“Pitiful,” he huffed. “At least get it to the twenty.” He brought a cut crystal tumbler glass to his lips, mumbling, “I would have taken it to the house,” before downing a generous portion of the casino’s top-shelf Scotch. Every seat in the ultra exclusive Players Club at Atlantic City’s Rio Grande Casino was taken. It was the biggest gambling day of the year—Super Bowl Sunday—and everyone wanted a piece of the action. Jared glanced over at the craps table, able to gauge who was winning and who would have to take out a new mortgage on their house just by studying the players’ body language. He’d been on both sides of that coin before. He could not go back there. Which was why, for about the thousandth time this hour, Jared asked himself just what in the hell he was doing in this casino. He usually wasn’t one for self-sabotage, but that was the only reasonable explanation he could find in a mind that was marinating in more alcohol than he usually consumed in a month.
