Tommy really was an idiot.
Checking himself in the mirror once more, Alex left the men’s room and waited for Dana in the bathroom hallway, just outside the ladies’ room.
After a couple of minutes of waiting, he poked his head back into the bar area. Perhaps she’d gone back to their seats.
There was no sign of her in the bar.
Maybe she was still freshening up.
He returned to the hallway and paused for another few moments. When his gut twitched, he knocked on the ladies’ room door and cracked it. “Dana? I’m just in the hallway.”
There was no response.
He entered. “Dana?”
The cubicle doors hung open. Her handbag was gone.
She had left.
As a sick sense of desperation assaulted him, Alex ran out of the washroom and out of the bar. He looked up and down the street but couldn’t see her.
She must have ditched him, thinking he was about to ditch her.
After everything she’d been through today, it was the last thing he wanted her to think.
When it became clear she wasn’t coming back, Alex grabbed his car keys and headed to the lot. Maybe he could find her and make it up to her.
Only then did it hit him.
He didn’t even know her last name and she didn’t know his.
He’d been trying to protect his heart in remaining anonymous and he’d only succeeded in making things worse.
Idiot.
It seemed he had more in common with Tommy than he thought.
Better this way.
Dana would want a long-term relationship with a stable man, someone with a good heart.
Alex was in no position to offer her any of those things.
Chapter Two
Two months later
It had been over a year since Shannon’s death, but the newspapers wouldn’t let him forget.
Hot shot developer seeks to escape his sordid past in Sin City.
Sordid.
No matter how many times Alex read the description, he still tasted sulphur.
Maybe this was a mistake.
Unfortunately, there was no going back now. As the Escalade approached Vice, Alex folded up the newspaper. A small cluster of reporters huddled at the door of the casino hotel, like a murder of crows waiting on a platter of carrion.
