger standing over her, would have
nightmares about showgirls until she died of old age.
He took Madeline by the elbow and gave her the bum's rush
toward the door. "Good night, thank you, and what do I owe
you for the favor?"
She patted his cheek. "We'll settle up next time you come
through Vegas," she said. She paused. "The hotel could
probably provide a babysitter, then we couldโ"
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