Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
“Okay, Miss Marino, we will take it in turns to deal. If you want me to deal on your behalf, that will not be a problem. Do you know how to shuffle cards?”
“Yes. I know lots of card games, just not poker.”
He pushed the deck of cards already placed on the velvety green cloth laid on the round table in his den towards her. “Shuffle these.”
Amused at his all-business approach, Francesca ripped the cellophane off the packet and removed the cards, shuffling them as Gino removed a small pile of poker chips from a carousel filled with them.
While the two of them had shared another informal dinner at his kitchen breakfast bar and Gino had talked her through the rudiments of the game, his staff had organised the den for them.
Up to that point, Francesca hadn’t known Gino even had a den.
Smelling of alcohol and the faintest trace of cigars, its walls were covered with prints of provocatively posed beautiful women and sporting memorabilia, giving it an even stronger masculine vibe than his bedroom.
She was quite certain she was the first female, barring his staff, to enter its hallowed grounds.
As she shuffled, she looked again at the provocative prints.
All black and white, they had a high-class erotic aesthetic.
The one that kept catching her eye was of a statuesque blonde wearing a black corset.
Licking her lips, she was cupping her breasts and looking directly into the camera’s lens.
To Francesca’s eyes, the print was sexy.
The woman was sexy. The come-to-bed expression in her eyes was sexy.
Francesca wouldn’t know how to be sexy if she tried, and she wondered how Gino would react if she copied that pose and fixed that expression on him.
Would he find it sexy or irritating? She’d deliberately teased and flirted with him because, as far as she was concerned, it was the duty of all good hostages to make their kidnapper as uncomfortable as possible, and that was one of the buttons she’d found to press that worked and which she got a kick out of too, but being overtly sexy was a whole new dimension.
Casting her gaze back on him, she knew she could dress in all the sexy get-ups and strike all the erotic poses, and he wouldn’t touch her.
She could climb into his bed naked, and he wouldn’t lay a finger on her.
The only reaction would be a heightening of the barrier he was determined to keep her from scaling.
But he would want her. As high and as impermeable as he made that barrier, he would still feel arousal for her, and as ridiculous as she knew it was to feel this way about her kidnapper, knowing a man as gorgeous and sexy and powerful as Gino Vicario found her attractive her only served to feed her desire, and she didn’t care that his attraction was only sparked because she happened to be a female with a pulse.
Francesca didn’t delude herself that she could ever look or be a fraction as sexy as the women on his walls.
She’d need to spend a month on a stretching machine to be even that fraction, and it made her heart twist to know that if he could read her thoughts, the man he’d relaxed into over the dinner they’d just shared would disappear in a flash.
It was the most relaxed he’d been around her since he’d realised what a pain in his backside she was going to be.
The more she’d bombarded him with poker questions, putting their conversation on firmly neutral territory, the more he’d loosened up.
Not fully, of course, but enough that the tension Francesca had been carrying had lessened, too.
It was that awful vision of him cold and lifeless that had set the tension off, the unravelling of a future beyond her control. Probably beyond anyone’s control.
At least she’d confronted that future. Put words to it.
When Francesca was a small child, she’d been terrified of the stories about her Uncle Lorenzo and the reasons for her parents choosing to live in the middle of nowhere to escape the danger his lifestyle posed to them.
The nightmares had gone when she’d stopped trying to block out the stories and forced herself to think about them, to confront the reality of them in her own mind and then detach them, because all the fear was in her mind, just as it was in her parents’.
She didn’t want to be frightened of shadows like them.
It was why she’d developed her obsession with her Uncle Lorenzo and his family, and watched so many horror films growing up.
Monsters could be anywhere. You couldn’t spend your life looking over your shoulder waiting for them to jump out on you. Recognising that had been very freeing.
In his own very different way, Gino lived by the same ethos. She didn’t imagine he’d ever let fear rule him, and if he was confident his gamble with her was going to pay off, then who was she to contradict him? Everything he had he’d built from nothing. He was a gambler who always beat the odds.
“You play poker at home a lot?” she asked. There had to be hundreds of chips in the carousel. Maybe thousands.
“Every few months. A group of old friends come over, and we have our own private tournament.”
“With lots of alcohol and cigars from the smell in here.”
He shrugged, uncaring. “This is a room for men.”
“I’d already gathered that,” she commented dryly. “I’d say your whole world is designed to exclude women other than for the purpose of sharing your bed.”
He fixed her with a narrowed stare. “Time to play poker.”
“Scared I’m going to start talking about sex again?”
Ignoring her comment, he pushed one of the small piles of chips he’d counted out to her. “These are for you to play with. As I said earlier, they’re normally used in place of money. All players in the game start with the same number of chips.”
Reaching into the back pocket of his trousers, he produced the folded piece of paper with the poker hand rankings he’d written for her while they’d eaten.
“Remember,” he said, “the winning hands are in descending order. Use it for your reference while we play.”
She studied the paper. Gino’s penmanship was as bold and masculine as the man himself, nothing at all like her flowery handwriting.
“Ready to try a hand?” he asked. “Or shall I run through the rules again?”
“Let’s go for it.” Reaching for her bourbon, she took a small sip. It tasted disgusting, but drinking it felt fitting for a game of poker. It helped that Gino had sweetened it by mixing lemonade into it for her. “I’m big blind, right?”
“Right.”
She put two chips into the centre. He moved them to his left and added one of his own to them, then dealt them two cards each. He took only a peek at his before putting another chip in the pile, and then he dealt three cards on the table face up.
“I bet first?” she asked after consulting with the piece of paper
“Yes. Two chips minimum.”
She pushed two chips onto the pile. He followed suit, then dealt the fourth open card on the table.
They each put two more chips onto the pile, and then the fifth and final open card was dealt.
When she pushed two chips into the pile this time, he added four and said, “If you want the game to end now, you either match me and see my cards, or you fold if you don’t think you can beat me.
Or you can raise the bet and force me to put more chips in to keep playing. ”
“What do I do if I think that your raising of the stakes is a bluff?”
He met her stare. The lines around his eyes crinkled. “That, Miss Marino, is what poker is all about.”
Oh but those crinkling eyes made her heart sing. “In that case, I will match your bet and see your cards.”
“You don’t want to raise it?”
“No. Show me your cards.”
He turned his pair of twos over. “Let me see what you have.”
“I thought I didn’t have to unless I claim victory?”
The unexpected admiration on his face made her feel ten feet tall. “You did pay attention. Now turn your cards over and claim your victory.”
“How do you know I’ve won?”
“From where you kept looking at the paper. To have any chance of beating me for real, you’ll need to memorise the rankings.”
She turned her Ace and King over. With the Queen, Jack and Ten on the table, that gave her, according to Gino’s list, a straight.
Snaking her hand out, she pulled the pile of chips over. “And now I deal?”
“You don’t want me to deal for you?”
In answer, she held her palm to him.
He put the cards on it. “Shuffle them well.”
She split the pack and used her thumbs to make the cards cascade together. “How many dummy hands will we play until we play for real?”
“We won’t be playing for real.”
“Why not? It seems a shame to go to all this effort to teach me and not play a proper game together.”
Amusement flared in his gorgeous dark brown eyes. “I can hardly gamble for money with my hostage when I know I’m going to beat her. Even I have some scruples.”
She raised a mock-shocked eyebrow. “Forgetting your newly-discovered scruples for a minute, you know you’re going to beat me?”
“I’ve been playing this game since before you were born.” He raised his glass of neat bourbon and took a healthy sip.
“All that lovely experience you’ve gained…” Openly staring at him, she deliberately let her voice trail off, the thought that had been playing in the back of her mind since he’d agreed to teach her the game gaining prominence.
He ignored her suggestive tone. “Trust me, it counts, so put your chip in for the blind and deal the cards.”
There was only the faintest tremor in her hands as she straightened the deck into a neat pile and placed her poker chip. Keeping her voice steady, she dealt their two cards. “If you’re so confident you will beat me, then I have a deal for you.”
“Another deal?” he asked wryly.
“A bet, and as you’re such a pro at the game, it’s a bet you can’t lose.”
“Go on.”