“Yep, and that’s why Grady and I have dated for a year. I wanted to be sure that he was the kind of man who would never hurt me, physically or mentally.”
“What happened when you had your first argument?” I asked, still in a bit of a shock that she was telling me something so personal.
“We didn’t see each other for several days. Both of us were miserable, and I finally drove up to his house and told him that he wasn’t ever to raise his voice to me again over something so trivial as him sitting inthe passenger seat of my car. We talked ...” She really smiled this time. “Plug your ears, Rosie.”
“I’m a grown woman,” Rosie said. “I know that you had hot and heavy makeup sex.”
Rosie might have known all about it, or maybe just guessed, but she still blushed as she spoke.
“You’ve had makeup sex, right?” Scarlett asked.
“Nope,” I answered honestly. “If you never get to that magic date when you have a fight, you don’t ever get to experience that kind of thing. I’ve only had one-night stands and a few forty-eight-hour relationships. Always with guys I knew and trusted from poker games, so don’t be thinking I picked up men in bars. I never sleep with married men, and I’m up front about there being no strings attached.”
Scarlett and Rosie both nodded in agreement.
“What about Jackson? Did you shake hands at the end of the time you spent at his trailer?” Rosie asked.
“No, he raised my hand to his lips and kissed my knuckles when he dropped me off at the trailer yesterday. From the romance novels I have read, that’s not even first base.”
“But it issuperromantic,” Scarlett said.
Rosie stood up and brought out the biscuit-making bowl. “Enough about all this. I’m going to make our brunch, and then we’ll get down to business.”
“One more question, Scarlett.”
“Just one?” Rosie frowned.
I crossed my heart with my forefinger. “I promise. What was your name before you became Scarlett?”
“My name was Stacy, and the son of a bitch—sorry, Rosie—that put me in the hospital said that when he got out of jail, he would hunt me down and kill me. So Matilda worked with the woman at the women’s shelter where I was living, and the two of them got me new papers. Scarlett rose out of the ashes that used to be Stacy.”
Was I ready to burn my poker identity, Clara Williams? Not just yet.
Chapter Sixteen
Scientists say that the brain does not feel anything.
I would argue that point after spending the whole day with Rosie at the kitchen table. I had taken pages of notes on which vendors arrived on what days, how to figure taxes and send them in quarterly, and everything that went into running a small café like the Tumbleweed.
Even though my head ached from looking at numbers all day, I was amazed beyond words at how much profit came in each month. If I let all that sit in the bank, or invested some of it to bring in even more, I could sell the place in six months and take what money was in the bank for more than one high-stakes game.
What about Rosie and Scarlett?the voice in my head asked.
There were all kinds of possibilities to use for an answer, but I didn’t like any of them. Not even the idea of making sure the new owners didn’t fire them helped. They were my friends, the first adult ones I’d ever had. I wanted to get back in the game, but I did not want to leave Rosie and Scarlett behind.
You can’t ride two horses with one ass,the same voice reminded me.
It took a few seconds for me to understand just what that meant. “Okay, okay!” I muttered.
“Okay about what?” Rosie asked.
“I need a card game.” Playing always helped me make difficult decisions.
“Oh, no, you do not!” Rosie said.
“I could teach you how to play,” I offered.
Scarlett brought a bucket of soapy water from the dining room and dumped it down the drain. “It’s not that she doesn’t know how, but rather that she won’t.”
