Diana guffawed. “I’d wear my bikini top with my candy striper apron down at the hospital as a service to the community. Give everybody the will to live.” She batted Holly’s hand away from her top. “Stop that and come on inside before you get us all arrested. As long as you’re standing between the two of us, you might get thrown in the wrong tank. Come on.”
The three of them linked arms, with Holly in the middle. She felt out of place more because she was shorter by eight inches than because she was the only genuine girl. But when they reached the front door, they stopped. Rob glared through the glass at them with a scowl on his face and his hands on his hips.
Cher stamped her platform shoe. “Why didn’t Marilyn kick that as**ole out?”
“I told her not to,” Diana said. “He’s a cop. I don’t want to make a cop mad. Half the people in here have a pocket full of ecstasy.” She looked down at Holly. “I will kick him out, for you.”
Wouldn’t that be nice! But Rob really might cause problems for Glitterati—he was that petty, Holly was learning—and she didn’t want anyone to get in trouble on her account.
“Thanks, but no thanks.” She patted Diana’s arm. “I have to face the music sooner or later.” She pulled the door open.
“We’re right here behind you if you need us, girl,” Cher called, and Holly was glad Cher had said this within Rob’s hearing. Rob loomed in front of her, blocking her way into the party.
And he wobbled a bit. She thought this was an optical illusion of the pink light strobing across his face—but no, he alternately swayed on his feet, then pulled himself up straighter to look more imperious, then swayed again. She’d thought she smelled liquor on him last night. Tonight he’d outdone himself.
She should have told him off rather than running away last night. Now she needed to handle him like the diva she was not. She picked up her feet and put on a pout as she approached him. “I’m here with Kaylee,” she shouted above the music. “Not you.”
“I didn’t see you with Kaylee,” he yelled back, too loud, too close to her ear. “I saw Dangermouse ramming his tongue down your throat.”
“It’s none of your business,” Holly said. “I don’t want to go out with you anymore. Stop hanging around my apartment. Don’t follow me. And don’t take this out on Elijah when you get home. You have no reason to be mad at him, or at me either.” She tried to step around Rob.
As she passed, he grabbed her forearm. “Why don’t we call it a night?” he growled, wilting her curls with a cloud of alcoholic breath. “You can make it up to me.”
“Ask Marilyn to call you a taxi.” Holly nodded toward the superstar at the door, who winked at her. “I didn’t come with you, Rob, and I’m not leaving.” She flounced away, half expecting him to grab her again.
But he didn’t. Miraculously she made it all the way into the center of the throbbing melee, where Kaylee was doing the Cupid Shuffle with a Celine Dion the size of a linebacker. Holly nearly hopped up and down on her high heels with glee at the prospect of dancing the night away with Kaylee. Every night onstage at the casino, she twirled and circled and presented. She toned her muscles with exercises in ballet and yoga classes. She didn’t do enough dancing.
First things first, though. She boogied up to Kaylee and stepped to the left with her, then to the right. “Where were you?” she shouted. “Rob tried to kill Elijah!”
“I wouldn’t have let you get in any trouble,” Kaylee yelled back calmly.
Holly knew this was true. Kaylee had her reasons for doing what she did. As Holly had surmised earlier, Kaylee’s phone call must have been official casino business.
Holly danced, concerned about nothing but her own body. Rob hung around, lurking at the edge of the crowd, but he never tried to approach her. He watched them dance from the periphery of their circling arms and legs.
Late that night, the crowd still hadn’t thinned. Kaylee took a turn in the rest room, and Holly was left doing the electric slide with a group of ladies from a librarians’ convention who were way too old for this club. As the whole double line of them leaned to the front and turned to the right, facing the corridor where Holly’s encounter with Elijah had taken place, she noticed Rob staggering toward the back door.
She leaped out of line, glancing around for Kaylee’s white-blond head or any transvestite bouncer to help her. All she saw was the tangle of dancers in shifting colors. Rob might have shoved his keys into the ignition of his sheriff’s car by now. Angry as she was at him, she couldn’t let him drive drunk. He might cause a wreck and kill someone, all because he’d tied one on, upset over her.
She skittered out the back door and into the parking lot. The brake lights of his car glowed already. She dashed the last twenty yards across the asphalt and knocked on the trunk to keep him from backing over her. Rounding the car, she conjured up her lecture. It should be persuasive but not patronizing, which would only make him madder. She opened the passenger door.
He looked up at her with too-bright eyes, watery at the edges, and turned off the engine. Good.
And then he yanked her into the car.
The passenger door sagged behind her but didn’t shut completely. She poised to spring right back out of the car again. But he held her with a hard grip on her forearm.
“Rob!” she roared.
“I couldn’t get close to you all night,” he complained. “I wanted to ask you to go with me to meet my brothers.”
He’d told her during their week of acquaintance that he and his brothers spent a lot of time together out in his sheriff’s jurisdiction, near Hoover Dam. At the time, she’d puzzled over why he didn’t live with his brothers, which would be more convenient for getting to work than living inside the city limits with Elijah and Shane. Now she wondered why a meeting with his brothers, of all things, was his proposed second date. He was really drunk.
“No.” She tried to jerk her arm out of his grasp. His fingers tightened around her. “Rob. I don’t want to go out with you anymore, okay? Let me go.”
In answer, he reached around and caught her other arm too, pulling her closer. His breath reeked of alcohol, but he looked straight into her eyes and sounded startlingly sober as he said, “Try it. You might like it.” He slipped one hand inside her top.
She had to get out the half-open door of this car and away from him. But intending to run didn’t count for anything. Though her muscles stretched taut, ready to bolt, Rob held her as firmly as before. His thumb rubbed her nipple.
“Rob!” she gasped. “Okay. Enough. I’ll call a taxi to take you home.” She moved her hand toward her pocket to take out her phone.
She managed to move only a millimeter before Rob’s grip stiffened further. “You’d love that,” he growled. “Go home with me. Do it in the same house with Elijah.”
The alarm Holly had felt the day she came down with MAD was nothing compared with her terror at this bizarre conversation. “Rob!” she shouted. “That’s crazy. I am not doing it with you at all. Let me call you a—”
“When you meet my brothers, you’ll find out what crazy means.” He laid her flat on the seat and pinned her wrists above her head with one big hand. His other hand worked on the buttons of her jeans. “And when you feel powerful in a few days, remember how powerless you felt right now. Remember how much you enjoyed this, because that’s how my brothers will make you feel.”
“Rob!” Holly squealed. She took a breath to scream, doubting anyone inside the club would hear her.
Abruptly he slid off her and sat back on the driver’s side of the car, against the door, still watching her with his hard brown eyes.
Holly didn’t waste time puzzling out his terrifying behavior or his equally terrifying one-eighty. She scooted away from him across the seat and hit the passenger door. Tumbling out onto the asphalt, she came face-to-face with wicked high-heeled sandals and a killer pedicure.
“Did he hurt you?” Kaylee cried, hauling Holly up by her sore arm. Her eyes stopped on Holly’s open fly. “That fuck!”
Holly stood, resting against Kaylee for a moment. Then she slammed the passenger door shut and pulled Kaylee a pace farther away from the car to put more distance between them and Rob. She took a deep breath to relax her nerves and clear her head after every horrible thing that had happened in the last five minutes. She buttoned her fly and gathered her very small sweater closer around her to ward off the chill that had come over her. It was no use. She assured Kaylee, “He hurt me, but not like you mean.”
Without a word, Kaylee reared back and kicked the bottom panel of the car with the heel of her sandal, leaving a small round dent.
Holly watched silently, unsure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Despite the fact that Kaylee was head of security at an institution rumored to be full of Mafia, Holly had never seen her do anything remotely violent before, and she had just dented a cop car with her shoe.
“You would have loved it, Holly,” Rob shouted through the back window with surprising clarity for a mostly passed-out drunk. “That bitch Kaylee wants to keep you a virgin until you’re thirty. You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Kaylee snapped open her purse, moved her handgun aside, and pulled out her phone.
“Who are you calling?” Holly asked worriedly.
“The cops,” Kaylee said without looking up from the keypad.
“They’ll want me to make a statement,” Holly protested. “I don’t want to make a statement.”
Kaylee looked up at Holly and cocked her head to one side. “Noooo, we don’t want you to make a statement.” The timbre of her voice changed from that of Holly’s angry friend to the calculating security officer at the casino, concerned about publicity if one of the scantily clad assistants for the casino’s popular magician were attacked.
“But we can’t just walk away from this,” Kaylee said. “He needs to be punished and then taken home and put to bed where he can’t hurt anybody else. Besides, if you don’t do something, he’ll just come after you again. Remember this morning at the apartment? He’s got stalker written all over him.” She moved her thumbs on her keypad.
“Now who are you calling?” Holly asked.
“My goons.”
Those Mafia rumors resurfaced in Holly’s brain. “Wait, no. Can you ask them not to beat him up?”
Kaylee shrugged. “It’s what they do. One or the other. Cops or thugs. Make a decision.”
No decision to make. “Beat him up. He deserves it.” Holly put her hand over her mouth, shocked at herself.
“Excellent choice.” Kaylee put the phone to her ear. Waiting for the call to go through, she said, “Holly, I’m really sorry. I told you I wouldn’t let you get in any trouble, but I lost sight of you for a minute. Even goddesses have to pee. I’m dropping the ball lately.”
“How can you say that?” Holly asked in astonishment. She was grateful for Kaylee’s protection, but she understood the limits of that protection. Kaylee couldn’t be everywhere. “You had no idea what he was going to do. You can’t read minds.”
“No,” Kaylee whispered, glowing like an angel in the night as the hot breeze rippled her gold lamé top and fingered her white-blond hair. “I can’t do that.”
A quarter hour later, safe in her apartment, Holly was surprised by the finger-shaped bruises on her hips. She stared into the bathroom mirror at the dark stains on her white skin. They didn’t jive with what she’d been through with Rob. He’d ripped open her fly against her will, yes, but when she thought back on what had happened, she framed it as sexual politics gone wrong, rather than a—
Rape.
Not a rape, she corrected herself, pressing her clammy fingertips to her temples, willing away the nausea. It looked so bad only because of the bruises. He’d read her wrong because he’d been drunk. She’d read him wrong because she was inexperienced with men.
Undoubtedly she was the only twenty-one-year-old virgin in Las Vegas. Surely to God she could have found a way to hook up with somebody by now. Of course, all the girls she’d known who’d had one-night stands had been aided by alcohol. On Mentafixol, Holly would have fallen asleep after half a beer, just like Elijah. She could have done it, but the escapade would have had a roofie-like flavor.
She leaned forward with her elbows on the counter and examined herself more closely at what had to be the lowest point of her life. Her careful brunette half updo had survived more or less intact through a night of dancing and abuse, as had her false lashes and makeup. A beautiful girl even to her own eyes, with glossy tendrils of her hair curling around her bare shoulders in her glittering brassiere, blaming herself for her own sexual battery. She’d assumed her low point was seven years ago when she’d lost her marbles. But at least that night she’d relished those exquisite tingles. At least she’d been powerful in her own mind. Now, at this moment, she was nothing. Her parents might have lied to her about her potential career, and she had abysmal taste in boyfriends. The one quasi boyfriend she had lingering feelings for after all these years was just as sick as she was. There was no future in this.
Well. There was no future in staring at herself in the mirror, either. She changed into pj’s, not feeling any better, but thinking she might feel better if she could talk to Kaylee about it. As a twenty-two-year-old responsible for the security of millions of dollars every day, and a calm twenty-two-year-old at that, Kaylee was always helpful putting Holly’s problems in perspective. And though it was incredibly late, Kaylee would still be up. She was awake when Holly went to bed and gone to work by the time Holly woke some mornings.