Sleepless in Las Vegas by Colleen Collins Read Free Book Online

she’d been expecting as much. She was glad the night shadowed her features, because confusion and hurt were probably stamped all over her face.
    The door to Dino’s swung open, and the faint strains of a Coldplay song wafted onto the street. Traffic cruised down Las Vegas Boulevard with its mix of honking horns and screeching tires. The air simmered with the never ending, relentless heat.
    Everything was the same as it had been when she first got here, but she had changed, irreversibly so. Until the past few minutes, she had not realized that, deep within her, she had put up a wall that protected something fragile, yet potentially devastating. Now it had been freed, and she could never put it back.
    “I need to go now,” she said, fighting to keep her voice even.
    “Where are you parked?”
    “There.” She pointed in the general direction of the Honda rental, thirty or so feet away.
    “I’ll watch, make sure you get into your car okay.”
    She didn’t trust herself to speak anymore. With a wave, she walked away.
    As her heels clicked across the lot, Jayne’s words drifted through her mind. Diamond Investigations never did honey traps because “inducing the behavior” to “objectively document” was unacceptable. Just like Jayne to couch it in clinical, detached terms.
    Val could add an important side note to her boss’s rule. Honey traps were especially unacceptable because people whose hearts had been numbed might unexpectedly wake up and realize what had been missing in their lives—an impassioned connection, a sense of belonging or maybe just a person’s touch. When that happened, inducements became deterrents, and all objectivity was lost. The game became real.
    She reached her car and turned.
    He stood where she had left him. A dark, lonely form, vigilantly watching, protecting.
    * * *
    A SHORT WHILE later Val sat at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and East Charleston. She still felt wobbly about what had happened in Dino’s parking lot. And embarrassed by telling him about the pulsations. At the time, she would have sworn they were dead-on real. She winced at her choice of words. Well, whatever, she should have kept the bulletin to herself.
    Her nanny was the one who really had the “soul’s eye,” as she called it. Through it, she said she experienced impressions— images, feelings, voices—in the part of her brain where dreams lay, which resonated from objects imbued with memories of their owners’ lives, anything from significant events to people they had loved. Although some people called her gift psychometry, Nanny called it “measuring people’s spirits.”
    When Val was thirteen, she’d thought she was picking up on objects’ impressions, too. Sometimes when she touched one of the antiques in their shop, especially ones with metal or stones, her fingers would tingle slightly. Immediately following that, an image or emotion would pass through her mind. Never heard a voice, though, like Nanny did. Not until tonight.
    Looking back, she couldn’t honestly say she really saw or felt those things. Sometimes she wondered if it had just been a way to be closer to her nanny, the two of them sharing something special. Hindsight could sure give a person twenty-twenty vision.
    But still, what happened earlier in the bar had seemed like an impression. She had definitely heard an older man’s voice when she held Drake’s phone, but thinking back, she remembered an older couple sitting at a table behind them, and Val had overheard him expressing his love for his lady friend. And those pulsations from the phone? No-brainer. The phone was on vibrate.
    A horn honked, jerking Val out of her reverie. Sheepishly, she realized the light had turned green.
    Another honk.
    “Hold your britches, bubba,” she muttered, stepping on the gas and turning down Charleston Boulevard.
    Time to call Marta with a final update. After a quick check to verify no cops were around—Nevada might have legalized