button until the rest of her paid attention. This man was far too close to her and she needed to get away from him, regardless of how enticing the other option might be.
He leaned in another half inch and stared directly into her eyes, and she couldn’t help looking back. The warm blue had turned dark from desire, and his voice was pitched soft and low when he spoke, rumbling through her like shock waves. “Do you want to go to my room?”
Yes! her body screamed out. No! Run! Her brain shouted back. Lucky for her sanity, he didn’t move any closer.
After a deep, shuddering breath, she managed to sidestep out from under his powerful presence and get herself into clear space. As she did so, some other guy who was standing with the women near the front of the club called out, “Aaron, let’s go! I don’t want to stand here all night, and neither do these lovely ladies,” as he leaned over to one and kissed her on the cheek.
One of the girls joined in, beckoning to Aaron as if she were getting a German shepherd to heel. “Come on!”
It was very clear to Jessica that her stranger had plenty of company for the evening already. With as much force as she could muster, she said, “You need to leave me alone. Go back to your friends.”
And she spun away from him, marching toward the waiting limo.
As she stormed toward the vehicle and climbed in, her head was a flurry of thoughts, and she couldn’t stop them from rushing one after another. What an idiot. God, he smelled amazing. Another asshole. I should’ve known. I swear, I hate men. I wish my hands would stop tingling like that. Why do I only seem to like terrible men? He had amazing arms. Maybe I should have kissed him. No, that would’ve been the worst thing I have ever done. Dammit, I’m crying. I hope he didn’t see that.
As soon as she was safely hidden away from peering eyes with the door closed, Jessica allowed a few tears to slip down her cheeks. She wasn’t sure exactly why she was crying over a man she didn’t even know, a lost opportunity that had never been an opportunity at all. She just felt very, very alone.
Jessica wiped at her face, only to notice she had something in her hand. It was the paper Aaron had given her a few hours before, his phone number. She had taken it out while she was walking, wondering whether or not she should call him. But that was before she knew the kind of person he was.
Jessica stared at it for a moment—how could she have been so stupid as to even consider calling the number of a complete stranger?—and then crumpled it in her fist and threw it into the tiny trash can beneath the limo’s bar.
After a few minutes of quiet weeping, she wiped her eyes on the corner of her dress. She had to hike it up above her waist to do so and left makeup smudges on the hemline, but it made her face look a little more presentable when she looked at her reflection in the window. She shifted her gaze to the dark street and empty parking lot beyond the glass. The group was gone. Aaron was gone.
She curled against the cushions of the spacious interior and closed her eyes, exhausted from the day.
* * *
THE SOUND OF the door opening woke her, and the rest of the bachelorette party filed in, loud and raucous and discussing the different men they’d ogled.
A few were giggling like schoolgirls about “the other side of the club,” the part with the female strippers, and the customers over there who had bought them drinks and flirted.
“Marilyn even got a phone number from some random guy!” the black-haired one—Anna, her name was Anna—gushed.
Marilyn shrugged, as if this was an everyday occurrence. “Did you see how hot he was? Of course I got his number. I’m going to call him tomorrow and get him to hang out with us. I even like his name. Jeremiah. It rolls nicely off the tongue. I probably would have taken him back to the room tonight if he hadn’t disappeared when we went back to check on Cindy.”
Jessica turned her attention to her friend, whose head was resting on her knees. Jessica had never seen her that drunk. From the way the other girls looked at her, a mixture of amusement and pity, it was clear she’d spent a decent amount of time throwing up in the bathroom.
Jessica squeezed Cindy’s hand, but her friend was already half-asleep.
The conversations washed over Jessica as she attempted to listen and be a part of the group. She was still groggy from sangria and sleep, still feeling gloomy, and she wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed. Thankfully the limousine started to pull away from the strip club and turned toward the hotel.
She grabbed her phone and turned on the screen, the bright light stinging her eyes. It was nearly four in the morning.
* * *
AARON LOOKED AT the clock on the bedside table of his suite, and four o’clock glared back at him. But he wasn’t feeling tired. He felt sick and annoyed at himself. The room was dark, the large bed unpleasantly empty. He went back through his choices of the evening, unable to get over the level of idiocy.
After sleeping for a couple of hours and getting ready, he and Jeremiah had headed out to dinner at Bouchon, one of the top restaurants in Vegas, where they were joined by a few “friends” they’d met in Vegas in the past few years. He and Jeremiah had organized this dinner weeks before, trying to get their long weekend started off right, but once they’d arrived, Aaron’s heart hadn’t been in it.
The women were gorgeous and throwing themselves at him, and they had grown up on farms and ranches as he did. All the things that would normally have made his evening buzz with excitement, but he just couldn’t stay interested. Much of the meal was spent picturing his mystery girl, then trying to figure out what the people around him had said, usually responding with a very clever “Hmm.”
He kept looking around for her, even though the likelihood of seeing her again was so minuscule. A scan of the room, then the realization that Jeremiah and the girls were waiting for an answer from him. “Hmm.”
It was not going well.
With nothing better to do, and to try to help him focus on the moment at hand, he drank more ridiculously priced whiskey than he would normally allow himself.
He kept checking his phone, on the off chance the woman had called or messaged him, but there was nothing.
After dinner, thoroughly smashed, he had followed Jeremiah and the women, none of whom were much more sober than he was, to a club. Then Jeremiah, his eyes glinting, said, “I have an idea...”
Things were fuzzy there—he was pretty sure he’d called his voice mail just in case he had gotten a call—but during that time, his friend had somehow talked the girls into going to a strip club. Something had been said about being in Vegas, after all.
By the time they’d gotten to Sapphire, Aaron was starting to feel sober again, and he wasn’t happy about it. He’d been to strip clubs before—he was a guy, and a friend of Jeremiah’s. It came with the territory.
But he’d never really seen the appeal, in truth. If he wanted a naked woman rubbing against him, he preferred not to be paying her.
This time, though, he couldn’t even pretend he wanted to be there, but he didn’t want to be alone in his suite, either. And for some stupid reason he couldn’t get his fantasy of the airport girl out of his head enough to want to be back at his hotel with the women standing around him, even though they seemed more than willing to keep him company.
While Jeremiah had a great time staring at the women on the stage and flirting with any female in his vicinity, Aaron sat at the bar and had another drink. And another.
When Jeremiah and his entourage of women came to get Aaron so they could leave, he was unsteady on his feet and his mouth had felt too unwieldy to form words properly. Two ladies, both of whom he’d spent nights with on other rodeo weekends, pulled his arms around their shoulders and led him out, laughing and chatting.
He had tried to join in but was captivated by the voluptuous and prominently displayed breasts of the woman on his