“I’ll see you,” she said. And then smiled. If it was her last smile of the night, then so be it. It was worth it just to see that twitch beneath his eye, and suddenly she was certain she’d called his bluff. If she had, he had to pay her the same number of chips as she currently had left. Add that to their current gambling pot, and she would have enough chips to take him on properly.
He turned his cards over. Two sixes. With the six on the table, that gave him three sixes.
Her smile widening, she turned her two sevens over. Her three sevens beat his three sixes.
The game was on.
Gino couldn’t believe what was happening. Twenty minutes ago, he’d been only a hand or two away from certain victory. He’d seen plenty of reversals of fortune in this game over the years, but never had his own fortune reversed so quickly. His game had gone to pieces, and now Francesca’s pile of chips was twice the size of his own.
This had never happened to him before. He didn’t always win at poker, but the men he played with knew the game inside out and played games as good as his own. It was always tightly fought, but win or lose, he was always in control of his own game.
Focus, he commanded himself.
It was a command he’d made a handful of times in a handful of minutes, since realising victory was slipping from his grasp.
He couldn’t lose. Mustn’t lose. He needed to take back control, not just of his game but ofthegame. Needed to stop letting Francesca get into his head.
But he’d let her get into his head when he’d accepted the damned bet in the first place.
For the first half hour, she’d been easy to read and anticipate, but then she’d started getting into the rhythm of the game, and now he couldn’t read her at all. Whatever she was dealt, she turned the cards over and smiled. When he raised the stakes, she giggled, whether she matched him or not. But it wasn’t just her body language; it was the way she was playing and the glee she was playing it with. She’d relaxed, and now she was enjoying herself, and he had no clue whether the hand she’d just raised the stakes to a hundred chips beat his two pairs. Worse, he couldn’t decide whether it was better to call her bluff or just fold. In this game, as with all games, he trusted his instinct, but in this game, his instinct had become shot.
He threw his cards on the table. “I fold.”
She grinned and used her arm to sweep the pile of chips to her overflowing pile.
It was her turn to deal.
He looked at his cards, and his chest loosened. A pair of aces. When another ace appeared on the table, his chest loosened that little bit more. By the time the fifth card had been turned over, he was sitting on three aces and a pair of fours. A full house.
Fuck it.
He looked her straight in the eye. “All-in.”
She smiled. “See you.”
His heart beating as hard as it had ever beaten, he turned his cards over.
Her smile became rigid. She drained her drink. And then she turned her pair of fours over.
Gino felt the entirety of his body freeze. He stared at her overturned cards, unable to even blink.
Over the roar of blood pounding in his head, she said, in a voice that sounded as stunned at his frozen body felt, “I do believe four of a kind beats a full house, Mr Vicario.”
She’d won. She could scarcely believe it. Somehow, Francesca had overturned the seemingly insurmountable odds and beaten him, and the longer the silence in the wake of her victory went on, the harder her heart pounded.
Slowly, very slowly, Gino lifted his gaze to hers. Disbelief rang heavily from his eyes.
She swallowed her constricted throat. “Think of the bright side,” she whispered. “You were due a loss. Better you lose to me now than my cousins later.”
There was an almost imperceptible shake of his head before he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.
When he looked back at her, there was an intensity in his stare. “You don’t have to claim your winnings.”
“Don’t I?”
“No.” His voice was hoarse. “This is no way for you to…”
“Lose my virginity?” she supplied quietly when it seemed he couldn’t bring himself to say the words.
