Prologue
~HUNTER~
It's Saturday night, and I'm coming off a two-day tournament. I'm tired and hungry, chugging back a DeVille bottled water as I steer my Aston Martin through the clot of traffic on The Strip, toward the private airport behind the golf club.
I won again, with a full house over queens in the last hand, but it was close. I was tired—am tired. Not enough sleep. I collected my chips just after midnight and we wrapped the show at one-thirty. There was a room at the Bellagio for me, but I'm sick of the Bellagio. The last two times I stayed, I found company in my suite. I didn't ask for any company.
I’m going to the vineyard: my house, my big bed, absolute quiet.
I know I can't sleep on my Gulfstream.
I'm still dressed in my poker black, and the jeans and button-up feel like sandpaper on my skin. I take another gulp. My head is throbbing like I just snorted a gram, but I didn’t. Four months sober. Four months celibate, too. No real reason why. I just got bored.
I'm starting to get that empty, ill feeling in my stomach that comes from lack of sleep when speak of the devil, Marchant starts blowing up my phone. I let it ring as I navigate South Maryland Parkway. I pull off my Stetson and run my left hand through my hair. Kinda makes me want to go to sleep. Maybe I can sleep on the plane.
Marchant just won't quit it with the phone. On the fifth call, I pick up, sounding more pissed than I mean too. "What do you want?"
"I've got a favor, man."
I groan, because I can hear it in his voice that Marchant is all hyped the hell up. “You got a favor you want to do for me?” I drawl. “Cause I could use a favor.”
"Nah, man.” He hesitates, the way he always does before he drops a bomb. “I need you to come out here. I've got something going on. I need you to run backup."
Run backup? I'm not sure what that means, but I can already tell it's going to be a pain in my ass. "You must be out your mind. It's two forty-five." I move the phone away from my face, scowling. "Are you rolling?"
"What? No. Look, just—hold on just a second." I hear shuffling, followed by Marchant's hiss as I roll into the parking lot of the tiny private airport where I rent a spot in the garage.
"Dude,” he says, after a moment of muffled static. “I got Priscilla Heat out here.”
He pauses, I guess expecting me to be impressed. When I’m not, he says, “She wants me and some of the girls for one of her videos.”
I shake my head. "I'm at the airport, March. I’m going to the vineyard for a little R&R."
"You're a bourbon heir, Hunter. You shouldn't even have a f**king vineyard."
I hit a button on my steering wheel, the garage door lifts, and I slide into the fourth slot. It's dark in here, making me ache for sleep. "The word is 'no.' Have Rachelle watch the ranch for you."
"C'mon, man, this is Priscilla Heat."
Marchant is the kind of guy that has a favorite p**n star, and Priscilla Heat, the lasered, lipo'd two-time World Boner Award winner, has been Marchant’s ultimate fantasy since college.
"I get it, dude, but use Rachelle." Rachelle is Marchant's right-hand woman. She can watch the cameras just as well as he can, and besides, he's got Richard on the ground. Richard and a team of big-ass bouncers.
"Rachelle is out,” he says sourly.
"What do you mean, she's out?" I know for a fact she lives at Love Incorporated, Marchant's fluffy bunny brothel.
"I mean her sister died. Breast cancer. Rach won't be back till October first."
I rub my eyes. "Then tell Priscilla Heat to wait a week."
"She won't." Marchant's voice is low, almost a growl.
"Why not?" I throw my car door open, wincing as the garage's interior lights blink on.
I hear another puff, a pause where Marchant hesitates. Then he lowers his voice another octave. "She wants you here, man. She wants to spend the night with you and shoot the video here all week. It's more than a video. It's like a doc-u-fuck-ery or something."
I lean my hip against my ride, looking out the garage window at my waiting jet as I start to understand.
"You need the money."
"Yeah."
“Damnit, Marchant.” I squeeze the bridge of my nose and swallow a sigh. "When this is over, I'm chaining you to one of your beds. No more going to Tao on Rach's nights, either."
I'm backing out of the garage a minute later, wheeling around and heading out toward I-215.
*
March and I met at Tulane, at the frat house. I had a shitty attitude because I joined under pressure from my father, and March was a party boy, moving through sorority girls like an assembly line. I thought he was full of shit, and he thought I was an uptight prick. But somehow the next semester we got stuck in adjoining rooms, and we’ve been tight since.
March's parents died our junior year—plane crashed into the peaks of the Ecuadorian Andes—and around then my dad won the U.S. Senator gig and left for D.C., so we said f**ks to the frat house and moved into West Manor. Marchant rented the entire downstairs, parading women in and out like cattle. The weird thing was, they always stayed friends after, so he had a lot of chick buddies. Sometime in our senior year, I bedazzled some of his inheritance, and he decided to use the money to open a brothel. Of course, Marchant being Marchant, he doesn't name it something normal like Radcliffe Ranch; he names it Love Incorporated.
It's a two-thousand acre, dusty, barren strip of Nevada desert, but the three sprawling, English manor houses and the forty or fifty acres around them—Marchant's got them looking like the Garden of Eden. He sold that image to a lot of people, too. Mostly people with dicks.
I'm not charmed when I give my Aston Martin to the valet and follow Bella, one of my least-favorite escorts, into the vast Love Den. Bella's got her strawberry-blonde hair thrown back over her shoulders, and it's kind of curly. Her blue eyes twinkle with a genuine smile, something I just don't understand.
Tonight she doesn't stop me in the den, with its many cozy alcoves, to ask me how I'm doing and bat her pretty blue eyes. In fact, I’m staring at the back of her head as she leads me down the nearest of four wide, candle-lit hallways. I watch her black silk dress sashay around her upper thighs, listen to her designer heels tap on the oriental runner. Against the soft brown wallpaper, her pale skin looks ghastly white.
For some reason, her silence makes me feel compelled to speak. "You doing alright tonight, Bella?"
"Just fine, Mr. West. Thank you for asking." She says it without missing a beat. “How are you?”