Strip Poker

by Lisa Lawrence

“Don’t be so cute, Helena,” I scolded her. “That’s why you were asking if I was fit when you called! You know the only way I’m going to solve this for you is if I get into the game. You don’t get to watch if you don’t play, do you?”

  Helena didn’t do a very persuasive expression of contrition. “Teresa, you are a looker. You’ve done a bit of modelling work, and we’ll go into London tomorrow to get you a wardrobe to look the part. You’ll need a car, too—we’ll get a rental. Something a bit flash. We’ll say you’re a broker or something—”

  “Helena, at least give me a convincing cover story. Something where I can lie well!”

  She was patting my arm like a nervous seamstress. “Not to worry, we’ll figure out the details. Then you’ll help?”

  I stamped my stiletto heel into her parquet floor, not caring if I left a mark. “You are talking about me perhaps getting passed around like a sex toy.”

  Helena grinned mischievously. “Then we’ll have to turn you into a poker expert. Janet will help.” She turned abruptly sombre. “She’s a good person, Teresa. She doesn’t deserve grief like this—neither does Lionel. It’s as if they’re picking off my customers and friends one by one!”

  I looked past her at the computer screen. Maybe I had ended up being a “kind of” investigator because I couldn’t resist a mystery. I was intrigued by this puzzle. And okay, I have to be completely honest, I was intrigued by the game.

  Bets against flesh. To risk yourself like that, to put yourself on display where others disrobed you little by little with a hand of cards, finally taking you or you taking them…Yes, it was a turn-on. My mind already guiltily played out little fantasies of all the combinations and potential scenarios.

  And more, more than all of this, I watched that incredible muscular brown back on the screen, and the way the muscles of his buttocks flexed with each thrust. I saw Janet Marshall’s face bathed in perspiration and ecstasy, and there was a higher pleasure there than I had had tonight with Fitz—created not only from lips and skin, but risk, exhibitionism, danger. Heaven help me, I wanted my own taste.

  2

  Come on, Teresa, you’re not paying attention,” Helena scolded me lightly, laughing. “Stay focussed. Now, what have you got in your hand? Garbage. What is that? What is that supposed to be?”

  “Well,” I said sheepishly, “I was working on a straight—”

  Helena and Janet looked at my cards, looked at each other and laughed. They were ruthless with me. Days like this, coming back again and again to the house in Richmond to play cards, so that I went to bed with little rows of red clubs and black diamonds floating in front of my eyes before I drifted off. Our games at the antique coffee table in the living room were with 5p antes and a £1 betting limit, because Helena said I had to understand money stakes and strategy before I could graduate to the mind games and cut and literal thrust of the strip version of the game. And so she drummed into me “The Poker Facts of Life,” as she called them, to help me survive.

  “You maximise the pots you win, you minimise the amount of money in pots you lose,” she said carefully and then smiled, waiting for my reaction, that well, yes, isn’t that obvious? And being an amateur, my face told her exactly that.

  “Darling, it sounds simple, but it isn’t,” she went on. “When you put money into a pot that you can’t win ‘just to see what happens,’ you’re losing more than you need to. If you don’t make players fold with a big bet who would have stayed in and called on a smaller bet, then you win less money than you should. At the end of the night, it’s not who has the bigger hand—it’s who has the most money. And who lost the shirt off their back.”

  If you’re going to call, pay attention to the amount of your bet and what’s in the pot. Better to stay in with a 50p bet for a £10 pot than a pot for £2. Adjust your playing style to whoever’s at the table. Check your own tells, don’t keep a lookout only for tells in opponents. She made my head swim with it all. Fortunately, I got better. Not great, mind you, but better.

  “Perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way,” said Janet one afternoon after her full house beat my flush.

  She was disappointed in my performance. The whole afternoon was, in fact, a “secret test” for me, concocted by Janet and Helena like some reality TV show to measure how I was progressing. Could I spot tells? Did I pick up on bluffing patterns? I wasn’t distinguishing myself very well, and if I couldn’t play my part, I couldn’t stay in the game. And catch the baddie.

  “I don’t know if she can do it, Helena,” Janet complained now. “And this isn’t fair, sending her in like a lamb to the slaughter. We need to give her an advantage.”

  Helena’s neatly sculpted brows furrowed, but still she smiled, trying to keep the mood light. “What did you have in mind, darling? You can’t have one of those clichéd earpieces, for God’s sake.”

  “Maybe if I was her silent partner at the table,” suggested Janet.

  “A con,” sighed Helena, and from her expression, it was clear she loathed the idea.

  I knew already she wouldn’t do it, and all the reasons were obvious. We could get tripped up before I made any headway on the case, and if that happened, Helena’s sideline would be over. It wouldn’t take long for her tarnished reputation on the circuit to affect her regular escort business.

  As for me, I was irritated as hell with the idea. “Please don’t be overprotective on my account,” I snapped.

  “It’s not overprotective, it’s simply protective,” replied Janet.

  “A con,” Helena said again, shaking her head. “No. Oh, no—no, no…”

  Janet wasn’t paying attention, still focused on me. “What is the problem with doing it that way? It’s safer.”

  And I thought, how like a politician to come up with a sleazy stunt like this—and to consider it safe. Might as well speak my mind.

  “Look, my primary job—why I was brought in—was to work the case, and I can’t do that if I’m too busy playing pantomime games with you. I’ll be there to watch the others. Plus I’ll have to go to games you probably can’t make because of your other commitments, and there’ll be times I won’t want you there.”

  Helena didn’t try to be the hostess with the soothing words this time. She knew that bringing me in always meant I called the shots on how I operate. Having Janet Marshall as my shadow would severely cramp my style, and while maybe she was a great poker player, I doubted she’d be a good enough actress not to give an unconscious sign to others that we knew each other. It would be important, too, to see the dynamics of our other suspects when she wasn’t around.

  And there was another reason, the one that prompted her contrite, small voice reply of: “Oh.”

  She looked to Helena once, but she didn’t need to ask the question. Neil. Janet knew I would consider him as a suspect for the blackmail. Maybe she couldn’t imagine it of her lover, but I had to. It was my job, so I would be treating everyone as a possible suspect.

  “Now we play for the fun stakes,” Helena told me after a week. And in less than two hours, she and Janet Marshall had me naked as a babe at the table.

  And insisted I stay naked at the table while the game was still in play.

  “You can’t look like a virgin when I bring you,” Helena chided me. “This is a game where women can enjoy losing as much as winning. You have to project that you want to be there.”

  “And even when you’re exposed like this, it doesn’t mean the game’s over for you,” Janet confided.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “A lot of girls give up after they lose their knickers or their bra and sit like an ornament at the table,” she explained. “They’ve resigned themselves to being the pot instead of ‘workin’ it’ to turn the tables. They sit back and just wait to be won. Me, personally, I find being nude is when I have the best psychological advantage.”

  She patted my arm gently and said, “I’m not trying to make you feel self-conscious, but you have beautiful brea
sts. Use them. Lace your fingers together—yeah? Go ahead, lace them together, now elbows on the table and just frame your tits with your arms—yes just like that—now stare at Helena as if she’s a man.”

  I looked across the green felt, but I couldn’t keep a straight face, erupting into giggles. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I sat up again and said, “I understand what you’re saying. I don’t think I’ll break up if I’m facing a guy.”

  “Oh, I know you won’t!” said Janet. “Then there’s the real obvious one. Arch your back like you need to stretch and tilt your chin up, yawning. Yep, boobs out.”

  “That’s so obvious!” I laughed.

  “Yes, and it works,” said Janet. “You’re not drumming your fingers or whistling, so it’s fair. Just don’t let yourself fall into habits and make it into one of your tells. Pull one knee up and sit with the heel of your foot on your chair. Little girl lost, ingénue thing. I’m too old for that one, but I’ve seen girls use it and just unravel men at the table. They bluff like mad.”

  “Really?”

  Helena nodded in confirmation.

  “And there’s other stunts you can pull to keep them off guard,” said Janet. “Chances are, the men sitting next to you will be doing their utmost to—ahem—get the best view of your southern exposure. Push your chair back a little to help them.” Her eyebrows fluttered suggestively.

  “Whoa! I should—”

  “I’m not saying you open your legs and give them the whole store, but you might want to encourage their eyes. The more they’re looking down there, the less they keep their eyes on their game. You can tell just how well someone plays by how long they stare at their cards. Strip poker, any kind of poker. Once you know what you have, why keep looking at your hand? Watch your opponents.”

  “And off the record,” said Helena. “You’re not supposed to touch another player while cards are in play, but if you’re daring, you can always reach out and grab his willy and completely throw him off guard.”

  “Helena!” roared Janet in convulsive laughter. “You’re too rude, man. Grab his willy!”

  “Like you’ve never done that, Jan! I know you, my love.”

  “Ladies,” I said, getting up from the table and collecting my panties off the rug, “I know I need to be good, but remember what I’m there for.”

  Hell, I had to remember what I was there for.

  “Time for the vocabulary,” said Helena, trading a knowing look with Janet. “Once I take you through this, maybe you’ll change your mind completely.”

  I waited. I had no idea what she meant by vocabulary. Poker is chock full of its own jargon, like outs and Broadway and rabbit hunt. It seemed that strip poker regulars had come up with their own cutesy lingo to add to it. Well, I didn’t know anything about topping or bottoms in BDSM either, so it was all new.

  “Betting is strip-betting until the final players at the table are more or less nude,” explained Helena. “The betting for sex comes in once everyone’s out of their clothes or by mutual agreement, partially clad, and in some games, there’s no ‘strip’ at all—they cut to the chase. You can open with a French, which is obvious. You can use a lap dance as your opener. That’s called a ‘bucket seat.’ One popular one with the Sloans and Knightsbridge types is the ‘Oxford Salute’—simple spanking, but it’s not meant as S&M, more comic relief and flirting.

  “Then you raise with different bets. ‘I’ll read you in Braille’ is masturbation. ‘Finding Nemo’ is going down on somebody, make of that what you will. And 69 is still 69. A ‘rug burn’ is simple vanilla sex, but if you lose to someone, you can choose whether you ‘blow out the candles’—meaning they can have you, but not with spectators, or you ‘go neon.’ Meaning you do it while others get to watch. Now bucket seats, Braille, Nemo and 69 will be Going Neon anyway, so few people get squeamish about rug burns. But it’s always the loser’s call, and some women—and men—still exercise their right. Usually because they either want to get wild with someone special or they don’t like their winning partner at all.”

  “With all that, where can you go?” I said.

  “A lot of places, actually,” replied Helena. “There’s ‘Marble Peach’—anal sex. But that turned off a lot of female participants, and it started to affect membership fees, so a lot of clubs dropped it. I never allowed it in the betting with my games. ‘Hang the Curtains’ is being tied up—usually with silk bonds—while doing it. The general rule, which I have at my club, too, is no bondage bets that blow out the candles. You want to play it, you play with an audience. No club organiser wants to get dragged into court having to swear that they heard a woman—or man, for that matter—give consent at the table, and then things went way too far after they left.”

  “I can’t believe there haven’t been incidents already,” I commented, shaking my head.

  “There have,” replied Helena. “You just never hear about them. Teresa, these are games for big kids with money—money enough to buy their way out of trouble. In the early days, everybody relied on just their word, thinking ‘Well, we’re special people. Nobody’s going to misbehave. Everyone knows everyone.’”

  She rolled her eyes in weary dismissal. “Well! When the fad caught on, the definition of ‘special people’ became pretty elastic to liven things up. Get more players, make it more interesting. I know of at least one alleged rape by an entrepreneur from Brazil. That’s a case where the police actually were ready to have him arrested. He skipped, of course.”

  “Jeez,” I said quietly.

  Helena lit a fresh cigarette. “I always thought if I’m doing the organising, the vetting, the retainer on the clinic to check diseases, I’ll bloody well be in control. I tried to anticipate rough customers. I kept my eyes out for who might push things too far and couldn’t take no for an answer. I was so careful. But blackmail…”

  “We’ll get him,” I promised her.

  My first game wasn’t at Helena’s. It was at a private home in Primrose Hill.

  Helena rented me a BMW to use on the case, and we drove up to the site of future shenanigans—this huge townhouse apartment with fifteen-foot ceilings and windows with a generous view of the park beyond. There were pregame drinks so that everyone’s inhibitions could float away on a river of free-flowing Cava and Gordon’s gin, and on the stereo was an eclectic mix of Aaliyah, Elvis Costello during his string quartet phase, and Justin Timberlake. The absent owner had a thing for abstracts with vivid colours, a Ruzicka prominently displayed on the wall.

  “So Helena, this is our new blood?” asked a good-looking white guy with silvering hair and a goatee. He was in a tailored pinstripe suit that must have cost £1,000, easy.

  “George, darling! George Westlake, let me introduce you to Teresa Knight.” She quickly explained how George was a self-made man, owning expensive real estate and a string of luxury resorts in spots like the Bahamas, Spain, Greece and South Africa.

  Westlake and I shook hands. “Hello,” he said warmly. We could have been sitting down for Bridge.

  “Be nice to her,” Helena told him. “She hasn’t played too many games around the circuit.”

  Helena had warned me she’d set me up as a novice-intermediate, which would cover any gaffes I made and any sign of jitters.

  Westlake laughed and said, “I wish I could believe you, my dear. But you do this every time, and then I find I’ve been taken by a ringer.”

  Time for me to be charming. I put a couple of fingertips on his chest as I pretended to lean in with a conspirator’s whisper. “Honestly,” I said, “I’m a terrible card player.”

  Joking, he mimicked my tone. “Honestly, so am I!”

  We laughed together, and he said, “I guess we’ll see.”

  I had got in because I was vouched for by Helena, who saved me the indignity of going for STD tests at the organizer’s private clinic. (She did, however, insist that I get myself tested at hers, and since I was allowed in that night, you know how I fared.) As the predators and prey cir
cled each other, she introduced me around as Teresa Knight, a “Senior Adviser” in scientific appraisal with a venture capital fund that bankrolled biotech companies. This was damn bold, I thought. And at one point, I took her by the elbow off to the side to ask: “Shit, what was all that?”

  She laughed and answered, “Take it easy, darling. Half these people are only scientifically literate enough to tell you water’s wet. If anyone asks what you’re working on now, tell ’em it’s to do with stem cell research.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’d you come up with biotech anyway?”

  “I was at my dentist’s, and I was so bored, I picked up a copy of New Scientist.” She downed her glass of champagne and added, “You wanted something where you could lie well, didn’t you? Mention science to this crowd, and their eyes will glaze over. It’s perfect—gorgeous beauty like you, major overachiever but bored by her career who wants excitement and to get her knickers off.”

  “Next time, give me a hint about my cover story,” I scolded her.

  “Teresa,” she called just before I moved off to mingle.

  I drifted back.

  “Smile,” she whispered close to me. “You have to look like you want to be here, darling. Look horny.”

  “Thanks, coach.”

  I was wearing a Joe Casely-Hayford outfit that would probably look as good when I let it slip to the floor as it did on my back. High-waist trousers, very elegant bright red top, not my usual colour, but hey, it worked.

  And I mingled. Now and then, Helena stopped by, filling me in on one or two of the regulars. There was Gary Cahill—Helena knew him from Uni.

  “What does he do?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” answered Helena. “Very rich, very spoiled. Waiting for Mummy to die. Big in the fight to stop the foxhunting ban, ‘our way of life’ and all that, even though he spends most of his time in London now.”

  Cahill’s face looked a little too much like Rowan Atkinson to me. When I thought I might be seeing this guy naked in a couple of hours behind a card table, I thought brrrr.

  “There’s Vivian Mapling,” said Helena, pointing out a bubbly redhead who looked like she was closing in on forty and hiding behind layers of eye shadow. “Loaded as well and a walking, talking example of how money can’t buy you manners. Very into the games. Believe it or not, I think this is shopping for her. She’s trying to find a husband who can double her wealth as well as her orgasms.”