Chapter 1
Ellie
“Can you tell I’ve been crying?” I turn around to face my sister Rachel and watch as her eyes narrow.
As long as we’ve been sisters, which is obviously the entirety of my life, she has been bad at lying to me.
She is, however, good at making me feel better.
Usually.
“Either that or you’ve been getting a little recreational in your free time,” she jokes with a snort, a signature laugh for Rachel.
I give her a look, a signature of my dry personality.
“That’s not funny,” I tell her, turning back to the blingy hotel lobby mirror.
I lift my black, feathery cat-eye mask, wondering how on earth my sister was able to convince me to come to this charity…gala…event thing.
In the end, of course, the selling point was booze.
I am fresh out of a relationship gone oh so terribly wrong.
Free cocktails were arguablythe onlything that could get me out the door of my residential Las Vegas apartment and onto the strip.
Rachel grabs me by the bare shoulders and forces me to face her. “Look at me, Ellie. You are young–”
“I’m almost thirty.”
“And you are sexy.”
“That’s debatable,” I mutter, but I am smiling.
Frustrating my older sister has always been an enjoyable pastime for me.
“And you are single. S-I-N-G-L-E. I’m talking single with a capital S. Single…TM.”
“Jesus,” I whine as I pull away from her, going back to the mirror to fix my mascara, which, without a masquerade mask, very much shows.
Why, oh why, did I not opt for the waterproof Maybelline?
Oh, I remember why.
Because I’m probably going to quit my job so I don’t have to see my now ex-boyfriend slash co-worker five days a week.
My mascara begins to run again.
“Forget the makeup,” my sister comes to my rescue, covering my eyes with the mask again. “You are stunning, and we are going to have fun. Now. Let’s go find one of those skimpy little cocktail waitresses and get this party started!”
I sigh as my sister bites down on her tongue with a smile and grabs my hand, tugging both of us out the door and back into the hotel event room.
I have to admit, it’s swanky as hell.
As a lover of hotels and all things event planning, I’ve always envied these hotels.
The chi-chinging sound of slot machines in the distance, the chandeliers that look like they’re made of diamonds though I’m sure it’s just glass. The circular bar right in the middle of everything with young, attractive people making all sorts of fancy cocktails.
And at tonight’s event, the hundreds of pretty people are all enjoying themselves at some rich as fuck hotel owner’s expensewhile they wave their wallets around nonchalantly in the name of charity.
