Page 93 of Holiday Home 3
“I won’t let you get me like that again.”
“I knew I should have folded there. Ugh!”
Playful glares were nearly as common as ebullient grins throughout the game, and the latter was particularly prevalent whenever he lost a hand to some last-second nonsense. Realizing just how much the four women enjoyed it when he hung in and suffered a biting defeat due to insane luck on the river, he further loosened his playstyle. For the rest of the night,he holstered most of his stratagems, focusing more on making the game exciting than winning.
Nevertheless, that didn’t mean he suddenly forgot how to play or wasn’t still the most significant threat at the table. As Victoria, looking surprisingly self-contented as she sipped from her drink, soon found out. By way of a pair of queens, he made her the first to run out of chips.
So, expectedly, everyone looked toward the dealer.
Straightening in her chair, Avril steepled her fingers. “Somehow, it’s extra fitting for you to be the first one.”
“Because I’m the one who needs to restrain you when you go too far?” the older woman asked. Her slim smile grew as Avril shrugged. Her eyes weren’t quite so piercing as usual, affected at least in some minor way by the haze of tipsiness. She’d smiled more in this round than the previous two combined.
“Maybe,” Avril said, answering a smile with a smile. “Let’s all have a little bit of fun, now. The rules are really simple. Whenever anyone goes out, they can answer a question of mine. If they do, they get to take half the pot—and keep playing. That’s all.”
“Oh, is that all?” he, the hand winner, groused.
“That’s all,” Avril repeated, grinning at him. “It’ll work out for you once or twice, too, so don’t pout. Share some of your winnings with Victoria so she can keep playing.”
“What happens if you can’t—or won’t—answer the question?”
With Avril being the questioner, they all knew the latter was more likely than the former.
“Then you are done. And I’m going to ramp up the questions’… spiciness, so don’t think you can just keep going out and expecting to come back in so easily. The first one will be a softball, though.”
Looks were shared, and shoulders were shrugged. This was what they’d signed up for, so they might as well see how soft this “softball” would be.
“Very well,” Victoria said tolerantly. “Go ahead.”
“When’s the last time you got drunk?” her one-time almost-in-law asked. “And not tipsy, but totally drunk. Teetering queasily with every step drunk.”
“Anything we share here is kept between us.” No squiggle stood above the dot at the end of Victoria’s punctuation; she was demanding, not asking. And even though she’d broadly addressed the room, her focus remained on the person she knew best in the room.
“For our eyes and ears only,” Avril agreed, nodding.
“Then not too long ago,” the olive-skinned professor said. “During the blizzard. I couldn’t go anywhere for days, and I ended up drinking more than I’d realized on one of those nights.”
“Aww, that’s kind of sad,” Avril said. “I was hoping for juicy, not depressing.”
“It was neither of those things,” Victoria declared. “I simply drank more than I had intended. I had been watching a couple of movies on my couch, and when I stood up, I realized I’d overdone it.”
“And back down on the couch you went?” Avril surmised, raising an eyebrow.
“Something like that.”
“I guess you are the only one who doesn’t have someone else in this room to share the misery with, huh? Anna and I live together, and Liam and Tess are just a door away. You should come live by one of us.”
“I like my home very much, thank you,” Victoria said.
“Yeah, but it’s so far away. I always hate driving to it.”
Victoria ignored Avril’s complaint, instead nodding toward the pile of chips at the center of the table. “So, I take half the total pot?”
Avril grinned and nodded. “And you get to watch the vein in Liam’s forehead twitch angrily as you do it, so do it really,reallyslowly.
No vein in his forehead did anything other than proceed as normal as Victoria claimed her half of the pot. He even helped her split it up so they could get to the next round more quickly. In it, Anna trounced him and Tess with pocket aces. Now that they’d discovered where the floor began, the three of them who hadn’t yet been subjected to a question all relaxed a little. For now, Victoria was the only one among them who needed to worry about how quickly things might escalate.
With that in mind, they silently agreed to keep playing loosely. In an expected turnout, each of them eventually heard Avril’s first question for them. Anna was asked if she’d always had that dress or bought it specially for tonight. Face rosy, she’d confirmed that it’d been the latter.