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He put up a hand to signal he needed another moment. I rolled my eyes impatiently and went to the bar to pour another drink. By the time he was ready, my mouth tasted of smoky scotch, but I wasn't enjoying it.
“Six, six-and-a-half years ago, I came here with Nicolas,” he began. “While he was in meetings, I went out to have a little fun. There was this guy in the hotel bar, talking big. Blond guy, tall.”
I narrowed my eyes and waved my hand at him to continue.
“He said he had a girl. Eighteen. Pretty. And new.”
My hand tightened around the glass. This couldn't be going where it sounded like it was going.
“I didn't find out until after that she was his wife. The track marks on his arms were evidence as to why he was pimping her out.” Kendall risked a glance up at me. “When I came back three years ago, I called him again and...” He ran his hand through his hair. “A couple months later, he told me she'd left him.” He shrugged. “Guess I was one of her first and one of her last.”
My stomach turned. I slammed the glass down on top of the bar, but it didn't break. I wondered if I should slam it again. He had to be lying. Briana would've been pregnant or just had her daughter when he claimed to have been with her the first time. And that would also mean that Briana had been working as a prostitute for at least three years. Sweet, beautiful Bri.
I shook my head. “You're fucking with me so that I get distracted and don't beat your face in for messing with my girl.”
“Your girl?” he asked, smirking. “Awfully possessive of the woman you've been given by the hotel for your patronage.”
I didn't tell him it wasn't like that, that she wasn't like that.
But if he was right, then maybe she wasn't who I thought.
Maybe she was just sleeping with me to keep me happy and to keep me coming back to her hotel. It’d worked, hadn't it? Fuck, it had worked so well that after a few days of being back in New York, I jumped on a plane back to Vegas just to see her, spending shitloads of money to be near her.
“If you don't believe me, I've got a little something I can show you...” Kendall staggered to his feet and made his way over to the bar to grab the drink he'd poured for himself before our altercation. “The husband filmed us. Now he's come out of the woodwork threatening to show the video to people if I don’t cough up money for him. It’s why I’m here. To get it.”
I felt even sicker than before. Even if Briana had been fooling me this entire time just to get business for the hotel, she didn't deserve to have her private past exploited with such malicious intent. Nobody did. I wanted to strangle that Elroy asshole with my bare hands, and maybe that was just what I'd do.
If what Kendall was saying was true.
“Show me.”
He started to shake his head. “Come on, man. Are you sure you want to see–”
“Show me the fucking video!”
He scuttled over to his bed and grabbed the phone lying by the pillow. When he made his way back over to me, there was a video filling the screen. I could clearly recognize Kendall despite the low quality. He was on his back with a woman straddling him. She looked vaguely like Briana, but so did tons of other beautiful women from the back.
“Show me a part where I can see her face.”
“Uh, there isn't one,” he said. “But she's got that tattoo, see? A rose right there. And the last time I...uh...she had a new one. A date on her hip.”
I told myself that he could have seen those tattoos in Hawaii when she wore a bikini, but when he pointed at the image again, I could see a little smudge that still looked enough like a rose for me to be forced to admit that Kenny was telling the truth.
My Briana wasn't who I thought she was. I was starting to wonder if I'd ever known her at all.
And if I'd ever been more than a client to her.
