Page 51 of One Night Gamble
She walked over to him and realized she was on the verge of crying and she didn’t want that. Not now. She wanted to keep it together until she was alone.
“I am leaving. If I were to stay, I would lose something I could never get back,” she said, knowing she had to put a higher price on her own self-respect. She’d never forgive herself if she stayed with a man who would gamble her love away. She walked to the door, then looked back as she opened it.
Casey wore an expression she’d never seen before but she couldn’t analyze it—not at this moment, when her world was crumbling. “Goodbye, Casey.”
“Goodbye, Brown Eyes.”
She walked into the hallway and closed the door behind her, holding on to the handle for a moment, her legs shaking. She heard the sound of something hitting the door and then smashing to the floor, followed by a round of cursing.
She had the feeling they were both losers in this and later that might matter, but at this moment she just needed to get away. The tears started to flow down her face and she forced herself to walk to the elevator. When she got on, she went directly to the bottom floor, and to her car.
She didn’t drive toward Henderson and the Glen View Senior Community because she didn’t want to see Gran until she had herself under control. She just pointed her car east and drove, just needing to get away from Vegas.
She followed the road for about thirty minutes and then pulled off to the side. She couldn’t control her tears, or even see where she was going. But she knew that there was no outrunning this.
There was no other place she wanted to be than in Las Vegas. And with Casey.
Chapter Sixteen
Talia did her best to move on with her life without Casey. She knew that she couldn’t just walk away from her job—while the owners knew about her relationship with Casey, her staff had been in the dark, and she had too many projects in the works to just walk away.
She called in sick that first horrible day but came in for the next one. And the first thing she did was assign Mark, one of the new guys on her staff, to work with Casey on the world poker championship event. In the meantime, she continued working with Rio and Nicholas on building their social media platforms.
She sent out her resume and had a few nibbles from competing casinos in Vegas but that felt wrong to her. When there was an opening at a casino in Louisiana, she thought about it.
But did she really want to work in another casino? And Gran’s upcoming girls’ trip to the Canadian Rockies sealed the deal. Talia knew that Gran wouldn’t want to leave her house empty, and Talia really didn’t want to move to Louisiana.
So, instead, she just existed. She pretended that she had never loved Casey and that broken hearts healed overnight. She also ignored the fact that she’d spent a lot of time standing under his poster on the front of the casino, studying it. Trying to see what she’d missed when she’d first seen it, some clue that would have told her that he’d be the man who’d break her heart.
She was sitting at her desk, typing up a report to send to the entire board about the projects she had in progress, when there was a knock on her door. She looked up to see Darien Mitchell standing there.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.
“Um…I’m sort of busy right now.”
“Right,” he said. “Listen, I know I’m the last person you want to chat with but I’m going to have to insist.”
She shook her head. “I’ve heard all I need to hear from you. And honestly, I can’t really deal with this right now. Could you just let Rio know whatever it is you have to say? Please.”
He stepped into her cubicle, his body filling the entire doorway. “I can’t. My brother doesn’t know I was a complete asshole to you.”
Oh.
“Um…maybe we shouldn’t talk here,” she said, very aware that her staff could hear everything that Darien was saying.
“Good idea. Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the new course anyway,” Darien said.
She followed him out of the social media area and instead of going to the elevator, Darien walked over to the stairs. She slipped her heels off and followed him down. He noticed she was carrying her shoes when they got to the bottom.
“Sorry about that. I didn’t even think about your shoes.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not great on the stairs to begin with, so I just usually ditch them.”
She glanced around—they were in the employee hallway. Darien gave her his hand while she put her shoes back on and he led her down to the door that exited onto the motocross course and locker room area.
She noticed that the course was empty and that someone had set up a table and chairs near the course.
