Good Girl (Sugar Life #2)

Darcy

I flip a poker chip over my knuckles and then back up, fingers dancing in the air, like they are stroking the keys on a piano, doing my best to appear as nonchalant as fucking possible. Poker is a numbers game, a splash of luck, and a whole lot of bravado.

I have bravado in spades; that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the asshole next to me knows me almost as well as he knows the numbers, so the only way this bluff is going to work is if I go from one extreme reaction to another.

Overeager. Bored. The next will be brash, doubling the entire pot, regardless of his counter bet. Then I’ll lean back and be thoughtful. Fuck up all his data points.

Bastard loves mindfucks. See how he likes being the one that is fucked with.

Chips soar across the table and land in the stash in the center as Hudson matches my raise. “Call.”

Damn.

My three and eight of hearts won’t stand up here.

Hudson deals the burn card—a single card face down to stop cheating—and then the turn—the fourth face-up card. I almost choke on my sip of beer. Another three. Well, well, well. This just got a little more interesting.

Change of plans. No more brash.

“Check,” I mutter and slump back in my seat.

Dramatic? Yes. Will I do anything to win a hand against Hudson? Also, yes.

Across the table, Xavier is staring at me, and only because I know the man so well, do I know that he’s amused. Clearly, he sees right through me.

The frosty glare coming from my right is difficult to ignore though, so I bring up the topic of SugarLife again, just to get everyone focusing on something else, even if it will tank the mood even more. “So, what’s the verdict on the invite? Are we changing the invite or the gift? My vote is the gift. We’ve already cut it down to the bare minimum for us. I’m not willing to remove anything else.”

My question is subtly directed at Derek. The rest of us can all read the writing on the wall, but he is the most change adverse. He likes everything in their neat little boxes, left-aligned, and in Times New Roman. It’s the accountant in him. Can’t help but balance the check book at the end of every conversation.

Whereas I, on the other hand, prefer the spontaneous. The random splash of color a bucket of paint makes on a perfectly white canvas. How that paint can be spread and smeared, twisted and twirled, until it forms a piece of chaotic art.

“Fine. We’ll up the gift on Sunday. Let the weekend play out and see where we end up.” Derek takes a sip of his drink before adding an afterthought. “I’m considering going to Obsession Saturday night, if any of you would like to join me.”

“Is it a theme night?” Xavier asks. His scruff-covered baby face hide some pretty extreme kinks and dark fantasies, and from what I’ve managed together, an equally dark past.

Of all of us, Derek is probably the most initially intimidating. Subs tend to seek refuge from his brand of dominance behind us. The man has a glare on him that flusters the majority of subs. And the fact that he is the go-to Dom at Obsession when someone wants an impact play demonstration doesn’t really make him approachable. What the subs don’t realize is that his kinks are probably the tamest of the four of us.

It only takes them a few minutes after seeing my collection of colorful ropes to acknowledge they have come to the wrong man for sanctuary.

And if they happen to go with Hudson and Xav, they’ll find themselves dancing on a knife’s edge—figuratively for Hudson, as he pulls their minds apart and puts them back together. That knife’s edge is literal for Xav, whose monogrammed, black-leather blade roll, filled with ten of the sharpest knives I have ever seen, causes many a sub to safe word out.

Derek readjusts in his seat. “I haven’t checked yet. The thought only occurred to me a moment ago.”

Xav rumbles a noncommittal noise. “As long as it isn’t one of those dress-up nights, I’ll join you.”

“Check.”

I tense. For a second there, I forgot I was waiting for Hudson to make his move. He doesn’t even give me a moment to think before he deals out the next burn card and the final card—the river.

Five of hearts.

No straight.

No flush.

I’m sitting on trip-threes. So, either Hud has two pairs or a full house.

My gut is telling me he has two pairs. But what if he used his position as dealer to slide into the hand with jack-three or a low pocket pair? He’d have a full house and I’ll spend the rest of the night playing with one hand tied behind my back.

Fuck that. It’s all or nothing.

I take another peek at my cards, just tipping the corners, as if I’m checking my cards. Pretending to need a better look at the cards on the table, I sit up straighter and grab a stack of chips, letting them rattle through my fingers as I filter and restack them over and over.

Deciding to put my chips where my mouth is, I make my move. “Pot.”

Xavier huffs out a laugh but reaches forward and does a quick count of the chips already committed to the pot, leaving them staked by value. “Four-twenty-five.”

I quickly stack up my chips to equal the same amount and use my index finger to push them into the center, committing them to the pot. When I lean back in my seat, I tilt into the corner of it and throw my arm over the top of the backrest. “Your move, Huddy.”

“Don’t fucking call me that,” he growls back at me, his icy blue eyes glaring. “And what the fuck kind of bet is that?”

I flatten my tongue to the roof of my mouth to stop from grinning—getting under his skin is an evil pleasure of mine. Shrugging, I reach for my beer and take a casual sip. “Just playing the cards I was dealt. Thankyou for that, by the way.”

Hudson grabs two piles of chips in one hand, leaving them side by side on the table. Then, using his middle finger, he cards up the center, shuffling the two stacks together, merging the blue and green in alternating stripes over and over until the stacks are back to solid colors.

Just when I think he is about to fold, he shocks the shit out of me. “Pot.”

We all turn to look at him, but he keeps his face annoyingly blank and just stacks up his bet before pushing it into the center.

What the fuck do I do now?

My read on him is shot. I’ve been too wrapped up in my own behavior and throwing him off, I haven’t been watching for his tells. I have no fucking clue what his hand is. Do I fold, admit defeat, and laugh it off?

Fuck, no. That is not in my DNA.

“All in,” I state, and messily push the remainder of my chips into the center of the table.

“Come on, Darcy, it’s the first hand of the night. Are you seriously going to—”

“Call,” Hudson says, cutting in over Derek.

“Fuck,” I mutter under my breath. The asshole has totally played me.

I toss my cards onto the chips in the center, face up. “Threes.”

Hudson tosses his cards between the two of us and starts to rake in his winnings. “Full house, kings over threes.”

Motherfucker. Asshole slide into the hand with pocket kings.

I puff out a heavy breath and slump back in my chair. “I will get youone day, Huddy.”

“But not today,” Hudson replies with a smirk.

Fucker.

The deal skips me and is handed to Derek. While he shuffles and deals out to everyone but me, I pull my phone out and decide to log into SugarLife.

The login screen appears, and there are two profiles for me to choose from: my single profile and our group one. We set up the group profile so that we could all check the account and any messages that may come through, rather than just one of us being in control of the profile and messaging on everyone’s behalf.

I select the group profile and while it loads, I take another sip of my drink. When I see the little red notification bubble over the Invitations icon, I suck in a breath. My gut tightens at the prospect of a potential play partner we can share for the night.

Glancing up at the others, I make the split-second decision to view her profile before telling them there is a notification. Why get their hopes up when this could simply be a spam message or a SugarLife event notification? I tap my thumb over the notification, and the screen loads.

Invitation Acceptance

SugarBB_Emmy has accepted your invitation.

I look at the others. The hand has finished, and Xav is pulling the cards toward him. He even has the smallest smile on his face. Probably has something to do with the new pile of unstacked chips sitting to the side of his meticulously stacked piles of chips.

Hudson is raising his beer to his lips as he talks, hand gesturing in front of him. I can hear his words, but I’m not listening.

The last time we’d had someone accept our invitation, we ended up locked in a text-only chat with them for four days. We barely left Xavier’s condo the entire time, all of us wanting to be there for the entire chat. That was months ago. My phone goes dark as I think back to the last time we were in this situation.

Everything was going just fine until getting into the particulars of our kinks. She was fine with Derek’s love of impact play, admitting to being a budding masochist. She also sent through photos of her previous experience with ropes, the knots not as perfect as I prefer them, but enough to let me know that her partner had been fairly serious about their rope work.

The cracks had started to show when Hudson brushed over his love of sensory deprivation, of breaking his sub down to a state of helplessness, reducing them to nothing more than a sex toy for him to use, until they didn't know which way was up.

And then there had been the very brief mention of medical play. That’s all Xavier managed to get out before her account went offline.

Can I convince them to try going into this just for the group play? For the baby girl aspect of the scene? If we can all keep our kinks locked in our play apartment for the night, maybe we could actually make this happen. The invite is already ridiculously cut down. Maybe . . .

“Everything okay?”

Turning, I look at Derek as he throws in some chips to commit himself to the hand.

I have to tell them. I can’t keep them in the dark about this, even if I just want to give us a head start. This group profile is all or nothing.

I clear my throat, then raise my phone and wiggle it in the air a little. “We have an invitation acceptance.”

Play stops immediately, and if it weren’t for the commentators calling out the baseball game on the TV behind us, the room would be dead silent.

“Have you looked?” Hudson asks, his body unnaturally tense.

I shake my head. “No. I’ve only opened the acceptance notification.”

“Open it,” Derek demands.

I don’t even hesitate. Not because I needed permission, but because I’m dying to see more.

The notification screen displays as soon as I have my phone unlocked. “Her name is sugar b b Emmy.” I pause, and my lips twitch once I figure out the name. “Sugar baby Emmy.”

“That’s cute,” Derek murmurs as he leans toward me to peer at my phone. I place it down on the felt tabletop and push it closer to the center so that we can all see the screen.

The icon near her name is showing as orange.

She was just online.