Sometimes love’s a gamble. Sometimes you go all in, you throw in all your chips, you lay down all your cards, and sometimes you lose your shirt. But sometimes that’s okay because if you never lose your shirt, how will you ever be able to tell the game’s getting interesting?
Poker is pretty much a metaphor for life, or maybe life’s just a metaphor for poker; at least that’s the way Jace Spade sees it. For him, life’s about playing his cards close to the vest, watching for tells and capitalizing on them, trusting in the hand he’s been dealt and sometimes risking it all, because if you don’t take risks, how can you ever win? And if you lose? Well, sometimes even when you lose, you win. Depends upon the stakes of the game you’re playing.
Sometimes both life and poker are about patience. It’s about hiding every thought and every emotion behind a mask of cool reserve until you’re ready to show your cards. Poker’s not a one-hand game. It’s about staying in the game until you’ve got nothing left to ante, and for eight long years, Jace has been watching for a tell from his best friend and business partner Quentin Jackson. Jace finally saw that sign, took a risk, and then stood back and watched to see whether he’d won the pot or drawn a brick, watched what he’d put into action and waited to see whether or not it would pay out. It did. And that’s when the stakes of the game changed, became so high that Jace was willing to risk everything he was and everything he had to make sure Quentin knew he was catch perfect.
Gambling Men is a great friends-to-lovers story about changing up the rules and reinventing the game midstream. Amy Lane has created quite a few of my favorite fictional characters, and I don’t hesitate for a moment to add Jace and Quentin to that list. It’s kind of nice when you’ve read so much of a single author’s work that you can begin comparing each new book against others from that author’s backlist. This one stacks up just fine.
Plus, hey, I learned a new way to play “Go Fish”, and it gives a whole new meaning to that “have you got a Jack?” question.
Buy Gambling Men HERE.