What the Gambler Risks

by Kristina Knight

  She stretched her hands over her head and turned her attention to Molly. “I think that went well.”

  “Great idea with the guest reader, otherwise we might never have gotten out of here.” Molly looked a bit harried, her usual French twist slightly askew and the ever-present clipboard spilling papers onto the carpeted convention floor.

  Sabrina nodded. “Molly, you’re, what, twenty-one?”

  The recent college graduate nodded. “Twenty-two, actually.”

  “Does it bother you that I’m seeing a man who doesn’t have a respectable job?”

  “I would prefer you not tell Mr. Lambert or any of the other publicists,” she said, slinking closer to Sabrina and lowering her voice. “My boyfriend is a mechanic who dropped out of school at sixteen. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re happy and he isn’t some kind of abuser, you’re good to go.”

  That made Sabrina feel better. Molly was more of her target audience than Mr. Lambert was. This, plus the above-capacity crowd, meant she was on the right track in reaching her readers.

  Lambert could suck it.

  Hopefully, she would never have to tell him that.

  The rest of her stay in Reno blurred into a stop at a small coastal town in Northern California, and that blurred into Albuquerque, and then Phoenix. Sabrina wasn’t sure where she was most of the time; she only knew that with each passing day, she was one day closer to seeing Jase.

  Mr. Lambert never called, leaving Sabrina to assume sales were strong enough that her publisher no longer cared who she was dating. Good. It was none of his business, anyway.

  Chapter Twelve

  “What do you mean you want the machines out?” Jase yelled into the phone. His cell had been ringing incessantly for more than an hour; each time, an angrier casino manager was on the other end.

  Jase put his finger in his ear, hoping to hear better. He was in the middle of the lobby at Reeves Brothers Entertainment, and he was stuck. There was a throng of women inside. Some were getting coffee, others talking to the newsstand man, and still others were simply standing around, waiting. For what, Jase wasn’t sure.

  “Every forty minutes, it’s giving a jackpot,” the casino manager said. “It’s hitting the best combination and paying out.”

  “Not a rolling jackpot, then?” Jase asked. Earlier this morning, Timber’s head of gaming called to complain about the returns from the new machines Jase had installed a couple of days before. Then, the manager from the Deuce didn’t like the sound mechanism of the machines, and now the head of the Emir was saying something he couldn’t understand about jackpots. His machines didn’t give out accumulating jackpots.

  “No, thank Christ. But the regular jackpots are bad enough. I’ve paid out close to fifty thousand so far this morning, and that’s with one of the machines down because every other spin was landing on a payout,” the manager explained.

  It had to be a glitch in the system. Jase just didn’t know what kind of glitch. When he’d tested the machines last week, they’d played fine. He pushed through the crowd, ignoring the requests for his autograph—what was that about, anyway?—and closed the door to the gaming office. Someone tried to push through, so he locked it.

  “You guys are going to want to exit through the back. There’s a crowd of women out front waiting for someone,” he told the developers at their cubicles in the main room.

  “They’re waiting for you.” One of the developers, an African-American man named Kye, turned around in his seat. His game ideas were some of Jase’s favorites. Today the man wore an old Naughty By Nature T-shirt, and he’d pushed his dreads into a large crocheted bonnet.

  Jase stopped in his tracks. “Me?”

  “That’s what several of them said when I asked why they were here. They’re all waiting for you.”

  “What the hell do they want with me?”

  “Something about reaching potential and Sabrina Smith and soul mates,” the developer said. “If you want my opinion, they’re all nuts.” With that, Kye turned back to his cubicle.

  Jase went into his office, closed the door, and called upstairs to Gage’s office. “There is a mass of humanity on the main floor.”

  “So I saw,” his brother said. “It’s started to extend out onto Fremont.”

  “How are we going to get them out?” Jase flicked the blinds open to look out onto the street. Sure enough, the crowd had leaked out of the building and onto the street. Crap, crap, crap. Where the hell had this throng of Sabrina’s readers learned their Google-Fu skills?

  “Why are you asking me?”

  “Because pre-Callie you regularly had women chasing you all over this damn town, that’s why,” Jase growled into the phone.

  “Never more than three or four at a time. You’ve got a horde on your hands.”

  “I’d call it a throng,” Connor said, his voice sounding kind of tinny. Great, he was on a conference call with both his brothers about the horde or throng of women outside his doorway.

  “And I ask again, what do I do about it?”

  “Sneak out the back,” Gage suggested.

  “I can call in some security guards to clear them out, but if you’re here they’ll just keep coming back.”

  “How do they even know I’m here?”

  “One or more of them are probably staking out your condo and have pictures of your truck on their phones.” Gage’s voice sounded smug over the phone, and Jase gritted his teeth.

  “Well, crap.”

  “Indeed.”

  “While the two of you are hashing out escape routes,” Connor said, “I need to make sure my celebrity beat writers are catching said throng before it disappears into Fremont.”

  “Jerk,” Jase said, but he didn’t put much emphasis on the word. Connor had steered clear of the Jase/Sabrina story for the most part, but hundreds of women converging on an office building in Las Vegas was news. He wouldn’t be surprised if the television stations showed up. Jase couldn’t be angry at his brother for covering a legitimate news event, even if the event centered on him.

  “I’m going to the ranch, just as soon as I get a couple of machines reset and ready to go.”

  “Godspeed,” Gage said.

  Jase made it through Timber and Deuce without any more crowd incidents. He reset the machines and played for a few minutes, just to make sure the games were following the development rules.

  Things took a turn into the weird at Emir. Jase crossed the lobby, hearing echoing footsteps close behind him. He turned and saw one of the women from the lobby following close on his heels.

  “Hi, you’re Jase, right? Sabrina’s Jase?” She held out a book. “Would you sign this for me?”

  Jase shook his head and stepped away from the woman. “It’s not my book.”

  “But it’s all about you.”

  “Actually, it’s all about personal responsibility, goal-setting, and achieving a better life. I wasn’t around when she wrote it.” And he hadn’t bothered to tell her that he’d read it, or that he liked it. Once she got home, he would have to rectify that situation. She was talented, and she deserved to know it.

  As if she didn’t already.

  Still, he wanted her to know how proud he was of her.

  The woman’s face fell, and Jase hurried in the direction of his machines. The manager was waiting for him nearby. Jase went to work, going over every sensor and playing option he could find. Nowhere was there an explanation as to why the machines were paying out every forty minutes.

  “This isn’t like your company, Jase. We’ve never had this problem before.”

  “I think there has to be something faulty in the internal mechanisms. The games at Timber and Deuce are working well.” Now, he added under his breath. “I’ll call one of our techs to retrieve these and have three new machines out to you tomorrow morning.”

  “What are we supposed to do tonight? We have three machine-less slots on the floor.”

  “I’d really like your autograph.” Another
woman from the lobby came around the corner. She ran her hand along Jase’s arm. “Right here beside Sabrina’s,” she added and maneuvered her body so that her breasts slid along his arm.

  Crap, crap, crap.

  “I told another one of you, it isn’t my book. I’m not going to sign it.” Jase pushed the book back into the woman’s hands and then took his phone from his pocket. Kye answered the office phone and agreed to call in the service techs.

  “We’ve got two machines in the holding area,” Kye said.

  “Can you get them checked out and ready to go?”

  “Sure.”

  Jase focused on the casino boss, tuning out the woman still standing way too close to him. “Do it,” he told Kye.

  “But I want you in my book, too.” The woman spoke again, and Jase thought this must be some kind of joke.

  He ignored the woman and told the manager to expect a pickup and delivery that afternoon.

  “I’ll have our set-up guys ready.”

  Jase started for the front door, and the woman followed him. Frustrated, he stopped. “What do you want?”

  “Just your autograph in my book. I’m a big fan,” she said, in what Jase thought was supposed to be a purr. He took a closer look at the woman. Long, black hair, dark eyeliner. White tank top, ripped jeans, and Converse. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her before. She was awfully persistent about the autograph.

  “I didn’t write the book; I wouldn’t feel right signing it.”

  “But the book is about you,” she insisted. “Sabrina and you. I want all the characters to sign. I’m even going to New York to find her editor.” The woman’s creep factor went up about ten notches. She batted her eyelashes at him. “Please?”

  Jase shook his head. “No.”

  “But—”

  “I didn’t write the book, I’m not autographing the book. I’m not in the book, either. Sabrina wrote it before she ever met me.”

  “But it’s about you, don’t you get it? She didn’t know you, but it was still about you.”

  Jase didn’t like where this was going. “I’m sorry, but I have to go,” he said and slipped quickly through a throng of Shriners that had just come through the casino doors. He needed to get out of here. This was wrong, this was all wrong.

  The woman following him was wrong. His machines not working was wrong. His inability to think about anything without Sabrina creeping into his mind every five minutes was wrong.

  He liked his life to be quiet. He needed it to be quiet. Since he’d met Sabrina a few weeks ago, his life had been anything but quiet. It had been noisy and a little messy, and look where that had gotten him: being hounded through a casino by one of her superfans.

  Sabrina was an amazing woman, and he liked having her in his life, but he couldn’t allow her to take over his life.

  He needed to put space between them, needed to get his life back under control.

  • • •

  “I don’t want this, any of it.” Sabrina threw the newspaper in the trash. Hot afternoon sunlight poured through the windows of Jase’s condo. She’d squeezed in a full day back in Las Vegas between the events in Phoenix and the next in Los Angeles, and so far she’d spent all the time she’d carved out for Jase arguing with him.

  “Yeah? Well, neither do I, sweetheart.”

  She’d needed to see Jase. She hadn’t expected to find him fuming about some fan who insisted her new book was about him. She understood that he was upset about his games, but he’d fixed the issue. The systems were replaced. No harm, no foul.

  He knew the book wasn’t about him. She knew the book wasn’t about him. Who cared what one slightly odd reader thought? Added to his annoyance at one of her superfans was the fact that the newspapers, specifically the Clayton newspapers, continued to write about the Vegas Virgin and the Playboy Gambler. Three additional articles had made it to print since that first photographer caught them kissing after the Hold ’Em tournament. She flicked off the local talk radio call-in show. The jocks, including Sid the Jerk, had picked up the story this morning and were polling their listeners to see how many thought Sabrina dating Jase was a cry for help, how many thought it was a publicity stunt, and how many thought her entire reputation was a fabrication.

  Sid was gleefully ordering his listeners to return her books. Thankfully, very few of his listeners were her readers.

  Still, she wanted to cry.

  No, she didn’t want to cry. She wanted to break something, preferably that reporter’s computer. Maybe her index fingers, Sabrina thought gleefully. “I’d like to see her type up another gossip piece without the use of her fingers,” she muttered, shoving the newspaper farther into the trash.

  “It’s just gossip,” he said, and she heard a hint of mocking in his tone.

  She whirled on Jase. “You might be used to gossip, Bazillionaire Gambler, but I’m not. People trust me. They like me. Now these articles”—she pulled the newspaper from the trash—“are telling them I’m a liar and a fake. My publisher thinks I should stop seeing you, and you’re blaming me for one little incident at the Emir. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Maybe make a statement to your fans telling them I’m not some sort of divine inspiration for female empowerment? Did they even read the book? That woman at the casino acted like she’d just read a romance novel, not a self-help book.” His voice held no sympathy.

  “You read my book?”

  “Of course I read it. I liked it.”

  Sabrina was torn between being mad at him for blaming her for the actions of a few women she didn’t know, and excitement that he had taken the time to read her work. No man had ever validated her work in that way before. Before Lorenzo dumped her, Sabrina’s own mother hadn’t read her work. This was huge.

  Jase was still talking. “Before that weirdo started stalking me through downtown Las Vegas, I was impressed with what you’ve accomplished. Now I’m thinking these articles are a sign that we need to slow things down.”

  Wait, before? Before? Her readers weren’t weirdos. Okay, that one, specific case might be, but that wasn’t the point. And slowing things down now, when things were getting a little uncomfortable? She didn’t like the articles or the fact that her fans tracked him down at work, but she wasn’t willing to “slow things down” because of either of those things.

  “This is my life, Jase. I don’t have millions of dollars in the bank or a ranch outside the city limits or a high-rise condo or a game development company that rivals the brands in Silicon Valley. Even if what we have threatens the little security I have, I’m willing to take that chance. I would gamble. On us.”

  He turned on her, annoyed now, she could see by the pulse beating madly at his temple. “And my life doesn’t matter because I can insulate myself in my millions of dollars? That fan of yours followed me from my business to three different casinos. That is my work, my livelihood, and she jeopardized all of it.”

  Sabrina snorted. He wasn’t actually comparing one woman who wanted an autograph to her publisher threatening her contract, was he? And what did “slow things down” mean?

  “For all I know, that article,” he said, pointing to the offending newspaper with its headline insinuating their relationship was a public-relations ploy to boost sales, “is true. You came on to me in Atlantic City. You’re the one who came back to find me, first at the casino and then at my office.”

  Pain stabbed Sabrina’s chest. “You don’t mean that.”

  Something flickered in Jase’s eyes. Guilt, maybe. Sabrina wasn’t sure.

  “You insinuated yourself into my life between the two legs of the tour launching your new book. The one that isn’t about relationships, and yet everyone in town seems to think it’s about me. And all that time I’m taking to convince them the book isn’t about me is also taking time from my business.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Sabrina wanted to sit down on Jase’s comfortable couch and pull one of the pillows to her chest. She couldn’t sit,
though, because if she sat she might collapse, and she wasn’t going to collapse in front of him.

  He didn’t really believe the words he was saying. He couldn’t, because if he believed them, then he didn’t love her. And if he didn’t love her … then she really was her mother, falling for the wrong guy and getting her heart handed to her like it was worth no more than the $5 chips poker players used to tip their waitresses.

  “Because we have to stop pretending this is more than a fling. We’re two very different people. I play cards and I develop games and I live out of a suitcase. You write books and you empower women and you want roots that I can’t give you.”

  Sabrina shook her head. “I’ve never asked you for anything.”

  “Sure you have. With every sad story about your mother—”

  “You want to know my mother’s sad, sad story?” she said, cutting him off. “She was dating a guy in college and got pregnant. He walked out, and it broke her. She quit school and started waitressing, and sometimes she sees a glimmer of the man who walked out on her in one of her customers and she gets a little crazy because she’s still trying to prove to herself that she’s worthy of being loved. The only problem is that she doesn’t love herself, and if you don’t love yourself, no one else is going to love you, either.” Sabrina couldn’t stop the words pouring from her mouth. She wanted to reach out to him, wanted to make him feel what she was feeling, but Jase’s eyes were shuttered, and he was standing very, very still. Just as he had sat very, very still during that poker tournament. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking or what he wanted, and not knowing made her hold herself back. “Every time one of them dumps her, she winds up right back where she was in college, lost and alone and responsible for a baby that she doesn’t know how to protect. My mother has spent the last twenty-eight years living tip to tip and paycheck to paycheck, and because she couldn’t afford babysitters, she took me to work with her. I stayed in the back rooms, alone, waiting for her to come and take me home. That taught me to be independent and to think for myself. None of this was about using you to get headlines, and the fact that you could even think that … It’s sick.”