Re: VIP Area
Wren had started drinking early, somewhere around midday when her nerves had started to get the better of her. After spending hours on the internet stressing about everything from child custody (which her lawyers still felt she shouldn't trust Luke to share), to the evacuation plan at the Mandalay Bay (which she had just about memorized by noon), she grabbed her keys and decided to do something useful with the bond money that had found itself back in her savings account that morning. Useful, being more booze and useless pampering.
She'd grown up with nothing, really, and even her mother's dressing room table (which she'd thought so very brilliant as a child) was something built on concrete blocks and dreams draped over in fabric remnants. She liked the things money bought, which made her feel so very removed from the scared little girl she'd been all those years ago. And she needed that tonight, needed that distance and that calm that removed her so very much from her past. And she had the money for it, and she was already drunk. No guilt, and she spent the afternoon in the spa and at the salon, and then she let a dresser pick what she was going to wear that night. She'd spent months being calm and sedate for the cameras and the press, trying to paint an angelic picture for the juries and the lawyers. Tonight she was done pretending, and by the time she got into the limo that was going to take her to Mandalay Bay, she was comfortably numb.
The crowd at the party wasn't surprising. Before she reunited with Luke in Las Vegas, these were the types of affairs Wren attended for networking. She knew all the models and the billionaires, the politicians and the debutantes. She'd seen nearly a quarter of them naked, and she'd made every last one of those beg beneath the sting of her crop. But she hadn't been out in awhile, and she knew she would have an endless amount of meeting and greeting to do before she could get free. And maybe it served Luke right, having to wait for her to come to him. She'd spent a month crying and begging, and she was drunk enough to want to turn the tables tonight.
Thankfully, the booze dampened most of the terror that had started her drinking that morning, and she let the valet help her out of the car in a veryopen-back black dress with mesh at the sides, a plunging neckline, and a slit at the willow-silk thigh. Her heels were stiletto sharp, and her hair was twisted and up, not a strand out of place. She wore an ornate chain around her neck that disappeared into the dress' plunging neckline, and she didn't look anything like the defendant that had just been given her freedom again. No, this was what Las Vegas was used to from the woman whose cards only listed her as Minette, and that alone made her feel powerful, out of Alexander's reach and beyond the concerns that belonged to the scared woman she had somehow slipped right back into being the past month.
She lingered in the crowd, pressing kisses to cheeks and feeling hands along her bare back, and by the time she approached the VIP area it was with a champagne flute in her hand and pupils blown wide with how drunk she was. She had all but forgotten Luke's promise about getting on the table and screaming her name, but she had forgotten just about everything from that teasing conversation in light of the one that followed. Still, he was impossible to miss, dressed in black and looking as beautiful as she always insisted he was. She noticed the woman that lingered near the table he was standing on, recognized the hungry look on her face, and she greeted a few more people as the sea of bodies parted to let her get near the table and the man atop it. "See anything you like?" she asked, the slur making her already husky voice huskier.