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“You weren’t expecting to be impressed,” she said.
“No. I’ve never seen cards shuffled that way so well.” He realized that compliment sounded hollow when Vivian’s eyes narrowed. “I couldn’t do it and I’m not foolish enough not to credit expertise when I see it, even if I don’t fully understand it.”
Her lips twitched and she started shuffling the deck. “What card do you want?”
“What?”
“Before you continue to damn me with faint praise—”
The well-deserved dry tone of her voice made him smile. Not many people were willing to poke at him, and a perverse part of him was attracted to those who dared.
“—I have another trick for you. Name a card.”
“Three of diamonds.”
She dealt them each five cards. “The top card in your pile is the three of diamonds.”
When he turned the card over, he was staring at the three of diamonds. “Five of clubs,” he said, not willing to believe what he saw.
She blinked, then dealt out another ten cards and looked up at him, one brow raised. He turned over his top card.
“Ten of hearts.”
“It’s the third card from the bottom on the table.”
He riffled through the cards to find the card he’d asked for, right where she’d said it was.
“Impressed yet?”
“Yes.” And a little appalled. These were not an honest person’s tricks. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“I’ve been shuffling cards since I could hold a deck. Some of the tricks my dad taught me are just for flourish. Others are made to look innocent and win money.”
“You play solitaire. How do you not win every time?”
“If you’re not gambling, cheating takes all the fun out of it. And I don’t like gambling.”
“But you worked at a casino.”
She shrugged. “At the time, I needed any job I could get and I got a job at Middle Kingdom.”
“And you kept it because…”
“How I feel about gambling doesn’t pay the bills.”
“And your college classes…”
“Didn’t get me anything other than an appreciation of Melville,” she said dryly.
He laughed. They were going about this relationship backward, with marriage and pregnancy first and the get-to-know-you later. Done the normal way, he probably wouldn’t have looked past her job to bother getting to know her. And he would’ve missed out on the sly sense of humor he was growing to really appreciate.
And those fingers.
She was shuffling the cards again. A nervous habit.
“Can you teach me?”
“To deal exactly the card you want? No.”
“To do the first card trick. The bit of flourish.” He didn’t know why he was doing this, other than that he liked being near her and wanted to keep her talking.
“Probably.”
He patted the seat next to him on the couch. When she raised an eyebrow at him, he politely asked if he could sit next to her.
I shouldn’t do this, he thought as he scooted closer to her. But she smelled like jasmine and suddenly he didn’t care if she had secrets, so long as her thigh was pressed against his.
“This would be easier if I had some room to maneuver.” She smiled up at him and her eyes colored to warm amber. Her pupils had gotten larger and her gaze softer.
“Probably,” he said. If she evidenced any resistance at all, he would pull back and learn a card trick he’d never use. Instead, her mouth opened and the tip of her tongue ran along her bottom lip. Karl stayed where he was.
We shouldn’t do this. They were strangers forced to live in an apartment together because they were having a baby. The intimacy he’d felt sitting across the dining room table from her, cleaning up after dinner with her, her hands soapy and warm as she passed dishes to him, sharing a couch—that was all a lie. They were still strangers.
He took the deck of cards from her hands, reaching blindly for the table and not caring when the cards tumbled onto the floor.
“I thought you wanted to learn a card trick.”
He took her breathy voice as further confirmation that she was as affected by him as he was by her.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said. He leaned in until the fact that they weren’t kissing was a technicality. The warm air she expelled from her nose spread across his face. “Nothing I give you has a price.”
