Page 36 of Dating the Rebel
She nodded.
“Then she won’t be suspicious if I tell her that I’ll fly you home,” he said as he pulled his cell phone from his pocket.
“You don’t need to do that,” she said.
“I will when you spend the night here.”
She chuckled. “What makes you think I’m going to spend the night?”
“Because you’re going to lose the next hand, and what I want more than Teo’s money is for you to spend the night with me.”
She glanced over to the bar where Alberta poured another shot for one of the losers. “Just me?”
The sick jealousy churned in his stomach again. He didn’t want anyone else touching her but him. “Yes, just you.”
She uttered a sigh, as if she was disappointed, but her eyes twinkled.
“You should be grateful that I want to focus only on you,” he said. “It’s a win-win for you either way this game goes.”
She shook her head. “So you’re saying I don’t get anything but money if I win?”
“What do you want?” he asked. And he hoped like hell that she wanted him as badly as he wanted her.
“For you to give up on joining Liaisons International,” she said.
That was an easy bet for him, since he’d had no intention of actually joining, anyway. He shrugged. “Fine with me. I’m not going to lose.”
“Don’t be so confident,” she warned him.
But he was...
Like everyone who didn’t think she had a tell, she had a tell. If she had bad cards, she swallowed before she started bluffing, as if she had to choke down the lie.
To him, bluffing wasn’t lying, so he had no tells. And he’d always had phenomenal luck when it came to cards.
Very rarely was he ever dealt a bad hand.
“If you’re so sure you’re going to win, why haven’t you agreed to my wager yet?”
She blinked. “Oh, I thought I had. I am very excited...” She leaned closer to him, and her breath brushed across the skin of his neck when she murmured, “To beat you...”
He damn well better get good cards this time...
CHAPTER TWELVE
DAMNIT.
She’d tried; she had really tried to win. To reclaim Teo’s money and to get Grant to leave Liaisons alone.
But somehow he’d drawn a straight flush...
“How the hell did you do that?” she asked. “You had to cheat. There’s no other way.” She’d had a full house. That should have been enough to win.
She’d even thought he’d been sweating it for a moment. But then he’d turned over his cards...
She stared down at them on the table and shook her head. “It’s not possible.”
“So you’re a sore loser,” Grant remarked with a chuckle.
