Page 2 of Texas Hold Em'
“Is there such a thing?”
Smirking, I stood behind the sofa, the cut of the backrest just high enough to hide my member as I dropped my towel. “There is.”
Carrie did a valiant job of keeping her blue eyes fixed on her fingernails while I put my jeans on. “For someone with your, um, muscle mass, I find it surprising that you’d skip breakfast. Aren’t you going to be working on the bar today?”
“What are you, my mother?”
“No,” she said sharply.
“Then there’s no need for you to worry about feeding me. Or my muscle mass,” I added slyly. “I’m a big boy. I can take care of myself. And I assume you can, too. I’ll be gone most of the day. You can do what you want while I’m gone.”
Carrie arched a blonde eyebrow dramatically. “Oh, I can, can I?”
I picked up my wet towel. “That’s what I said.”
“Well, that’s what I had every intention of doing.”
“What?”
“What I want,” she huffed. “I have every intention of doing what I want.”
I frowned. Had I missed something here? What the hell were we talking about? “Good.”
“Good.” She nodded, before muttering, “I can’t for the life of me figure out why Jackson wanted me to stayhere.”
“Neither can I.”
Carrie rolled her eyes.
I pointed around at the cinderblock walls of my apartment. “The acoustics are pretty good in here.”
“Great.”
Chuckling, I hung my towel on the bathroom door and raked my fingers through my hair, taming it back off my forehead and into place. “Could be worse, sweetheart. You could be crashing at Gabriel’s. Or Abel’s. You think they’d let you sleep in their bed without trying to get in with you?”
“So I’m supposed to feel lucky?”
“Well, yeah.”
She snorted and pushed off the doorframe. With that, she turned her back on me and disappeared into the bedroom, where I assumed she was getting changed, but I didn’t really care.
I knew her type all too well. I’d been just like her, after all.
Like Carrie, I’d once worn the Texas Ranger badge. I’d grown up in Austin, just like I assumed she had, and I was the good old boy who followed the straight and narrow and did what he was told.
Until the straight and narrow blew up in my face and I learned I could get a lot more done when I wasn’t wearing the badge and brushing shoulders with cops.
Carrie was living that experience right now. She’d discovered the corruption we all knew existed in the Reno police department. She was seeing with her own two eyes how flawed the law was here, and she had to be wondering if it was like this in other places. And even if it wasn’t flawed, rules and regulations kept things stagnant. Real bad guys, the ones who took the time to look into the loopholes and play the smart game, could evade arrest and justice at every turn if they were clever enough. Like Bates.
Her badge wouldn’t help her put a stop to his reign of terror. She had to be coming to terms with that.
It probably wasn’t easy for her.
Still, I didn’t care.
I grabbed my leather jacket from the hook at the front door and called out to her that I was leaving.
She stuck her head out the bedroom door and gave me a forced, cheesy smile. “Bye bye then.”
