Perhaps he thought he could butter me up with free drinks and then wheedle his way into my bank account. My real-life bank account was nothing to write home about, but my imaginary heiress bank account could keep him in Rolexes and designer underpants for the rest of his days.

Now that I was watching him, he did strike me as the type who could sail through life on his looks if it so pleased him. Jay was attractive in a rough around the edges, battle-scarred sort of way. The bartender was a pretty boy. I doubted he had a single scar on his tanned, muscular form.

Once he was finished with the ladies, he sidled his way back over to me and began wiping down the bar top.

“Is the cocktail to your liking, honey?” he asked, and I gave him a polite smile. I was beginning to tense up now, because the way he looked at me was like he’d already stripped me of my dress and was pleased by what he saw. Actually, it was kind of irritating.

“It’s great, thanks,” I said, stiff.

He leaned slightly closer. “I love your accent. Where are you from?”

I inwardly snorted at the idea of my accent being anything other than common and mundane. The romance languages were the ones that had the enviable accents. “Ireland,” I answered finally.

“Oh, yeah? I’m a fifth Irish on my mother’s side, you know,” he said, and winked. “What brings you to this part of the world?”

Before I could tell him that I was on my honeymoon, another voice did it for me. That voice was one part amused and another part seriously pissed off, and it came from the stool to the left of me. A stool that I was sure only seconds ago had been empty.

“She’s on her honeymoon,” said Jay, and I turned to him. He was frowning.

The whole randomly appearing thing was a bit of a habit of his, something of an occupational hazard for magicians, you could call it. One of these days he was going to give me a heart attack. It usually goes something like this: I walk into the empty kitchen, open the fridge, pull out some orange juice, take a sip, look to the previous vacant table, and there sits Jay, sending my heart racing. It’s similar to when you think you see a person standing in a darkened room, but it turns out to be a coat rack…or a cardboard cutout of Harry Styles. Only in my case, the person often turns out to be Jay.

The bartender quickly took in the dynamic, eyebrows shooting up into his forehead, nodded, and suddenly looked like he had a very important task to complete elsewhere. A second later, he was gone.

Jay took my hand in his and leaned down to sniff at my cocktail. “As if he didn’t see the ring. Prick was trying his luck,” he muttered. “What are you drinking, darlin’?”

“A Sex on the Beach,” I said wryly. “The barman suggested it.”

“I bet he did. I can’t leave you alone for a minute before the vultures start circling.”

I laughed loudly. “But of course. I might as well be Pamela Anderson in the ’90s. The menfolk just can’t get enough of me.”

“That is a weird analogy, Watson. Why wouldn’t you just say Megan Fox? Or Mila Kunis?”

Trying to keep a straight face, I replied, “They didn’t come to mind. But I’m very interested by how quickly they came to yours. Do you have a celebrity crush, Jason?”

He pulled my hand up to his mouth, turned it, and kissed the inside of my wrist, murmuring, “The only crush I have is you. The only person I see is you.”

He made some intense eye contact with me that had me burning up and wishing I’d never had the genius idea to make sex off limits. In that moment, I wanted him to show me with his body the things he was doing to me with his eyes.

“That’s….” I cleared my throat. “That’s a very good answer. So what brings you down here and out of your crazy magician cave?”

“I went to take a piss and saw you were gone. It’s a good thing I came after you, too. Otherwise, the pervy fuck of a barman might have tried to spike your drink.” His words dripped with possession…and I kind of liked it. “I also have a question for you about our bet,” he went on, piquing my interest.

“Oh, yes?”

His gaze darkened roguishly. “I need to know what your limits are. Do you want me just to scare you, or are you giving me permission to mindfuck the shit out of you?”

Well, the second option sounded both frightening and sexy as hell, which was exactly why I swallowed and answered, “The latter. Yes, definitely the latter.”

Jay grinned in approval and brought his arms around my waist, his fingers kneading my hips. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Arriving back in Vegas was a whirlwind of activity. Jay had to get back to doing his show five nights a week, which meant I had to return to work, too. Since I hadn’t won our bet yet, I was still confined to the usual (boring) man choices of the wardrobe world. My artistic freedom was going to come at a price, and that price would be fooling my husband into believing he couldn’t frighten me.

I spent our first afternoon home secretly Googling techniques for staying calm in times of crisis. If I knew anything about Jay, he was going to go all out, so I needed every advantage I could get.

In other news, we’d been invited to a Halloween party being thrown by Tina, the girl who worked as Jay’s assistant. Don’t get me wrong — he didn’t have those sexy magician’s assistants who wore sparkly outfits that showed lots of leg and/or cleavage, but he did have a PA. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t like her much, and I rarely disliked people.

This was probably due to the fact that she showed a lot of leg and/or cleavage anyway.

I could tell she fancied the pants off Jay and was secretly biding her time. It was ridiculous; I mean, we’d just gotten married, for Christ’s sake. And really, it was so unclassy to have designs on someone else’s man. It wasn’t as if there weren’t thousands of other eligible bachelors in the city for her to set her sights on. No, she wanted mine. I knew Jay was aware of her affections and a little discombobulated over what to do about it. He was trying to be a gentleman, but I thought maybe he was going to put in for a new assistant soon.

I was hoping that was what he’d do, because I was one step away from making a voodoo doll, and since I was a dab hand at crafts, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that I would….

Anyway, I was holding my head high and not succumbing to the urge to trip Tina and her too-tight jeans over, and I had agreed to go to the party. It was fancy dress, which meant I needed to find a suitable outfit. I kind of felt like going down the comedic route by dressing as a beer bottle or a stop sign, but that wouldn’t do. All of the women would be going as sexy angels, witches, nurses, vampires…llamas. No? Okay, then.

The point was, I needed to come up with something that was fancy dress but also provocative. It was shallow, but I wanted to look better than Tina. I would have designed and made something myself, but I was too rushed off my feet. That meant I had to go to a costume shop and buy an outfit. Unable to decide, I ended up buying three and bringing them back to the hotel with me to try on. They were as follows:

1.) Black pleather cat suit with spider-web netting over the boobage. Indecently tight.

2.) Sexy cop outfit complete with handcuffs and a bare midriff.

3.) Another black cat suit, this one for an actual cat, with cute ears and stick-on whiskers. Again, indecently tight. I thought I might have to be sewn into it like Olivia Newton John in the “You’re the One That I Want” scene from Grease.

And you know what? I kind of hated all three. I just wanted to wear a nice dress, do something cool with my hair, and be done with it.

It had been three days since we made the bet, and I was dying to give in and call it off. In terms of our relationship, everything was still very new, and I had a hunger for Jay that simply wouldn’t abate. It was torture to watch him doing stage rehearsals, which could be very rigorous, and hence he would work up quite the sweat. Yesterday he pulled off his T-shirt, balled it up, and used it to dab his forehead. It almost felt like it was happening in slow motion, like a Diet Coke ad or something. I mean, how was I supposed to resist that? Tina almost spontaneously combusted with an eye orgasm.