Page 82 of Ruined Vows

As I watch her now, pushing all her chips to the center of the table and smiling broadly at me, it’s so brief I almost miss it. The barest bite of her top tooth on her bottom lip before she’s all grins again. She looks at me confidently, almost taunting.

“All in.” She leans forward with her elbows on the table in a way that makes her boobs bounce jauntily, nipples puckered. Well hello. She’s bringing out all the stops to distract me, isn’t she? She really wants this bluff to work.

I pause and look at my cards as if I’m actually considering. She doesn’t know what I have, and she could possibly still have something better than my jacks high.

In the pile are a jack of spades, a king of hearts, a nine of hearts, and a three of hearts. I’ve got a queen and a jack in my hand. If she’s bluffing, I should get a jacks high, if nothing else. But I’ve been watching, and there’s a fair chance that the last river card pulled will be?—

“All in,” I announce. Kira’s satisfied smile only pushes my own grin higher as I shove in all my chips.

The dealer slaps down the last river card—an eight of hearts, just like I hoped for. Completing my straight.

“Ha!” I yell. “Strip it all off, Red.”

I lay my straight on the table, cards facing up.

Kira looks at my hand and breathes out, all the air seeming to swoop out of her lungs in one great gust. Her head hangs for a moment.

I reach out a hand and touch her forearm. “I was just kidding. You don’t have to get naked. We can go now.”

But that just makes her slap her own cards to the table, face down. Then like always, she does the last thing I expect.

She climbs up onto the table itself and there, in front of God and the entire club, starts to shimmy her underwear down her hips. She doesn’t just push them down her legs and let them drop, either.

No, she spreads her legs and bends over, moving them down her thighs inch by inch, until her hands are flat on the table. As she accomplishes this feat of stretching, her eyes catch mine from between her legs and her bent-over position. She smirks at me, glistening pussy right in my face.

Fuck. Me.

“Want to stay and play?” she whispers.

Actually, I want to take her out to the back seat of that infuriatingly small car of hers and fuck her brains out. But Caleb wouldn’t look too kindly on that. The cops have busted members more than once for fucking in public on club property, and the parking lot counts.

“I’m waiting,” Kira sing-songs. And then she starts to look around the room. “Because if you’re not feeling in the mood, I bet I could find someone else who?—”

“Don’t you dare,” I say, hand shooting out to lock around her ankle like a shackle. “Until you walk down that fucking aisle, you’re mine. You hear me?”

She sucks in a quick breath of air at the vehemence of my words, and I think I suck in an inhale too, as shocked myself as she seems to be.

“I hear you,” she whispers back, and it satisfies some rumbling thing in my chest that she’s agreed. “So claim what’s yours already.”

She doesn’t know how dangerous it is to say that to a man like me. Especially now that, after talking to Marcus, I have an idea of exactly how I might do just that.

“Come with me,” I growl, sweeping her off the table where she’s standing and into my arms. “I hope you’ve got your strength up, darlin’. ’Cause you’re gonna need it for what I have in store.”

THIRTY

KIRA

As Isaak bendsme over a leather bench and secures leather cuffs to my ankles and wrists, I have a brief freakout moment.

What the hell have I just gotten myself into? I’m not into pain… I don’t think. Isaak knows that, right?

I don’t even know why I climbed up on the poker table like that. I just knew I had the impulse—get up on the table and show your cunt off to the whole room. And I needed to know if it was an intrusive thought or a real one. As I was doing it, I felt wild. And on the edge of crazy, too. As in, maybe actually nuts. I was always worried about what would happen if I gave in to the intrusive thoughts.

Like, would I someday end up with a fork shoved in my hand? Or would I yank the wheel of my car and drive off a cliff while I’m driving in the Texas Hill Country with all those dramatic drop-offs and nothing but a tiny railing between me and the great beyond?

My thoughts have terrified me since I was a teenager when they really started getting scary. So I didn’t let myself do… well,anything. I followed the rules religiously. Religion gave such strict rules, too, and I was always so good at following rules.

But somehow that was still never good enough for my mother. Because she had so many extra rules. Rules for everything, and they were never written down anywhere. Invisible rules for food, rules for how I was supposed to do my hair, and rules for which clothes I was supposed to wear with which shoes. Rules for how I was supposed to respond when Carol was sad, angry, or happy, and rules for the expression I was supposed to have on my face at all times.

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