A Little Texas

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU DID WHAT?” KATE NEWMAN asked, tossing aside the letter from the IRS and shuffling through the papers piled on her desk. Maybe she would find something to negate what she’d read. Something that would magically make the whole tax mess disappear. “Tell me this is some kind of joke. Please.”

No sound came from the chair across from her. She stopped and looked up. “Jeremy?”

Her friend and business partner sat defeated, shoulders slumped, head drooping like a withered sunflower. Even his ever jittering leg was still.

She picked up the letter again. Only one question left to ask. “How?”

A tear dripped onto his silk shirt before he lifted his head and met her gaze with the saddest puppy-dog eyes she’d ever seen. Jeremy enjoyed being a drama queen, but this time the theatrics were absent. He shook his head. “It’s Victor.”

“Victor?” she repeated, dumbly. “What does he have to do with the salon? With paying our taxes?”

The small office at the rear of their salon seemed to rock as the reality of the situation sank in. IRS. Taxes not paid. Future in peril. Kate grabbed the edge of the desk and focused on her business partner.

He swallowed before replying in a near whisper, “He’s got cancer. It’s in his bones now.”

“Cancer?”

“He’s dying.”

Her legs collapsed and she fell into her swivel chair. “Oh, my God. What kind?”

More tears slid down Jeremy’s tanned cheeks. He closed his eyes, but not before she saw the torturous pain present within their honey depths. “He was diagnosed with testicular cancer two years ago. He underwent treatment, and the doctors said he was in the clear. We didn’t think it was a big deal. We never even told anyone. But six months ago, the cancer came back. And you know when he lost his job, he lost his insurance.”

Kate couldn’t think of a thing to say. Her feelings were swirling inside her, tangling into a knot of sorrow and outrage. How could this happen? How could Jeremy’s life partner be sick and her business at risk? The world had tipped upside down and now Kate was hanging on by her fingernails.

“I didn’t know what to do. He was so sick…is so sick, and there was all that money sitting there in the bank. I thought I could pay it back in time. Kate, he’s my life.” Jeremy’s last words emerged as a strangled plea before he broke into gut-wrenching sobs. “Please forgive me, Kate. I needed the money for his chemo. To stop the cancer. It didn’t work.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the leather chair. She wanted to cry, to express some emotion, or punch Jeremy in the mouth. But all she felt was emptiness. Then fear crowded her heart, choking her with the sour taste of failure. How could she have let this happen? Why had she assumed Jeremy was taking care of their taxes?

“I don’t know what to say, Jeremy. I’m seriously contemplating murder.”

His shoulders shook harder.

Shit. As angry as she was with him, she knew she’d have done the same thing.

The sunlight pouring in the window seemed way too cheerful for such a day. It pissed her off, so she jerked the blinds shut. “Why didn’t you tell me? Let me help you before it came to this?”

His sobs subsided into an occasional sniffle. She knew he hurt badly. His partner meant everything to him. The two men had been together for four years—they’d met at the launch of Fantabulous, Jeremy and Kate’s high-energy salon located on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Jeremy and Victor had hit it off immediately, acting like an old married couple almost from the beginning. They were the happiest couple she knew.

“I couldn’t. Victor is so private and didn’t want anyone to know. He was adamant about it. You’re my friend, but he’s my partner. I promised, and until now, I kept the promise.”

His eyes were plaintive. He could offer no other explanation and Kate couldn’t blame him. She’d felt much the same way her whole life. Private. Elusive. Never one to offer up a motive.

“I don’t expect you to forgive me, Kate, but there was nowhere else I could go for the money. I even called my parents.” Jeremy’s long fingers spread in a plea.

“They wouldn’t help you,” she said, shifting the colorful glass paperweight her friend had given her for Christmas. She wanted to yell at this particular friend, get it through his gel-spiked head, that somehow she would have helped, but it was too late.

“No. Didn’t even return my call.”

“So what are we going to do? Can’t we stop this? Put the IRS off somehow?” Kate knew she sounded desperate. She felt frantic, sick. Vomit perched in the back of her throat. Although Vegas had taken a huge hit economically, they’d been making it, but money wasn’t flowing the way it had when they’d first opened.

“I talked to my friend Wendell. He’s a bankruptcy lawyer. He said if we could scratch up ten thousand, we might hold them off then see where we stand. He also said we might cut a deal with the IRS and pay a lesser amount on the back taxes.”

“Ten thousand?” she echoed. She only had about three thousand in savings and she’d been dipping in to cover extra expenses for the past few months. She didn’t own anything she could use for collateral, and they’d put a second mortgage on the salon for an expansion right before the economy tanked. She looked down at the three-hundred-dollar boots she’d bought before the holidays and thought she might be ill on them. She felt stupid. Dumb. She should have been better at saving her money.

Jeremy dropped his head into his hands.

“That feels like a fortune. I don’t have it right now. No one does in this economy. The banks won’t give us free suckers anymore, much less a loan,” Kate said.

“I don’t have the cash, either,” he said. “I mean, obviously.”

She pushed her hands through her hair and looked at the IRS letter. It ridiculed her with its tyrannical words. She wanted to rip it up, pretend it was a silly nightmare. Lose her business? Ha. Ha. Joke’s on you, Kate, baby.

But no laughter came. Only the heavy silence of defeat.

Like a bolt of lightning, desperation struck. Once again she was a girl lying in the small bed inside her grandmother’s tinfoil trailer, praying she’d have enough to make the payment on her class ring. Praying she’d have enough to buy a secondhand prom dress. Praying no one would find out exactly how poor Katie Newman was.

Her unfortunate beginning had made her hungry, determined to never feel so insignificant again.

She had to get out of the salon.

She snatched her Prada handbag from the desk drawer.

“Where you going?” Jeremy’s head popped up. He swiveled to watch her stalk out of the small office.

“Anywhere but here,” she said, trying to keep the panic from her voice. She felt as if someone had her around the throat, closing off her oxygen. She could hardly take in the temperate air that hit her when she flung open the back door.

“Kate! Wait! We have to tell Wendell something.”

“Tell him to go to hell. I’ll rot before they take the salon,” Kate managed to say through clenched teeth. And she meant it. She didn’t care what Jeremy had done. She wasn’t going to lose her business. She’d go Scarlett O’Hara on them if she had to. The image of her clutching a fistful of deposit slips in the bank lobby crying out, “As God is my witness, I shall never go hungry again!” popped into her mind. She saw herself sinking onto the bank’s cheap Oriental rug, tears streaming down her face.

She yanked open the door of her cute-as-a-button powder-blue VW Bug, plopped her purse on the seat and slid her sunglasses into place. “Screw ’em. I ain’t giving in. Even if I have to sew a dress from my stupid-ass curtains, I’ll get that money.”

She wasn’t making sense. She didn’t care that she wasn’t making sense. She needed money. She needed it fast.

And there was only one way for her to make money fast in Vegas.

Blackjack.

THREE HOURS LATER, KATE SLID onto a leather stool in the casino lounge. For all the clanging and clinking going on outside the bar, it was eerily quiet in here. Curved lamps threw soft light on the polished dark walnut tables scattered around the room. Kate had chosen the nearly empty bar over a cozy table. She needed to be close to the liquor.