I watched as Ronan ate the burnt ones I’d picked out. He shrugged. “I like the burnt ones.”
“I hate empty calories,” I complained, as I ate a handful of popcorn and washed it back with a tequila shot.
“But they look good on you,” Ronan said, his eyes moving over my body. When they met mine again, they widened. “That was a compliment. I meant… you’re so beautiful.”
I wondered if he realized how many times he’d already said that to me tonight.
I was definitely enjoying Unfiltered Ronan.
The three of us sat down around his dining room table—after Ronan pulled out my chair for me—with the popcorn, the bottle of tequila and our silly shot glasses. Andre poured us out another round of shots.
I wasn’t sure how many we’d done. They were all kinda blurring together now.
“To getting drunk and stuff,” Andre aptly toasted us. After we’d downed the shots, he burped and said, “So, now what? Drinking games? Kings Cup?”
“We need more people for that,” I said.
“Drunk Jenga?”
“Do I look like a man who owns Jenga?” Ronan said.
Both Andre and I looked at him.
“Never Have I Ever?” Andre suggested. “Truth or Dare?”
“We’re not twelve-year-old girls,” Ronan pointed out.
“Then what’re we doing here with all the shots, if not playing drinking games?” Andre inquired.
“We’re getting Ronan to loosen up his professional boundaries,” I said.
“Oh, shit. Why didn’t ya say so? Strip poker it is.”
“Ooooohh,” I said. “I love that.”
“Nope,” Ronan said. “Veto.”
“And since when do you get a veto?” I demanded. “If we’re voting, let’s vote.”
Andre and I both shot a hand up in the air.
“Sorry, Ronan,” Andre said. He didn’t sound sorry.
Then he got up and went digging in the hall closet, presumably looking for poker stuff.
“Come on,” I taunted my date, “when was the last time you totally let loose, and played strip poker with a co-worker and one of your clients?”
“Uh, never.”
“See?” Andre said, heading into the kitchen. “Meant to be.”
“Deal ’em up!” I said cheerfully.
Ronan groaned.
Andre was sifting through a kitchen drawer. “Where’s your cards and stuff?”
I poured us all another shot.
“Slight problem…” Ronan said, as Andre’s search moved into the living room. We clinked and tossed back our shots.
“Found cards!” Andre’s head was now under the living room coffee table. He thrust a deck of playing cards victoriously in the air.
“… I don’t have poker chips,” Ronan informed us.
Now Andre groaned. “What dude doesn’t own poker chips?”
“One who doesn’t play poker?”
“We could play Blackball,” I suggested.
“What’s that?” Andre placed the deck of cards in front of me and sat down.
“I’ll teach you. I used to play it with my grandparents.” Though we’d never stripped while we did it… “I need paper and pens.”
Ronan sighed. “I’ll get them.” I shuffled the deck while he went looking.
“Do you know Whist?” I asked them, dealing out the cards.
“Sure,” Andre said.
“What’s Whist?” Ronan returned with a pad of note paper. And three sparkly pens that said Darla Draperton on the side in fancy lettering… with a tiny picture of a floating head; when I looked closely, it was a man in makeup and a big blonde wig.
“What the hell is this?” I said.
Andre craned his neck to see. “Ronan had a drag queen for a client,” he supplied.
I blinked at Ronan.
“She always gave me swag.” He shrugged. “She liked sparkly shit.”
“You know, you are a lot more interesting than I thought you’d be when we first met,” I told him. “No offense.”
“None taken,” he said, with that faint smile he’d had on his face ever since the third or so shot of tequila.
And fucking hell, he was handsome.
Mine.
I’d licked him—thoroughly—and he was totally mine. I had dibs all over the man, and I was keeping him.
My drunk mind made the decision, just like that.
“Okay,” I said, trying to focus. “Blackball is kinda-sorta like a modified version of Whist,” I explained, though clearly that meant nothing to Ronan. I ripped off three sheets of paper and wrote a line of numerals on each paper, starting at 10 and counting down to 1, in a vertical line. Then I gave each of us one of the papers and a pen. “There are ten rounds. The first round corresponds to the ten on your paper, then the second round is nine, and so on. For the first round, we each get ten cards. Then next round we get nine, and so forth. The goal is to win ‘tricks,’ by playing the highest card. Aces are high, by the way, twos are low. You look at your hand and for this round, you decide how many tricks you think you’ll win out of ten. You can say anything from zero to ten. You write that down on your paper. That’s called your bet.”
“This sounds like Oh Hell,” Andre said. “I used to play that with my cousins.”
“Could be,” I said. “There’s probably a million variations. Oh, and the total number of tricks bid between all of us can’t equal the number available. So for example, when we’re playing the first round, if you guys both bid five, five plus five equals ten, so I can’t then bid zero. I’d have to bid at least one. Follow?”
“I’m with you,” Andre said solemnly.
Ronan looked utterly lost.
I kinda liked that look on him. It was pretty adorable.
“We all try to win the exact number of tricks we bet,” I went on. “That’s the goal. If we do, we get to write down a one before the number we bet, and we get that many points. So a bet of one becomes eleven points. A bet of zero becomes ten points. If we don’t win our tricks, we get a blackball. You don’t want those.”
“What’s a blackball?” Ronan asked.
“It’s worth zero points. You literally draw a little black ball on your paper instead of
