AllFreeNovel
Share Us
One in particular who was quickly stealing my heart.
* * *
“So, each of you take turns hosting the monthly poker game?” I asked hours later, sitting slightly behind Asher where he was seated at the poker table.
“Yes,” Asher answered while the others nodded.
I was freshly showered and in a ridiculously comfortable sundress, Brynn wearing much of the same where she sat behind Weston. Which was a relief, since the girls Ethan had brought were wearing skin tight club dresses with all manner of sequins on them as they flitted back and forth from him and to the bar. And they looked amazing in them, for sure, but I thought I’d missed the memo on the dress code, but Brynn had been my savior.
“I haven’t hosted yet,” Doyle O'Brien said from where he sat on Gareth’s left. The older man was stout, his suit looking like it was one size too small as he shifted anxiously in his chair.
“That’s because this is your first game,” Crossland snapped, not disguising his annoyance at the newcomer.
None of them were very good at hiding their discontent for the man, actually.
Asher had told me earlier when he introduced him that Weston had lost a Ducati race to Doyle, which had earned him a seat at their exclusive table. Doyle had a kind of overconfident and sleazy attitude about him, but I was doing my best not to judge. Especially when his daughter, Serenity, was so sweet when we’d met just minutes prior. She sat behind her father, quiet and contemplative, definitely on the shy side but kind all the same.
“Texas Hold’em?” I whispered into Asher’s ear after Weston had dealt the cards.
Asher folded his cards, then turned to look at me with an eyebrow raised.
“What?” I asked. “I have a whole series set in Vegas,” I explained. “I know my way around a poker table. What I’m confused about is the chips.” Normally, in a regular Texas Hold’em cash game, there were at least three colors of chips varying in monetary amounts. More, if you were bringing a lot of coin to the table. Here they only had white chips resting next to stacks of cash, a black sharpie sitting not far from the two.
Asher smiled. “I’ll have to add those to my reading list,” he said, then reached for one of the white chips he had in his stack and handed it to me.
I took the chip, flipping it over to see words scrawled in blank ink across it. The Waverly Hotel.
I tilted my head at him. “What, this is like to stay there for the night?”
“No,” he said. “I own that hotel.”
“And you’re betting the entire hotel?”
Asher nodded like it was the most obvious and easy thing in the world. “If I bet that and one of them wins it, I have my lawyers sign it over to them within the week.”
My lips popped open, shock rippling through me. Asher tracked the move, a smirk shaping his lips.
“It might seem outrageous,” he said. “But when you have as much money as we do, we have to bet with things that have more stakes attached to them or the game would be pointless. We have our own set of rules, including cash to cover the blinds, but for the real bets, we use whatever raises the stakes.” He explained it so effortlessly and without a hint of condescendence. He wasn’t bragging that he had enough money to buy and sell a hundred companies, he was just stating facts. I loved that about him.
“And earlier this morning,” I said, handing him back the chip. “When Crossland backed out…”
“Weston gets to write something on one of his chips,” Asher answered my unspoken question. “Because Weston is hosting and Crossland didn’t complete the task before the game. It’s standard for all of us. You back out, you hand over a blank chip.”
“Ohmigod,” I said. “So, someone could write the Carolina Reapers on a chip of yours and you could lose the team?”
“Technically, yes. But I rarely back out of the experiences, so I hardly ever give out blank chips.”
Weston finished dealing the hand—Gareth won something from Weston I couldn’t make out on the chip—and then Weston passed the deck to Gareth to deal the next hand.
Asher didn’t like his cards again, and folded, only losing the pre-flop blinds.
The game went on, and I was fascinated to watch how they played, betting things I couldn’t even imagine owning. There were also lower-stake chips too, like when Crossland won against Ethan who had to supply Crossland’s next charity event with food and drinks.
Servers brought me and Brynn and Serenity drinks, though Doyle never allowed his daughter anything other than club soda and lime. It rubbed me the wrong way, but Serenity seemed fine with it, so I kept my feminist filter in check. The girl was at least twenty, so clearly she shouldn’t need her father’s permission for anything, and I even caught Gareth glaring at the way Doyle spoke to her, but I wasn’t about to insert myself where I wasn’t wanted.
