Ain’t Misbehaving by Jennifer Greene Read Free Book Online Page A

coat as he closed it. His breath was rasping in his lungs as though he’d just sucked in fire. “Your men,” he said raggedly.
    “Pardon?”
    “You have a poker game.”
    “Do I?”
    “Yes.” And if she thought he was going to leave her at the door to a group of other men, she was sadly mistaken.
    Maybe he had a latent streak of masochism, but he needed to at least see his competition.

Chapter Four
    Kay crunched down noisily on a potato chip and saw five pairs of eyes turn irritably in her direction. She swallowed hastily.
    “Do you by any miracle have just a little more of that dip in the refrigerator?” Stix asked.
    “What’s it worth to you?”
    “At least all my love for the rest of your life.”
    “I know that. I meant in money.”
    Stix aimed a slap at her backside but missed. Chuckling, Kay fetched a fresh bowl of dip from the refrigerator and perched back up on her stool. Stix instantly scooped up a tablespoon of the stuff on a quarter-sized chip and popped it into his voracious mouth, mumbling, “Raise two.”
    Mitch smiled, as if the raise had pleased him. “See your two and raise another.” His eyes flicked first to Stix and then to Kay before his attention returned to the cards.
    Sucking on a salted cashew nut, Kay watched with fascination as Mitch raked in yet another stack of chips.
    Having lost her stake of five dollars—her max—to him earlier in the game, she was delighted to sit back and let the others suffer. Glancing at the clock, she saw it was nearing midnight. She still hadn’t figured out how Mitch had ended up at the poker game with her. He’d seen the four men waiting for her at the door when he brought her home, and the next thing she knew he’d blended into the group as if born there.
    The table was set up in the living room. Soda and beer cans littered the side tables; chips and dip and napkins and bowls of cashews were clustered among the cards. John was the only smoker in the group, and his thin haze of smoke wandered around the room.
    John chain-smoked when he had a good hand. Stix munched when he had a good hand. Barker fidgeted, and their resident CPA, Hailey, from three blocks down, pulled his mustache. Kay had always found him remarkably easy to beat.
    Mitch did nothing to give himself away. He just won. No big deal, but he definitely kept drawing in the lion’s share of the chips.
    And he listened. The man might have a zipper for a mouth as far as his own secrets, but he was remarkably adept at prying information from others. What they did for a living, how long they’d been married, how long they hadn’t been married…and how Mitch got them going, she had no idea, but the guys had been relating a disgusting selection of escapades from their—and her—younger days. One senior prom night that ended with skinny-dipping in Coeur D’Alene Lake. One perfectly innocent afternoon of fishing in the Sawtooth Mountains that turned into four days, thanks to a flash flood that washed out the roads…
    “Kay always had the best ideas,” Barker told Mitch, still laughing. “Whenever the guys wanted any excitement…”
    He left the sentence hanging. Thanks so much, Barker, Kay thought darkly. She stuck another cashew nut in her mouth. You’d think she’d spent her entire life in high-spirited antics, but that just wasn’t true. Working herself through college hadn’t been a lark, nor was making a life for herself alone. And earlier, there’d been some very dark years, when the family had been afraid Jana wasn’t going to make it, when her mother had come close to falling apart and it had been up to Kay to keep up the family’s morale.
    Given a choice between a funny story and a tragic one she’d choose the funny one any day, but the picture of Capering Kay was hardly accurate. Her poker cohorts knew that; she was used to their ceaseless teasing, and she wouldn’t have cared at all if it hadn’t been for Mitch.
    On the one hand, he kept feeding the guys their cue