Shameless Read Free

out of here, Mercado.”
    â€œForget shameless. Find that churchgoing girl, old man.”
    Mercado waved jauntily and saluted. Then the door banged behind him and he was gone.

One
    S tella Lamour grabbed her guitar and glided out of the storeroom Harry let her use as a dressing room. After all, a star had to have a dressing room. She tried to ignore the fact that the closet was stacked with cases of beer, cocktail napkins and glasses…and that the boxy, airless room gave her claustrophobia when she shut the door.
    Some dressing room…. Some star….
    As Stella approached the corner to make her entrance, she cocked her glossy head at an angle so that her long yellow hair rippled flirtily down her slim, bare back. At thirty-two, she was still beautiful, and she knew it. Just as she knew how to use it.
    â€œFake it till you make it, baby,” Johnny, her ex-manager, always said.
    Fake it? For how much longer? In this business and this city, beauty was everything, at least for a woman.Every day younger, fresher girls poured into Vegas, girls with big dreams just like hers. Johnny signed them all on, too.
    Hips swaying, Stella moved like a feral cat, her lush, curvy, petite body inviting men to watch, not that there were many to do so tonight. There was a broad-shouldered hunk at the bar. He gave her the once-over. Her slanting, thickly-lashed, blue eyes said, “You can look, but keep your distance, big boy—this is my territory.”
    Johnny Silvers, her no-good ex-manager, who liked fast cars and faster women, had taught Stella how to move, how to walk, how to hold her head, how to look like a star—how to fake it.
    Some star. The closest she’d come was to warm the crowd up before the real star came on stage.
    Now she’d sunk to Harry’s.
    Harry’s was a dead-end bar in downtown Vegas, a hangout for middle-aged retreads, divorcées, widowers, alcoholics, burned-out gamblers—a dimly lit refuge for the flotsam and jetsam who couldn’t quite cut it in real life and were too broke to make their play in the hectic, brightly lit casinos on the strip. They were searching for new lives and new loves. Not that they could do more in Harry’s than drown their sorrows and take a brief time-out before they resumed their panicky quests.
    In a few more years, I’ll be one of them, Stella thought as she grimly shoved a chair aside on her way to the bar.
    Her slinky black dress was so tight across the hips, she had to stand at her end of the bar when she finally reached it. She’d put on a pound, maybe two. Not good, not when the new girls kept getting younger and slimmer.
    Mo, the bartender, nodded hello and handed her her Saturday night special—water with a juicy lime hanging on the edge of her glass. She squeezed the lime, swirled the water in the glass. Wetting her lips first, she took a long, cool sip.
    Aside from Mo and a single, shadowy male figure at the other end of the bar, Harry’s was empty tonight. There wasn’t a single retread. So, the only paying customer was the wide-shouldered hunk she’d seen come in earlier. She knew men. He was no retread.
    There was a big arms-dealer conference in Vegas. For some reason, she imagined he might be connected to the conference. He was hard-edged. Lean and tall and trim. He had thick brown hair. She judged he was around thirty. Something about him made her think of the way Phillip looked in his uniform. Maybe it was the man’s air of authority.
    Just thinking about Phillip made her remember another bar seven years ago when she’d been a raw kid, singing her heart out, not really caring where she was as long as she could sing. She’d gotten herself in a real jam that night. Lucky for her, or maybe not so lucky as it turned out, Phillip Westin had walked in.
    Just the memory of Phillip in that brawl—he’d been wonderful—made her pulse quicken again. It had been four drunks against