Page 7 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

the first night on the vegas strip

LEXI BYRNE

Even though I’d parked inside a shady covered garage a few blocks away from the Strip, my car slowly heated, first to sultry, then to boiling, and I finally rolled down the dang windows.

Concrete-roasted air rolled into the car, but I didn’t have the ability to stand up and leave.

Trying not to feel sorry for myself was consuming all my energy like a brushfire.

I had my phone, thank goodness, but I couldn’t fathom whom to call for help.

All my friends had been in that church when her accusations had hit me, and they’d all turned their backs on me and walked out.

My friends weren’t really my friends. They were all Jimmy’s sisters, sisters-in-law, and cousins.

When sides needed to be taken, they’d chosen him because he was their family.

And I wasn’t.

Outside my car’s windshield, sharp shadows painted the inside of the garage black, but beyond the noses of the parked cars and the cement half-wall, white sunlight bleached the desert beige-white. The whole sky glared bright blue light.

One of my suitcases was still in the trunk of my car, stuffed with shorts and a couple of tank tops. I changed out of my wedding dress in the back seat.

Blast-furnace air dried the sweat on my skin.

At least I was cooler.

Leftover snacks for the road trip from Scottsbluff to Las Vegas still littered the seat and floor in the back.

Lydia and I had traded off driving during the fourteen-hour straight-through trip a few days before.

The remaining dozen water bottles for crossing the desert lay scattered behind the passenger seat.

Jimmy’s sisters and I had cleared out my apartment the week before, taking my clothes and my few kitchen items worth saving to Jimmy’s house and the rest to the Goodwill or the apartment complex’s trash bin.

The complex’s management had only given me half my security deposit back, the jerks, because they could tell I’d filled the nail holes in the drywall with toothpaste instead of spackle.

My twin-size air mattress and sleeping bag were in the trunk, too.

Those paltry few things were all my possessions in the world, other than a few maxed-out credit cards and Jimmy’s engagement ring.

The white-hot sun walked across the sky above the parking garage, finally blasting the whole sky nuclear orange and yellow at sunset.

My eyes followed its path, my brain not even acknowledging my heartbeats marking minutes since Jimmy left me and my life had fluttered to the ground around me, my vision only tracing the giant sun’s journey over the wide blue dome of the desert sky.

With the dark, the air wafting into the parking garage cooled a little, but the cement still radiated the day’s heat like a stove burner.

At eight-thirty that night, from my sweltering car in a Las Vegas parking garage, I called my mother.

She picked up. “Lexi? It’s past eight o’clock.”

Calling after the boys’ bedtime was a cardinal sin. “I’m sorry to call so late, but I?—”

“You know that I’ve been with Rogan in the hospital all day until they finally let him come home, and I just got him and Jake to bed and finally have a few minutes for myself.”

“I know, and I’m sorry to call so late, but?—”

“I just hope you didn’t wake Jake up. You know how hard it is to get him to go to bed at night, just like you were.”

I was aware that I had been a difficult child, especially concerning sleep. My toddler-phase night terrors and general bedtime problems were my mother’s favorite topics. “I’m really sorry to call, and I’m even sorrier that I need to ask?—”

“God, Lexi. Why can’t you be more considerate?”

That hit me hard, right in the middle of my chest.

My shaking hands were already clutching the steering wheel. I squeezed it more tightly to steady my voice.

The car was heating up to the point where my skin was prickling from sweat.

And I couldn’t even breathe anymore. “I’m sorry.”

“If you want to talk, call me tomorrow after Jake has gone to school. Rogan has to stay home for a few days, maybe even until next week. Maybe you shouldn’t call until next Monday.”

“Right, Mom. Message received. I hope everything’s okay with Rogan.”

I tapped the phone’s screen and ended the call.

Maybe I should have pressed harder and told her that I was in trouble over her objections.

It wouldn’t have mattered even if I had told her.

Gathering myself took twenty minutes, so it was nine o’clock when I made my second phone call, desperately trying to figure out what to do. “Hi, Melissa?”

Jimmy’s mother’s voice was lower than I’d ever heard it before, even lower than when she was calling vendors who hadn’t delivered construction materials ten days past the contracted site-due date. “Lexi, why are you calling me?”

“I didn’t do it. I swear.”

“I don’t want to get in the middle of this. He’s my son.”

“Can you just talk to Jimmy? Can you tell him that I would never do that to him? That I’m not, and I would never?”

“And why would I talk to him for you?”

My throat was so tight that my voice squeaked through. “Because you know me. Because you know that I was saving myself. Because I would never cheat on him, ever.”

“Melissa, you have to know that I would never tell Jimmy that. I’ve never even”–I whispered the next part– ”had sex with anyone, not even Jimmy.”

“Then why would he agree with such a thing?”

“I don’t know.”

Even though I did, or at least I suspected.

Or at least my bleeding heart feared and didn’t want to believe.

“Melissa, you have to believe me. I never told him anything like that. I never even pressured him to get married for four years. Even you and Mason teased him about how long he was stringing me along.”

“That doesn’t matter. He said that you told him that you were knocked up.”

And that was it. The Johnson family was closing ranks. I was on the outside.

Even though I’d been so close to being a part of their family.

I rested my sweating forehead against the hot steering wheel. “I can’t force you to believe me, but I never told him that.”

“I believe my son.”

“I know you do,” I whispered. “Can I get an advance on my salary?” I blurted out.

“You don’t work for us anymore.”

Yeah, I’d figured they’d fire me.

“But can you please at least send me the salary you owe me for the last two weeks? I really need it. Jimmy and her have run up charges on my credit card and drained my bank account. I literally have no money.”

“That’s not my problem, Lexi,” she said. “You caused your own problems in this world, and it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to bail you out.”

“But that’s my salary for the last few weeks. I worked at your company and earned that money. And I had a month’s paid vacation time saved up for the honeymoon that you should pay me for, too.”

I’d worked every dang day for four solid years at Johnson Construction to save up the vacation time.

“Your paid time off is forfeit because you were fired with cause.”

“You can’t do that! I earned that paid time off. I don’t think you can even fire me for something that happened in my personal life, even if my personal life was with your son.”

“Our contracts have a morals clause. I think you’ll find the conservative and moral state of Nebraska will be on the side of the employer in this, if you did try to bring a lawsuit against us.”

My breath hitched in my throat as the air became hotter in my car, licking my skin like flames. “I didn’t do it.”

“Don’t call me again, Lexi. Your last paycheck for the time you actually worked will be direct-deposited in three weeks, on schedule, but you don’t deserve any paid vacation time.”

“Not even for the week I’ve been preparing for the wedding, moving out of my apartment, and driving here?”

Her voice growled more harshly. “Not for dragging us down to Las Vegas on a fool’s errand, no. I should have known that you were a whore when you chose Sin City for your wedding.”

The phone’s screen turned black.

Jimmy had chosen Las Vegas because it was close enough for his family to drive and it had cheap flights for his college friends.

Crying tended to give me a sinus headache, so I clenched my teeth and tightened my fists around the steering wheel and tried to hold it off, and then I tried to be silent while the headache bloomed behind my eyes, and then I crumpled over sideways so at least no one could see me crying while the car’s console between the front bucket seats jammed against my ribs.

Those miserable hours were my first hot, vulnerable summer night homeless in Las Vegas.

Rolling up the windows turned the car into an oven even without the sun, so I lowered them to half-open.

Around two in the dark morning, my uneasy dozing in the reclined driver’s seat broke when a man pounded on my windshield, screaming that bats were chasing him.

I jabbed the ignition button, slammed the car into gear, and drove away, moving it to another, cheaper parking garage farther away from the Strip. Garages seemed safer than flat, open lots where anyone could see a young woman sleeping in my car.

The fitful sleep that finally came just before dawn never really settled in.

Camping in my car was not a long-term solution. The car was moderately safer than sleeping on a sidewalk, but I was painfully aware that my savings were gone and I was unemployed.

My financial safety net was broken.

I was falling hard.

Even the roach motels on the outskirts of Vegas charged more per night than what would be a week’s rent for a studio apartment. If I stayed in a crappy hotel, my credit card would hit its absolute limit in two days, and then there would be no more money.

I needed cash, and I needed it fast.

Pawning my engagement ring the next morning took five hours as I burned gas driving from pawn shop to pawn shop, my stomach gurgling as I ate the remnants of the road-trip snacks, while I haggled with the shops’ owners.

When I finally handed the ring to one of the dealers for the last time, the one-fifth-carat of diamond chips caught a stray beam of sunlight and threw spangles over the dusty bikes, televisions, and computers for an instant before the clerk dropped the ring onto the black velvet tray holding five other discarded engagement rings.

She shoved the tray into the scratched glass case and locked it.

So I pawned Jimmy’s ring that I had worn for four years, the ring that had meant so much to me that I had kissed it good night before sleeping while Jimmy was away at college, the ring that had meant I belonged somewhere.

I left it in the pawn shop and walked out the door.

But I kept the white dress.

The white dress was going to come in handy.