SLOW PLAY (7-Stud Club #4) - Christie Ridgway Page 0,70
a diamond or a colored stone for her engagement ring.”
They all groaned.
“What’s the matter with you guys?” Raf asked. “Don’t you know better? Talk to him about sports and weight lifting and the best power bars you can buy in bulk. Manly things, not matrimonial things.”
Mad could only agree. “Maybe we happily single guys should go out in the yard and hang with him…you know, in an act of solidarity.”
Now all the gazes swung his way.
“Happily single?” Raf asked, one black brow winging upward in clear incredulity. “That’s you?”
“I…”
Before he could come up with an answer, Boone peered into the darkness of the backyard and then strode to the front window and widened the blinds. “Never mind. We lost him.”
They all rushed to Boone’s side to see the taillights of their friend’s truck receding in the distance.
“What’s the date?” Cooper intoned in a quiet, dire tone.
Shane told him.
Coop sighed. “It’s Kim’s birthday. He mentioned it to me in passing a couple of weeks ago—he was planning to call her folks today. I didn’t remember until now.”
His dead fiancée’s birthday. Mad scrubbed his face with his palms. “Somebody should go after him.”
“I vote you,” Cooper said.
He dropped his hands and stared at his friend. “Why me?”
“The whole thing’s got to be familiar to you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know that look on Hart’s face tonight?”
“Yeah.”
Cooper shrugged. “Just like yours those many months after Harper left and before you did that head-smack-with-a-loose-floorboard thing that you called an engagement to perky Courtney.”
“Remind me to have your car towed,” Mad said, disgusted. “And leave Courtney out of this.”
“You managed that yourself, thank God,” Eli said, “before we had to stage an intervention.”
Exasperated, Mad looked around at his friends. “Wow, I’m having so much fun here.”
Cooper sighed again. “I’ll go after Hart,” he said, “since I’m the one who forgot the date.”
“And I’m going to sit down and deal ’em up,” Shane said, “because you dudes still have money in your pockets.”
After Cooper exited the house, they did get back to play, but this time it was Mad in a mood, as he shifted from thinking about Hart’s grief to his own dilemma. What had he been thinking, falling in love with Harper and then considering a relationship with her again? Certainly he hadn’t been recalling the anguish of his grieving friend or his sister Tracy’s despair after her divorce. Not to mention his own hell upon losing Harp the first time. How could he take a chance on someone who had already hurt him once before?
Ruminating on all that, he bet and folded and bet and raised and lost chips and won chips and won chips again. And won again.
“What the hell?” Boone said, tossing down his latest hand in clear disgust. “You’re not playing like the reliable Mad we know. You never bet and raise aggressively with a nothing hand. I know if you do it’s because you have the damn goods to back it up.”
Boone shot him a dark look. “But you just bluffed, asshole. For the third time.”
Mad shook his head. “What are you talking about? That’s part of the game.”
“Not your game,” his big friend grumbled.
“Apparently even ol’ Mad can change on occasion,” Shane said.
“Hey—”
“Yeah?” Boone said. “I bet he still irons his boxers.”
“And eats fiber every morning,” Shane added. “I’ve witnessed it.”
“Predictable,” Raf declared.
“Stop.” Mad stared down the table. “I’m not so damn predictable. I didn’t bring the rye pretzels this time. I went with black licorice.”
“Yeah, well, we like the rye pretzels. The licorice not so much.”
“Maybe we’ve been friends for too long,” Mad said, annoyed. “Because I’m beginning to notice how you can all be shitheads.”
Eli shook his head. “You gotta stick with us,” he said. “There’s gotta be at least one dependable bachelor uncle in the group, and face it, you’re the man we can always count on.”
Mad frowned. The man counted on to be reliable, predictable, to not hit on a twelve, and to never win big. Pathetic. “What the hell is a bachelor uncle, anyway?”
Shane pointed at him with his beer bottle. “You teach our kids to drive, you bail them out when necessary, you show them how to forge their parents’ signatures on report cards or do it yourself if they’re squeamish.”
“We needed a bachelor uncle,” Raf said to his half brother.
“More important than all that,” added Eli, “is you come over on Christmas Eve and put all the stickers on the plastic toys.”