Page 38 of Vegas Heat

“How was the meeting with Dr. Foley?” she asks once she opens the passenger door and slides into the seat. She’s working toward her bachelor’s in business management, so we’ve taken a lot of the same classes together over the last three years and we share the same advisor.

“Fine. She told me I need to start looking for an internship for next semester.”

“Any ideas?” she asks as she buckles her seatbelt.

“I want to find somewhere that might hire me on after I finish my degree,” I say. I pull out of the parking lot and head toward her favorite Thai restaurant. “I’ve thought about asking my dad if he might have something for me.”

“Ooh, that’s a great idea. Ask him if there’s anything for me, too,” she says. “Wouldn’t it be fun to do an internship together?”

“It would besofun!” I say, but the truth is I’m not sure I’d really want that. We’ve done everything together since we met our freshman year of high school. I love her dearly. She’s the sister I never had. But I also sort of want something that’s justfor me. I feel selfish telling her that, though, so I exaggerate my excitement over the idea.

“It probably wouldn’t work out, though, since I’d need something on the business side and you’d more be looking at the marketing angle. Maybe he can get me in the front offices and you in the marketing department,” she suggests.

“I’ll ask,” I say.

If it was anybody else, I’d assume she’s using me for my connections. But this is Mia. She’d never do that.

Still, it feels…weird. We’ve never had issues regarding my family, but for most of our friendship, we didn’t know who my dad was.

And then we did, and now I’m a little territorial over him.

I shouldn’t be. I trust Mia more than anybody else in the entire world.

But that doesn’t mean I want her getting close to my dad. He’s been like a father to both of us since we moved here, and just like when Cooper asked Mia her name at the blackjack table that first night we met, a bit of jealousy tears through me any time my dad gives Mia fatherly attention or advice.

It’s not just that.

My dad…he’s a complicated man.

As it turns out, he has a lot of money. He has his hands in a lot of different business ventures in Las Vegas, and he recently accepted a new position that will take him away from me a lot more. I’m so excited for him—thrilled, actually, since he told me it’s everything he ever wanted out of his career, but I’m sad I won’t get to spend as much time with him. So maybe if I can snag an internship with him, I’ll get to have more time with him.

And it’s not just all that. Sure, he’s successful. Sure, he’s rich. He’s even pretty famous, which is why I don’t want to mention him to Cooper.

But he’s also devastatingly good looking. Women flock to him, and I see the way my best friend looks at him.

She literally swoons when he pays her the tiniest bit of attention, and he never does it in any type of sexual way. But he’s young at only forty-one. He got my mom pregnant when he was nineteen, long before he became a household name, and when I tracked him down through a cousin, of course her first instinct was to believe I showed up out of the woodwork to claim something that didn’t belong to me.

But my uncle was there at that first meeting, and he saw the resemblance immediately. He knew my dad had gotten a girl pregnant. He knew my dad sent monthly checks to help with the expenses of raising a child. He believed me, and a DNA test proved the rest of the truth.

It was weird at first, and I didn’t live with my dad when I first moved to town, instead opting to live in a dorm my freshman year. But I found myself driving over to his place for dinner or meeting him in between classes, so when the school year was over and I needed to find housing for the summer, I opted to stay with him. And he convinced me not to leave when my sophomore year started.

My close group of friends know who my father is, but for the most part, I’ve kept it quiet at school. We don’t share the same last name since my mother put her last name on my birth certificate, and sometimes I wonder what he did to her to make her hate him as much as she does.

And then I think about how narcissistic she is, and I truly believe it had more to do with her than him. He’s a good man, passionate about the things he loves, smart and business-minded, talented and athletic. I admire so many things about him, and I often wonder what it would’ve been like to grow up with him rather than with her.

But I can’t change the past. I can only react to the present and plan for the future.

Such an optimistic life view, and I find it adorable how Cooper immediately picked up on that part of my personality so easily that he nicknamed me Sunshine.

I love when he calls me Sunshine. I love when he calls me Gabby. I love when he calls me babe.

That feeling of missing him claws at me in a way I’ve never felt before.

“Are you okay?” Mia asks.

“Fine,” I murmur, still lost in thought about Cooper as I pull into the parking lot.

“You’re just…quiet.”

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