Love Me Like No Other

by A.C. Arthur

• ISBN13: 9781583147931
• ISBN10: 1583147934
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-01
• Publisher: Harlequin Kimani

Summary

That day had started out like any other, until a brown-skinned beauty in a flimsy nightgown jumped into his car and demanded he drive her to the airport. That's how investigative reporter Adriano Norwood met Payton Vaughn, the star witness in the trial of

Excerpts

"Craps!" the man dressed in too-tight black pants and a colorful vest with a bright red bowtie said. His expression remained dour, the way it had been for the last three hours since she'd been here. Jade Vincent shifted. Her feet hurt. Whatever possessed her to wear slacks and pumps to a casino? The man with the long black stick and the blank gray eyes leaned into the table, retrieving the dice--the ones that had just cost her another fifty dollars--and with a quick glance he handed them to her again. Taking them out of his hand she looked down at the pile of chips that once represented all the free cash she had to spend--the entire three hundred and forty-two dollars. What was she doing here? The pale man waited for her to either roll the dice or walk away from the table. Men, she thought with a heavy sigh. That was the simple answer to her latest dilemma. How a woman who graduated tops in her class from Harvard always managed to pick the worst men was an enigma to her. Her stomach twisted, her temples throbbing as chiming slot machines and hostesses with sing-song voices chanting "Coffee? Soda?" for the billionth time, echoed in her head. She didn't want to be here, didn't want to be in this desperate situation, but she'd never gotten what she wanted. So with great reluctance and a silent prayer to the gods to shine favorably on her just this one time, she shook the dice in her hand then let them fall onto the green felt, watching eagerly as they tumbled and landed. Her entire future rested on the roll of two red squares. Well, not her future. Noelle's future. Noelle Vincent, two years younger than Jade, average intelligence, a pretty face and a magnet for trouble. It was just three days ago that Noelle had come barging into Happy Hands, Jade's day spa, whining about some fiasco at the casino. Noelle, in her bubbly, never-worry-about-a-thing-because-my-big-sister-will-bail-me-out attitude, had sat in the steam bath and informed her older sister that she had ten days to come up with five thousand dollars or the owner of the Gramercy casino was going to have her thrown in jail. Jade hadn't had a moment's peace since then. All Jade had ever wanted was to run her business and to lead a nice, quiet life. Fate obviously had a different agenda. Since her grandmother's death a year and a half ago Jade's life had been full of drama and stress. With Noelle usually being the cause of them both. Still, it would be unfair to blame all her recent misfortune on Noelle. A good portion could be attributed to Charles Benson. He was the man she'd thought she loved. The man she was going to marry. Jade had planned every tiny detail of the wedding even through the grief of losing her grandmother, knowing how much the thought of her being married to a good man would have made Grammy happy. She missed Grammy terribly but would be forever thankful for the inheritance she'd left her. With that money Jade had planned to open her day spa. Jade was going to make something of herself. Something her mother couldn't do. She was determined to be successful. Lillian Vincent died from years and years of alcohol abuse when Jade was sixteen. That's when Jade and Noelle had moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, to live with Grammy. Grammy spent many a day drilling into her head the importance of being independent and not relying on anyone but herself. In turn, Jade was spending her days drilling the same thing into Noelle's thick skull. Jade had been smart enough to get into Harvard and even smarter to know that she'd only be happy running her own business. And with Grammy's inheritance she'd planned to do just that. Grammy used to laugh and say, "All that money I put into your college education and you come back wanting to give people massages." But it was so much more than that. Massage therapy provided an escape, a healing for the stressors of the world, and Jade knew all about stress. Her ultimate