Page 77 of For Pleasure Or Worse

My sister mockingly made a chatting hand movement, bringing a reluctant giggle to the tip of my tongue. “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said. “She’s busy, with these guys whosaid they’re in the Navy or something. Oh yeah, big sailor boys. They said they’d show us the best spot for a lap dance.”

“Mia.” I choked out a laugh, reaching for the cell, but she twirled in a circle away from me.

“Oh, that’s going to chap some asses.” Phee’s eyes widened. “We’ve got minutes before the SWAT team arrives.”

“‘On to the next one’? Ariana Grande would be rolling in her tanning bed,” Mia continued. “Hope you don’t get a rash from those cheap-ass Temu rhinestone bras those girls were wearing, and tell your brother I can smell his bodega cologne all the way from the MGM Grand.”

“Jesus, Mia,” Cami snorted. “Tell him how you really feel.”

“I mean, the audacity,” Mia added. “You must be fucking high—oh, you’re drunk? You know what, that’s so rich, trying to find a cop-out. You’re not getting off that easy.”

“He said he’s drunk?” I bit my tongue.

Mia clipped the phone between her shoulder and her ear and put two hands out, forming air quotes. “Allegedly.”

I was exasperated, and Mateo was clearly having his fun. It was my turn to throw that type of caution to the wind. God, I’d never been so frustrated with him before, and it hurt me more than I realized it could.Hehurt me more than I realized he could, and I was unable to process it while trotting around Las Vegas on a bachelorette trip. All I knew was I wanted to make him feel the way I felt.

I grabbed Ophelia’s hand and tugged her toward the sparkling facade of billboards on crystalline hotel blocks and the sign for a beach club calling out to me like a sermon. “You can hang up, Mia. We’ve got a game to win.”

“Hope you guys got your fun little giggles in, because this is war now,brother-in-law. If you think you five play dirty, there’s nothing quite like a woman scorned with a tag team of vengeful Russos…and Ophelia.”

“Thanks.” Phee shot her a pair of finger guns for support.

“You won’t even know what hit you until you’re two-stepping across the dance floor in Key West. Ciao.”

I snatched my phone, Mateo’s desperate voice called out my name in a last-ditch effort to sway me, and I ended the call before the little voice in my head convinced me to answer him back.

chapter twenty-seven

Mateo

We walkedtwenty blocks with blind hope that the girls were a handful in the thousands of people swarming the pools and dance floor at a massive exorbitant beach club. Sand vibrated beneath our feet and anxiety beat like a low drum in my chest trying to wrangle the level of overstimulation. I tamped it down forcefully to keep my head on straight as it swiveled searching for my fiancée in the sea of inebriated ravers.

Pike threw his arm around my shoulder and tugged me into him. “They’re here somewhere.”

The only lead I had was the little bit of information my sister-in-law decided to give me in that god-awful, albeit warranted, phone call. Which brought us to the biggest, loudest, crowd control fiasco of my wildest nightmare. AWhere’s Waldo?would be easier than this.

“Mia mentioned the MGM Grand,” I said. “They have to be. Let’s just scope it out and move on. We might need to divide and conquer, though. Frankie, we’ll take Angelo out toward the DJ. Wink, Echo, you two float around the pools and the bar.”

“Roger.” Tyler tugged his T-shirt over his head and tucked it into the waistband of his pants, letting it hang. It came as no surprise to anyone that it took Tyler less than five minutes tostart stripping off his clothes. You couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks. Especially not one at a busy dog park.

“They’re out for blood with this scavenger list, so keep that in mind and don’t be like my fucking brother.” I glared at Angelo. “I swear to God if someone takes another photo of me with a woman even standing in the background you’re going to find me floating face down in the fountain at Caesars Palace.”

“Didn’t she say they were with a bunch of Marines?” Sam asked. “I think you have bigger problems, Cap.”

The thought of Natalia surrounded by a group of ogling men sent fire through my veins. I didn’t mind the attention she got when it came to the work we did on camera. It wasn’t the fucking same. She was safe with me, behind a screen, in our own home with a set of rules and boundaries, a pre-existing understanding of what’s going on, and a partner who respected her more than anything in this world. I was well aware of how stunning my fiancée was and that given the option, she could have any goddamn man on the planet. Not for a second was I okay with being more than an arm’s length away from her in a barrage of fuckboy bachelors trying to get laid in Las Vegas.

“Navy.” I pushed the word through gritted teeth.

“At least it’s not Marines,” Angelo offered with a faint shrug. “Could have been Marines.”

“I’m calling their bluff on that one. O knows better.” Frankie shielded his eyes with his hand and lifted onto the balls of his feet to look over the crowd. My best friend had his heart broken once upon a time, but Ophelia had picked up all those little shards and hot glue gunned them back together in a way that changed him permanently. “Check your phones,” he said. “Half an hour.”

The Swans broke away, their tall, broad bodies still inches above the people around them after getting swallowed into the shuffle toward the pools. They were easy to pick out, yeteffortlessly blended into whatever background they needed to when necessary, and I had trust in them the same way I trusted Pike. Plus, if anyone were to take this scavenger hunt to heart, it would be Sam and Tyler. My conscience breathed out a sigh of metaphoric relief knowing the two most shameless competitors were on my team.

The venue split itself down the middle, and my brother and Frankie led the way through a plume of fog into the pit of people in front of the DJ. I stopped attempting to speak to them beyond hand gestures and facial expressions as a mind-numbing bass gonged in my ears. Through what game of charades we were playing, I understood we were circling the dance floor, making our way to the other edge and avoiding the shower of champagne from the bottle service models standing over the crowd at the edge of the stage. By the time we got there I’d had two drinks inadvertently spilled on me, a high heel speared through the top of my foot, a puff of vape smoke that smelled like cotton candy hotdog burps blown in my face, and the will to live drained like a toddler with a Shirley Temple from my veins. No Natalia to be found.

That wave of anxiety was growing again. The loud music and tight spaces filled me with an untamable dread I could only breathe through until we arrived at the end of our search, still coming up empty.

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