by Shen, L. J.
“Exquisite, thank you.” I dabbed the corners of my mouth unnecessarily with a napkin. “And your white quail?”
“Good.” He gave me a cynical once-over, knowing very well I was faking it. “Wanna share the dessert assortment?”
I tried to think what a girl like Gabriella would reply to that. That’s what he liked, right?
That’s the company he willingly chose.
“Thank you, but I don’t eat sugar after six,” I murmured.
“You destroyed a sleeve of Oreos last night. On the bed. Then I caught you munching on the crumbs this morning.”
I felt myself flushing pink. “I’m trying to get better about it. I have to watch my figure.”
“Your figure’s perfect.”
“Is that a medical assessment or a personal one?”
“It’s a goddamn fact I wish wasn’t true because it has been distracting me since my years on the high school football team when you’d come to Rob’s games. What’s gotten into you?”
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.
That was a lot to unpack, but he delivered the barb with such ease, with an almost mocking smirk, I forced myself not to pry the subject open. I couldn’t afford to argue with him publicly and/or kiss him.
Not tonight.
“I’m trying not to cause you any trouble.”
“By being the most boring woman on planet Earth?”
“By trying to act like someone you’d actually be seen with,” I snapped, my nose and eyes feeling unbearably hot with humiliation.
I wasn’t going to cry, of course, but I was feeling all kinds of weird about trying to pacify a man who wasn’t my father or Bear. It went against my religion or something.
He groaned, flagging down our waitress.
“My only issue with you is that you like to dress the part people in town gave you. The rest of your personality is amusing to me. I can handle crazy. I speak the language fluently.”
The waitress approached, hugging a round black tray to her chest and looking at Cruz like he was her dessert assortment.
“Can you please get my wife that coconut cocktail she likes?”
“Upside-down Christmas margarita?” she beamed.
“With extra marshmallows,” I murmured quietly. Because dang, it was good. “And a whiskey for the gentleman, please. I don’t want to get drunk alone.”
“Any preferences?”
Cruz gave her his preference—of course he had one—and a moment later, I was sucking sweet, alcoholic goodness from a straw.
“You know you can drop the married undercover story. People must know we’re not a real couple by now.”
“I like to keep ’em guessing.” He threw me an enigmatic look. “I have a confession to make.”
“Will it make me want to punch your face?” I asked.
“Very possibly.”
“Then please wait until we go back to the room. I’m trying my hardest not to embarrass you.”
“Drink your cocktail, Tennessee. You’re impossible when you’re sober and eager to please.”
“Why do you call me that?” I dutifully sucked on my straw. “Tennessee. To everyone else, I’m Messy Nessy.”
He shrugged. “I don’t think you’re all that messy. And besides, Nessy reminds me of the Loch Ness monster, and frankly, I think you’re giving it a bad rep.”
I polished off the cocktail quickly and ordered another one with the dessert assortment, which, by the way, I pounced on, not giving Cruz the faintest opportunity to even taste a crumb.
“Where does all this food go?” Cruz finally asked, his eyes big and full of surprise.
I patted my flat stomach. “I have a fast metabolism.”
Oops.
That was just another way of saying I pooped a lot, wasn’t it? I wasn’t as guarded after two drinks in me, but I gave myself a free pass because we were still having a pleasant evening.
“I remember you used to eat a donut every morning and dissect the sprinkles one by one with your index finger and thumb and nibble on them slowly in high school.”
My mother used to take it as a personal offense that I did not gain weight from that habit. My lithe body was a genetic gift from my father’s side.
Trinity had taken after my mother. They were both always falling in and out of diets. Weight Watchers. South Beach. Ketogenic. Mediterranean. The baby food diet.
The clip-your-nose-while-you-eat diet was the worst. They did that so they couldn’t smell the food. Unfortunately, they also couldn’t breathe, which put a real dent in their efforts to survive it.
Anyway, and back to our subject, it surprised me that Cruz had paid any attention to me at all. I grew up thinking he was blissfully oblivious to my existence as more than Rob’s little, annoying girlfriend. If even that.
I curved an eyebrow. “You seem to remember a lot about me in high school.”
“I have a good memory.”
“Or stalking tendencies.”
“Ah, there she is. Soft as barbwire and just as subtle.”
“I’m starting to think you’re enjoying this.” I narrowed my eyes.
“I am. You’re giving me trouble. No one ever gives me trouble.”
“Such a hard life.” I put the back of my hand to my forehead, like an outraged Victorian duchess.
He leaned forward, letting his elbows drop on the table. Such a small gesture, and still, it filled me with unexpected delight to know that even the Almighty Dr. Cruz Costello could use a few table manner tweaks.
“So. What do you want me to teach you first?” he asked.
“How to make an entire town believe you’re the Lord’s gift when it is perfectly obvious you are Mr. Average with a fabulous ’stache?”
“I mean in the casino.”
But his smile widened further, making my knees part involuntarily under the table. I licked my lips when I thought about the dusting of dark blond hair peppered on his chest.
Yesterday at the pool was the first time since I was sixteen that I’d wanted to climb someone like a tree. My sexuality had been so dormant in recent years, I hadn’t realized it was still buried inside me.
“Oh. I don’t know. I think I’ll just go for the fruit machines.”
Translation: I couldn’t afford anything else.
He shook his head. “C’mon, Tennessee. You’re more hardcore than that.”
“I may be hardcore, but I’m also broke.”
“I’ll foot the bill.”
“You’ve done enough of that already.”
“Not nearly. The truth of the matter is, I want to have a good time on this cruise, and if that means spending a few bucks, then I’m all for it. It’s not about you, Tennessee, it’s about me. If you really want to be like Gabriella Holland, you should let me treat you well.”
“I don’t want to be like Gabriella Holland,” I corrected him. “And I don’t want your charity.”
“You call that charity?” He snorted out. “Sweetheart, if I didn’t enjoy you, I’d leave you in the room and find someone else to keep me entertained.”
That was a backhanded compliment if I’d ever been slapped with one.
“You don’t expect me to put out, do you?” I cocked my head sideways.
“Expect? No. Hope? Always.”
I mulled this over.
It was true that I didn’t let men treat me well. In fact, I didn’t let them treat me at all. The very few men in town who had wanted more than a tumble between the sheets with me and actually went through the effort of so-called courting me were met with a cold shoulder.
I threw Tim Trapp’s flowers into the trash in front of his very eyes, donated the gifts Roy McCarthy sent me to charity, and flat-out refused a job with Eamon Levy as a secretary at his workshop, even though it had great benefits and medical insurance, because I knew he was going to ask me out.
But maybe this was the perfect solution. To play make-believe with a man I could never have in real life. To heal myself and practice a little th
rough this little adventure.
“All right. Teach me your ways, Master Costello.”
“Miss Turner, I thought you’d never ask.”
There were a few things that immediately stood out to me the first time I stepped into a casino.
First things first—this was not a place for people suffering from epilepsy.
The bright colors, blinding lights, constant ding-ding-dings echoing in your ears and dark surroundings made the place look like what could have happened to Alice had she stepped into Wonderland under the influence of LSD and way too many tequila shots.
It looked like the grown-up version of an arcade, only slimy instead of fun. With waitresses dressed in uniforms that made my Jerry & Sons outfit look like it belonged in a nunnery, floating between tables and handing drinks to sweaty men and women.
Cruz was right that the slot machines were probably a bad call. The only people occupying them were seventy-five and over, and it looked like you had to rely solely on luck, which, I was aware, was something I was not endowed with.
Plus, obtaining control of a situation—or at least having the illusion of having control—was important to me.
My eyes immediately drifted to the blackjack tables and the roulette. There was something downright sinister about them. Some magnetic force that made people look extra alert and nervous when the dealers slid cards on the tables.
I felt Cruz’s arm brush mine, and a shudder rippled through me again. I had to be careful. My inhibitions around him were already loose.
He stood beside me, glancing in the direction my head was turned.
“I think you’ll enjoy blackjack.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Lax rules, low-house edge, and fast pace. You’re a straight-to-business type of girl. You’ll like it.”
“I don’t know how to play.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
He laced my arm in his and tugged me forward, toward one of the velvet-green tables with the cards and the chips. The croupier gave us a quick smile as he dealt the players their cards, and I followed everyone’s hands carefully as Cruz’s lips skimmed over my ear tenderly.
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.
“This is my wife Jocelyn.”
“My pleasure.” Jocelyn extended her hand to Cruz for him to kiss.
He obediently did so, the obnoxious gentleman that he was.
“Honey, this is Dr. Costello, the guy I told you about yesterday after Ramona told us about the…incident.”
Here we go.
“This is Dalton,” Cruz ignored Dr. Wootton’s lukewarm introduction, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We went to med school together. Dalton, Jocelyn, this is my lovely date for the evening Tennessee.”
“Ah, date. Is that what you kids call it these days?” Dr. Wootton guffawed.
“What else would you call having a drink with a friend from town?” Cruz asked nonchalantly.
“Ramona says—”
“Ramona’s looking for a headline,” Cruz said. “Really, Dalton. I thought gossip was beneath you. We’re not in kindergarten anymore.”
Jocelyn suggested we grab a drink together, and both men were too polite to point out it was a terrible idea, so here we were, sipping drinks.
There were no empty seats at the bar, so we opted for a round table with four stools by the roulette tables. Personally, I thought Jocely
n’s nipples deserved a stool of their own. Were they enhanced, too?
I sat opposite her, and Cruz was in front of Dalton.
I guessed that it wasn’t a good time to confess to Cruz that I’d had three more drinks he wasn’t aware of while he was playing blackjack, and that I was tight-roping the line of drunk as a skunk.
Jocelyn couldn’t stop undressing Cruz with her gaze while Dalton seriously eye-plucked me into oblivion.
Were they swingers?
No judgment here, but there was no way I would participate in that kind of thing with this nipple-wielding power couple.
I decided to go for the same wine Jocelyn sipped, while the men stuck to whiskey. It occurred to me that I should probably stop drinking, but this was my first real experience with alcohol. Pathetic, considering I was near thirty, but also true. And this was the trip of new experiences, apparently.
“Where are you working these days?” Cruz asked Dalton, obviously trying to steer the conversation into safer territory.
“I’m a plastic surgeon in Greenville. At the Green View Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery Clinic.”
That could explain why his wife had enough plastic to mold an industrial trash can.
“Nice. That’s what you’ve been gunning for.”
“How ’bout you? Heard you ended up taking your old man’s job after all?” Dalton scooped an ice cube from his whiskey tumbler into his mouth, crushing it with his teeth. “Thought you had second thoughts about that?”
Cruz stiffened next to me. The good-natured smile still played on his lips, but I could tell something had shifted inside him.
“I was on the fence for half a minute. Ultimately, though, I like it in Fairhope.”
Dalton took a swig of his whiskey. “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers was playing in the background.
“Thought you said it gave you too many dark memories.”
I couldn’t help but snort out an unladylike giggle.
“Dark memories?” I echoed. “Cruz was, and always will be, Fairhope’s guiding light. I think his only unpleasant memory is being born, and that’s only because that’s the moment people began to fawn over him twenty-four seven and he got tired of being admired.”
Dalton turned his gaze toward me, seeing this as a direct invitation to answer my breasts.