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“Hopefully, justalmostfalling today,” he said, slowing down. Anna followed suit. “But back to Avril, she’s going with the classic: Texas Hold’em. If you’ve ever seen a professional game of poker on TV, it was probably that. It’s pretty easy to learn, but unlike Blackjack, you’re playing against the other players, not the dealer. Best hand wins.”
At Anna’s behest, the two spent the next leg of their skating time talking about what might be the world’s most famous casino card game. He filled her in on all the terminology, really only needing to mention things once before she learned them. She’d proved her acumen quickly when he’d taught her the rules of Blackjack back at her apartment, and it proved itself again here.
When he started discussing strategies and tips, she aptly listened, now skating backward so she could still look at him. As he’d assumed, she remained as graceful on the ice no matter how she was skating.
Comparatively, he wasn’t as quick to acclimatize to skating as she was to cards. He remained mildly unstable whenever he tried to pick up any real speed, wobbling occasionally, though he staved off any falls. Anna kept her speed matched to his, appearing unperturbed at his mild pace. He briefly considered what Avril had claimed when he’d come skating with the two of them: that Anna could pull off all manner of impressive maneuvers, though she’d never do so with others around. The other pairs didn’t seem in any hurry to vacate the rink, so he supposed that he’d just have to keep on imagining what those maneuvers might be—if she would have even agreed to show off a little had it just been the two of them.
“So, depending on how serious the game is, folding immediately is fairly necessary for success?” Anna asked while he outlined a few golden rules in the game.
“Yeah, it’ll happen a fair bit in a high-stakes game. For raising, it’s usually a matter of position---where you are in the betting order. There are only about sixteen starting hands that you’d want to play through no matter what position you’re in, but there are a hundred and sixty-nine possible starting hands in the game. Knowing when to fold is one of the most important skills to learn.”
Anna began to nod, smiling as she attentively absorbed the information he doled out. Yet, midway through tilting her head, her posture froze, her eyes widened, and only years of instinct developed on the ice kept her from staggering and potentially falling.
The change was so severe and sudden that Liam didn’t know what quite to make of it at first. It was as though he’d blinked, and in that infinitesimal time frame, someone had replaced Anna with a doppelganger—one doing an abysmal job of mimicking her current joviality. Maybe it was over a pay dispute or something.
But no. The Anna in front of him was the Anna who he’d been with for the past two hours. So, what could have shattered her pleasant mood so completely?
She was staring right at it, and he only needed to follow the direction of her gaze to understand immediately—and to feel his good mood also go the way of the dodo bird.
Wearing the delight that he’d stolen from Anna, Trent Alden leaned against the rink’s wall not thirty feet from them.
“What the hell?” Liam muttered under his breath, face contorting into a deep frown.
Anna, however, remained ghostly silent. Their momentum thankfully carried them away from the scion of Alden Electronics, and he didn’t pursue them. He just kept staring at Anna where he was, wearing a smug look.
Once they were a bit further away from the black hole of Anna’s joy, she found her voice.
“Liam,” she whispered, though they were far enough away that she shouldn’t need to worry about Trent eavesdropping. “Let’s get our things and go, please. Liam.”
He’d started to glance over his shoulder toward Trent again when she called his name a second time, more forcefully than he’d ever heard her voice. It was enough to curtail his look. Bringing his focus back to Anna, whose expression hadn’t mended in the slightest, he nodded.
“Sure, let’s do that.”
Thankfully, Trent had posted himself at a location relatively far from where he and Anna had left their shoes and her purse. Skating around the rink as if nothing was wrong, they suddenly stopped off at the nearest gate to their things and began an overtly rapid attempt to get out of their skates.
Unsurprisingly, as soon as he realized it, Trent started wrapping around the rink toward them.
“You can just go ahead and go if you want to,” Liam told Anna as they swapped into their shoes. He still had to return his skates, but Anna could potentially get to the parking lot and leave without having to share a conversation with the odious man making his way toward them if she hurried.
“I’m fine,” Anna said tightly, sounding anything but fine.
How had he known they—or she, really—was here? He didn’t believe for a second that this was a simple happenstance, which he could already imagine Trent was about to claim it was. Barring something heinously creepy, such as her father tracking her phone and letting Trent or his father know where she was, the only two who might have overheard their plans were the tailor back at Mercer’s and the older man she’d run into.
He wasn’t wealthy enough to know just how things worked in Anna’s echelon of wealth, but maybe it was some self-serving attempt to curry favor with the Royces and the Aldens. Who fucking knew?
What he did know was that the last thing he wanted to let Anna be subjected to was Trent Alden. He’d seen how he was the other day. And the sheer creepiness of appearing here bordered on stalking, as far as he was concerned.
Skates off and shoes on, they’d begun to head back to return his skates when Trent reached them. Anna, either from a lifetime of instruction on manners or perhaps simply because she didn’t want to feel like she was fleeing, stopped and faced Trent once he entered polite speaking distance. He’d already called out to her, so any hope of feigning ignorance of his interest in speaking to her had collapsed like a tower of wet cards.
“Hello, Trent,” she said, smiling politely, though there were a few more jagged edges to it than usual. “I didn’t realize you skated.”
“I’ve been taking it up,” the blond-haired successor to Alden Electronics said.
What a bald-faced lie,Liam thought, clenching his jaw.
Arrogance, and now a fair degree of smugness, still rolled off his body in waves, though there was a pungent waft of cologne that outdid it. He was all smiles, oblivious or uninterested in Anna’s clear discomfort about his presence. The same could be said about his awareness of Liam’s presence—again.
Does he not recognize me?Somehow, the idea that Trent had literally forgotten about him, even though they’d met just three days ago, seemed laughably plausible. He was the exact type of person who discarded his memories of anyone he sneered down at moments after they vanished from his conceited gaze.
