Double Blind (5 page)

Randy snorted. “No. I’d have been a traveling salesman. And I never would have let my little talent be so obvious. Unless, of course, I was trying to get someone into bed.” Ethan stiffened and cast him a warning look. Randy shrugged. “You’re sitting now. I’m flirting out of relief.”

“I believe,” Ethan said, pausing to take another sip, “you could flirt if you were stripped naked, tied up, and dangling over a pit of snakes.”

Randy’s laugh turned into a purr of its own free will. “If you were the snake charmer, baby, I’d surely try at the very least.”

Ethan blushed, but his mouth tightened, too, and he put his drink back down. “Don’t call me ‘baby’.”

Randy hadn’t even realized that he had. “Is there an endearment you prefer?”

“My name is Ethan,” he said sharply.

“
Endearment.
” Randy rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “You certainly aren’t Sunshine, and anyway, that’s taken. Black is too dismal. Baby suits you in the abstract, but it’s too blasé for a nickname.” He ran his gaze up and down Ethan in a critical scan. “Slim would fit, but it’s too neutered.”

“Just call me by my name.” Ethan was sliding his thumb up and down the side of his glass as he stared into the ice. He softened a little as Randy let the silence wear on. “So why did you come up to me, really? Why did you make that bet against my ring?”

“That one’s complicated,” Randy confessed. He glanced at Scully to make sure he was still at least half-listening, and he was. “I made the bet against your ring because Tyler is an ass. I don’t care for the shitty odds in roulette, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that he’d see your win as my win, too, so I still had the best of it, in a way.”

“But he was the one that suggested I take the zeroes,” Ethan said, and Randy grinned.

“And I made sure that was the way it went down, baby.” Randy caught himself this time and winced. “Sorry. I’m honestly not doing it on purpose.” He rubbed his cheek and sighed. “But no, I came up to you because of a different bet, if you must know.”

Both Ethan and Scully looked askance at him at this bald confession. Randy felt a bit taken aback himself. He hadn’t exactly meant to come that clean, and he ran his finger around the edge of his glass, buying time as he tried to figure out how to save this. Nothing came to mind, so he shrugged off the encroaching panic. Honesty it was, then.

He lifted his glass in his hand as he extended an index finger to the silvered dome in the ceiling above the back of the bar. “See that? It’s camera number seventy-two. There are three hundred of them in the casino, which actually isn’t quite enough, but it’s all we’ve got.”

“This is your casino?” Ethan said.

Randy shook his head. “No. But I work here sometimes.”

Scully snorted and turned back to his game.

“You’re a security person?” Ethan’s voice was spiking nervously. “What—what did I do?”

“I’m not security,” Randy said quickly. “I’m a prop. But I wasn’t working earlier. I was just hanging out in Billy’s office, watching the security feed. He likes to watch some of the tables himself, and I saw you playing. Fantastically badly, I might add.”

“I don’t understand,” Ethan said. “Who’s Billy? What’s a prop?” He frowned. “What was wrong with the way I played? I was waiting for black!”

“You were waiting for fucking Godot, baby.” Randy drank. “Billy is Billy Herod. It’s
his
casino. A prop is harder to explain, but for now let’s just say that I play poker.” Randy drank again and then set the empty glass back down. “The bet is what’s important here, sweetness. I watched you play, and I read you. I declared to Billy that I knew three things about you. Billy thinks I’m cocky, so he roped me into a bet, and to win I have to find out if I was right or wrong. And I have to be right on all three counts, just for the record. Igor here”—he jerked his head at Scully—“is the witness.”

Randy paused, because he knew he had to, and he watched and waited while Ethan sputtered, indignant. In a few seconds he was going to make some outraged cry, demanding to know if that had been all this had been, if everything about their encounter had just been about a bet.

“Do you mean,” Ethan said, his consonants going sharp and angry, “that this whole thing, everything at the table, getting this drink, the flirting and calling me ‘baby’ has all been about a
bet?
”

Randy sighed. Sometimes he really wished people would surprise him.

“No,” he said, deadpan. “I saw your sad face in the camera, and I fell in love. I came down to propose to you. Of course it’s a fucking bet. The fact that you like being flirted with and that you look good when you’re pissed off is just a plus.”

“I do
not
enjoy being flirted with,” Ethan shot back. “Not by you.”

“Fine,” Randy said, getting bored. “Just take my quick survey, lover, and then you can go. I say you came to Vegas—from Utah—because someone dumped you and broke your heart. They did this in part by taking a significant amount of money from you. You came here with what was left, and you pissed away your last dollar back there at Roulette Three, determined that if you sat there long enough, black just had to come around because it owed you.” He leaned back against the bar, threaded his fingers behind his head and smirked. “Isn’t that right?”

He saw the truth of it in Ethan Ellison’s wide, pale eyes: the shock, the fear of exposure, and most of all, he saw the pain. It hooked the edge of Randy’s heart, which
was
a surprise, and he softened his expression. Ethan had been through enough. He didn’t need mocking too.

But then there was a shift, a hardening of Ethan’s mouth, and Randy stilled as he saw something else, something troubling in Ethan’s eyes.

Triumph.

“No,” Ethan said quietly, but quite clearly.

Scully, who had been facing the TV but had glanced at Ethan for his answer, now turned toward them full on. Randy lowered his hands and sat up.

“Excuse me?” he said, his heart beginning to beat a little faster. No. He could not be wrong. He’d seen it, both upstairs and here, now. He was right, and he knew it.

Ethan’s eyes hardened further. “I said no. You’re wrong. Yes, you were right about some of it, but not all. Yes, he took money, and yes, that was my last dollar.” His chin went up a little, and his eyes glittered as he added, “But it was
me
that dumped
him.
”

Randy stared. No. No, that was
not
what he had seen. But then he looked again, looked deeper, using the full force of what Billy liked to call his “freakish gift for reading people,” using the parts of it he couldn’t explain out loud even if his life depended on it, and he saw the shades he had glossed over before, what he could never have seen from the camera and what he’d been too confident and too lazy to see in real time.

What he saw was that Ethan was not lying.

Randy sank back into his chair, staring open-mouthed.

Then the rest of it hit him. He glanced at the camera, then at Scully, who couldn’t have looked more shocked if someone had thrown a glass of cold water at his face.

Then Randy swore.

“Fuck!” He turned to Ethan, then to Scully, then to the camera again. “
Fuck!
”

Scully, recovering, began to laugh a very wicked laugh, the laugh of one who had been waiting a long, long time for this moment. “You better start doin’ some sit-ups, Jansen. Otherwise your beer gut’s gonna hang out over them little neon shorts Billy’s gonna make you and the other twinkies wear!”

“Jesus
fuck
,” Randy whispered, and he collapsed onto the bar, resting his head against the rail as he tried to compose himself.

“What’s going on?” he heard Ethan ask. He still sounded confused, but he was clearly enjoying Randy’s discomfort as much as everyone else.

Scully laughed again. “What’s going on is that Randy Jansen, who is never, ever wrong about a poker face, just read yours and
lost
.” He clapped Randy on the shoulder and sighed contentedly as he turned back to Ethan. “Buddy, you won’t need to pay for a drink at the River for a week, maybe a month. So what can I get you? Another G&T?”

“What about me?” Randy lifted his head. “I’m the poor bastard who has to wear the shorts.”

“You,” Scully said with no sympathy at all, “still owe me for the first round.”

Randy glared at Scully as he sat up and dug into his pocket. “Here,” he said, slamming a twenty-five chip onto the counter. “Happy?”

“Oh, very,” Scully said, scooping up the heavy toke.

“And as for
you
—” Randy said, turning back to Ethan. But he said nothing more, just stopped, not knowing how to finish this. He was still smarting from the misread, and he was unsettled by his own sloppiness. But Ethan wasn’t gloating, wasn’t reveling in the fact that he had just done what a healthy portion of Vegas had been trying to do for years. He was just looking at Randy uneasily, waiting, steeping in more patient Nice as he watched to see what happened now.

And goddamn it, but it was turning Randy on.

Randy swore again. The only way out was to raise the stakes, but it was a bitch to do when there was only one player in the game. So he turned back to Scully, the only player left he could beat. He slammed down another chip—a fifty this time. “You can just damn well wait to buy Slick here a drink, because I’m getting this one too. Another Dirty Whiskey and another G&T. Small T, and a big, big fucking G.”

“Slick?” Ethan repeated.

Randy curled his lip in a snarl. “You want to go back to ‘baby’?”

Ethan smiled, just a little. “Slick’s fine.”

He relaxed, too, for the first time since Randy had picked him up at the roulette table, easing back on his stool, bracing one long arm against the bar, his slender, pretty, but still very masculine hand opening casually as he laid it on the counter. Randy took in the tempting, tender and smooth flesh of Ethan’s palm, and his arousal heightened as he imagined the way that skin would taste. The thumb crooked once, then twice, as if calling to him, but when Randy looked up at Ethan’s face, the man was too distracted watching Scully make the drinks to have done that on purpose.

Unless, of course, Randy had misread him again.

“Fuck,” he whispered and slumped forward back onto the bar.

Ethan
wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but he understood enough to know that somehow he’d bested Randy, which no one, including Randy, had anticipated. And whatever Randy had bet was, from the sound of it, quite embarrassing.

Good,
Ethan thought. He reached for his drink.

He was still working on the first one, but there was a second gin and tonic sweating on a coaster, the drink that Randy had bought him when he’d lost the bet. It didn’t make any sense to Ethan, but he didn’t ask questions. He just watched, his head getting slightly fuzzy from the alcohol as he watched the bartender joyfully needle Randy, who still had his forehead resting on the rail.