That hadn’t happened. Instead, he’d said a bunch of stuff he hadn’t meant, because otherwise he’d have told her he loved her, and that wasn’t the way to sever things…

She was going on a date with Bo, which he’d engineered. That was a good thing.

But it meant they couldn’t be a couple any longer—not even a secret couple—so there was no point taking a step backward by trying to hold on. They were over.

And yes, she’d been ticked about it because she thought she wasn’t ready and she wanted to be the one to decide. But he wouldn’t be doing her any favors by becoming another crutch to her. So he’d pushed. And if that had made her mad enough to remember why they’d started this thing in the first place, then good.

“You keep playing like this and that pile of quarters ain’t going to last long.”

Tucker glanced over the top of his cards to eye Arlo. Sitting around from him at the table was Drew. It was a rare Saturday night they could get together, but Drew had informed Tucker that he needed not to be at Jack’s—or home alone—tonight, and frankly he’d been too damn morose to care.

Drew had arranged for Bryce to take over the bar and harassed Arlo about truly taking a night off by handing his pager over to his deputy and hosting a poker game. A proper one with six-pack beer and crap frozen pizza cooked in the oven. Arlo used to host a regular poker night, but then Della had come to stay and it had stopped.

Drew had suggested his place, initially, then changed his mind. Apparently, Tucker was funereal enough without playing poker next to a room full of coffins.

Ultimately, the location didn’t matter as long as it wasn’t Jack’s. Drew was right—he couldn’t have stood on the other side of the bar and watched Bo make goo-goo eyes at Della all night. Or vice versa. So being anywhere but Jack’s was a smart move.

Didn’t stop him from playing shit poker, though.

“Maybe if the dealer wasn’t so god-awful,” Tucker growled as he tossed his nine-high collection of crap into the discard pile, “I’d get a decent hand.”

“Nothing wrong with my hands,” Arlo said calmly.

Tucker snorted. “How convenient.”

Arlo had always been a card shark. He knew all those fancy shuffling tricks and had played a lot of very serious poker during the year he’d been mad as hell and convalescing from his injury. At one point, Arlo had announced his intention to move to Vegas, until Tucker had persuaded him to come home to Credence instead.

Tucker should have let him go to wallow in his misery and lose all his money. It would have saved him this ass-kicking.