Page 75 of Sin City Lights

Tonight was a Glenfiddich Grand Cru night. He’d brought the bottle back from Heathrow Duty-Free and had been saving it, but tonight was special because he was celebrating the end of a supremely shitty week.

To say it had been hell at work would be an understatement. Everything that could have gone wrong had gone disastrously. First, Tim had fallen off that mobile elevated work platform, sustaining a severe head injury. He had only come out of the coma this morning, but based on their evaluations, the doctors were confident he’d make a full recovery, thank God. That was the only bit of good news.

On Tuesday, one of his pilots had decided to ski in Aspen and broke his leg in three places, leaving Adam to pick up the pieces. He’d had to fly the guy’s entire schedule, which had included two long-haul flights.

The first run of the engines on the 2024 had been a catastrophic failure. Today, he’d had to take off several heads in the engineering department, and it hadn’t been pretty. The flaws were supposed to have been addressed by now; the holdup was pushing the launch date, and he’d had to field numerous calls from nervous investors who’d somehow gotten wind of the problem.

He opened the cherry display case and found the black bottle with the gold stag prominently featured on the front. Grabbing a cut crystal lowball, he poured himself two fingers, then decided to go for a double.

He took a sip and let the smooth liquid burn down his throat, willing it to calm his nerves. He hadn’t felt like dinner, so the alcohol was going on empty.

Good. The buzz would come faster.

He thought of all the blood, sweat, and millions in cash he had sunk into this project.

Millions of his own damned money.

Never in his life had he come this close to the edge, always hedging his bets, never putting everything in one basket. This project had seemed a sure thing, but now it looked close to becoming a runaway train, and he hoped to hell that train didn’t hurtle over the cliff.

He thought of the much simpler days back in Alaska. If all went to shit, he could probably go back to that, take Betty, buy a bunch of high-wing Cessnas, and to hell with all of this.

But with so many people’s livelihoods depending on him…

Not in the mood for music, he turned off the jazz, then went back to indulging himself in brooding.

He looked down into his glass, contemplating the amber liquid. At least this wasn’t rotgut. This was good. He savored the flavors of oak, sandalwood, and white grape and strolled to the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows.

Outside, the Vegas signs and lights glittered and blinked withgarish colors.

At least up here, at the top of Lark Hotel, he was insulated from the traffic noise and the drunken tourists, yelling and singing and getting into fights at all hours of the night. But Lark was still in the middle of all the action, and he was getting tired of it.

After Ingrid’s disappearance, leading the bachelor life had been just fine. He would bring different escorts to his place to fuck them in the guest room, satisfied with the impersonal sex and variety. At the completion of the Lark just recently, however, he’d moved to this penthouse and had returned home to it empty ever since.

Because, in all honesty, he no longer had interest in the revolving door of meaningless one-night stands. A certain petite brunette with huge brown eyes now occupied his thoughts.

Perhaps the time had finally come to move off the strip. A quiet neighborhood. Maybe buy a house with a nice backyard, where he could have a lawn chair, a pool, and a couple of fruit trees.

Eve.

He took another swallow. Of late, she no longer featured only in his erotic fantasies. She was now in that house, in the backyard, picking fruit.

He smiled to himself.

She may as well have fed him that proverbial apple because she was in his mind to stay. And on a night like tonight, it sure as hell would have been good to find her here, waiting for him, with open arms. And open legs.

The way she’d fed him that pie…Jesus. He’d never forget that if he lived one hundred years. He’d been sorely tempted to hit the autopilot button and christen Betty in the mile-high club. What stopped him, again, was her.

She didn’t deserve her first time with him to be a fast hump in the front seat of a Cessna.

OK, technically, not her first time with him, but still…

When he had signed the contract with Eleet, he’d screwed himself. He’d been so eager to secure it that he hadn’t used his customary caution before signing anything. Eleet had set up the deal to accommodate Eveso that if she did this, he got weekdays or weekends but not both.

Since he worked all week, weekends were the perfect choice. At least, he’d thought so at the time. But now he was stuck with not being able to contact her during nonwork hours because that’s what the contract stipulated. She hadn’t offered to exchange numbers, so he figured he wouldn’t push.

And he… Well, over the course of this week, he’d come to understand why it was called the cockpit. He couldn’t even think of Saturday without having to adjust his pants. And with those long-haul flights, he’d had plenty of time to exquisitely torture himself by playing the whole thing in his mind on an endless loop.

What would Eve say if she knew of all these land mines he was trying to avoid? The way she looked up at him sometimes, as if he were that fairy-tale guy from her grandma’s stories… Christ. Would she look at him differently if he took Betty and moved back to Alaska? Would she even want him anymore?

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