“Eat your pasta,” he told her, reaching past her to pick up the container.

“Now you’re going to ride herd on my food intake?”

He tucked the container into her hands and then framed her face and kissed her. Hard. “No,” he said when he lifted his head. “I just think stamina is probably going to be a good thing.”

“You think so, do you?” she said, going for sanguine, missing by a mile. He was…hell, she couldn’t even quantify any longer what he was.

“Let’s just say I’m hoping.” He pressed a finger to her mouth, then stroked her bottom lip. “And if you say anything else about my offer to help being some kind of insurance for extra favors, I will take that as a direct insult. Other than being one of the many reasons why I’m all wrapped up in you, this,” he said, dropping another hard kiss on her mouth, “has nothing to do with that.”

“Wasn’t going to say a word,” she said, looking a bit stunned.

“Good.” He nudged the bowl at her. “Eat.”

“Not all that hungry all of a sudden.”

“Hmm. Well.” His smile spread slowly. “Maybe we should focus on building your appetite, then. As it happens, I have quite an appetite. Where you’re concerned, anyway.”

Her entire body responded to his suggestion in ways that the best comfort food in the world couldn’t have appealed to her. “Shouldn’t we be working on…whatever it is we have to do to see if your idea will work?”

“I just have to make a few calls, find out what the time frame will have to be. It won’t take that much to generate interest; then it’s just a matter of figuring out the logistics.”

He kissed Kirby’s knitted brows. “Don’t worry. I’ll set it up so it works out for the best. For both of us.”

“Okay,” she said, still torn between massive relief and being a little worried that he was leaping before he was looking. “So, what happens next?”

“I’ll make those calls; then we’ll have to wait to get some feedback. I don’t think it will take long.” He brushed her hair from her cheek. “I know we can make this work.”

She took a short, shaky breath. “Okay. Wow, but okay.” She looked at him. “You’re sure?”

“One hundred percent sure. The question isn’t will it work, but how long it will take to put together.”

“All right.” She smiled a little, then, more confidently. “All right.”

He laughed. “See? Not all that hard, right?”

She laughed, too. “Oh, I didn’t say that. But I appreciate this, Brett. All of it. Your proposed solution and making it easier to say yes to accepting your help. This is the best solution I could hope for. Win-win.” Then she held his gaze in steady regard and grew more serious. “As long as you promise me this isn’t going to put you in a place you don’t need to be. I don’t know all the reasons you stopped playing, or why you left Vegas. But I can’t move forward with fixing my problem if it adds to yours.”

“I’m a big boy. I know what I’m doing.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” He bracketed her hips and tugged her closer again. “So, I was thinking, we could either stand around here in the kitchen and talk about not eating my very fine pasta, or…”

Her stomach chose that moment to growl. Loudly. They both laughed.

“I’m not sure, but I think I was just flattered and insulted all at the same time.”

She shook her head. “But maybe I should at least make an effort. Is there anything I can do…with the rest of this? Any calls I can make locally to get the ball rolling?”

“Once I get things started out west, then yes, it’s definitely going to have to be a team effort.”

“Team efforts are good.” She picked up the pasta and found that she was kind of ravenous all of a sudden.

“Agreed.” He stepped back, gave her some space, and went to fix himself a cup of coffee.

Too late, she thought to warn him about the toxic level of caffeine she’d been shooting for earlier and had to apologize when he gagged. “Sorry.”

“Wow,” was all he said after he finished choking. “Sort of like a caffeine Slurpee.”

“Pretty much. I didn’t sleep. I needed a boost.”

“Astronauts need a boost. This is…wow.”

She sat down her bowl. “Let me make another pot.”

“I can do that. Eat.”

She saluted him with her fork. “Yes sir, captain sir.”

“It’s not so much about bossing you around as it is about me making a cup of coffee that won’t keep me up until 2025.”

“I’d call you on that, but you might have a point.” She gestured to the cupboard over the coffeemaker. “The beans are in there, and the grinder.”

His eyebrows lifted. “Freshly ground coffee?”

He looked like a kid on Christmas morning. She went back to forking up her now cold pasta. It was quite possibly the most delicious thing she’d ever eaten. “You know, and I’m not trying to butt in or anything, but given that you have apparently cashed in more than a few poker chips in your day, you could go out and get your own grinder and coffeemaker and have freshly ground and brewed coffee every single morning. Just saying.”

“For that I’d have to stay in one place for more than a week at a time. And remember to buy beans.”

“So you travel a lot? Are famous poker players like rock stars where you have a list of things you request that have to be in your dressing room?”

“We don’t get dressing rooms.”

“Right, you get actual rooms. Humongous suites in fancy hotels. Well, if the movies are to be believed.”

She looked at him expectantly. He didn’t refute her supposition, other than to say, “Little inns in Vermont are more my speed.”

“So, in these big, fancy suites, can’t you make a few demands?”

“I could try.”

“But you don’t.”

“Never thought I needed anything that badly to be a pretentious ass about it.”

“Back to that arrogant-cocky argument.”

“Something like that.”

She made a humming noise and continued to regard him while she ate and he went about making the perfect cup of coffee with his new bright, shiny object. Boys and their toys, she thought. In Brett’s case, that included bikes and, apparently, bean grinders. She wondered to what other realms his interests extended.

“I can hear the wheels,” he said as he flipped off the grinder.

“That was the coffee grinder.”

He shot her a smile over his shoulder. “No, that was you, trying to figure out which of the million questions you have were okay to ask.”

She waved her fork at him. “Now that could be mistaken for arrogance.”

“Only if it wasn’t true.” He continued to look at her.

A little flush climbed her cheeks. “Okay, okay. Guilty as charged. But I wasn’t going to say anything, or ask anything.” At least not right that second.

“Well, now that I’m bringing my world to yours, I can hardly ask that you take me separately from all that. And you might as well know what you’re really getting into.”

“Such as?”

“In order to pull this off, it needs to be an event. A big event.”

Kirby still hadn’t wrapped her mind around all of the ramifications of Brett’s offered solution as yet. Heck, she hadn’t even wrapped her mind around the basic concept that Brett would be willing to do any of this for her in the first place. They hardly knew one another. She didn’t know him well enough to know for certain if this was a truly selfless act, or perhaps a step he wanted or needed to take for himself. Then again, if it got her what she needed, and helped him in some way, wasn’t that a win-win proposition? What did she care what he got out of it, if it solved her immediate problems?

“How big is big? I assume it will help the resort, since they’re hurting pretty big, too. And their continued success is vital for my continued success, so that’s all a good thing. And the town wins, too, with increased revenue, however briefly, from more visitors coming and spending their money here. What else do I need to know?”

He ducked his chin for a moment, and Kirby wondered again about his stake in this. He had, on the surface, anyway, left poker playing behind. Did he want to go back? Was this a way to ease himself back into the limelight and possibly garner the goodwill and support of event coordinators who might have been less than thrilled with his sudden defection from the game?