Page 52 of One Night Gamble
“Are you thirsty?” Darien asked.
“No, I’m fine,” she said.
Darien rubbed the back of his neck and then scrubbed his hand down his chest and looked over her shoulder and then back at her. “I can be an ass sometimes and I definitely was to you. I owe you an apology. I know the words I’m sorry aren’t enough to make up for everything. But I am sorry.”
She nodded. “It’s okay.”
She didn’t know how else to accept his apology. He’d ruined something for her but a part of her believed that maybe he’d just sped up the inevitable. The truth was she was never going to be content to live with a man who could gamble so carelessly.
“It’s not okay,” Darien said. “I have no excuses, but I ruined something between you and Casey and I shouldn’t have mixed in.”
“I don’t think it was all you. I mean, I could have done without your comments when I was with Rio and of course, to Casey, but I have to believe you were doing it with the best intentions,” she said. She’d had a lot of time to think about how much Darien must care for Casey to try so hard to protect his friend.
“I thought I was,” Darien said. “Anyway, I’m sorry for my part. I wanted you to know that I goaded Casey into the way he behaved that morning.”
She shook her head. “He’s responsible for his own actions. You apologized. That’s enough.”
He rubbed the back of his neck again. “I want to fix this.”
“It’s not your problem to fix,” she said.
“She’s right, Dare, it’s mine,” Casey said.
His voice felt like a warm blanket on a cold morning and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed hearing it until he spoke. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him there, standing a few feet away, looking better than she remembered. Her heart beat a little bit faster and she got frustrated.
Was it too much to ask that her body wouldn’t betray her? Not now, when she had almost figured out how move on without him.
“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Darien said, walking away.
She didn’t want to do this. Not today. She still wasn’t over him. The logical part of her wanted to follow Darien and leave this place, but her heart wasn’t moving until she’d heard what he had to say.
…
Casey had spent the last two weeks drinking and playing poker. Doing anything to dull the memories of Talia and to prove to himself that he didn’t need her in his life.
But every night when he tried to sleep, he had been plagued with memories of how she’d felt in his arms. And that look on her face when he’d held the door open and she walked out of his life.
There wasn’t enough Jack in the world to dull the memory of her. She’d proven herself to be made of tougher stuff than even he’d guessed when she’d kept working at the Jokers Wild, reassigning the poker stuff to another person on her staff and acting with grace and dignity. He shouldn’t have been surprised and actually he wasn’t.
He’d learned enough about her to know that she wasn’t a quitter and she also was never leaving Las Vegas.
That had been the first thing he’d realized about her. He should have known that hurting her wouldn’t be enough to make her go. She’d spent her entire life being let down by men who should have protected her, and it had hurt and humbled him to realize he was just the latest.
Once he’d sobered up, he had heard through the grapevine that other local casinos were trying to poach Talia from their staff but Nicholas told him she’d turned them down. It had made him take stock. She was tough. Even when she’d been humiliated and hurt, she’d stayed.
And he knew that he couldn’t just let her go. When Darien had mentioned he was going to apologize after Rio had lit into him about being a jerk where women were concerned, Casey knew he needed to apologize. Even more, he needed to show Talia exactly what she meant to him.
So he’d arranged with his friend to get her down here where he’d be alone with her.
“You look good,” he said, feeling out the room and seeing if she was amiable to an easy solution to this problem he’d created.
“Don’t,” she replied. “Just say what you have to say and let me get back to work.”
He didn’t blame her for her response.
“You’re right to shut me down. I have had a lot of time to think about what you said.” He started walking toward her. He hadn’t been lying, she did look good. She’d lost weight though and she looked as if she’d been having trouble sleeping. But she would always take his breath away.
“It’s always easy to bet on something when you have nothing to lose,” he admitted. “And that morning when Darien was in my face, I wasn’t thinking about losing you—I was trying to get rid of him. I wanted to ask you to stay with me, to start making a life together, and so I fell back on old habits. I knew the quickest way to get rid of him was to force him out, and I can’t beat Darien at anything but cards. Winning at cards is the only thing that has never let me down. I can trust it.” He shook his head. “It’s not an excuse, I know. I shouldn’t have done it but maybe you can understand why,” he said.
