“I care about many people, Mr Vicario, and your gamble threatens many of them.”
“And yet you want me to teach you how to gamble.”
“I want you to teach me how to play poker. From what you’ve told me about it, the only thing you can lose is the stake you bring to the table.” Her smile returned, a wryness forming in her beautiful translucent eyes. “I won’t be staking my life – I’ll leave those kinds of gambles to you.”
Somehow he pulled in a breath through a chest that had tightened into a knotted ball. Jerking a nod, he looked at his watch. “I have a video meeting with my legal team soon. Let’s wait until after our dinner, and then I will teach you how to play poker.”
The flirtatious sparkle made its return. “I look forward to deciding what our stakes are going to be.”
Only by exerting supreme control did Gino stop his gaze drifting down her body and his tongue from forming the words his own body ached for him to say. “I’ve agreed to teach you to play the game, Miss Marino. Nothing more.”
That knowing smile now made its return, too. “We’ll see.”
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, theman 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 wasinher 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.”
