‘Will do.’ Sean winked, and the temperature of the smile returned his way nearly knocked him off his chair. He took the list and flattened the paper onto the tablewith his palm.
‘You could use your notes app on your phone for this,’ he said.
‘Ah, where’s the fun in that? Plus, you’d never have asked me about it if it was there.’
‘Very true. Okay, what have we got? Let me check for dolphins and the Taj Mahal.’ Performatively, he ran his thumb down the page.
Cherry giggled, a cute contrast to the bold-as-brass exterior she’d exuded so far.
‘I see you’ve got “crash a wedding” on here,’ he noted. ‘Guess you can cross that one off. Okay, wait…Is there anything on here that isn’t about sex?’
‘Crashing a wedding isn’t about sex. At least not yet.’
Sean whipped his head up.Bloody hell!
‘You’ve got having sex with a man in a kilt, an NYPD officer, an FDNY officer, a Canadian Mountie, a cowboy, a younger man, under a waterfall and in an elevator. Am I missing anything else?’
‘Not on the sex front, I don’t think.’ Cherry sipped her champagne. ‘Do you like the list?’
‘It’s entertaining. What else have we got? “Get married in Vegas”, “marry the love of my life”. And what does the wee star next to that mean –hung like a blue whale?’
‘Exactly that.’
This got another powerful laugh.‘I presume all the cowboys, NYPD, kilted men, etcetera, have to meet the same criteria?’
She shrugged. ‘Preferably.’
Sean shook his head, but the grin on his face betrayed how amusing he found this. ‘Okay, to the less X-rated section of the list: learn to surf, adopt a cat/kitten, learn to cook, write a book, sex in a vineyard… I must have missed that one. “Win the World Series”…Are you a baseball player?’
‘No, poker.’
‘You’re a professional poker player?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that makes sense.’
‘Does it? How so?’
‘You don’t strike me as the type to have hot chocolate and Hobnobs in the office at eleven every day. I mean, you could be blowing off steam from all that, I suppose.’
‘No, poker’s been my full-time job since I was twenty-five. Twelve years. That’s what I want to write a book about.’
Sean did the calculations in his head. She was thirty-seven. She didn’t look thirty-seven. Five years older than him. It was nothing. Before now, he might have considered it something, because the last older woman he’d dated hadn’t exactly worked out, but things had changed. In the last twenty minutes.
‘Is poker what brought you out here?’ he asked.
‘Kind of, yeah. I mean, you can’t stay in the States because you like to play poker, but I’ve had enough money to support myself and got visas that way. And I was in a relationship with an American guy.’
‘I’m guessing not a cowboy or NYPD officer?’
‘No, another poker player. So I stayed. When I’m not travelling around the world playing, this is where I spend most of my time. I’ve come close, but the World Series has eluded me. Any woman, actually.’
‘Sorry to hear that. But there’s still time.’
‘There is, although I’m not sure it matters all that much to me now. I might scrub it off the list. Replace it with somethingmore important.’
‘Like what?’
