Tempt Me In Vegas

“The only thing that appeared was her name,” Dave Carey reminded him.

True, but hardly consolation. Cooper stared at the other man for a few long beats. Dave had been his best friend and confidant since college. He was always reasonable, logical and so damn cool-headed that it was irritating at times. Like now, for instance.

“That’s enough, though, isn’t it? She exists. She has a name. And now,” Cooper added darkly, “apparently, half of my company. To top it all off, we know nothing about her.”

Here in his office on the twentieth floor of the StarFire Hotel, Cooper could let his frustration show. In front of the board and the company’s fleet of lawyers, he’d had to hide his surprise and his anger at the reading of Jacob Evans’s will.

Usually, being in this room with its wide windows, plush carpeting and luxurious furnishings helped to center Cooper. To remind him how far the company had come under his direction. As did looking at the paintings of the famed Hayes hotels that decorated the walls. His father and Jacob had started the company, but it was Cooper who had built it into the huge success it was today.

But at the moment it was hard to take comfort in his business...his world, when the very foundations had been shaken.

Cooper still couldn’t quite wrap his head around any of this. Hell, he’d had everything planned out most of his life. Hayes Corporation had been his birthright. He’d trained for years to take the helm of the company and he’d damn near single-handedly made his hotels synonymous with luxury.

Though there were five star Hayes hotels all around the world, their main headquarters was here, in what was considered the flagship hotel, the StarFire, in Las Vegas. The building had undergone massive renovations over the years, but it still claimed a huge swath of the famed Vegas Strip, and at night it glowed as fiercely as the stars it had been named after.

When Trevor died, Cooper had stepped into his father’s place and worked with Jacob. Since the man had no family, it was understood that when Jacob died, the company would fall completely to Cooper, who had been raised to be king.

Except it hadn’t worked out that way.

Cooper looked at Dave again. Now his executive assistant, he and Dave had both worked summers for the corporation, interned in different departments to learn as much as they could and, when Cooper took over from his father, Dave had come along with Cooper. He couldn’t really imagine doing this job without Dave. Having someone you could trust was priceless.

Dave sat in one of the maroon leather guest chairs opposite Cooper’s massive mahogany desk. He wore a black suit with a red power tie. His brown hair was cut short and his dark brown eyes were thoughtful. “We don’t know much now. We will, though, in a couple of hours. I’ve got our best men working on it.”

“Fine,” Cooper muttered darkly as impatience clawed at his insides. “Jacob had a daughter. A daughter no one knew about. Still sounds like a bad plot in a B movie.” Unbelievable. Apparently, Jacob did have family after all. A daughter he’d never seen. One he and the child’s mother had given up for adoption nearly thirty years ago. And he had waited until he was dead to make the damn announcement.

Pushing one hand through his black hair, Cooper shook his head. “You’d think Jacob could have given me a heads-up about this.”

“Maybe he planned to,” Dave offered, then shut up fast when Cooper glared at him.

“I’ve known him my whole damn life,” he reminded his friend. “Jacob couldn’t find five minutes in the last thirty-five years to say, ‘Oh, did I tell you I have a daughter?’”

“If you’re waiting for me to explain this away,” Dave said, lifting both hands in an elegant shrug, “you’ve got a long wait. I can’t tell you why he never told you. I can say that Jacob probably wasn’t expecting to die in a damn golf-cart accident.”

True. If that cart hadn’t rolled, Jacob wouldn’t have broken his damn neck and—it wouldn’t have changed anything. Jacob had been eighty years old. This would all have happened, eventually.

“He gave her up for adoption, ignored her existence for years, then leaves her his half of the company?” Cooper took a deep breath, hoping for calm that didn’t come. “Who does that?”

Dave didn’t answer because there was no answer. At this point all Cooper had were questions. Who was this woman? What would she say when she found out she was a damn heiress? Would she expect to have a say in how Cooper’s business was run? That stopped him cold. No way was she going to interfere in the company; he didn’t care who the hell she was.

“Okay,” he said, nodding to himself as his thoughts coalesced. “I want to know everything there is to know about—” he broke off and looked down at the copy of Jacob’s will laying on his desk “—Terri Ferguson, by the end of today. Where she went to school, what she does, who she knows. Hell, I want to know what she eats for breakfast.

“If I’m going to have to deal with her, I want to have as much ammunition going into this fight as I possibly can.”

“Got it.” Dave stood up and turned for the door. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe she won’t want any of this.”

Cooper would have laughed, but he was too furious. “Sure, that’ll happen. People turn down billions of dollars every day.”

Nodding, Dave said, “Right.”

“No, she won’t turn it down,” Cooper was saying, more to himself than to his friend. “But she’s not going to show up out of nowhere and be a part of the company. I don’t care who she is. Maybe what we have to do here is find a way to convince her to take the money and then disappear.”

“Worth a shot,” Dave said. “I’ll push our guys to research faster.”

“Good.”

Once his friend was gone, Cooper turned toward the wall of windows at his back. He stared down at Las Vegas Boulevard, better known as the bustling Vegas Strip, nearly thirty floors below, and let his thoughts wander. He’d grown up in this hotel and still lived in one of the owner’s suites on the twenty-fifth floor. He knew every nook and cranny of this city and loved every mercenary inch of it.

On the street, tourists wandered with hope in their hearts and cash in their wallets. They played the machines, the gaming tables and in the bingo parlors. Every last one of them had thoughts of going home rich.

Why would Jacob’s long-lost daughter be any different?

His gaze swept the hotels that surrounded his own and he noticed, not for the first time, that in daylight Vegas held little of the magic that shone on it at night. The city slept during the day but with darkness, it burst into exuberant life.

Cooper’s family had been part of Vegas history for decades, he reminded himself as he turned back to his desk. He’d taken his father’s legacy and made it a worldwide brand. Cooper had made his mark through hard work, single-minded diligence and a vision of exactly what he wanted.

Damned if he’d let some interloper crash the party.

* * *

“I’m sorry.” Terri Ferguson shook her head and almost pinched herself, just to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. But one look around the employee break room at the bank where she worked convinced her that this was all too real. Just fifteen minutes ago she’d been downstairs on the teller line, helping Mrs. Francis make a deposit. Now she was here, sitting across from a very fussy-looking lawyer listening to what seemed like a fairy tale. Apparently, starring her.

“Would you mind saying all of that one more time?”

The lawyer, Maxwell Seaton, sighed. “Ms. Ferguson, I’ve already explained this twice. How many more times will be required?”

Terri heard the snotty attitude in the older man’s tone and maybe there was a part of her that couldn’t blame him for it. But come on. Wouldn’t anyone in her current position be a little off balance? Because none of this made sense.

It had been an ordinary day in Ogden, Utah. She’d gone to work, laughed with her friends, then taken her spot on the teller line at the Wasatch Bank in downtown Ogden. Familiar customers had streamed in and out of the bank until this man had approached her and, in a few words, turned her whole world upside down.

Now the older man removed his glasses, gave another sigh, then plucked a handkerchief from his suit pocket and unnecessarily cleaned the lenses. “As I’ve made clear to you, Ms. Ferguson, I represent your biological father’s estate.”

“My father,” she whispered, the very word feeling a little foreign. Terri had grown up knowing she was adopted. Her parents had always told her the truth, that she had been chosen by them because they fell in love with her the moment they saw her. They’d encouraged her to search for her birth parents once she was eighteen, but Terri hadn’t been curious. Why would she be? she’d reasoned. Where she’d come from didn’t really matter as much as where she was, right?

Besides, she hadn’t wanted to hurt her mother or father. Then her dad died, her mother moved to southern Utah to live with her sister, and Terri had been too busy with college and life to worry about a biological connection to people she didn’t know.

Now that connection had just jumped up to bite her on the butt.

“Yes, your father. Jacob Evans.” The lawyer slipped his glasses back into place. “He recently passed away and in accordance with his will, I’m here to inform you that you are his sole beneficiary.”

And that summed up the weird. Why would he have left her anything? They had no connection beyond biology. And if he’d known who she was, why hadn’t Jacob Evans ever reached out to her? Well, those were questions she would never get an answer to.

“Right. Okay. And I inherited a hotel?” She took a breath and held up one hand before he could speak again. “I’m really sorry. Normally, I’m not this slow on the uptake. Honestly. But this is...just so bizarre.”

For the first time since entering the bank and asking to speak to her privately, the lawyer gave her a small smile. “I do understand how unexpected this must seem to you.”

“‘Unexpected’ is a good word,” she agreed and reached for the water bottle in front of her. She took a sip and added, “Weird is better.”

“I suppose.” Another smile. “Ms. Ferguson, your father was a full partner in the Hayes Corporation.”