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“Astrid, Nola, and Thea, this is my husband Zach and our dear friend Cal. Astrid, you work with Cal, right?”
As if Fallon wasn’t absolutely aware of their connection.
“You’re the guy?” Thea asked as she pushed her glasses up.
“Oh yeah,” Nola said after a quick up-and-down assessment. “He’s definitely the guy.”
Cal lifted an eyebrow in Astrid’s direction, and a splotch of red appeared at the base of her throat.
“Can we just sit down and play?” she mumbled.
Somehow she ended up sitting next to him—and in this case “somehow” meant by the mechanisms of her friends and Fallon with an assist from Blackburn who “rested” his foot on one of the legs of Cal’s chair and accidentally shoved it closer to Astrid’s.
Being this close to her after two weeks of near misses was either heavenly hell or a hellish heaven—he couldn’t decide. Just like he couldn’t make up his mind whether to throw her over his shoulder like some kind of caveman or to keep on ignoring her like she was him—not that either of them was doing a good job of it, considering the whole team was gossiping about them. That was no doubt exactly what she wanted to avoid. He couldn’t blame her after what had happened with Jones. The story had been juicy and the coverage extensive at the time. It must have been brutal.
But there weren’t any Ice Knights at the pub tonight, or reporters, or people intent on stirring up shit—except Blackburn, of course, but he didn’t count. He was an asshole, but he wasn’t that kind of asshole.
“So I’m the guy, huh?” he asked, keeping his volume low enough that only Astrid heard him.
“One of them,” she shot back, all brass and sass.
Was that supposed to put him off? Going by the what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it look she gave him, probably so. Yeah, well, he wasn’t that guy. To him, that was just an opportunity to show her why he was better, much better, than any other guy for her tonight. He slid his gaze from Astrid to check the rest of the table. Everyone else at the table was super focused on their bingo cards. He didn’t buy it for a second, but that didn’t mean he was going to let this chance slip by.
He leaned in close and dipped his head so his lips nearly brushed against the curve of her ear. “Just as long as I’m the only one tonight.”
She shivered and let out a shaky breath. “I’m only here to play bingo.”
“Well, you know how much I like watching you get yours,” he said with a wink that made her flush deepen even more. “But unlike the pantry, I’m winning tonight.”
Two rounds later and he was doing just that.
“Bingo,” he yelled out.
Cal read back the numbers that formed his bingo, and the jerk from the other night handed him a raffle ticket for the big pot given out at the end of the night. Astrid grumbled something that sounded a lot like “lucky bastard” under her breath and waved at the skinny kid going table to table selling additional bingo cards. She got three more and lined them up with her other cards. Someone definitely did not like losing. He got that. He also got a little closer to her, scooting his chair a few inches over so that the outside of their legs were nearly touching under the table.
He popped one of the tiny pretzels from the pile in front of her cards into his mouth and crunched it extra loudly while she glared at him. “You wanna rub me for luck?”
“I do fine on my own,” she said, all prim and proper even as she let her leg fall open enough that her knee rested against his thigh.
“Yes, you do.” He dropped his hand to her thigh, dragging his fingers an inch or two up the inside seam of her jeans. He leaned in again to whisper, “You do very fine on your own if the other night’s texting is anything to go by.”
Her eyes darkened with desire, and just when he thought he had her, she snapped her legs closed and left his hand just hanging in the air.
“C nineteen,” Andy called out, starting the next round before Cal could say anything else.
Twelve numbers later and he was one O fifteen away from another win. Astrid kept cutting glances at his card and hissing out curses in several different languages every time he marked another spot.
“O,” Andy said into the mic before taking a pause to really draw out the drama. “Fifte—”
That’s when Astrid struck, gliding her hand up the inside of Cal’s thigh and scattering every thought in his head. It wasn’t until someone a few tables over yelled out bingo and Astrid pulled her hand back to her own lap that Cal registered what had just happened.
“You play dirty,” he said, but he wasn’t complaining.
“No.” She ripped off the used bingo sheets on one of her nine cards. “I play to win.”
“But you didn’t,” he said.
She looked over at him and lifted an eyebrow. “You really think so?”
