Runaway Vegas Bride / Vegas Two-Step. Liz Talley

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.

      It sounded cold and maybe a little as if he was taking advantage, but truly, he wasn’t. People needed that time to let their emotions rage, he’d discovered. It wasn’t pretty, but it was all about processing those bad, messy feelings that came from the breakup of most relationships. And without that processing time, people simply couldn’t move on.

      He gave them that time, at an outrageous sum per hour, as most attorneys did, and then when he felt they were ready, he got them to agree to the actual divorce.

      Wyatt liked to think he provided a much-needed service to the miserably married public, that he gave his clients a nice balance of hand-holding, emotional venting opportunities and, in the end, closure. For that, he was incredibly well paid and had learned how to talk almost anyone into anything. A skill that he never imagined he’d need in such abundance in looking after his beloved but troublesome elderly uncle in the man’s waning years.

      Problem was, certain things about uncle Leo showed no signs of waning. Most distressingly, his interest in women.

      When they’d come to Remington Park, Wyatt had been at his most charming, most reassuring, pushing to seal the deal without ever seeming like he was pushing, seeming like a man with no troubles at all, when he convinced Ms. Steele to take uncle Leo.

      “Kicked out of three retirement homes already!” Ms. Steele commented.

      It wasn’t a question. She knew it was true. Damn. “Look, he just went a little…you know—”

      “No, I don’t,” Ms. Steele said. “The man’s eighty-six, not sixteen!”

      “He and my aunt Millicent were together for eleven years,” Wyatt explained.

      Ms. Steele didn’t seem impressed at all with the number.

      Wyatt frowned. “No one in my family’s ever stayed married that long. This was the marathon of marriages for the Gray