“Waiting for a game to start?” I nodded to the table as I approached.
He leaned back to examine me, a pleasant satisfaction in his features. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Just keeping the chair warm then?” I offered him my best smile. The smile that led men to believe they were the best thing to ever cross my path.
“More like waiting for you,” he said smoothly.
My smile faltered for a second as his eyes flashed with hunger. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something about this guy felt vaguely familiar. It wasn’t just the suit. It was his energy, his voice. They pulled me back to another time and place, past the locked gates of my memory where everything was blurry and distorted. It wasn’t the first time this had happened, and I doubted it would be the last. Bits and pieces of all the men I’d known before would often appear as traits in perfect strangers. I had to remind myself I was in the present. I didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know me. And right now, a clock counted down the seconds on the due date of my monthly installment.
Acrid bitterness coated my tongue as I forced my next words out. “Perhaps you’d like to wait for me somewhere else?”
Without missing a beat, he removed a key card from his pocket and considered me. “How much to do anything I want for the night, nothing off limits?”
His blunt words didn’t surprise me, but they did make my fingers inch toward my purse. I had to repress the urge to use my Taser on him right here and now. Under the guise of pliability, my smile remained. He didn’t know the only pleasure he would have tonight was an ice pack on his balls when I finished with him.
“Why don’t you tell me how much you think I’m worth,” I answered coyly.
He slid the key card across the table. It was still in the paper slip, the room number printed in black ink. “Give me ten minutes. I need to stop at the ATM.”
And just like that, the deal was done, and we went our separate ways. I debated the validity of this awful feeling brewing in my gut and forged on. My heels tapped over the polished floor as I rounded a giant art installation parked at the midpoint for both sides of the hotel. It was a colossal glaring red sign that simply read “LOVE.” My lip turned up as I passed the love-sick couples taking selfies in front of the sign. Didn’t they know love was a joke?
I stayed the course, trying to bring myself to focus. One more job, and I could send off my monthly deposit and breathe again for five minutes. But I was distracted, and when my phone chirped with a new message, my uncertainty amplified.
Trouble: Something came up, and I had to run. Message you later!
I frowned at the screen. That had to be record time because I’d barely been gone for ten minutes. My fingers whipped over the keyboard, tapping out a hasty message in reply. A message that was cut short when my body smacked into a hard surface, plunging me back into my surroundings. When I looked up, I found that the wall blocking my path was actually a man. Except man wasn’t the appropriate term. He was a tank. At least six and a half feet of unwavering steel. A curious amalgamation of hard lines and rough curves. The expansive chest resting at my eye level gave way to powerful, broad shoulders and below that, arms ravaged by ink hung like weapons at his sides. The inhumanly-sized barbarian wore faded blue jeans and a black motorcycle vest. He was out of place, and I was out of patience when I finally tilted my head up to examine his face.
For a split second, I couldn’t breathe. When his whiskey-colored eyes latched onto mine, everything else disappeared. If I didn’t believe in kismet before, it was undeniable now. Those golden eyes had haunted my dreams for years. A mythical figure I was certain my imagination had invented. Someone I didn’t even know, but whose presence I’d felt in the depths of my unconsciousness. And now here he was in the flesh. It was too surreal to accept, and I didn’t want to.
Whoever this man was, he definitely didn’t fall into my target market. He was bearded. Rugged. His toffee brown hair was windswept and wild, and judging by the coppery tint of his skin, he spent a lot of time under the Nevada sun. The motorcycle boots and chain jangling from the side of his jeans alluded to one certainty. He was a biker. And in my gut, this meeting felt fated, though I couldn’t figure out why.