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“Felt what?” Eliza asks, walking into the kitchen.
“Oh, nothing important,” Ro says.
“Are you going to all your classes?” Eliza asks sternly. “Keeping those grades up?”
“Of course, Mom. I’m not letting my 4.0 go.”
“Good girl.” Eliza puts an arm around her daughter’s shoulder and gives her a quick hug.
The small gesture makes me think of my own mom. She’s not a soft, motherly type, but she’s still my mom. She never got over me choosing to be with my dad over her after the divorce. Even though she’s a very flawed person, I should make time to go home and visit sometime.
“How about you, Gia?” Eliza asks me, giving me a quick side hug, too. “Are you doing okay?”
I smile gratefully at her. “Yes, I’m good.”
“Still working on your poker game?”
“I am.”
No one—not even Ro—knows how much money I make playing poker. My father raised me to keep things like that close to the vest. Ro knows I make enough to support myself, but her parents worry I’m going into debt chasing a dream.
“And you’re okay on money?” Eliza asks me.
“I’m good, thank you.”
Ro’s parents are middle class, but the way they’ve accepted me into their family, I have a feeling they’d offer help with money if I needed it. I always wished for a family like this when I was growing up, with family dinners and time spent just being together.
My dad was a poker junkie, though. And now I am, too. I’m already itching to get back to a table tomorrow night.
Because I am chasing a dream, but it has nothing to do with the amount of money I win. It’s about what that money will allow me to do. I’m out for revenge, and nothing will distract me from getting it.
Chapter Five
Maverick
“Want to go out tonight?” I ask Pike as I walk into the main locker room area, a towel secured around my waist after my post-practice shower.
He gives me a wry grin. “Do you mean actually go out, or do you mean search poker rooms for that woman who’s probably not even in Vegas anymore?”
“Yes or no, dickhead?”
“Yeah, I’ll go. But seriously, give it up, man. We’ve checked pretty much every poker room on the Strip.”
“So we’ll go off-Strip.”
He shakes his head and grins. “I don’t care where we go, as long as I can play some cards.”
“You guys going out tonight?” Pax asks as he approaches.
“Yeah, you in?” Pike says.
Pax hesitates a moment before saying, “Yeah, I’m in.”
“Still traumatized from the other night?” Pike cracks, laughing his ass off.
Pax glares at him. “You wouldn’t be laughing if it happened to you.”
“What?” I ask, looking back and forth between the two of them.
“You didn’t hear?” Pike hikes his brows up, still laughing as he looks at Pax. “You gotta tell him, dude.”
“I’m glad the most painful and harrowing experience of my life is so amusing to you.”
Alexei Petrov is laughing from the other side of the room. “That was the funniest shit I’ve ever heard in my life, man.”
“What happened?” I ask Pax.
He sighs heavily. “I was out with a couple of guys the other night and I met this woman I wanted to hook up with.”
“Yeah?”
“So we went back to her place. You know, had another drink, made out on the couch, and then she takes me into her bedroom.”
My chin drops, because I know where this is heading. “She was a guy, wasn’t she?”
Pax shakes his head. “No. Honestly, I would have preferred that to what actually happened.”
Now I’m intrigued. A couple other guys walk over to hear his story.
“She’s got one of those four-poster beds, right?” Pax continues. “And she asks if she can handcuff me to it. I told her she could put my wrists on the two posts at the pillow end, but I didn’t want my ankles handcuffed. So she goes to her underwear drawer and takes out two sets of handcuffs and cuffs me to the bed. I’m already naked and then I watch her undress and I’m thinking she’s gonna ride me raw. Can’t fucking wait. And then…” He shakes his head and looks away.
“Keep going,” Pike says. “Don’t be shy. Tell ‘em what happened next.”
Pax turns back to me and picks up the story. “She opens her nightstand drawer and tells me she’s got a surprise for me. And she pulls out a tube of something I thought was lube. I was like, okay, I haven’t had a hand job in a while, this’ll be fun.”
“It wasn’t lube?” our teammate Grady asks, eyes widening.
“She squeezes a bunch of it into her hands and rubs it all over me,” Pax says, rubbing his face. “All fucking over me…dick, balls, even my asshole. And then I feel this tingling sensation, and I ask her what it is, right. She starts stroking my dick, which is covered in the shit she squeezed out of the tube, and a few seconds later, the tingling turns into a burning. I thought my dick was going to burst into flames.”
