Which brought him to the other thing. The more she pretended nothing had changed, the more he wanted to prove to her they had. Her actions were like a red flag to his bull. A challenge he readily accepted.
She scoffed at him from across the small table. “You’re always starving. I swear your legs are hollow.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a healthy appetite.” He turned to their waitress as she tucked the tray under her arm. “Am I right, Cherry?”
Dillon only meant to gain a friendly ally for his defense, but the girl raked her gaze over him like he had the words Please objectify me tattooed on his forehead. Flashing her dimples and giving him a suggestive wink with fake eyelashes, she replied, “Not if that body is the result.”
Coming from the Colorado winter to temps in the fifties and sixties, he’d chosen jeans and a blue, short-sleeve polo he hadn’t even bothered to tuck in. Not exactly something he’d expect to be ogled in. Now he needed to do damage control.
“There, you see? I’ll start worrying when I look down and can’t see my feet. Besides,” he said, pointing a finger at Alyssa, “you’re the one who cooks gourmet dinners for me every night, so that makes you my enabler, sweetheart.”
Whether it was the emphasized pet name or the insinuation that he and Alyssa lived together, Cherry dropped the flirtatious act as Dillon had hoped and resorted to proper server behavior, albeit with a look of disappointment. “I’ll be back with your meals as soon as they’re ready.”
Alyssa thanked her in way of dismissal, then watched as Cherry sashayed her way through the patio tables back to the main dining area. The darts Alyssa shot at their waitress’s back made a tiny grain of hope swell in his chest. Alyssa might actually be jealous of another woman’s attention.
If that was the case, then maybe she was starting to feel just as possessive of him as he was of her. Relief flowed through him. He wasn’t the only one experiencing strong emotions. A fact that would be to his benefit when he proposed that this last much longer than a single weekend.
“I still can’t believe you beat that Texan,” he said, drawing her attention back to him. “The way he talked, you’d think he invented Texas Hold’em, and yet you took him for everything he had in under an hour.”
“Correction: everything he had at the table.” She dragged a chip through the warm spinach-and-artichoke dip while trying to hold back her smile. “As a real estate mogul, I’m sure the fifteen-hundred-dollar loss didn’t put much of a dent in his coffers.”
“Still, the look on his face when you beat him was priceless. I’ve never seen anyone so tan go so completely white before.”
At last the smile broke free. “He did look rather peckish when I pulled the stacks of chips to me, didn’t he?”
She popped the corn chip into her mouth and let out an appreciative moan for her favorite appetizer. It was perfectly innocent. It shouldn’t remind him of the sounds he’d brought out in her less than six hours before with his hands, his mouth, and his cock in the bathtub. Sounds that had made him totally crazy and hard as hell. Sounds that were starting to make his jeans damn uncomfortable as he sat in public to enjoy a meal with her, but wanted nothing more than to make her his meal, public or not.
Giving himself a mental shake, he raised his beer and took several long draws. With any luck the alcohol would take the edge off until he could get her back to their room. Then all bets would be off.
Speaking of bets… Dillon chuckled, remembering how they spent their morning. After breakfast at the hotel’s buffet, they’d walked around the casino for a while. When they found a room running Texas Hold’em games that started on the hour, he suggested they play. She balked at first, but he eventually convinced her. One-hundred-dollars ante each and they’d only play until they were out. No pressure, just fun.
Except a few hands in, Dillon realized that Alyssa was a fucking card shark. He’d never seen a woman with a poker face like hers. The way she acted, she could have been at a high-class dinner party or interview with the president. Nothing but polite civility utterly lacking any hints of emotion. No one at the table—including him—could read her.
She, on the other hand, read everyone else like their skulls were transparent, allowing her to know their every thought and every move. She was so dead-on, it was almost creepy.
“So when’d you become such a ruthless opponent in poker anyway?” he asked. “Last I checked, you’d never played cards. You always just sat next to me and watched or did your own thing whenever I played at parties.”