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“It’s a serious situation, Sam.”
“I know.” She stared at his face, her gaze lingering on the bruises instead of his eyes as she whispered, “You think I don’t know that?”
“I need you to focus.”
Sam picked up one of the plastic-wrapped soap packets and hurled it at him, landing a direct hit to his chest. “Did you figure this was my idea of fun? That I wanted to come to Vegas and help a porn star pay off his bookie? Trust me, this is not my idea of happy-happy-fun times, okay? I’m doing this to help you, so try to remember that before you get snippy with me.” Tears were welling in the corners of her eyes, and her voice had gotten high and shaky.
Where had all the fire come from all of a sudden? The Sam he knew was mostly timid with an occasional bitchy streak, but otherwise personified the ideal of girl next door. This Sam had spunk and a serious sassy side to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re helping me. I’m just a little freaked out.”
“You think I’m not freaked out?”
Ethan tapped the cards, too startled by her intensity to meet her gaze, especially when it looked like she might cry. Her commitment to helping him was surprising, even to him, and he was touched by her concern so much it made his chest hurt. Why did she care so much what happened to him?
There was work to be done before he’d have an opportunity to get philosophical about Sam’s emotional attachment to him and what it meant.
He still needed to teach her how to recognize when she had a good hand, which was proving to be more difficult than he’d anticipated. She quickly grasped the basics of the game, but it was the various combinations—full houses and flushes—she hadn’t gotten a handle on quite yet. With the night growing later, he needed to get her ready so she could play and hopefully win.
If she didn’t win, he could royal flush his life down the drain.
Chapter Sixteen
Sam toyed with the hem of her dress, trying to pull it lower to give some illusion of modesty.
“Where’s the rest of it?” she asked, touching the back of her thighs and wishing they weren’t so damned bare.
“Stop playing with it.” Ethan lightly slapped her hands away from the bottom of the dress and stood back to give her an assessing look. “I don’t know how, but you manage to make even that dress sort of proper.”
Sam glanced at herself in the mirror and met Ethan’s gaze before he did another once-over of her body, his eyes seeming to lock on to her ass.
Which was dangerously close to claiming its freedom.
“What was wrong with the one I had on?”
“You looked beautiful in that dress. Men would have admired you, but no one was going to be distracted by you in that thing.”
She tugged the new dress again, dreading how much it would inevitably rise when she sat down at the gaming table. As it was, the thing barely covered both cheeks. There was a very real possibility she’d flash her underwear at someone when she sat down.
Thankfully, considering what she’d hoped to be doing with Ethan that night, she had opted for her fanciest, laciest pair of panties, so if someone did see them, at least they’d think she had taste. Unfortunately the person they were meant for was too busy trying to keep her from fidgeting to notice the effort she’d gone to.
“I don’t see why this is necessary.” In addition to the barely there hem, the dress was cut low in the front, giving the world a good eyeful of her assets both coming and going. She looked more like the girls she’d met at the AVAs than herself.
Her height didn’t make matters any better either because the dress made her stupid legs look about a foot longer, so she felt like a baby giraffe in a black bandage dress.
“If you’re wearing something like this, it helps you. The other players will be too busy looking at all this.” He indicated her cleavage, which had already been enhanced with a little help from the fine folks at Victoria’s Secret. “If they’re distracted, your other tells won’t be as obvious.”
He’d mentioned her tells on several occasions through the evening, giving her the indication she might as well have a neon billboard on her forehead whenever she had a good hand. Sam had thought she kept a decent straight face, but according to Ethan she was terrible at hiding her reactions.
He might have a point about the dress. She was already staring at her cleavage. Perhaps the men at the table might have a similar—or better—reaction to it. She adjusted her boobs in the dress, trying to display them to their best advantage.
“Don’t muck around with it so much. You have to look comfortable.”
“I’m not comfortable.”
“They don’t need to know that.”
Sam lifted her arms then dropped them, unable to manage a good shrug in the binding material. “I think I look ridiculous.”
