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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