One Night Gamble

by Katherine Garbera

  “Talia, Brown Eyes, I never lose,” he said.

  She shook her head. “You just did.”

  And at that moment, he knew he’d said the wrong thing. But he had no idea how to play it any different. If he could get her back into bed where he could show her with his body what she meant to him, he might have a chance. But it wasn’t looking likely.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?” she asked. “Because guess what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not the first man to say those words to me. Most of my childhood I was told, ‘Don’t worry, kiddo, I’ll double your lunch money, I never lose.’ You know what? He did lose. Maybe not that week or the next, but eventually I had no lunch money. And I had to ask for free lunch or worse, ask Gran,” Talia said. “You are going to lose eventually. And I’m going to be the one who pays for it.”

  “Never. I’m not taking anything from you,” he said.

  All the color left her face and her hands shook as she stalked past him and picked up her keys. “You would have taken my job if you’d lost. And what about us? I’m not playing a game. I’m not interested in being a prize that you won in a childish bet with your friend.”

  “I wasn’t playing for you,” he said. “That thing with Darien was for him. It had nothing to do with us. I would never put you out of your job. I want you in my life. I felt like I was fighting for everything last night when you were trying to break it off with me—”

  “I was trying to, and I should have stuck to my guns. My gut was saying this was a bad idea from the moment I walked into my final interview and saw you sitting at the table. I knew I should have gotten the hell out of Jokers Wild.”

  She took another step toward the door, but he caught her hand, pulling her off balance without meaning to. He steadied her, then stepped away. “Don’t go. Not like this. Give me a chance to explain. To make things right.”

  She shook her head. “Everyone knows better than to bet against the house, Casey. For a while I forgot, but I’m not going to make that mistake again.”

  “I’m not the house,” he said. But how could he convince her when he’d already damned himself with his own stupid actions? What had he been thinking? All he’d wanted was to get rid of Darien so he could move on with his morning with Talia. He had been on the cusp of having it all, having everything he wanted with her. And now, it had been snatched away from him.

  At least the cards weren’t that hard to read. They fell where they did and he’d gotten lucky when he’d drawn the ace. But in his heart, he knew that she was his. It had been more than luck guiding his hand to that ace. It was fate.

  How could Talia not see it?

  “I’m the man who wants to spend his life with you,” he said, coming back to her and trying to make her see the truth in his eyes.

  “For how long?” she asked.

  “Forever,” he admitted, baring his soul in a way that he never had before.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to high card me for it?” she asked, pain and sarcasm in her voice.

  …

  Talia knew that she had hit below the belt with her last comment, but he deserved it. She’d expected to be let down by her father. And when she’d first met Casey, she’d taken his measure and decided that he was cut from the same cloth. But he’d wooed her and shown her a side of him that was different.

  She felt like an idiot, and she had no one but herself to blame for that. But that didn’t stop her from loving him. She put her hand over her heart and staggered backward. How could she still love him?

  She’d heard him betting with his friend, risking their future on a card. What was wrong with her? Was she so broken that she thought she didn’t deserve to be loved?

  “If you’re going to be irrational about it, then there is no point in talking,” he said.

  She heard the anger in his voice, and his betrayal stung a bit more. He should have been angrier when he’d talked to Darien. He should have figured out a way to appease his friend without putting their relationship on the line in a card game. Risking it all on a whim. “You started this. I didn’t force you to try to settle things with Darien with a deck of cards. But that is what your gut led you to, isn’t it?”

  He tightened his jaw and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, it did. When the chips are down, I fall back on what I know to strengthen my position.”

  She got that. She hadn’t before this moment, but she finally thought she understood Casey. It wasn’t just that he wanted to win, or that he was good with cards—it was that taking chances was the only way he knew how to navigate through life.

  She’d seen the tattoo and the table in his foyer and how every part of his life was embossed with cards. She should have known better.

  “Sorry, you’re right,” she said. “I should leave.”

  “I don’t think you should,” he said. “I’m not very good at relationships and I’ve done everything I can—”

  “Don’t. You didn’t do everything. You risked it all on a card because you wanted to one up Darien. You couldn’t trust that I cared about you enough to make this work, could you?” she asked.

  She walked over to him and realized she was on the verge of crying and she didn’t want that. Not now. She wanted to keep it together until she was alone.

  “I am leaving. If I were to stay, I would lose something I could never get back,” she said, knowing she had to put a higher price on her own self-respect. She’d never forgive herself if she stayed with a man who would gamble her love away. She walked to the door, then looked back as she opened it.

  Casey wore an expression she’d never seen before but she couldn’t analyze it—not at this moment, when her world was crumbling. “Goodbye, Casey.”

  “Goodbye, Brown Eyes.”

  She walked into the hallway and closed the door behind her, holding on to the handle for a moment, her legs shaking. She heard the sound of something hitting the door and then smashing to the floor, followed by a round of cursing.

  She had the feeling they were both losers in this and later that might matter, but at this moment she just needed to get away. The tears started to flow down her face and she forced herself to walk to the elevator. When she got on, she went directly to the bottom floor, and to her car.

  She didn’t drive toward Henderson and the Glen View Senior Community because she didn’t want to see Gran until she had herself under control. She just pointed her car east and drove, just needing to get away from Vegas.

  She followed the road for about thirty minutes and then pulled off to the side. She couldn’t control her tears, or even see where she was going. But she knew that there was no outrunning this.

  There was no other place she wanted to be than in Las Vegas. And with Casey.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Talia did her best to move on with her life without Casey. She knew that she couldn’t just walk away from her job—while the owners knew about her relationship with Casey, her staff had been in the dark, and she had too many projects in the works to just walk away.

  She called in sick that first horrible day but came in for the next one. And the first thing she did was assign Mark, one of the new guys on her staff, to work with Casey on the world poker championship event. In the meantime, she continued working with Rio and Nicholas on building their social media platforms.

  She sent out her resume and had a few nibbles from competing casinos in Vegas but that felt wrong to her. When there was an opening at a casino in Louisiana, she thought about it.

  But did she really want to work in another casino? And Gran’s upcoming girls’ trip to the Canadian Rockies sealed the deal. Talia knew that Gran wouldn’t want to leave her house empty, and Talia really didn’t want to move to Louisiana.

  So, instead, she just existed. She pretended that she had never loved Casey and that broken hearts healed overnight. She also ignored the fact that she’d spent a lot of time standing under his poster on
the front of the casino, studying it. Trying to see what she’d missed when she’d first seen it, some clue that would have told her that he’d be the man who’d break her heart.

  She was sitting at her desk, typing up a report to send to the entire board about the projects she had in progress, when there was a knock on her door. She looked up to see Darien Mitchell standing there.

  “Can I help you?” she asked.

  “I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said.

  “Um…I’m sort of busy right now.”

  “Right,” he said. “Listen, I know I’m the last person you want to chat with but I’m going to have to insist.”

  She shook her head. “I’ve heard all I need to hear from you. And honestly, I can’t really deal with this right now. Could you just let Rio know whatever it is you have to say? Please.”

  He stepped into her cubicle, his body filling the entire doorway. “I can’t. My brother doesn’t know I was a complete asshole to you.”

  Oh.

  “Um…maybe we shouldn’t talk here,” she said, very aware that her staff could hear everything that Darien was saying.

  “Good idea. Let’s go for a walk. I want to show you the new course anyway,” Darien said.

  She followed him out of the social media area and instead of going to the elevator, Darien walked over to the stairs. She slipped her heels off and followed him down. He noticed she was carrying her shoes when they got to the bottom.

  “Sorry about that. I didn’t even think about your shoes.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m not great on the stairs to begin with, so I just usually ditch them.”

  She glanced around—they were in the employee hallway. Darien gave her his hand while she put her shoes back on and he led her down to the door that exited onto the motocross course and locker room area.

  She noticed that the course was empty and that someone had set up a table and chairs near the course.

  “Are you thirsty?” Darien asked.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said.

  Darien rubbed the back of his neck and then scrubbed his hand down his chest and looked over her shoulder and then back at her. “I can be an ass sometimes and I definitely was to you. I owe you an apology. I know the words I’m sorry aren’t enough to make up for everything. But I am sorry.”

  She nodded. “It’s okay.”

  She didn’t know how else to accept his apology. He’d ruined something for her but a part of her believed that maybe he’d just sped up the inevitable. The truth was she was never going to be content to live with a man who could gamble so carelessly.

  “It’s not okay,” Darien said. “I have no excuses, but I ruined something between you and Casey and I shouldn’t have mixed in.”

  “I don’t think it was all you. I mean, I could have done without your comments when I was with Rio and of course, to Casey, but I have to believe you were doing it with the best intentions,” she said. She’d had a lot of time to think about how much Darien must care for Casey to try so hard to protect his friend.

  “I thought I was,” Darien said. “Anyway, I’m sorry for my part. I wanted you to know that I goaded Casey into the way he behaved that morning.”

  She shook her head. “He’s responsible for his own actions. You apologized. That’s enough.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck again. “I want to fix this.”

  “It’s not your problem to fix,” she said.

  “She’s right, Dare, it’s mine,” Casey said.

  His voice felt like a warm blanket on a cold morning and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed hearing it until he spoke. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him there, standing a few feet away, looking better than she remembered. Her heart beat a little bit faster and she got frustrated.

  Was it too much to ask that her body wouldn’t betray her? Not now, when she had almost figured out how move on without him.

  “Then I’ll leave you to it,” Darien said, walking away.

  She didn’t want to do this. Not today. She still wasn’t over him. The logical part of her wanted to follow Darien and leave this place, but her heart wasn’t moving until she’d heard what he had to say.

  …

  Casey had spent the last two weeks drinking and playing poker. Doing anything to dull the memories of Talia and to prove to himself that he didn’t need her in his life.

  But every night when he tried to sleep, he had been plagued with memories of how she’d felt in his arms. And that look on her face when he’d held the door open and she walked out of his life.

  There wasn’t enough Jack in the world to dull the memory of her. She’d proven herself to be made of tougher stuff than even he’d guessed when she’d kept working at the Jokers Wild, reassigning the poker stuff to another person on her staff and acting with grace and dignity. He shouldn’t have been surprised and actually he wasn’t.

  He’d learned enough about her to know that she wasn’t a quitter and she also was never leaving Las Vegas.

  That had been the first thing he’d realized about her. He should have known that hurting her wouldn’t be enough to make her go. She’d spent her entire life being let down by men who should have protected her, and it had hurt and humbled him to realize he was just the latest.

  Once he’d sobered up, he had heard through the grapevine that other local casinos were trying to poach Talia from their staff but Nicholas told him she’d turned them down. It had made him take stock. She was tough. Even when she’d been humiliated and hurt, she’d stayed.

  And he knew that he couldn’t just let her go. When Darien had mentioned he was going to apologize after Rio had lit into him about being a jerk where women were concerned, Casey knew he needed to apologize. Even more, he needed to show Talia exactly what she meant to him.

  So he’d arranged with his friend to get her down here where he’d be alone with her.

  “You look good,” he said, feeling out the room and seeing if she was amiable to an easy solution to this problem he’d created.

  “Don’t,” she replied. “Just say what you have to say and let me get back to work.”

  He didn’t blame her for her response.

  “You’re right to shut me down. I have had a lot of time to think about what you said.” He started walking toward her. He hadn’t been lying, she did look good. She’d lost weight though and she looked as if she’d been having trouble sleeping. But she would always take his breath away.

  “It’s always easy to bet on something when you have nothing to lose,” he admitted. “And that morning when Darien was in my face, I wasn’t thinking about losing you—I was trying to get rid of him. I wanted to ask you to stay with me, to start making a life together, and so I fell back on old habits. I knew the quickest way to get rid of him was to force him out, and I can’t beat Darien at anything but cards. Winning at cards is the only thing that has never let me down. I can trust it.” He shook his head. “It’s not an excuse, I know. I shouldn’t have done it but maybe you can understand why,” he said.

  “You don’t have to explain. Sooner or later, I needed to face the fact that you are a gambler. I mean I knew it here,” she said, pointing to her head. “But my heart was hoping for something different. Something unrealistic. I know that now.”

  He stopped her. “It’s not unrealistic. You and I both aren’t what the other expected and I will have to play in charity games from time to time but for the most part, my poker playing days are over.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not poker or cards. It’s that thing you have where you bet on everything. It wasn’t the cards that bothered me—it was the fact that you gambled us away.”

  “I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I knew I couldn’t lose,” he said.

  “Unless you were cheating, how could you know that?” she asked, wrapping her arms around her waist and arching one eyebrow at him.

  “I wasn’t cheating,” he said. “I’ve always been luckier at cards than at any
thing else. And with you on the line, I knew my luck wouldn’t run out.”

  “Casey, that’s crazy.”

  “No, it’s not. If I’d drawn a lower card, I would have cheated. There isn’t a power on earth that could make me give you up. But my own pride cost me. I should have been honest with you from the moment we met. I should have told you the second I realized that what we had was more than sex. I love you. The only excuse I have is that I wasn’t sure what love was or if I was just feeling something for you because you were the sweetest, sexiest woman I’d ever met.”

  He laid it all out there for her. She just stared at him and he went to her, gently put his hands on either side of her face, and leaned down to kiss her. He told himself to keep it gentle but he couldn’t. He missed her. He needed her. He loved her more than he had ever thought he could.

  “I love you,” he said again, when he lifted his head. “And I know I’m a risk for you and that you won’t be able to trust me until we’ve been together for fifty years but I’m not going anywhere. And unless you tell me you never want to see me again, I’m going to keep telling you I love you for the rest of our lives.”

  …

  Talia looked into his ice-blue eyes and for the first time, realized that he’d said the things she’d always wanted to hear. He was correct when he’d said that a part of her was always going to be on edge when he made a bet, but the truth was, Casey was much more in control of himself that her father had ever been.

  And she loved Casey. She’d proved to herself that she could walk away if she had to and it was something she never wanted to do again.

  “I love you, too, Casey,” she said.

  He lifted her off her feet and spun her around. “I don’t deserve you. I’m going to tell you that right now, but I’m not letting you go. All my life I’ve been a loner and I thought that was good enough but when I met you…the rest of the day all I could remember was your smile. That cute way you had of tilting your head to the side. Chances were I’d never see you again and then you—”

  “Spilled more drinks on you,” she said with a laugh. “I guess I wanted to make an impression.”