A burn streaks across my cheeks, an all too common occurrence now. He always knows just what to say to pull a blush from me. I glance to the bunkhouse. “Is he a close friend?”
“Yep.” One big hand slides down my side. “And maybe when we go to my parents for Christmas dinner—if you’re feeling up to it, that is—I’ll introduce you. He’s a good friend and a good man.”
Maybe he is, but I don’t think any man is as good a man as the one I married. His hand flexes around my hip in the gentlest squeeze. Measuring me once a day isn’t enough for him. No, he needs some small way to touch me multiple times throughout the day to reassure himself that I’m eating enough, and just mentioning Christmas dinner opened up a perfect opportunity.
As usual with these not so hidden inspections, Warren ends it with one last squeeze and a softly pressed kiss to my temple. “So…all those sighs of boredom. What say we play a game since the little one’s sleeping the day away?”
“What kind of game?”
His free hand plays with some loose strands of my hair. “Checkers. Ever played it before?”
“I think so.” A vague memory forms of me and another little girl moving some circular pieces over a patterned board before Reverend Overstreet sternly chastised us for risking our souls in a game of chance. “Where we try to move all our pieces to the other side of the board?”
“That’d be the one.” He tugs at my waist. “C’mon. Let’s bring the cradle to the kitchen and see how many rounds we can do before our little girl wakes up.”
It turns out we can play quite a few while Emmalinesleeps. Usually one hour is her preferred nap length, but some of them have lengthened to two hours lately. After one practice round where he refreshes the rules for me, we play for real and I win four games to Warren’s three.
“Beaten by my own wife.” His wide smile belies the rueful shake of his head. “You’re getting too good at this.”
I look at the pile of red pieces I collected from him and can’t stop a small smirk of my own. “That was pretty fun.” Not at all an evil game like Reverend Overstreet believed, and not so much given to chance as it is simple strategy. “Ready to go again?”
He leans back and crosses his arms. “I think you’ve conquered checkers pretty good. How about a different game?”
“Like what?”
“Twenty-One. Just need to grab the—shit.” Warren winces. “Uhhh…never mind. Not that one. I’ll, um…think of something else.”
“What’s wrong with that one?” It sounded innocent enough, but now I’m not so sure. Not with the troubled look on his face.
“It’s a, uh…” He rubs the back of his neck. “A card game.”
We both fall silent for a moment.
“Oh.” I’m taken aback, and I know my expression shows it.
“Shit,” he groans, raking a hand through his dark brown hair to muss it even further. “I don’t know what I was thinking, Mara. Damn it, I didn’t think at all. I’m sorry. Should’ve known it’d remind you of?—”
“No,” I interrupt, coming to a quick realization. “It’s okay. Neil’s the one who used the cards in a bad way and offered up something that wasn’t his to give. Just…let’s maybe not play poker. That way it will be completely different.” I smile softly. “I don’t know anything about Twenty-One, though. You’ll have to teach me.”
“You sure?” Still obviously feeling terrible, he eyes me suspiciously. “You’re not just saying that?”
I gesture towards the confining walls. “We’re stuck here for a good while, and I don’t think I can play endless rounds of checkers. That’d make me just as bored as I was to begin with.”
“If you’re really sure.” He drags out the words as if expecting me to change my mind at any moment. But I don’t, and he accepts that. “All right, get ready to learn.”
The cards fly in the most mesmerizing blur between Warren’s long fingers as he shuffles them. I’ve been paying far too much attention to his fingers lately, but something about the confident way they handle the cards has my heart skipping a beat. Ridiculous, I know, because they’re only fingers.
But they’re his.
And if his fingers have me feeling this way, what about the rest of him?
“You’ll get two cards. The goal is for them to be as close to twenty-one as possible, but the choice you have to make is deciding whether or not you’re satisfied with the two numbers you have or if you want to draw another card. The problem with drawing another card is now you might get too high of a card and go over twenty-one.”
“So it’s more a game of chance than skill.”
He concedes my observation. “In a way. But you still need skill in making the decision. How about we do a trial hand before the real thing?”
So we do. And that’s when he teaches me terms like stand, hit, and bust and the hand motions to representthem. Oh, and to be mindful of his cards, as well, because one of his will show while the other is facedown.
