As his lovely new wife Diana Maitland Richards melted into him, Charles Richards forgot everything else and just concentrated on the feeling of her soft lips and tongue mingling with his as they kissed each other slowly and deeply. He had just placed all of his chips on one number for a last spin on a Roulette wheel in the casino of The Riviera Resort in Las Vegas, where they were spending their honeymoon—having married less than 3 hours after they met in a pub in Los Angeles. They didn't hear the ball drop or hear the croupier announce the winner as 11 Black; they didn't stop kissing until the people around the table started cheering and a couple men slapped his shoulders!
When they realized that he had won, Charles picked Diana up, hugging her, and spun her around as they laughed excitedly. He set her back down and they watched as the croupier started piling up his stack of chips; they looked at each other and smiled excitedly as the croupier announced that he'd won over $3,000! They looked at each other again and said seriously at the same time, "It's time to quit!" They burst out laughing as they started gathering up all the chips to go cash them in.
As they headed toward the cashier's desk, Diana told Charles that she had made an appointment to get her hair done because she wanted to look nice for her performance in the nightclub later that evening. He told her that was fine; then she told him that she wanted to surprise him with a grand entrance at the nightclub after she was all made-up and dressed in the special gown he had bought for her. She asked him if he would mind cleaning up, dressing and leaving their suite at about 5:45 to go down to the nightclub for their 6:00 dinner reservation, and then she would join him as soon as she was able. Charles reluctantly agreed; he hated the thought of spending that much time away from her and he thought to himself that it had better be worth it!
When their chips were counted, Charles asked for $300 in cash and handed $100 to Diana, jokingly telling her he hoped that would be enough to pay for her salon appointment! Then he yelled, "OW!" and grabbed his right upper arm after Diana punched him for making it sound like she required a lot of services at the salon! He frowned as he looked at her and rubbed his arm and asked her, "How the hell did you learn to punch like that?"
She told him about the lessons her youngest brother had given her when she was just 7 years old. Her brother had been 17 at the time and he had been the youngest kid for a while and he'd learned to stand up for himself. When her brother saw how Diana let the other kids tease and pick on her, he'd taken her aside and shown her how to throw a really hard punch and told her to use it whenever some other kid just wouldn't leave her alone. She'd only had to do that a couple times before word got around that she could hit really hard, and the other kids finally started to leave her alone when she told them to—though they still teased her at times...from a distance!
He grinned as he frowned and said, "I'm going to have to remember not to tease you like that any more—I don't want any of my colleagues at the Bureau to start seeing bruises on me and then have to explain to them that my wife gave them to me! I'd never hear the end of that!"
He put the other $200 cash into his wallet and told the cashier they would request a Cashier's Check for the remaining amount when they were ready to leave tomorrow, so they waited while the cashier wrote out a voucher for the remaining amount of his winnings. Diana noticed that it was getting close to 4:30—the scheduled time for her appointment at the beauty salon, so she told Charles that she needed to get going to make her appointment. He told her when he came down at 5:45, he would leave the key to their room at the front desk and she could pick it up there to go up and dress before she came down.
She kissed him quickly and headed for the beauty salon. On the way there, she remembered that she didn't have any kind of purse or evening bag to go with her dress and she would need something just to throw the room key and some lipstick or whatever else she might need to freshen her make-up into. She popped into the clothing store again and asked the sales lady if they had any little evening bags; the sales lady remembered her from that morning and said she had just the thing. It was a little gold clutch bag that would match her shoes perfectly; she thanked the sales lady, paid for the bag and took off for the salon.
She told the ladies at the salon that she just wanted her hair curled and styled, but asked them not to use any hairspray because the hairspray would affect her vocal chords and she had to sing later. They told her that would be no problem; they had other setting solutions they could use that would hold her style for a while without having to spray it. Then she told them that she wanted the make-up they used to be as subtle as possible, but that she would be performing onstage and she didn't want to look "washed out" in the lights; they told her they would do their best and she could judge the results when they were through.
As she sat under a dryer with curlers in her hair, she closed her eyes and started singing the songs she was going to perform that evening, just to make sure she remembered all the words and the tunes. When she was done, she opened her eyes and saw a lot of the women in the salon were looking at her and grinning, and some of them were clapping; then she noticed one woman glaring at her. She frowned at the woman when she recognized her as one of the women who had been hanging around Charles at the Roulette table before she showed up and shooed them away. She kept staring at the woman and arched one of her eyebrows at her as if to say, "You want to challenge me, bitch? Go ahead!" The woman finally looked away.
Diana was thankful to finally get out from under the hot dryer and get those blasted curlers out of her hair! She hated messing with this stuff—that's why she rarely ever bothered; but this was a special occasion! She wanted her new husband to see just how beautiful she could be and feel confident as she performed this evening. She told the salon ladies that she was putting her trust in them to make her look as sexy as possible without looking like a tramp.