Free Holding The Cards by Joey W. Hill Page B

and locks up her creative mind with fretting about deadlines or editors, or other such drivel, she goes and plays a few rounds."
    "And just how long does the game say I hold the high card?"
    "How long did you say you were going to be here?"
    Lauren decided that Marcus was altogether the strangest person she had met in quite some time, and that she liked him intensely. "Josh, Marcus," she shifted her attention between them, "I command you to play Monopoly with me."

Chapter 7
    Three hours later, they all had had second helpings of stir-fry, Josh had made cookies, and crumbs were scattered as liberally on the floor as hotels on the board. And most of them were Lauren's. The hotels, that is.
    This, despite Marcus's blatant cheating. Josh was not a tremendous threat, having a penchant for landing on the Go To Jail corner mark, and possessing pathetically poor judgment when it came to selling and developing his properties. Lauren had not had so much fun in…well; she couldn't remember when life had stopped being fun. Her mind wanted her to start the clock with the break up with Jonathan, but she wasn't sure that was true.
    "Well, I guess we don't have to ask what you do for a living," Marcus said darkly, as he landed on Boardwalk, parking his pewter iron next to her three glossy red hotels. "You're a corporate raider."
    She chuckled. "Worse. A pediatrician." She extended her palm. "Fifteen hundred dollars."
    "That was going to be my next guess, right after loan shark," Marcus said. "I'm done. You've cleaned me out."
    She had knocked Josh out of the game ten rounds ago and now he lay on his back on the floor by the table, his bare feet curved against the arm of the loveseat. His denim-covered thigh rocked back and forth with restless energy as he laced his fingers behind his head and watched them.
    She picked up her wine glass, her gaze following the appealing way the jeans pulled along the inseam from his movement, and felt his eyes watching her.
    It was late, and she had drunk a bit too much wine, but it was the relaxed camaraderie that was so intoxicating. The playfulness of the past three hours had lowered her guard. Like a slumber party after midnight, things became far more easy and familiar, affection for one's companions increasing Page 35

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    exponentially. Similar to the old adage - everyone looked good at closing time, because otherwise a cold, lonely bed waited.
    She had settled for loneliness, after Jonathan. In order to get the intimacy she craved, she had to deal with the demands and shortcomings of the guest invited to join her. She wanted the fantasy of a stranger spooning around her in her sleep, cradling her protectively against his body. Somehow they would know nothing and yet everything about each other, having connected far beyond the level of conversational inanities, those pathetic, required attempts to get to know one another in less than two hours over drinks.
    It was the "required" that had turned her away from the opportunities that had presented themselves.
    "Had to" was what you did as an obligation, the price of admission, and putting a price on the rare gift of intimacy… well, it was no longer a gift then, was it? Gifts were offered from love, affection, inspired by your lover, an offering at the altar of their presence in your life. She didn't inspire that in anyone anymore.
    Right now, she corrected herself fiercely, unwilling to fall into that dark abyss.
    The worry was there, though, that she was too tired to play hide and seek for love anymore. Maybe that was why the natural order of things was to marry and have children in your early to mid-twenties. It was something about the approach of thirty. You just ran out of whatever juice it was to play the games to get into a meaningful relationship. Once you reached thirty, all you wanted was to wake up and find love and a lifetime commitment beside you. The hunter