Page 74 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

I know this expression. I’ve catalogued it. It precedes nothing good and everything entertaining.

“Good, you’re all awake,” he says.

“It’s eleven,” Asher says. “Where are you?”

“My suite. Very good Barolo, by the way, Killian, I’ll send you the vineyard details.” He takes a sip and looks at the three of us on his screen with the satisfaction of a man who has found his people from six time zones away. “I have a proposal.”

“No,” Killian says.

Maddox looks at him. “I haven’t said it yet.”

“You have that look.”

“What look?”

“You have the look you had in Monaco in 2019 before you suggested the thing with the boat.”

“The boat thing turned out fine.”

“Maddox.”

He smiles. “Strip poker.”

There is a brief, resonant silence.

“Absolutely not,” Killian says.

“I’m not twenty-one,” Asher says, which is such a specific and personal objection that it makes me want to ask a follow-up question immediately.

I look at the screen. “Harper. You’re the tiebreaker.”

“I’m not a tiebreaker, I’m a person.” I pause. “Also how does this work over video? You’re in Milan.”

The expression on his face sharpens into something and I already know what he’s thinking.

“Glad you asked,” he says.

Maddox explains the logistics with the focused enthusiasm of a man who has clearly been thinking about this for longer than the last five minutes. There’s a card app. Honor system on the hands. He can see us, we can see him. When someone loses a hand they take something off. He is also, he clarifies, subject to the same rules and will be taking things off on his end. The hotel room, not the bar. He’ll relocate.

“This is insane,” Asher says.

“You said that about the Milan deal in 2021 and that one made us forty-two million dollars.”

“That’s a completely different category of situation.”

“Is it though?” Maddox looks at me through the screen. “Sweetheart. Thoughts.”

I look at Killian, who is watching me with the expression of a man who has already decided what he’s going to do and is waiting to see what I do first. I look at Asher, who has his book closed now and is looking at the phone with the particular expression of a man whose objections are becoming less structural and more reflexive.

“What are the starting items?” I ask.

Maddox’s smile does the thing it does. “That’s my girl.”

Killian picks up his scotch. “Deal the cards.”

Here is the thing about Maddox St. James that I perhaps should have understood before agreeing to play cards with him: he has been doing this for money since he was nineteen years old.

Not strip poker specifically. Cards. High-stakes, real-money, read-the-room-or-lose-everything cards. He grew up in a house where there was never enough of anything and he learned early that the fastest way to change that was to be better at the table than everyone else in the room, and he has had twenty-nine years since then to refine the skill. The man does not have tells. Or if he does he’s buried them somewhere I don’t have the experience to locate.