Desire ripped through my skin, veins, and bones. Suddenly, all I wanted to do was press my body to his and drink him in like fine champagne. He was waking the volcano again.
“Here’s the skinny of it. Each player wants to beat the dealer, meaning you don’t play against one another, you play against that gentleman over there. The way you do that is by getting a count as close as possible to twenty-one, without actually going over the number.”
My nipples puckered to attention at his husky voice, but I was entirely uninterested in the game and fully invested in feeling more of his body pressed against mine.
Yesterday’s brief kisses left me breathless, and now, semi-drunk and fully-horny, I wanted all of Cruz Costello.
“It’s your choice whether your ace will be worth one or eleven. Face cards are ten, and any other card is its pip value. So far so good?”
“Yup.”
I didn’t register anything he just said.
Something about a pimp. The only thing that got to me was the way he smelled, the way his lips moved over the shell of my ear, and his heavy arm against mine.
Cruz went on to explain about the betting, the shuffle and cut, the deal, splitting pairs, doubling down, and the naturals.
I successfully blocked every bit of the information with my piece-of-rock brain, instead focusing on the rhythm of my breaths as I wondered what would happen if I rubbed myself against him.
Note to self: do not drink and think. You are not good at that.
Cruz played a couple rounds, patiently reciting all the things he’d explained to me about blackjack throughout, even though I could tell it was annoying the men around us and entertaining the women draped on their arms.
I nodded vehemently, flagging down the waitresses for more and more cocktails whenever he looked away. I’d never gotten drunk publicly. Actually, I very rarely had more than a couple glasses on my own.
I got knocked up before I had the pleasure of getting trashed, and getting trashed after bearing a kid seemed unwise, if not completely impossible. Even if I’d wanted to, I was no longer attending high school and therefore hadn’t hung out with my former classmates. Drinking alone while breastfeeding? Not even on my worst day.
This meant that now, at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I was finally checking the box on my bucket list and getting completely tanked.
Cruz wasn’t aware of how much I drank.
He was too engrossed in his game and in explaining the game to me. Plus, I did a pretty good job at holding my drink under the table and being sneaky with my straw.
All in all, I still sported the mental age of a preteen.
Awesome.
When it was my turn to play, I proved to be talented in more than just being a fashion criminal and a terrible waitress, and lost him a whooping three-hundred bucks in three consecutive games.
It was swift and painless, seeing as I had no idea what I was doing, and slow to react when the dealer explained my next moves to me. But Cruz had a remarkable poker face and seemed casually amused, as opposed to murderous and upset.
“Wanna try again?”
He leaned way too close to me for me not to take advantage and sniff into his chest. His neck smelled amazing. I was momentarily blind with rage when I thought of how Gabriella must’ve enjoyed all this male goodness in bed for months and months.
“Are you crazy?” I hiccupped. “I’m a national disaster.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. State hazard, maybe. And you’re still learning.”
“At your expense.”
“As I said, that’s my problem, not yours.”
“And what a beautiful problem to have on your hands, eh, Dr. Costello?” A man’s voice drifted from behind my shoulder.
I swiveled around to face a hunky man, muscular as Robocop, with trimmed graying hair, and a button-up shirt that threatened to burst. He reeked of enough cologne to drown a beaver, and next to him was a woman with bleached-blonde hair and a red dress that highlighted all of her enhanced assets.
Her nipples were so prominent through her clothes, I wondered if it was a fashion statement of some kind. I mean, the place was air-conditioned, but it wasn’t that cold.
Suddenly, I saw myself in that woman. The skimpy clothes. The in-your-face sexuality. It was all a front and made me feel uncomfortable.
“Dr. Wootton. It’s been a while.”
The two men shook hands. You could cut the tension in the air with a butter knife.
Two things I knew for sure—Dr. Wootton was the colleague Mrs. Warren had referred to, the person who’d recognized Cruz, and that these two men were not on good terms.