Bad Cruz(47)

Note to self: do not drink and think. You are not good at that.

Cruz played a couple rounds, patiently reciting all the things he’d explained to me about blackjack throughout, even though I could tell it was annoying the men around us and entertaining the women draped on their arms.

I nodded vehemently, flagging down the waitresses for more and more cocktails whenever he looked away. I’d never gotten drunk publicly. Actually, I very rarely had more than a couple glasses on my own.

I got knocked up before I had the pleasure of getting trashed, and getting trashed after bearing a kid seemed unwise, if not completely impossible. Even if I’d wanted to, I was no longer attending high school and therefore hadn’t hung out with my former classmates. Drinking alone while breastfeeding? Not even on my worst day.

This meant that now, at the ripe age of twenty-nine, I was finally checking the box on my bucket list and getting completely tanked.

Cruz wasn’t aware of how much I drank.

He was too engrossed in his game and in explaining the game to me. Plus, I did a pretty good job at holding my drink under the table and being sneaky with my straw.

All in all, I still sported the mental age of a preteen.

Awesome.

When it was my turn to play, I proved to be talented in more than just being a fashion criminal and a terrible waitress, and lost him a whooping three-hundred bucks in three consecutive games.

It was swift and painless, seeing as I had no idea what I was doing, and slow to react when the dealer explained my next moves to me. But Cruz had a remarkable poker face and seemed casually amused, as opposed to murderous and upset.

“Wanna try again?”

He leaned way too close to me for me not to take advantage and sniff into his chest. His neck smelled amazing. I was momentarily blind with rage when I thought of how Gabriella must’ve enjoyed all this male goodness in bed for months and months.

“Are you crazy?” I hiccupped. “I’m a national disaster.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. State hazard, maybe. And you’re still learning.”

“At your expense.”

“As I said, that’s my problem, not yours.”

“And what a beautiful problem to have on your hands, eh, Dr. Costello?” A man’s voice drifted from behind my shoulder.

I swiveled around to face a hunky man, muscular as Robocop, with trimmed graying hair, and a button-up shirt that threatened to burst. He reeked of enough cologne to drown a beaver, and next to him was a woman with bleached-blonde hair and a red dress that highlighted all of her enhanced assets.

Her nipples were so prominent through her clothes, I wondered if it was a fashion statement of some kind. I mean, the place was air-conditioned, but it wasn’t that cold.

Suddenly, I saw myself in that woman. The skimpy clothes. The in-your-face sexuality. It was all a front and made me feel uncomfortable.

“Dr. Wootton. It’s been a while.”

The two men shook hands. You could cut the tension in the air with a butter knife.

Two things I knew for sure—Dr. Wootton was the colleague Mrs. Warren had referred to, the person who’d recognized Cruz, and that these two men were not on good terms.

“This is my wife Jocelyn.”

“My pleasure.” Jocelyn extended her hand to Cruz for him to kiss.

He obediently did so, the obnoxious gentleman that he was.

“Honey, this is Dr. Costello, the guy I told you about yesterday after Ramona told us about the…incident.”

Here we go.

“This is Dalton,” Cruz ignored Dr. Wootton’s lukewarm introduction, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We went to med school together. Dalton, Jocelyn, this is my lovely date for the evening Tennessee.”

“Ah, date. Is that what you kids call it these days?” Dr. Wootton guffawed.

“What else would you call having a drink with a friend from town?” Cruz asked nonchalantly.

“Ramona says—”

“Ramona’s looking for a headline,” Cruz said. “Really, Dalton. I thought gossip was beneath you. We’re not in kindergarten anymore.”

Jocelyn suggested we grab a drink together, and both men were too polite to point out it was a terrible idea, so here we were, sipping drinks.

There were no empty seats at the bar, so we opted for a round table with four stools by the roulette tables. Personally, I thought Jocelyn’s nipples deserved a stool of their own. Were they enhanced, too?

I sat opposite her, and Cruz was in front of Dalton.

I guessed that it wasn’t a good time to confess to Cruz that I’d had three more drinks he wasn’t aware of while he was playing blackjack, and that I was tight-roping the line of drunk as a skunk.

Jocelyn couldn’t stop undressing Cruz with her gaze while Dalton seriously eye-plucked me into oblivion.

Were they swingers?

No judgment here, but there was no way I would participate in that kind of thing with this nipple-wielding power couple.

I decided to go for the same wine Jocelyn sipped, while the men stuck to whiskey. It occurred to me that I should probably stop drinking, but this was my first real experience with alcohol. Pathetic, considering I was near thirty, but also true. And this was the trip of new experiences, apparently.

“Where are you working these days?” Cruz asked Dalton, obviously trying to steer the conversation into safer territory.