Breaking Beauty: Devils Aces MC Part 1

BREAKING BEAUTY.

Devil's Aces MC.

A VEGAS t.i.tANS NOVEL.

by Celia Loren.

PROLOGUE.

Though he'd made this trip a hundred times, it never seemed to get old. To begin with, all the world would be flat in front of him, the highways lonely and dark. The horizon would seem nonexistent until suddenly, as he rounded the tight corner just beyond the jutting lip of the Hoover Dam-there she'd be: a glittering, blinking metropolis, flas.h.i.+ng her blinding grin his way. Las. Vegas. The city on the edge of forever.

He'd accelerate on his way into city limits, letting the thrum of the speeding engine begin to outpace his heartbeat. It was always like mounting a rollercoaster, this odd mixture of dread and glee which filled his blood whenever he drifted through this funky town. Perhaps because he was usually on the run from something (or someone...) whenever he took shelter here. Perhaps because the neon lights made such a stark contrast to the silent prairie plains of his youth. But in the way that say, the stilted bungalows of Northern California or the waterfront clapboards of Seattle were designed with certain sorts of folk in mind, Vegas was a town for the runaway, the man of mystery. It was a town made for him, and in this way...it was home.

CHAPTER ONE.

Romy was tired. Well, correction: she was always tired; today she was exhausted. First, she'd been up till four in the morning proofing a friend's biology thesis. She'd gone on to spend her waking work day shuffling between Professor Hinegart's office hours and the library. Now-having had barely enough time to secret a granola bar from the common room vending machine on her way to the car-Romy found herself bopping from foot to foot under angry casino lights.

She'd hastily changed from her college-girl gear (five year old Sofi pants, old boyfriend tee) into the glorified bustier and black leather knee-length "business skirt" which made up, of all things, her work uniform. She shuffled two letter-thin stacks of plastic KEM cards between her aching joints, sneaking the subtlest peak possible at her watch: 10pm. A mere hour into her s.h.i.+ft.

"Look alive, Blondie," muttered Paulette, sauntering by on yet another of her stealthy strolls about the pit. Paulette Nagle ("Used to be Nagle-Brownstein, but whaddya gonna do?") was Romy's immediate supervisor and closest alliance here at The Windsor-a.k.a. the ninth most popular casino on the Sunset Strip. Two years ago, fresh off the boat from a small college in Arizona, Romy had put all of her belongings into a guitar case, put the guitar case in an ex-boyfriend's third-hand Thunderbird, and high-tailed it to Vegas; hoping to make a brand new name for herself at the research university there. Neither the boyfriend nor the dream had lasted the year, but today a much wiser Romy Adelaide was a mere two credits away from a Masters in Statistics, paid for in part by dozens of weekends spent shuffling KEM cards at the ninth-sw.a.n.kiest spot in all of Vegas. She was a blackjack dealer.

"I'm serious, Ro. They've been watching us like hawks lately," Paulette said. She made a meaningful face at an innocuous spot in the ceiling which, everyone agreed, was the site of the pit's largest security camera. "So I'll let you back at it." Paulette wiggled away, flas.h.i.+ng a toothy smile at the motley crew of mid-level-rollers who'd been waiting all this while for their cards.

Romy took a deep breath. Seven hours, plus breaks. She could do this.

"Are you full up?" came a voice from by her elbow. Romy lifted her eyes from the deck and stopped short.

Typically, handsome clientele at The Windsor fell into the 'Silver Fox' category-they tended to be older gentlemen, vacationing from the East or West coasts. The SF's were dapper, old-school-their suits were cut from Savile Row, their chips were stacked in perfect, guarded rows. They were well-groomed and appointed. They didn't grab a.s.s the way plenty of the local-yokels or bachelor parties liked to do; they were polite, reserved, sensitive. They'd render you smitten with a George Clooney grin or a Sean Connery c.o.c.ked-eyebrow before offering to buy your s.h.i.+ft drink.

You'd hear them talk a little nonsense about the NASDAQ and feel like a respected adult. But as compelling as these gentlemen could be, the Silver Fox seduction ended the same way any other seduction seemed to in this town: buck naked, sharing a cigarette in a "Basic Luxury Package" room upstairs, the TV on low and the shower running. There was something endlessly grimy about sleeping with customers, and Romy'd made sure to fall for even the top-shelf stuff only once. Because odds were, the lady lost face.

But this face was different. The man in front of her now was cut like a sculpture. The fabric of his black b.u.t.ton-down s.h.i.+rt was working impressively hard to contain his straining muscles. There was a swatch of curling chest hair-not too much, just enough-leaking out from the s.p.a.ce at his throat where his two top b.u.t.tons lazed open. A series of interlocking tribal designs rendered in the thick black paint of Serious Tattoos crept up the man's neck, framing a perfectly symmetrical face bearing an indolent expression. Though he was wearing a nice suit (if not Savile Row, something comparable), Romy knew immediately that this man wasn't a Fox. He wore his blazer like someone who'd have preferred to be naked than confined, which was to say he seemed slightly on edge. He kept squinting about the room, shaking his arms to and fro. G.o.d, and now she couldn't not think about him naked...it took a heft of professional willpower to keep her eyes from dancing down to the stranger's crotch.

His eyes were the kind of eyes she'd only heard about from Paulette's weekly soap opera recaps: these eyes were so impressively penetrating, so impressively blue, that she simply could not hold his gaze for long. A dusting of artful stubble camped along his jaw line (which was Herculean...). His hair was what her foster mother might have called "shoes.h.i.+ne black," and it was thick as a horse's mane. His nose was aquiline, nearly Roman, but looked to have been broken at some point in the owner's history. And something about this fact excited her.

"Are you full up?" he asked again, granting Romy a glimpse of two improbable rows of white teeth. While the newcomer seemed patient, even playful, her a.s.sembled table of gambling grumps were starting to fuss.

"LADY!" yelled a fat man in a checked suit, his tone the tw.a.n.gy drawl of a Long Islander, "Get the ball moving, why don'tcha?"

"Have a seat, sir," Romy said, scrambling to regain her composure. She motioned to the last open seat at the game. The man leaned into it, like a wind.

Romy began shuffling again. "Bets, bets, bets," she muttered, eyes still locked on the late arrival. There was something about him. The way he wiggled his arms reminded her of...someone.

The men around the table lodged their bets; most numbers drifted just inside of a hundred dollars. When she landed her panorama on the stranger, he forced her to meet his gaze before moving ten green $25 chips neatly on to bettor's circle in front of him. Then, the man winked.

A high-roller with neck tattoos? Well, Vegas was a city of surprises. It was also a city of fools-at the bottom of her heart, Romy had a certain disdain for people who could throw money around like it was nothing. All her life, these mens' "chips" had been the grinding necessity of her toil, the source of all struggle, the tenuous mark of her independence. Dealing at The Windsor furnished her with just enough to stay afloat: she paid for school, she lived alone, and could just barely afford monthly insurance payments on the decrepit Thunderbird she'd inherited from her last relations.h.i.+p. And here came an admittedly roguish, cla.s.sically handsome biker type throwing caution to the wind simply because he felt like it. Puffing out the span of her chest as far as the bustier would allow, Romy dealt the first hand.

The Long Islander squealed early; his tell was something terrible. "Blackjack, motherf.u.c.ker!" he whooped, moving two bejeweled hands towards his chips. Romy sighed. This was one of her least favorite parts of the job.

"Please don't touch the chips, sir, or the cards." she said, tapping the back of his knuckles with a handy cue. "Would you like Even Money?"

The man looked confused, then upset. "What the f.u.c.k is Even Money? I thought if I got 21 on the first deal I won automatically, 3:2 odds, one-and-a-half times my bet?"

Romy sighed. "No sir, not if the dealer also has blackjack on the first deal, then you'd push, unless you wish to take even money, 2:1 odds instead. Or you can gamble that I don't have blackjack, and if I don't you'll get the 3:2 payout, otherwise you'll push and get nothing."

The Long Islander seemed bemused, then fl.u.s.tered, then angry. How was it possible that people managed to get this far into the casino without knowing how to play the games? Some days, Romy couldn't wait to have a degree and be a high school math teacher. She'd lead whole lessons on How Not To Look Like An Idiot in Vegas.

"He's not from around here, I guess," mumbled the stranger beside her. He had a sly grin on that could just about melt. Fiercely, unbidden, Romy pictured the stranger clearing the chips from the table in one elegant swish of his hand before scooping her up and setting her down on the green felt. She pictured his hot breath on her neck. She pictured her shaking fingers rooting through his chest hair, then plunging downward, picking their path through walls of muscle towards the elastic of his expensive boxer shorts...

"Are you from around here?" the mysterious man asked her now, the edge of a laugh in his voice.

"Me? I'm from Reno. Why do you ask?" Romy said. Her heart fluttering wildly in her chest.

"Because you're a complete f.u.c.king s.p.a.ce cadet," muttered the wounded Long Islander. "Like I don't know how to play blackjack? n.o.body can take a joke?"

"I'm from Reno, too." said the handsome man.

"What?"

"Yeah, I'm from Reno." The man leaned back in his chair, and seemed to size Romy up with a different set of (equally imperturbable) eyes. "Hey, what high school did you go to?"

"What is this, f.u.c.king Love Boat? I wanna play the game!" chirped the thinnest man at the table, a gaunt fellow with a clip-on tie and a ghoulish complexion. A few of the others nodded in unison.

The Long Islander frowned down at his slice of the action, "I don't want Even Money, I don't think you have a ten under that Ace."

"Would anyone like insurance?" Romy asked the men.

"Sucker bet." said the thin man.

No one took insurance. The game ended fast after Romy checked her hole card and flipped over a Queen, that made 21. From the ways they did and didn't keep their cool, Romy determined that there were few men at the table tonight with much experience playing cards. She pegged them for ambitious vacationers all, the kind of men who jumped at business trips to anywhere, the kind of men who slid off their weddings rings at the first sign of willing flesh-for-sale. People who pretended to be other people when out of town. And something about the typical grumble-gamblers' affect drew only more attention to how effortlessly cool, how frank the mystery stranger was. Though he might be loose with cash, and he might be wearing the h.e.l.l out of a borrowed suit...something in his manner told her that he wasn't really pretending to be anyone. They'd still barely exchanged h.e.l.los and she remained convinced that she knew him in some way. Had they maybe met before?

After the next deal-as a new crop of lower executives rotated on to the table-the stranger got blackjack. Collecting his reward, he flipped Romy a green chip with a deft move of his wrist. It was then that she got a glimpse of his palms, which were not the padded manicure jobs of any typical high-roller. His hands were rugged, beset with calluses. She wondered what he actually did for a living.

"This is really very generous," she whispered under her breath in the stranger's direction. "You don't have to-"

The man just pressed a finger to his lips and smiled the melting smile again. When he looked at her, Romy felt it in her base. Her belly seemed to seize up, and she felt the inside of her thighs turn slick. Her face grew hot...she was in trouble and she knew it.

Two more games pa.s.sed at the table the same way: the man stayed pinned to his corner, betting two hundred fifty a hand, and he nearly always came up winning. It would have been statistically suspicious were it not for the choice crop of goonheads playing tonight-besides, Romy was in no position to s.h.i.+rk the now tidy pile of twenty-five dollar chips in her dealer's corner. When Paulette came by on one of her rounds, she waggled her eyebrows above the handsome man's head, nodding a.s.sent. Paulette was pretty intent on fixing Romy up with a high-roller, having made her young, blonde friend into something of a test-daughter over the past two years.

As the night crept towards dawn, the handsome man kept winning, kept winking, and Romy remained unable to place him. At one point he rose from the table "for a walking break," and Romy watched him (and his high, tight a.s.s) saunter towards one of the side roulette tables. He placed the whole of his night's winnings down on some lark.

Paulette appeared at her elbow then: "I want you to take that young man home and do absolutely everything you can think of to him. If you need help coming up with ideas, I've prepared a stand-by list."

"Paulette, I'm working. Like you said."

"Oh, shut it, Princess." Paulette turned to address Romy's table: "MAMA TAKES A UNION BREAK. Table adjourned for five minutes, till we get a sub in here." When the men groaned, Paulette became a full-on mother hen. "Go on. SCOOT," she said. She walked Romy over to the unofficial employee break table on the floor, where a few other dealers were attempting to stretch inside of their leather bodysuits and b.i.t.c.hing about the players over c.o.c.ktails.

"Oooh, Romy, I saw you with that tall drink of water," said Kali, a beautiful Hawaiian woman who held the informal "Best a.s.s" t.i.tle among the pit crew. "Look at you. Got yourself a high-roller."

"Mmm-hmm. He's worth staying awake for, darling," said Annisette, another motherly supervisor with an expensive red weave and a temper to match. "I see you drooling."

Romy took the affectionate ribbing in stride. They were ent.i.tled to a bit of gossip about her personal life. While the rest of the lady dealers and c.o.c.ktail waitresses were an aggressive division of chatty Kathy's by nature, Romy had always been notoriously quiet about her personal life at the casino. There'd been the single one night stand, the six months' worth of breaking up with Lewis, her ex...and that basically brought everyone up to date on her "s.e.xy Vegas back story." Romy was private, she was wary, and maybe most of all, she was busy-it wasn't as if she had time to primp and fret over a boy when there were sixty page labs due for her math and science courses every week. Her co-workers' concern brought the fatigue back: nothing was going to happen with her handsome stranger. And why? Because this was Earth, not Heaven. This was Vegas, where fortunes and the privilege of other people's beds were gambled, gained and lost in the quick roll of a die. Better to shake it off and stay professional. Stop thinking about the mystery man. Get a grip, Adelaide, she told herself. Get a grip.

She saw him approaching from the corner of her eye before the other women did. A small hush rippled through the party as he planted himself before her. His arms still jittered, though perhaps his evening's winnings had gifted him the confidence to sit a little easier in his expensive suit. "Romy Adelaide. Silver Spring High School, cla.s.s of 2006. I know you," he said. She was speechless, until: "Bryson. Vaughn. I knew you looked familiar!" The name appeared in her mind's eye like something from a dream, and was attended by a flood of memory.

"I knew you knew I looked familiar," Bryson said coolly. He leaned towards her, slipping what she could feel to be a fat hundred-dollar chip into her sweaty palm with a measure of coyness. "Listen, I just won five grand. So that's yours to keep. Now I've got to run, but Romy-" and here he drew back and looked her full in the face, his blue eyes dizzying as they seemed to suck her in, "-how about you don't forget about me again." He winked once more, before making for the exit.

The other women had already begun to fan themselves like schoolgirls, but Romy watched Bryson's retreat as far as her eyes could follow. She saw him peel off his sport coat and flex his powerful body just outside the casino lobby. She watched him don a pair of black aviator sungla.s.ses, despite the morning hour. She watched him pop an unlit cigarette into his mouth and toss the coat over a shoulder, before striding away into the bright night.

CHAPTER TWO.

He'd looked different in high school. No suits in his closet back then.

The Bryson Vaughn of Silver Spring Secondary had been something of a contradiction: a baseball star, a basketball forward, and a bad, bad kid. The kind of guy mothers warned their daughters about. The unsupportive legend went: "a kid like Bryson could turn a valedictorian into a teenage mom in ten minutes." At least that's what Romy's foster mother had liked to say, as she sipped her teetotaler's soda with lime through perpetually pursed lips.

Back then, he'd worn only leather jackets and grimy t-s.h.i.+rts when not in uniform. He'd yet to get his first ink, but was never without a bona fide diamond stud in his left earlobe. Plenty of cheerleaders had harbored secret crushes on the brutish Vaughn-his greasy hair always falling into his eyes in just such a dream-beau way-but he wasn't what any lady with self respect would ever consider "boyfriend material." She remembered that he used to take girls out to the abandoned quarry on the edge of the city. The girls he took out there would never give any juicy details about what went on at these "dates," but after the fact, they did tend to smile smug little smiles to themselves-like members of an elite club.

Before Romy had really known what s.e.x involved-she'd been two grades behind Bryson in school-she'd overheard a beautiful uppercla.s.sman girl make a befuddling remark of the swaggering Vaughn: "He was so well endowed, I almost couldn't. But then...well...a lady shouldn't say..."

When he wasn't deflowering homecoming queens, Bryson got into fights with other boys. These dust-ups were often in the name of what had then seemed like vague concepts: honor, integrity, "a man's good name." Then again, this kind of behavior wasn't so unusual when your whole family was a part of the no-good hustling motorcycle club, the Devil's Aces. She remembered him on his own first bike-a fire-engine red Harley XR-1200 that used to get a lot of complaints from the Neighborhood Watch about its conspicuous lack of a m.u.f.fler.

Romy's recollection trailed here, because by the time she was really old enough to start paying attention to Bryson Vaughn, he'd all but drifted off the face of the earth. At the beginning of his senior year, he was kicked out of varsity basketball when a coach found a dime bag in his locker. A dishonorable discharge from the baseball team wasn't far behind. Bryson rarely went to cla.s.s, but when he did, he slept. Girls started spinning elaborate fictions about what he stayed up all night doing that made his daily life at Silver Spring such a torturous bore.

In two years of overlap at a tiny high school, Romy and Bryson had taken a single cla.s.s together: Chemistry 101. They'd been lab-partnered for a single a.s.signment on nucleotides. She'd worn her best dress to the library on that day when they were supposed to meet after school and work on their lab together. She'd prepared a dozen veiled, nerdy come-ons...but of course, Bryson Vaughn hadn't shown up. She felt foolish that she'd even imagined wooing the school hottie via homework. He was Bryson Vaughn. He didn't "show up" for chemistry labs.

And right around this incident, Romy met Kellan.

If Bryson was the bad boy, Kellan was the sensitive artist-he was rarely spotted after soph.o.m.ore year without the company of a creaky electric guitar, which he played and sang along with in the courtyard during lunch. Kellan's hands were always covered with ink stains, thanks to the doodles he fas.h.i.+oned through every single cla.s.s. And where Bryson's body was athletic and ripped, Kellan's was slender and sinewy. He wore band t-s.h.i.+rts and skinny jeans as a rule. Lots of the hippie girls liked him. Oh yeah, he also wrote poetry.

Romy had kept to a tight-knit bunch of ambitious, dorky girlfriends while in high-school, and so Kellan was the natural object of a lot of her friends' affection. He was a kind of blessing: in their corner of Reno, where a mere handful of women expected to finish college without winding up saddled to some b.u.m working for the city, here was Kellan: a boy who thought about the world, had opinions, and loved art. Romy was drawn to him spiritually before s.e.x even factored in. The pair started having weekly meet-ups in the courtyard during which he'd practice songs on his guitar and she'd talk to him about all the novels she was reading. Together they hatched wild plans to leave Reno. Then one day, Kellan brought in a song he'd written especially for her: Don't tell me you can't feel it with your body next to mine wish I had you in my bedroom wish you lived there all the time He was no Shakespeare, but she wound up seeing the inside of that bedroom. Though all of her girlfriends stopped talking to her once the fling was "sealed."

And for some reason, Romy Adelaide was the last person in school to connect the dots. Bryson was never around, for one. Kellan, in all of his sentimental reveries, never once mentioned having an older brother. Sure, the boys shared a last name, a hunky jaw line and certain goading expressions...but plenty of people were distantly related in Reno. It took two weeks of going steady and a brief meeting with his parents to learn the perfectly plain truth: Bryson and Kellan were brothers. Always had been.

The dalliance didn't go much past a fumbling dash for third base in his attic bedroom and a few more artistic courtyard meet-ups-Romy grew preoccupied with school, while Kellan began to follow his brother's academic example. By school's end, Romy was a rueful egghead whose only dream was skipping town, while Kellan had followed Bryson all the way into the motorcycle club's inner circle. She hadn't seen the younger brother in years. She hadn't seen either Vaughn boy, really, since graduation day.

"You know him?"

"My G.o.d-you know him?"

"Body that fine should have a nice driver."

"Why didn't you ask for his number?"

"Why didn't he ask for your number?!"

"Trifling."

"Men are sc.u.m."

"But did you see his-"

Romy secured a moment to drift away from her "union break." The other women would be content to talk about Bryson for the rest of the night. Truth was, Romy couldn't stand to be the subject of their motherly pity and unsolicited advice. She didn't need another mother-mothers, in her experience, were nothing but coincidental baggage. She far preferred to navigate romantic waters alone.

Though then again, why hadn't Bryson asked for her number? What would be the point of his whole "remember me" act if he didn't want to see her again? Romy felt a feeling she hadn't allowed herself to feel for years: neglected. With a heavy heart, she began her binding trudge back to the pit. At least her s.h.i.+ft was almost over.

Before she reached her table, Romy felt a hand on her shoulder. For an eighth of a second, she imagined it was Bryson-come back to kiss her, to carry her out of the casino onto some waiting Harley, a madcap adventure unspooling before them...but when she turned around, she saw only the rodent-y little face of the pit boss. Lou.

"Where you going, sweetcheeks?"

"Back to work, Lou. I'm just off break."

"I don't think so."

Ugh. Lou Valentine was among the creepier of Romy's immediate employers. He ogled and pinched freely, and had uncanny skill when it came to trapping people in unpleasant conversations. He was also a round little man with a preposterous toupee and breath like the devil's dog. "I'm taking you somewhere."

"I'm not in the mood, sir," Romy said. She began to pull away from him, but Lou merely tightened his grip on her forearm.

"And I'm not playing around. Seriously, Adelaide. Boss wants to see you. Follow me."

Romy's stomach tightened. The boss? She knew of no boss beyond Lou. She turned towards her co-workers, but the unofficial break party had broken up at the manager's approach. She imagined that Paulette and Kali and Anisette were each furtively avoiding her gaze at their own tables, already aware of some horrible truth in her future. Was she getting fired? Had the mystery bosses been taking note of how tired she seemed on her feet lately? h.e.l.luva way to go, Romy thought to herself, while Lou scurried through the crowd before her. Meet dream guy. Don't get asked out. Lose job. Sounds about right for my luck.

CHAPTER THREE.