The Baby Gamble (Texas Hold'em)

Shoving open the unlocked door, he stepped forward, to find the unconscious man lying prone on the floor beside the toilet, his pants down around his ankles.

ANNIE WAS ALMOST ASLEEP when Cole called just after the nightly news on Wednesday.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting up, instantly awake when she recognized her little brother’s voice.“Verne Chandler had a stroke.” Cole’s voice sounded strange. Lost.

“Is he alive?”

“For now. But he’s still unconscious. Blake found him.”

“When?”

“Tonight. He got to the game first and was concerned when he didn’t see any lights on. If he hadn’t found him when he did, and hadn’t administered artificial respiration, Chandler probably would have died. Apparently, from what the paramedics and police could piece together at the scene, he’d been drifting in and out of consciousness since sometime last night. He must have just gone into cardiac arrest when Blake arrived.”

It didn’t surprise Annie a bit that her ex-husband had been the one to save the day. Or that he’d had the emotional wherewithal to remain calm and preserve a life.

“Has anyone called Mercedes?” she asked.

River Bluff’s favorite postal worker had been married to and divorced from Verne before Annie could even remember knowing them. But she still kept an eye out for her ex, and Annie had always suspected that while the older woman hadn’t been able, or maybe willing, to live with Verne’s drinking, she’d never been able to fall completely out of love with him, either.

Verne Chandler, who’d come back to town upon his younger sister’s death to assume responsibility for her saloon, and her then-twelve-year-old son, wasn’t a bad person. He was just weak.

As Annie’s father had been.

“She’s with him now,” Cole was saying, and Annie realized she’d missed the first part of her brother’s response to her question.

“Thank God Blake was there,” she said, wondering how Cole was taking this indication of another man being too weak to help himself, putting his life in danger rather than getting help. Especially when the man had been the father figure, however inadequate, of Cole’s best friend during their pivotal high-school years.

“He was a rock,” Cole agreed. Annie, still predisposed to mother her younger brother, hated the fatigue she recognized in his voice.

“Brady and Luke showed up before I did, and they were already cleaning up the mess before I even knew what was going on. When the rest of the guys showed up, I sent them home and then stayed to help get the place sorted out. It was a wreck.”

Annie leaned over, elbows on her knees. She studied the hems of the sweatpants she’d thrown on after she’d realized that she couldn’t possibly climb into the bed she’d shared with Blake the night before.

Not until she’d had time to put a little more distance between that particular night and the rest of her life.

“Would you like to come over?” she asked. “There’s still half a six-pack in the fridge.” They’d shared more late-night beers than she could count in the months immediately following the breakup of Cole’s marriage to a spoiled socialite who’d run home to Daddy after Cole lost his shirt in a realestate deal she’d helped to orchestrate.

“No. I’m okay,” Cole said, though he didn’t really sound as if he meant it. “Blake stopped by and we had a couple of beers already.”

Blake was still in town, then? Her stomach muscles fluttered, refusing to settle as she bade them to. They’d been acting up all evening, in spite of the fact that she’d made it perfectly clear to herself that Blake’s presence in River Bluff for his weekly poker game had nothing to do with her. He’d been coming to town every week for the past two years, and she’d never once so much as seen him on the road.

Last night hadn’t changed anything. He wasn’t coming to see her.

To pretend that they needed one more night of loving in order to be certain she’d conceive the first time out.

“He said he was in town last night,” Cole added, almost as an afterthought.

Except that she knew her brother.

“Oh.” She wasn’t discussing this with him.

“Said he was at your place.”

“Yeah.” Her tone dared him to make something of the fact.

“I’m glad. That’s all.”

“You pretty much ordained it,” she reminded him.