NICK
While Stella took a shower, Priscilla galloped from one corner of the huge king-size bed to the other, flopping and woofing at the enormous down pillows in crisp white cases. After a particularly huge leap, she managed to flip herself over between two pillows and got stuck on her back like a turtle. I had to grab her little paws to help her back up, and she lay like Wonder Woman on her stomach.
Lying down next to her, I propped up my head on a pillow and woke up my phone. Stella didn’t know I’d done it, but I’d grabbed a picture of her as she drove. I had it as my wallpaper and my home screen. She was in profile, with Arizona blurry behind her. Her head was thrown back and she was giggling; as soon as I saw her, I started to smile too. I moved the icons around on my phone so that nothing was over her face. She made things happen inside me I hadn’t felt in years. Maybe ever. Things I didn’t know I ever deserved to feel at all. Gratitude. Peace. Possibility. Hope.
Love. Once-in-a-fucking-lifetime love.
Opening my browser, I looked up land for sale in Arizona on Zillow. From my wallet, I took the receipt from Alvarado Auto and typed in the zip, but I wasn’t looking for the mechanic’s shop. The Big Wide Open was the first listing:
21.5 acre parcel whose east and west edges border Coconino National Forest. 45 minutes to Flagstaff and services. Enjoy quiet high desert beauty and mature piñon juniper trees. Small ranch house on northwest quadrant, single-story, single-family dwelling. 3 bedroom/2 bath. $410,000.
I thumbed through the beautiful landscape shots before finally getting to the little ranch house. It wasn’t much, just a red-roofed adobe on a concrete slab. But it was beautiful, the sort of place it was easy to imagine a lifetime inside. Looking at it, there was only one thought in my mind. I want her to have that, and I want to be the one to give it to her.
The hairdryer switched off, and she came out of the bathroom wearing a hotel robe. Her face was flushed with the heat of the dryer, and she had twisted her long sexy hair into a shiny dark rope over one shoulder. “You OK?”
I took one last glance at the Big Wide Open and powered off my phone. “Yeah, gorgeous. I’m perfect.”
She released her hair, and it unwound in a silky spiral. In her eyes was a heat and a light that turned me on like lighter fluid on hot coals. I gave her a come here finger in the air. She very, very slowly tugged at the belt of her robe, until the bow untied and the front fell open. With a wiggle of her shoulders, the robe fell away.
Fucking goddess, every last inch.
She grabbed the champagne from the dresser and took a long pull straight from the bottle. Then she set it down on the table, planted her hands on the mattress . . . and tiger-walked her way into my arms.
Half an hour, an orgasm apiece, and half the bottle of champagne later, we headed out to grab a drink before dinner. And do a little recon.
We looked damn good. My shoes still squeaked when I walked, but I hardly noticed. Walking behind her just a few steps, I got to watch every single curve sparkle as she passed under the halogen lights above. And the dress wasn’t all, because she’d also let me pick out the shoes. They were four-inch stilettos, the same color as pink gold.
I wasn’t a guy who looked up at the ceiling and thanked God for much, but I couldn’t help it. Instinctively I raised my eyes and said a private, Thank you, man, for this woman.
As I looked up, I remembered what she’d said about the lack of cameras. And holy fuck alive, she’d been right. Way, way down by the elevators, I saw one that pointed toward the doors. But there wasn’t a single camera or black dome between here and there—just a long line of recessed lights. Stella glanced back over her shoulder, and I raised my eyes to signal to her. Without moving her head at all, she scanned the ceiling. She gave me a long, slow blink to say, Told you.
But still, better safe than sorry. I adjusted my hipster fedora to bring the brim down a little lower and followed behind her as we approached the guard’s room, number 321.
Just in front his door, she let the room key fall from her hand—classic move to buy a little time. I knelt down to get it, sizing up the distance from the guard’s room to ours and the distance from both to the elevators. But my kneeling confused the hell out of Priscilla, who took it as a sign that I was getting down on the floor with her to play, and she began dancing in circles, tangling herself—and Stella and me—up in the leash.
I sized up the situation to see what we were up against. The guard’s room had the same lock setup as ours, almost exactly what I’d put on Stella’s door and just what I’d expected to see here. I’d used a keypad on her room in Albuquerque, but this was a card swipe. Same difference—getting past the lock would require the same brute force. Next to his room was a fire alarm, which might be good in a pinch. Down the hallway were the elevators, and across from them the room with the ice machine.
Stella went to her knees to help Priscilla out, accentuating the ball-busting V on her back, so deep I could almost see the top of her ass. Her hips looked like a teardrop, and every move was accompanied by a sound like she was walking through a beaded curtain. I put my fist to my mouth and growled. Stella shot me a look over her shoulder.
“All good?” she asked as she untangled Priscilla. As soon as she had her paw free, she zoomed forward on her retractable leash like she’d been flung from a potato gun. Stella straightened up and shimmied her dress down her hips.
Yeah, no. I wasn’t all good. I was standing in the hallway of the Ritz-Carlton, planning a jewel heist with one half of my brain, and with the other imagining what it would be like to rip the dress off her, sending rhinestones flying in every motherfucking direction. And I was scheming about how fast I could put a down payment on that ranch for her. All good? Fucking fantastic. “Absolutely.”
She reached out her hand for me, and we made our way to the elevators to head downstairs. For about point five seconds, I had every intention of being a gentleman about all this, but then I saw her reflection in the spotless mirrored doors, and I couldn’t help myself. I put my hand on her left hip to turn her around to face me. I walked her backward, pinching her jaw in my other hand as I kissed her. She pulled away, sassy and coy, just long enough to say, “Why, Mr. McNamara, whatever are you doing?”
I kissed her again to steal her words. She smiled at first, resisting me, tight-cheeked and battling me with her tongue. But soon enough she relented, going slack against the elevator door. On one particularly aggressive dive into that sweet mouth of hers, she smacked the mirrored door with her palm. It made a squeaky-clean noise as her hand slid down it.
I could’ve kissed her for hours. For days. For years. But I didn’t have the chance, because just as I was starting to get really into it, pushing my cock into her stomach, the elevator door rolled open behind her and she staggered back. Standing in the middle of the elevator was an astonished-looking maid, smiling embarrassedly at the carpet.
“Hello!” Stella said. She smoothed her hair and smiled, her lips kiss-reddened and her lipstick smudged. I wet my thumb and took a step toward her to patch her up. Stella’s eyes glistened and her breathing quickened as I touched her. Her eyes darted to the maid and back to me as if to say, We should probably take this back to the room! Priscilla sat down beside the maid, sniffing her nylons. But I wasn’t going anywhere, and after a few gentle rubs, Stella looked as good as new.
I turned to face our reflection in the door. It was time for our first date. I was absolutely ready. But as the doors were just sliding shut, there was the thump, thump, thump of footsteps, followed by a guy saying, “Hold that door!” And a tanned hand shot between the doors to open them back up.
There he was. The sheikh.
Stella coughed delicately in the general direction of the stack of towels on the back of the maid’s cart, and I lowered my eyes, sizing him up in my peripheral vision. What immediately caught my attention was what he was wearing on his feet and the ridiculous contrast they made to the rest of us in the elevator. The maid’s orthopedic sneakers. Stella’s gorgeous heels. My Italian whatevers.
And the sheikh’s gold Crocs.
Of fucking course.
As the doors rolled shut, the elevator instantly began to smell like the fragrance room at the Axe Body Spray factory. The smell was so thick, so acrid, that I could feel it on my tongue. The maid rubbed her nose, and I saw a smile, a painful near-laugh smile, start to creep up Stella’s cheeks. She lifted her eyes to me, and I gave her a look to say, No fucking laughing, cutie. If you start, we’re hosed.
She nodded and lowered her eyes again. The maid sniffed hard, her nostrils thick with a sudden rush of protective snot. I blinked hard. It was the closest I ever hoped to get to being maced, that was for damned sure. The maid pounded on the button for the lobby, but the elevator didn’t move.
Yet again the door rolled open, offering a burst of mercifully fresh air. The maid inhaled like she’d been given a whiff of smelling salts, and Stella made a little meep and tried to cover it with a cough. At first, nobody appeared outside the door, but then I heard a shuffling. Or a swishing.
It was the bodyguard. He held the Zero Halliburton, just like we’d known he would.
He was massive, and he looked even more massive in his cheap, too-tight suit that didn’t fit him right anywhere, especially under the arms, which were dark with half circles of sweat. He lumbered into the elevator, thighs rubbing, and stood right in front of the sheikh. His hair plugs were the worst I’d ever seen in my life, and I’d met some seriously macho motherfuckers in my day, guys with a deep and abiding phobia of early male-pattern baldness. This guy’s plugs took the prize. They were like porcupine quills—spiky and separate like that. In the reflection on the door, I watched him study Stella, then the maid, and then me. His eyes went right to the tattoo on my neck. He didn’t even glance at my face.
But regardless, the situation was less than ideal. Though we weren’t exactly doing this job with ski masks, I didn’t want his eyes on us if we could help it. Especially not on her. What we really needed was a distraction, and I seriously contemplated laying a kiss on Stella right there and then. Maybe I’d walk her back into the maid’s cart and send all the tiny bottles of shampoo tumbling.
But before I could make a move on her, Priscilla waddled over to the sheikh and gave his bare, hairy calf a sniff. She lowered her ears and looked up at him. Her snout barely cleared his ankle. Her tail was straight and rigid. Very slowly, she maneuvered herself around to face me. She looked up at me—and our eyes connected in total human-canine connection. And then she squatted, closed her eyes, and let loose with a long and magnificent piss. All over the sheikh’s golden Croc.
Stella still had laugh-tears in her eyes when we dropped Priscilla off for Yappy Hour, and she was occasionally overcome with a sudden snort even as we headed out to the poolside bar for drinks. I, too, was fighting back laughter, because over and over again I kept replaying it in my head. It was like Priscilla had saved up on pee for days; when the sheikh moved his right foot, she backed her ass up onto his left one in one continuous stream of dog urine so potent, it overwhelmed the cologne with something that smelled a whole hell of a lot like wet pretzels.
We walked down the flagstone steps and headed for the poolside bar area, a classy looking tiki hut surrounded by small café tables. I picked the table that had the best view of the pool and the back of the hotel so we could get a sense of what we were up against for tomorrow. I pulled her chair out for her. As she sat, I got a killer view of her cleavage. Then I sat across from her, looking out at the water. She was still laughing a little. As her head fell back, the beautiful creamy line of her throat made a perfect curve, interrupted only by the string of decoy pearls that I had asked her to wear. Because fuck, they looked good on her—even hotter because she’d made them. Even hotter still because they were concrete proof of her—so sweet, so nice, so lovely—being nothing but trouble with a capital T.
Once she let all the laughter out, she inhaled and fanned her face with her slightly spread fingers. “OK. I think I’m OK. Probably.”
“It’s OK if you’re not,” I said. “I could watch you laugh all damned night. That’s why I first noticed you, that laugh.”
She blinked away the shine in her eyes. “What! Really?”
“Fuck yeah,” I said as I got comfortable in my chair. Much to my surprise, the suspenders both looked good and felt good. Way better than a belt. She’d make a hipster out of me yet. “I had a feeling if I got too close, I’d never let you go.” I reached out my hand for her, and she laced her fingers in mine. For a few beats, we held each other’s stare. It was fucking blissful, like nobody else existed on earth.
But at that moment, the sheikh jumped into the pool, hollering, “Cannonball, suckas!”
Stella winced and turned away to look at the pool. The backsplash made a little boy start crying. A stooped old man removed his glasses to dry them on his soaking wet shirt.
The guy was insufferable. “What a dick.”
“The worst,” Stella answered.
Together, we took in the scene. The sheikh’s pissed-on Crocs were stuck on the arms of his lounge chair, drying in the setting sun. He sloshed out of the shallow end of the pool, knocking over someone’s bottle of water on his way out. He flopped down on his chair and took a selfie with a folding umbrella from his drink between his teeth. He typed something into his phone, and I heard the burner vibrate in Stella’s purse, but neither of us reached for it. Planted between two nearby palms stood the bodyguard. Except for the Halliburton in his hand, he looked like he was in a natural history diorama about early humans in the tropics.
The tables around us were unoccupied, and I wasn’t concerned about being overheard, but I still wanted to be careful. Plus, she was way too fucking far away. I grabbed the leg of her chair and pulled her over to me. I put my arm around her and got in close. “What was the original plan?”
Stella relaxed into me, one hand on my thigh. She toyed with her pearls, twisting them and letting them go. “I decided it had to be something to do with the hair.”
The guard hadn’t been outside the cannonball range either, and he kept dabbing at his quills—like he was checking to make sure they hadn’t fallen out. “I’m with you so far.”
“We planned to drop something on him. Anything, really. Something sticky or smelly or slippery. Anything messy. Honey. Shampoo. When we were here last, which we timed to coincide with the sheikh visiting, a seagull pooped on the guard. You’d have thought he was attacked by bees. Forty-five minutes later, he came back, hair still wet from the shower. We discovered he leaves the sheikh every afternoon at six-ish, with the briefcase. That was when we planned to do it; I figured the most reliable spot to make it happen was underneath the archway.”
I saw the spot exactly—it was the most logical choice. A path led from the pool back into the hotel, and above that was a walkway that acted as a kind of balcony, providing a direct view, and a direct line, to anybody walking on the path.
The only problem that I saw was that it would require so much precision. Walking at a normal pace, the guard would only be underneath the drop zone for a second. “We’d need to slow him down,” I said, running it backward and forward. “I’ll bet you I could slip him a mickey at the bar. Dose him with something untraceable. He’ll be out like a light.”
She deadpanned me. “Don’t be such a brute.”
Point taken, but still . . . “I think I lost brute status when I put on this hat,” I said. She gave it a playful little nudge with the tip of her finger, and I repositioned it so it sat lower again. Truth be told, I liked it. Al Capone wore a hat, and if it was good enough for Capone, it was good enough for me. Minus the tertiary syphilis, obviously. “You think you can do better? Hit me.”
“I mean, I’m not talking about hurting the poor guy. He suffers enough having to work for You-Know-Who,” she said, looking back at the pool. “Let’s keep it simple. Easy. Basic. Nonviolent.”
“Stella. I’m a criminal. Not a pacifist. This is a jewel heist, not a Buddhist retreat.”
She tossed her head back and shook it, laughing at the clear blue sky. “Oh you.”
Just then, the dog sitter appeared on the path, walking Priscilla. She had her little snout raised and her chest puffed, marching along like a little superhero. “Oh look!” Stella cooed. “There’s our little lamb.”
At that moment, a ball popped out of the kiddie pool and bounced along the path. Priscilla charged after it, accidentally kicking it with her paw. She juked left to chase it and zipped around—tangling up the giggling dog sitter like she’d been snared in a spider’s web.
Very slowly, Stella turned me, wide-eyed. “Nick. Did you see that?”
Holy fuck. It was exactly the same thing that had happened to Stella and me in the hallway. “That damned leash. Can we make her do it on command?”
“She’d chase a cookie anywhere,” Stella said, nodding slowly, blinking once. “All we need to do is practice.”
The dog sitter was still trying to extract herself. Every step she took just made it exponentially worse. She lost her flip-flop, she dropped her bag, and Priscilla kept on zipping and zooming around like it was the best thing she’d ever experienced.
Stella went slack in my arms. She put her hand to her forehead and looked up at the clear sky. “Oh my God. That’s it. That is it!”
A retractable dog leash as a trap was a far fucking cry from doing shady deals in the desert. But the truth was, I liked the simplicity. I liked the innocence. No weapons, no violence. Just a simple heist, with simple parts.
I pulled Stella even closer and pushed her blonde hair aside and gave her a kiss on the side of the neck, right underneath her ear. The spot that made her shiver. “Tomorrow, we work,” I growled into her ear. “But for tonight, we play.”
She shivered, nuzzled against me, and said, “Now you’re talking.”
The waitress came by and gave a little cough. Stella pulled away and smoothed her wig, smiling—all shy and sweet as ever. “Congratulations on your honeymoon, Mr. and Mrs. McNamara. Can I get you a glass of champagne to start?”
To start. To start the night, to start this last job, and to start something much bigger and much more important. With Stella.