Behind Closed Doors (Behind Closed Doors #1)(46)

“Don’t worry. I don’t want to pull you anywhere and kiss you.” He chuckles.

My cheeks heat. “I guess you heard that.”

“Yeah, well, I have a knack for hearing things I shouldn’t.” He motions me forward. “Let’s go rearrange some seating and get you away from all those magpies yakking about you and Jason.”

He turns and I join him, my gaze lifting to where I can now see Jason and Daniel standing several feet away. Daniel is animated, while Jason appears pretty calm.

“Nothing rattles him,” Abel comments, chuckling under his breath, seeming to read my mind. “It’s why he’s so damn good at poker.”

But he’s wrong. Something can rattle Jason: blackmail. I’ve seen how much, but it seems no one else ever has. And I want to keep it that way. But more and more, I think about the people around me who I’ve met. The people around him, and they want the opposite. The number of people motivated to hurt Jason are many, and I wonder: Is there more to this strung-out blackmail than meets the eye?





CHAPTER TWELVE


NOT LONG AFTER Abel and I find seats on the opposite side of the event room from Mandy and Sheila, Jason appears and kneels beside me, his hand on my leg, which suddenly feels naked. “I calmed the beast,” he tells me.

“The beast?” I laugh.

“My nickname for Daniel when he gets this ridiculously worked up,” he says. “But at least he’s the one that gets worked up, so I can just focus on playing.” He reaches for my coffee, and using my hand and his to tilt the cup up, takes a swig, the act somehow ridiculously intimate, and his lips, as they curve afterward, ridiculously sexy. “Too much sugar and not enough caffeine.”

“The opposite is true of Red Bull,” I reply, heat radiating from where his hand presses to my leg, going all the way up to more intimate places where I really want this man to touch me. “At least to me.”

“Good thing opposites attract,” he says, mischief and heat in his eyes, both of which assure me we aren’t talking about drinks anymore.

“It seems so,” I reply, “though I’m beginning to think we aren’t so opposite.”

“That makes two of us,” he says softly, reaching up and caressing my cheek with his knuckles, touching me the way I’d touched him, and I can see in his eyes that’s his exact intent. “I can’t get you alone to find out very soon. Which is why I’d better go play these cards.”

I catch his hand, not about to let him escape yet. “Are you sure everything’s okay with Daniel?”

“I’m never halfway about anything, baby. Daniel’s handled.”

I’m skeptical, not quite sure that man’s hate for me can be so easily handled, but now really isn’t the time to question such things. Maybe there will never be a time, and an announcement sounds, dragging my attention rightfully back to the tournament anyway: “The exterior doors are being sealed after the final cycle. If you remain for the final table, you will not be able to enter or exit during the play.”

“It’s almost time for the big finale,” I say, feeling kind of excited now.

“Two more tables,” he says. “Some would say that’s a world from the finals.”

“I’m nervous,” I confess. “Actually nervous for you.” I frown. “Wait. Should I say that? Does it make you nervous?”

“I haven’t been nervous in years.”

“Not even when it’s a massive payout?”

“I don’t allow one game to be different from the rest,” he says. “Winning is winning, and if that’s always my intention then I’m always playing at a hundred percent.”

Abel leans forward. “It’s going to be you and Cowboy,” he says to Jason. “It’s in the air. He’s killing it tonight.”

“Is he?” Jason asks, his expression unreadable, as is his tone, but his fingers flex ever so slightly against my leg, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he already knew Cowboy was doing well. “I guess we’ll see just how good, now won’t we?” He refocuses on me. “Let me go win these last two tables so I can collect my prize. I won’t be back until this is over.”

He pushes to his feet and starts walking, and something about the way he carries himself leaves no doubt in my mind when this is over, he’ll be the victor. Abel laughs. “Oh man. He’s going to whip some Cowboy ass now, isn’t he?”

I glance over at him. “You did that on purpose?”

“Hell, yeah. I love to put some competition in the air and watch that man get focused and do what he does best: win at poker.”

“I’m kind of loving it too,” I say, while I’m also loving sitting with someone who actually isn’t competing but cheering Jason on. And for the next thirty minutes I watch one table fall to Jason, with the added entertainment of Abel’s hilarious commentary about each player. Observing one man holding a drink, he says, “He can’t play without a Fuzzy Navel in his mouth.”

“He never wins, but he always gets a damn good rubdown trying,” he says of another man getting a massage at the table and making some very strange faces. And the comments go on and on, while the questions about me and Jason are mercifully zero. People don’t approach me now that I’m with Abel.