Page 30 of Gamble (Black Light #38)
ELIJAH
E lijah slipped his phone back into his pocket with a grin that felt foreign on his face. When was the last time the prospect of a simple dinner date had made him feel like a teenager sneaking out past curfew? Never, if he was being honest with himself.
Looking forward to tonight. ~E
Such simple words, but they barely scratched the surface of what he was feeling. He’d been looking forward to tonight since the moment he’d driven away from Reagan’s apartment building five days ago.
The brick ranch house in West Hollywood felt different today, charged with possibility.
He’d bought the place fifteen years ago when real estate prices were still somewhat reasonable, back when he could afford a modest home in a decent neighborhood on a stuntman’s salary.
It wasn’t fancy—three bedrooms, two baths, and about eighteen hundred square feet of lived-in comfort—but it was his.
And more importantly, it had the kind of backyard that had sold him on the property: a covered patio with an outdoor kitchen perfect for grilling, mature orange trees that provided privacy and shade, and a hot tub that had saved his aching body more nights than he could count.
Tonight, he hoped that the hot tub might serve a very different purpose for his body.
Elijah walked through the house with fresh eyes, seeing it as Reagan might when he brought her back here after dinner.
The living room was comfortable but masculine—leather furniture, a large flat-screen TV, bookshelves filled with everything from technical manuals and mysteries to the most popular romance novels he’d started reading to better understand what women wanted from relationships.
Because the kitchen was small but functional, he’d already stocked the refrigerator with champagne and fresh strawberries.
The master bedroom... well, that was where things got complicated.
His king-size bed was just a bed, nothing kinky about it.
But the locked door to what had once been the third bedroom—that was an entirely different story.
His personal playroom, equipped with restraints, impact toys, and furniture designed for activities Reagan did not know he enjoyed.
Christ, what am I going to do about that?
For the past five days, ever since he’d been texting with Reagan daily and falling deeper under her spell with each conversation, he’d been wrestling with the same question.
It was hard to believe, but he’d never had to tell a vanilla woman that he was involved in the BDSM lifestyle?
He’d dated a lot of women back in his stuntman days, but none of those relationships had lasted long enough to even have to worry about sharing the darker side of his sexual desires.
And now, he’d have to figure out how to explain that he didn’t just participate—but was the Dungeon Master at one of the most exclusive kink clubs on the West Coast. A job he was not only great at, but that he loved.
He’d almost convinced himself this week that the kind thing to do would be to end things before they got too serious. Reagan deserved someone who could give her the normal relationship she probably wanted. Someone her own age who didn’t have a closet full of floggers, paddles, gags, and restraints.
But then Wednesday night had happened. That three-hour phone conversation that had started as a simple check-in and developed into the kind of deep, intimate talk he’d never experienced with anyone.
They’d discussed everything—childhood memories, career dreams, favorite books, places they wanted to travel.
She’d laughed at his stories about disastrous movie stunts and listened with genuine interest when he’d confessed fears about aging and limitations he’d never voiced to anyone.
And somewhere around two in the morning, as her voice had grown soft and sleepy, he’d realized he was falling in love with her. Not just attracted to her body or charmed by her personality— genuinely falling in love.
That realization had changed his perspective.
If he was falling in love with Reagan Murphy, then she deserved the chance to make her own informed decision about what she wanted.
She deserved to know who he really was, what he was into, and what being with him would mean.
She was a grown woman, a successful professional, and she had every right to decide for herself whether his lifestyle was something she could embrace or something that would send her running.
He had decided that tonight, after dinner, he was going to show her his private dungeon and let her know his role at Black Light. He was going to show her his world and let the chips fall where they may.
The decision had been both terrifying and liberating.
So terrifying that he’d done something he never did—he’d called in Tyler to give him advanced warning that he might bring his date by the club.
If not tonight, in the future. Tyler had already agreed to cover for Elijah as he took a rare Friday night off, but he had called to threaten his number two that he’d better not make a big deal about Elijah bringing a woman to the club for the first time—at least not in front of her because he knew she’d already be nervous as hell.
Elijah grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and stepped out onto the back patio, surveying his domain with satisfaction.
The outdoor space was his pride and joy—the one area where he’d invested serious money in upgrades.
The covered patio extended from the back of the house, creating an outdoor room complete with a built-in grill, prep space, and comfortable seating.
String lights crisscrossed overhead, creating a warm ambiance when the sun went down.
The hot tub sat in the far corner, surrounded by privacy screens and mature landscaping.
It was a space designed for entertaining, for intimate dinners under the stars, for long soaks in the hot tub with a beautiful woman pressed against his chest.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to find a text from Tyler: Everything’s under control here, boss. Have fun on your date. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
Elijah chuckled as he typed back: That doesn’t rule out much, you pervert.
True. Get laid, old man. You need it.
If only Tyler knew how much Elijah needed it. Not just the physical release—though God knew that was part of it—but the connection. The intimacy. The feeling that someone saw him as more than just the guy who kept order at Black Light or the has-been stuntman with too many aches and pains.
Reagan saw him. She saw the man he was underneath all the roles he played, and she liked him. That was a gift he’d never expected to receive at fifty years old.
Elijah checked his watch: five-thirty. He had an hour and a half before he needed to pick up Reagan, and he wanted everything to be perfect when he brought her back here.
The patio furniture could use a quick wipe-down, and he should check the hot tub’s chemical levels one more time.
And the string lights needed to be tested again—nothing would kill the mood like half the lights being burnt out like the last time he’d been in the hot tub.
He headed to the garage to grab his stepladder and cleaning supplies.
The ladder was an old aluminum one he’d had for years, and it wobbled as he set it up under the string lights.
He should probably replace it, but like so many other things around the house, it still functioned well enough that he kept putting off the expense.
The first section of lights tested fine, each bulb glowing warm and amber in the afternoon sunlight. He moved the ladder and climbed up to check the second section, stretching to reach the far corner where the lights connected to the outdoor electrical outlet.
That’s when everything went wrong.
Later, he would never be sure what had happened.
Maybe the ladder legs weren’t level on the patio stones.
Maybe he’d overreached, shifting his weight too far from center.
Or maybe it was just the inevitable result of asking a fifteen-year-old ladder to support a fifty-year-old man who’d subjected his body to decades of abuse.
All he knew was that one second, he was reaching for the electrical connection, and the next second the world was tilting sideways.
The ladder collapsed beneath him, and he felt the sickening sensation of falling sideways with nothing to break his six-foot fall except the unforgiving stones of his patio.
The impact drove the air from his lungs and sent a lightning bolt of agony up his spine.
His left hip—the same hip that had been giving him trouble for months—took the brunt of the fall, and he heard something pop in a way that wasn’t supposed to happen.
His knee twisted as he landed, adding its own sharp note to the symphony of pain that consumed his nervous system.
For a long moment, he lay there on the warm stones, gasping like a fish out of water and wondering if he’d done permanent damage. The pain was unlike anything he’d experienced since his worst stunt accidents, a deep, grinding agony that made his vision blur around the edges.
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He tried to sit up and regretted it as fire shot through his back and hip and down the full length of his left leg. Whatever he’d done to himself, it was bad. Possibly ambulance-worthy bad.
But even through the haze of pain, all he could think about was tonight.
About Reagan waiting for him in that green dress he’d imagined her wearing.
About the reservation he’d made at Mastro’s, the champagne he’d ordered, the carefully rehearsed speech about wanting to share details about his secret lifestyle.
And finally, about how he was going to cancel all of it.
Elijah lay on the patio stones for what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, taking inventory of his body and trying to decide if he could move.
His back was screaming, his hip felt like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it, and his knee was already swelling inside his jeans.
But nothing felt broken. More like everything had been knocked out of alignment.
Finally, moving with the careful precision of a man defusing a bomb, he rolled onto his good side and then slowly, agonizingly, crawl the few feet to the outdoor sectional sofa.
Getting onto the cushions required a Herculean effort that left him sweating and nauseous, but at least he wasn’t lying on hard stone anymore.
His phone had somehow survived the fall without a cracked screen, and he pulled it out with shaking hands. For a moment, he considered calling 911. The smart thing to do would be to get checked out, to make sure he hadn’t done any serious damage to his spine or joints.
But the thought of spending his Friday night in an emergency room, with doctors and X-rays and huge medical bills, made him feel even sicker.
He knew his body well enough to know that while this was bad, it probably wasn’t life-threatening.
What he needed was to get inside, take the strongest pain medication he had, and hope like hell that rest and time would put him back together.
Moving like a man three times his age, Elijah levered himself off the couch and hobble toward the back door. Each step sent fresh waves of agony through his hip and knee, and by the time he made it to his bathroom medicine cabinet, he was worried he might pass out.
The bottle of prescription pain medication left over from his last surgery rattled as he shook out two pills, then thought better of it and added a third.
He dry-swallowed them before hobbling out to sink onto the edge of his bed.
Collapsing back, he closed his eyes and waited for the medication to take the edge off the worst of the pain.
Twenty minutes later, the crushing agony had dulled to a manageable throb, but Elijah knew there was no way he could take Reagan out to dinner. Hell, he could barely walk to his own kitchen, let alone drive across town and pretend to be a charming dinner companion.
He was going to have to cancel. The question was how to do it without sounding like a pathetic old man who couldn’t even clean his own patio without injuring himself.
Elijah stared at his phone for a long time, trying to come up with the right words.
He could tell her the truth—that he’d fallen and hurt himself and needed to reschedule.
But the thought of Reagan pitying him, of her seeing him as the broken-down has-been he sometimes felt like, made his chest tight with shame.
Or he could lie. Make up some work emergency, some crisis at the club that required his immediate attention. But Reagan deserved better than lies, even well-intentioned ones.
As the pain medication settled into his system, making his thoughts fuzzy around the edges, another option occurred to him. Maybe this was the universe’s way of telling him what he should have realized all along—that he was kidding himself thinking a relationship with Reagan could work.
She was young, beautiful, successful. Reagan deserved someone who could take her dancing without worrying about his joints, someone who could keep up with her energy and ambition, someone who didn’t carry the baggage of a kinky lifestyle she probably wouldn’t understand.
She deserved someone who wouldn’t fall off a fucking ladder while trying to impress her.
The thought made him feel sorry for himself in a way he hadn’t allowed since his divorce twenty years before.
But maybe self-pity was exactly what he needed right now.
Maybe it would give him the courage to do the right thing and let Reagan go before she got too attached to someone who would only disappoint her.
Before he could lose his nerve, Elijah typed out a long text message:
Reagan, I’ve been thinking about our situation, and I realize I’m too old for you. You deserve someone who can give you the kind of future you want. I wish you all the best, but you should find someone your own age. Take care. - E
He stared at the message for a long moment, his thumb hovering over the send button. Once he sent this, it would be over. No more daily texts, no more late-night phone calls, no more imagining what it would be like to fall asleep next to her every night.
But it was the right thing to do. The kind thing to do.
Elijah closed his eyes and hit send.
Then he turned off his phone, pulled a pillow over his head, and tried to convince himself he’d just made the best decision of his life instead of the worst.