Читать книгу The One-Night Wife - Сандра Мартон, Sandra Marton - Страница 9

TWO HOURS LATER, Sean was sitting across from Savannah at a poker table in the high-stakes area of the casino and the warning bells in his head were clamoring like bells inside a firehouse.

The game was draw poker. She was still playing. He’d already folded, just as he’d done half a dozen times since they’d started. His fault, he knew. He’d played with lazy disinterest, underestimated the lady’s skill.

And her skill was considerable.

The realization had caught him by surprise. Once it had, he’d played a couple of hands as he should have from the start. She’d folded. He’d won.

That had led to another realization. Goldilocks wasn’t a good loser.

Oh, she said all the right things, the clever patter card-players used to defuse tension. She flashed that megawatt smile across the table straight at him. But her eyes didn’t smile. They were dark with distress. What she’d said about simply wanting to play him wasn’t true.

Just-Savannah needed to win. He decided to let her. There were all kinds of ways to up the ante.

And if she was new to the game, he was Mighty Mouse.

She played with the cool concentration of someone who’d had years to hone her talent. Her instincts were good, her judgment sharp, and by now he’d determined that the cute little things she did when she played, things he’d at first thought were unconscious habits, were deliberate shticks meant to distract him.

A little tug at a curl as it kissed the curve of her cheek. A brush of her tongue across her mouth. A winsome smile accompanied by a look from under the thick sweep of her gold-tipped lashes.

Most effective of all, a sigh that lifted her breasts.

The air-conditioned chill in the casino was cooperating. Each time her breasts rose, the nipples pressed like pearls against the red silk that covered them.

Forget about the odds, she all but purred. Forget about the game. Just think about me. What I have to offer, you’ll never get by winning this silly game of cards.

It was hard not to do exactly that. The man in him wanted what she was selling with every beat of his heart. The gambler in him knew it was all a lie. And there it was again. The smile, just oozing with little-girl amazement that she was actually winning.

Bull.

Savannah wasn’t a novice, she was an expert. Playing without using any of those distractions, she’d beat every man at the table on ability alone.

Every man but him.

She was good, but he was better. And once he knew what in hell was happening, he’d prove it to her.

Meanwhile, the action was fascinating to watch. Not just her moves but the moves of the rest of the players. Two—a German industrialist and a Texas oil billionaire—were good. The others—a prince from some godforsaken principality, a Spanish banker, a has-been American movie star and an Italian who had something to do with designing shoes—weren’t. It didn’t matter. The men were all happy to be losing.

Sean didn’t think Savannah gave a damn. He’d have bet everything he owned that she was putting on this little show solely for him.

Why? No way was it so she could go home and boast about having played against him. That story leaked like a sieve, especially because he could see past the smile, the cleavage, the performance art.

Under all that clever artifice, she was playing with a determination so grim it chilled him straight down to the marrow of his bones.

So he’d decided to lay back. Win a couple of hands, lose a couple. Fold early. Look as if he was as taken in as the others while he tried to figure out what was going on.

Right now, he and she were the only ones playing. The rest had all folded. She sighed. Her cleavage rose. She licked her lips. She twirled a curl of golden hair around her index finger. Then she looked at him and fluttered her lashes.

“I’ll see your five,” she said, “and raise you ten.”

Sean smiled back at her. He didn’t bother looking at his cards. He knew what he had and he was damned sure it beat what she was holding.

“Too rich for my blood,” he said lazily, and dropped his cards on the green baize tabletop.

The German smiled. “The fraulein wins again.”

Savannah gathered in the chips. “Beginner’s luck,” she said demurely, and smiled at him again.

It wasn’t luck, beginner’s or otherwise. The luck of the draw was a big part of winning but from what he’d observed, it had little to do with her success at this table.

The lady was good.

He watched as she picked up her cards, fanned them just enough to check the upper right-hand corners, then put them down again. It was a pro’s trick. When your old man owned one of the biggest hotels and casinos in Vegas, you learned their tricks early.

Not that Sean had spent much time in the casino. State law prohibited minors from being in the gaming areas. More importantly, so did his mother.

One gambler in the family was enough for Mary Elizabeth O’Connell. She’d never complained about her husband’s love of cards, dice, the wheel, whatever a man could lay a wager on, but she also made it clear she didn’t want to see her children develop any such interests.

Still, Sean had been drawn to the life as surely as ocean waves are drawn to the shore.

He began gambling when he was in his teens. By his senior year in high school, he bet on anything and everything. Basketball. Football. Baseball. A friend’s grades. His pals thought he was lucky. Sean knew better. It was more than luck. He had a feel for mathematics, especially for those parts of it that dealt in probability, combinations and permutations. Show him the grade spread for, say, Mrs. Keany’s classes in Trig over the past five years, he could predict how the current grades would play out with startling accuracy.

It was fun.

Then he went away to college, discovered poker and fell in love with it. He loved everything about the game. The cool, smooth feel of a new deck of cards. The numbers that danced in his head as he figured out who was holding what. The kick of playing a hand he knew he couldn’t lose or, conversely, playing a hand no sane man would hold on to and winning anyway because he was good and because, in the final analysis, even the risk of losing could give you an adrenaline rush.

By the time he graduated from Harvard with a degree in business, he had a small fortune stashed in the bank.

Sean handed his degree to Mary Elizabeth, kissed her on both cheeks and said he knew he was disappointing her but he wasn’t going to need that degree for a while.