Runaway Vegas Bride / Vegas Two-Step: Runaway Vegas Bride / Vegas Two-Step

Thursdays.

Lasagna night.

One of Jane’s big dates of the week.

Thursdays was lasagna with Gram, her great-aunt Gladdy and a few of their friends from their active retirement village—they stressed the word active in all things—called Remington Park. Sunday afternoons were spent taking Gram and Gladdy shopping, maybe to a movie or brunch.

There it was, the sad truth about Jane’s big dates.

Oh, she could have found a man to go out with. Men were everywhere. But a man she truly wanted to spend time with? A man who could be depended on to show her a good time that topped a hot bath, a glass of wine and a good book?

There certainly weren’t a lot of those around, Jane had found in her twenty-eight years.

She put down the phone—forgotten by Gram, who’d gone in search of Leo, the supposed love of her life—and sighed, trying not to think Gram had more of a social life than she did.

“Is she all right?” Lainie asked, hovering as she tended to do.

“Well, she’s either forgotten her own age or she’s pretending to be five years younger to impress a man. Please tell me we won’t give a flip about impressing a man when we’re eighty-one. I mean, at that age, who really wants one? They’re bound to be more trouble than they’re worth in their eighties. I mean, I think men in their thirties are more trouble than they’re worth.”

Lainie frowned. “Jane, you think all men are more trouble than they’re worth.”

Jane considered, decided she couldn’t argue that point. “And?”

Lainie looked sad, as if she might just feel a bit sorry for Jane. “I’m just saying…Don’t you ever get lonely?”

Absently drumming the keys on the powered-off calculator on her desk, Jane considered. “Not really. I have my work, my family. I guess I’m a little lonely now that Bella’s gone—”

“Bella was a dog, Jane.”

“I know. I’ve never met a man who was nicer to me than my dog was.”

Then there was no even trying to hide it. Lainie definitely felt sorry for her, which made Jane wonder if it was really that sad, to have a beloved and recently deceased dog who was nicer to her than any man she’d ever met. But really, Jane felt lucky to have no illusions. To be honest with herself and in the way she’d put together a life of her choosing. And it was a good life. A good, satisfying life most of the time.

Sure, every now and then she got lonely, but didn’t everyone?

“Men are so unpredictable,” she complained.

“Life is unpredictable,” Lainie insisted.

“No, life with men is unpredictable.” Jane smiled, quite satisfied with that catchphrase.

She quickly scribbled it down on a list she kept handy for just these occasions. She’d come up with another great catchphrase for her work with the poor, unhappy women who hadn’t yet come to the wisdom she had, wisdom she happily shared with others in her Fabulous Female Financial Boot Camp seminars. Where she preached financial independence with the same fervor of a good old-fashioned preacher trying to save lost souls. The women in her seminars were lost, too, in a wilderness of financial ignorance, irresponsibility and the completely mistaken idea that they were helpless to assist themselves, to take control of their own financial destiny.

Men were what messed up everything.

Most women would be so much better off without them.

Jane didn’t come right out and say that, exactly, to the poor, lost female souls who came to her. She didn’t want to freak them out too badly right away, and Jane knew she could really freak people out if she wasn’t careful, being so passionate and insistent in getting her ideals across. She just told women that unless and until they were in charge of their own lives, they would never have any true independence or stability, and that who, if anyone, should be in charge of their lives except themselves?

Empowerment and enlightenment, Jane promised in the advertisements for her seminars. Changing women’s lives for the better.

Jane was completely in charge of her own life, and it was wonderfully predictable, dependable and sane.

And she liked it that way.

Wyatt Addison Gray IV got the look the minute he walked in the door at the main offices of Remington Park.

The administrator, a most aptly named Ms. Steele, was waiting for him, all starched and pressed and so buttoned-up it looked like her blouse might be strangling her, even as she stood there.

Wyatt asked himself, How bad could it possibly be? The man had only been here for a week. How much havoc could an eighty-six-year-old man possibly cause in seven days?

And come to think of it, why couldn’t his uncle be immobile like so many men his age? Maybe just stuck in a wheelchair that conveniently didn’t move, the wheels sabotaged for his own good? Was that too much to ask? Drugged into a mild haze that left him feeling no pain and causing no trouble? What would it take to arrange that? It wasn’t really illegal, was it? Drugging and restraining a troublesome eighty-six-year-old?

Wyatt tried to fortify himself for what was to come, put on his best I-can-fix-this smile and extended a hand. “Ms. Steele. What can I do for you?”

“You promised there wouldn’t be any trouble,” she said, attacking from the first word as she stood in the doorway to her office.

“Yes,” he said, pretending he believed every word he was about to say.

No trouble.

No problem.

Nothing to fix.

She gave a curt nod that said, Inside my office. Now.

Wyatt smiled reassuringly and then tried to appear calm and confident—none of which he felt—as he complied with her unspoken command.

Ms. Steele seated herself behind a desk organized with rigid precision, pen here, clock here, phone here, files neatly housed in a small holder on her desk, paper in a short stack that looked like someone had taken a ruler to the edges.

Ooh, Wyatt thought, feeling like he was a teenager and had been summoned to the headmaster’s office at boarding school. Again.

He sat back, determined to at least seem relaxed, and smiled. “What can I do for you?”

She huffed like she was already disgusted with him and his uncle, and Wyatt hadn’t even begun to make his explanations yet.

“You think those of us in the eldercare community don’t know each other?” she began. “Don’t talk? Don’t get together to share our problems and ideas on how to address them?”

Oh, hell.

He hoped not. Though he probably should have thought of that and negotiated a confidentiality clause with the other retirement homes his uncle had been in.

“Well, we do talk to each other,” Ms. Steele said. “And I did some checking. I don’t know how I let you talk me into taking him without talking to some people first—”

Wyatt knew exactly how he’d done it. It was, simply, what he did—talk people into things they didn’t want to do. He was a divorce lawyer, and what he’d found, mostly, was that by the time they got to him, people really didn’t want to divorce their spouse. They wanted to torture their spouse, mercilessly and without end, and the way to do that was to keep fighting about the divorce.

So he usually let them fight it out for a while, chalking up billable hours like crazy, until most of the fury had burned out, that gleam in their eyes about revenge giving way to exhaustion and growing financial distress, and then he talked them into what they really needed to do. Agree to the divorce.