WHAT DO YOU WANT to do first?” Matt asked.
Bridget was surprised that he didn’t have more questions after what had transpired in the restaurant. “You don’t want to talk about what happened in there?”
Matt shrugged. “I figure that you’ll tell me what you want me to know.”
“You really are a unicorn.”
He gave her the lopsided smile that had made it really hard not to kiss him the whole summer. “Not a unicorn. I’m just not an asshole.”
What a revelation.
Hannah and Jack walked out of the restaurant and onto the casino floor then. “After that, I think we should drink a lot,” Hannah said.
“Jack and I had already agreed to that when he fetched me from the bathroom,” Bridget said.
Hannah turned to her betrothed. “I knew there was a reason why I agreed to marry you.”
Then her brother kissed his fiancée, and Bridget rolled her eyes. She caught her breath when Matt put his arm around her waist and put his lips against her ear. “Kind of cute, but kind of sickening, right?”
Her brother came up for air. “Just wait until it’s you, little sister.”
“You’ll be waiting a long-ass time,” Bridget said. “I’m not doing that anymore.”
Jack gave her—with Matt’s arm around her waist—a meaningful look. She wanted to deny that she was going to fall for Matt, but she sort of already had. She was in lust with him, and she really liked him despite all her efforts not to.
And it felt totally natural to walk around the casino with his arm around her waist. She liked the weight of it there. As soon as they’d kissed in the hotel room, a dam broke. She no longer wanted to be not touching him. She couldn’t stop thinking about his lips.
Even with Chris making a scene, she’d only been partially distracted from the lust she felt for Matt Kido. And maybe that was why Chris had made a scene. Maybe he’d seen the energy between the two of them and it had made him feel like it was really over.
For Bridget, kissing Matt had been like closing a door on one thing—feeling alone—and opening a door on something new. Whatever it was with Matt wasn’t going to last—he was way too young for her, and she wasn’t even his type. But having him interested in her made her feel like maybe she could do a relationship again. Maybe she wanted someone’s focused romantic attention on her.
She was way overthinking this as they wandered closer to the gaming tables. She was here to celebrate her brother and Hannah, not have fights with her ex and figure out her whole future—confused feelings and all.
It was sort of perfect when Hannah said, “I think it’s time for some tequila shots.”
ARE YOU SURE THAT we want to do shots?” Jack asked his fiancée in an indulgent tone of voice.
“It’s not a proper bachelor/bachelorette party unless there are shots.” Hannah looked at Jack as though he was new here.
“It’s not a proper bachelor party at all. There are no strippers,” Jack said.
Matt didn’t know if he was witnessing a fight or a spirited discussion. All he knew was that it was highly amusing. Like, he didn’t know if the betrotheds were going to tear each other’s faces or clothes off. Their voices were completely sweet, but the snapping tension between the two reminded him more of his working relationship with Bridget than his previous romantic relationship with Naomi.
“I’m pretty sure the girl with Chris was a stripper,” Bridget said. “And I vote for shots.”
Bridget hadn’t said much since the scene with her ex-douche, and he hated that. If it took shots to get her back into a good mood—or if she needed to forget the evening up until now with the help of an alcoholic anesthetic—he was going to be supportive.
He motioned for a cocktail server to come over and ordered shots for the four of them—everyone else had wandered off to gamble and drink on their own. It seemed that Jack wasn’t going to let his little sister out of his sight for the time being, so there they were.
“Blackjack?” Matt suggested.
Bridget turned to him, a smile on her face for the first time in about an hour. “You really are the perfect date.”
“I don’t know about that.” Matt could feel himself blushing. Something had changed after she’d kissed him. While he’d been working for her, he’d felt sort of awed and terrified the entire time. And now he felt like he was her knight in shining armor. He knew she didn’t really need one, but he wanted to be that for her all the same. He wanted her to see him as an equal, even if it meant throwing some money at her problems tonight.
Because the shift in their relationship had happened so fast, the last thing he expected her to do was to kiss him on the mouth. But that’s what she did. It was a quick thank-you, not the sultry kiss they’d shared upstairs, but they were in public and in front of her brother. He totally got why she wouldn’t want to take it too far in front of Jack and Hannah.
He was just glad that she did it.
And he didn’t have to worry about stealing a kiss in front of her big brother, because Jack and Hannah had taken a seat at a blackjack table near them. Matt wanted to focus on Bridget having a good time, so he didn’t want to get wound up in playing the game, even though he liked that it required some skill in addition to luck. He’d gone to law school because he’d hated math, but he was good enough at it to count cards, even though that was frowned upon.
The server came back with shots for them and Matt motioned for them to give the other ones to Jack and Hannah. Hannah winked at Matt when she looked over her shoulder, and Matt liked having the woman’s approval. He didn’t know her very well, but she seemed like the ultimate straight shooter. If she didn’t like him for some reason, he could see Bridget taking her future sister-in-law’s judgment to heart.
“Bottoms up,” Bridget said, just before taking the shot. He was a few seconds behind her because he was looking at her with her head tilted back. She looked so different tonight than she normally did.
She wore a tiny sequined dress that barely covered anything at all. It had a low back, and he felt like he couldn’t stop touching her soft skin. She had more makeup on than usual, and it made her eyes even more vivid than they usually were.
At work, she was an apex predator in prey’s clothing—professional but with an almost-too-innocent face. Here, she looked the whole part, and he wanted to be devoured.
“What?” She was smiling, her cheeks pink and her lips plump and still wet from tequila.
He couldn’t say all the things that he was thinking in that moment. She wouldn’t be able to hear them without running flat out in the opposite direction. They didn’t really know each other well enough for him to tell her all the possibilities they’d unlocked in his brain the second they kissed.
And he knew she wouldn’t want to hear that he wanted to be her rebound guy and maybe more, because that sounded like it was jumping the gun—to him.
But something about standing there with her glittering eyes and shiny red-gold hair, and the lights of the casino making the sequins of her dress shimmer, made her look like a mirage in the desert to him.
Something in him made him want to reach out before she disappeared. He couldn’t say any of that, so he took a shot and ordered another round.