Vegas, Baby. Theodora Taylor
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to get around The Benton Group’s nonfraternization policy, which would hopefully help sell their whirlwind romance. Though Cole Benton didn’t exactly strike her as a whirlwind-romance type of guy. Their first date wasn’t scheduled until Sunday night, some business dinner, which she didn’t even have to shop for, because Cole’s secretary had emailed that she’d be sending over a dress for the event. So she had a lot of time on her hands. A lot of time.
The first few days, she spent deep cleaning her entire apartment and setting up a bunch of traps for the rat who’d stolen her meal replacement bar. There were no signs of him in the cabinets, thank goodness, but she doubted she’d seen the last of him. Quite frankly her apartment was a dump, chosen shortly after she and Pru had given up their lease due to Pru’s parents dying in a car accident and her having to take over as her high-school-aged brother’s only guardian. Sunny’s apartment was cramped and in a questionable neighborhood, but it was also cheap and right on a major bus route, so she never had any trouble getting to work. The good had outweighed the bad—until her furry roommate had showed up.
After that it hadn’t been worth the amount of sleep she’d lost, because she kept jerking awake, thinking she heard the quick movement of tiny feet inside her walls.
By the time Saturday night rolled around, Sunny was a wreck, still tired, and bored on top of it. But for the first Saturday night in her working life, she had no boss to report to, no dances to perform or drinks to serve, no friends to go out with since they all were Benton Girls performers—nothing to do but twiddle her thumbs.
She’d already read every book in her apartment, and choreographing a whole new routine for her Sunday girls’ dance class at the Balzar Community Center had only occupied her time for a few hours. By five, she was nearly out of her mind with boredom, and thinking she should use some of her hard saved money to buy a TV. Something she’d never bothered with before, because she was usually too exhausted to do much more than fall into bed when she got home from either of her jobs.
People call New York the city that never sleeps, but really it was Vegas that never shut down, not even for national holidays, not for one single neon weekend. There was always work to do in Vegas. But here she was now with nothing to do.
Just then her doorbell rang, and she was more than a little surprised to see who was standing on the other side of the door when she opened it.
Before she could even work up a pleasant hello, Cole Benton held up a manila envelope. “Your confidentiality agreement,” he said. He looked very, very annoyed. Even though he was the one who had shown up at her front door unannounced.
“You want me to sign a contract?” she asked, blinking as she tried to catch up.
“Yes,” he answered, then he pushed past her, barging into her apartment without invitation.
“Please come right on in,” she said, closing the door behind him.
He either didn’t pick up on her sarcasm or didn’t care. He looked around the apartment for a few seconds, then he pulled the contract out of the envelope. “Sign there and there. It’s pretty standard. You won’t say anything about any of this to anyone, including Nora.”
Sunny wondered if she’d ever get used to hearing him call his grandmother by her first name. She knew her own grandma wouldn’t have put up with that even for a second. But she had the feeling The Third—she meant, Cole—probably got away with a lot of behavior most people couldn’t.
She signed on the line above her printed name, “You couldn’t have just mailed this to me?” she asked. “I thought we weren’t supposed to start pretending to date until tomorrow night...”
She trailed off when she saw that Cole wasn’t listening, instead his phone was to his ear.
“What time do you think you can have the moving truck meet us here?”
“Wait, why is a moving truck coming here?” she demanded.
Cole kept talking as though she hadn’t said anything. “Couple of hours? Great.” He then frowned at something the person on the other side of the phone had said. “I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”
He lowered the phone and glanced at Sunny. “Do you want the movers to pack you up? Or do you want to do that yourself?”
Sunny screwed up her face. “What? When did I agree to move?”
Cole put the phone back up to his ear. “She’s not sure. Just tell whoever you get to be ready for an either-or situation. I’ll touch base later. Thanks.”
As soon as he hung, she informed him, “I’m not moving to...” She realized she had no idea where he was trying to make her go, and finished with a tepid, “Wherever you’re trying to make me move.”
Cole picked up the signed contract and flipped through it before turning the found page around and pointing to a paragraph. Sunny read it. Something about her agreeing not to do or say anything that would cast him in the bad light.
“How is living in my own apartment casting you in a bad light?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No man of my standing would ever let his girlfriend live in a dump like this.”
“It’s not that bad,” Sunny argued, her voice sounding a little weak even to her own ears, as she tried to keep her eyes from straying over to the water stains on the walls.
“It’s a dump,” he repeated. “And judging from the deal I saw going down in the nearby stairwell, probably not at all safe. You move in with me until my assistant can set you up in a decent apartment.”
Sunny’s first thought was to argue with him. No one told her what to do or where to live.
But then the image of the rat with her protein bar in its mouth floated across her mind. She could still hear distinctly the high-pitched click-suck of its teeth.
“Exactly where would this apartment be?” she asked. “It would have to be something I could afford on my own.”
“That’s something you can discuss with Agnes when the time comes,” he said, sounding brusque and bored with this whole line of conversation.
Sunny tried not to bristle. She supposed she should just be grateful he hadn’t decided to make a big deal of her easy acquiescence. “I... Um. Don’t really need a moving truck,” she mumbled. “Everything I have fits easily into two suitcases. I’ve been getting rid of a bunch of things before I go to New York.”
He brought out his phone and started texting. “All right, I’ll have Agnes call off the moving truck. Pack up and I’ll drive you back to my place.”
“You don’t have to drive me—”
He cut her off with another disapproving stare. “If your car is anything like your apartment, I think I do.”
She thought of the bus, which had served her well over the year she’d been living there. “The bus gets the job done,” she said, feeling the need to defend Las Vegas’s transit system.
Cole didn’t even look up from his smartphone. “I’m telling Agnes to pull out one of the cars from my garage. You can probably handle the Mercedes.”
“Really, you don’t have to—”
Cole crossed his arms across his chest. “So is the plan to keep me waiting instead of packing your bags quickly?”
Sunny pursed her lips. Cole was acting as if everything he was commanding was the most logical thing ever, but she wasn’t a doormat.
“You know you’ve got me thinking...” she said.
His eyes narrowed, but he remained quiet, waiting for her to go on. He seemed to have two modes of communicating, Sunny noted to himself. Either issuing commands or using silence in a way that felt as though he were carefully wielding a weapon.
She continued on, anyway, even further convinced by his weaponized