Here Comes Trouble Page 0,103

But perhaps she saw that future alone. She’d said as much, early on.

Would she take a chance? Play the hand despite the odds?

“I have a pretty unconventional background, too,” he reminded her.

“Did your parents run a casino?” she asked, smiling as she rephrased his earlier question.

“Actually, my mother was a showgirl. I haven’t a clue who my father was.” Her gaze sharpened on his and he suddenly realized why she’d gone back to chopping vegetables as she’d told him about her childhood. Clearly she’d long since come to terms with how she’d been raised, and she had even spoken about it pretty fondly. But that didn’t mean it was easy to share with someone else. Perhaps someone whose opinion might matter to her.

And as much as that thought brought a little unknotting to the anxiety he was feeling, it didn’t help that he had to bear his soul in the same way with her. He’d also come to terms with it, but it mattered to him what she would think. “She was also a prostitute. And a drug addict.”

Kirby’s mouth shaped a little “o” and her eyes filled with sadness. “Was it just the two of you?”

He nodded. “Until I was about nine. Then we moved into the boarding house, the one Vanetta runs, that I told you about. Vanetta couldn’t do much at the time, but she went easier on my mom when she couldn’t come up with rent. She’d stopped performing by the time I was twelve. Her lifestyle was taking a toll on her body and her looks, at least by her bosses’ standards. By then I was already playing cards, working odd jobs at the casinos to make money. Mom, uh…well, there were more men coming around. Vanetta put a stop to that when she found out, but that just meant that Mom was gone all the time instead. I’d have to go find her…” he trailed off, realizing that Kirby didn’t need to hear the gory details. It was bad enough that he’d had to deal with finding a parent who’d oftentimes been left beaten up, or was strung out. He didn’t think back to those days much, if at all, anymore. “She died when I was fourteen. Overdose. Vanetta kind of did what your friends at the resort did. Made sure I had food, clothes, that I went to school, though that was never a chore. I loved school.”

“Me, too,” Kirby said, the light of true kinship in her eyes. “It was the most normal thing in my world. And taught me how big the real world really is. It gave me such a better perspective of what my possibilities were. I would have stayed there twenty-four-seven if I could have.”

“That’s exactly how I felt. Well, there and at the casino. Even though I knew the latter part probably wasn’t healthy, it was home for me.”

“Maybe the resort wasn’t quite the same, in terms of not being so great an environment for a child. But I know what you mean, it was home to me, too.”

“Except I never left the casino life, while you grew up to build your own version of home.”

She laughed. “Right, where people still come and go and nothing is permanent. But a permanent home for me, I guess.”

He leaned back to look into her eyes. “We do what we know. I know cards. You know resorts.”

She lifted a shoulder. “Makes sense, I guess.”

“If things had gone differently with…what was his name?”

“Patrick.”

“Right. Say he had married you, been partners at work, partners at home. Would you still have wanted this?” He gestured to the room around them, and what lay beyond.

“You mean did I want the more traditional home? Babies, a puppy, nine-to-five day job, that kind of thing?”

“Yes. I know the resort was never going to be nine-to-five, but you know what I mean.”

“I do, and I don’t know. Patrick had other properties, but the resort was his baby. We lived on premises, very nice premises, but…that was home. A very familiar one to me, of course, though certainly more posh than the one I grew up in.”

“Were you happy? Doing that, I mean?”

“I was certainly good at it, given my background. But…I don’t know that I yearned for the white picket fence world, really. We never really got that far and my life didn’t really ever seem suited quite for that. But I did know that if I could do whatever I wanted, I wanted to take what