My hand finds Ella’s knee under the table. My palm lands there, on the warm skin above the hem of her dress and stays because that’s where it belongs. She turns a private smile on me, and it’s all I can do to tamp down the desire that’s always there whenever I look at her. She presses her leg a fraction closer to mine, and the contact settles into my body like the first sip of something good.
“Last time you were at this table, you face-planted into the chips,” Brad says, dealing Ella in without being asked. “You look marginally less terrible tonight.”
“High praise from a man whose poker face is worse than his haircut.”
“Beckett’s feeling better,” Wyatt confirms to the table. “The insults are back.”
The cards come around. Ella picks up her hand and studies it with a focus I recognize from watching her read a crowded diner floor. She’s assessing. Not the cards. The men. The tempo of the room. The way they speak to each other. The things they don’t say.
It took me years to learn the language of this table, the shorthand of men who show affection through well-aimed sarcasm and good-natured ball-busting. Ella’s mastering it in seconds.
“So,” Gabriel says, his dark eyes settling on me. “Are we going to address the elephant in the room, or are we pretending Alec Beckett isn’t about to relocate to the desert for love?”
Finn chuckles. “Isn’t Sedona one of those hippy towns full of woo-woo vibes and mystics on every corner?”
I glance at Ella, recalling a time not too long ago when I sounded like the same kind of jackass as my friend. “Don’t knock it if you haven’t been there, Finn. Sedona’s beautiful. It’s good for my soul.”
Ella reaches for my hand, giving it a tender squeeze. “Told you so.”
“Yeah, you did.” I lean over and kiss her, just a brief brush of our lips.
Wyatt chortles into his whiskey. “Never thought I’d hear the day this guy starts waxing on about looking after his soul. Now we know he’s lost it.”
“Speaking of losers,” Finn says, clearing his throat. “Didn’t you come here to square up, Alec?”
I nod. “Glad to.”
I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the check I wrote earlier tonight. I slide it to the center of the table, next to the pot. One million dollars, made out to the Last Billionaire Standing fund.
“I’m officially out, gentlemen.”
My friends stare at the check for a moment before Brad breaks the silence.
“Three down,” he says, pointing around the table. “Mason, Damien, and Alec are out. That leaves four of us still standing.”
Finn gestures to me with his whiskey glass. “Congrats to Alec and Ella. As for the rest of you, best of luck. I’m one step closer to winning the whole pot now.”
The boast earns him a round of guffaws and insults, all of which he takes in stride, sipping his drink like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“A week off to save your life,” Wyatt says, shaking his head at me. “And it cost you a million dollars.”
I look at the check on the felt. A million dollars. I’ve made more than a hundred times that building HoloTech. I would paya thousand times that to be with the woman sitting next to me, whose hand has now migrated to my thigh under the table, her fingertips tracing a lazy line along the inner seam of my trousers that is making it very difficult to maintain any kind of dignified composure.
“Smartest million I ever spent,” I say.
Ella squeezes my leg. I catch her eye and she’s looking at me with that expression I first saw in our suite in Barbados. The one where her blue eyes go soft and the corner of her mouth tilts and the rest of the room ceases to exist.
I have to look away before I do something these men will never let me live down.
The game continues. Ella folds her first hand and then wins her second with a bluff so clean that Brad demands to see her cards and then stares at them in silence for a full five seconds.
She shrugs. “Waitressing is just poker with food. You read the table, you know who’s bluffing about the steak being overcooked, and you never show your hand until the tip’s on the ticket.”
“I like her,” Brad announces to me. “She’s a hell of a lot quicker than you.”
“I’m aware.”
The banter rolls on. The cards come and go. Ella holds her own, not by pretending to be something she’s not, but by being exactly what she is: warm, sharp, funny, and entirely unimpressed by the net worth in this room.
