by Suzie Nelson
When Francois took me in his arms after he’d played for a while, I was ready for him. I don’t think I’d ever been so aroused in my entire life. This was more than a physical desire; I was ready to surrender all of my soul to him. I could tell that Francois was feeling the same magnificent sense of surrender as he kissed me softly all over my neck and breasts; savoring each kiss as if he were exploring a magical world he’d never seen before. When he finally made his way to my legs and pulled down my panties I was hot and wet for him…hungry for his touch and longing for the gentle caress of his tongue. He kissed me between my legs and then started licking the tip of my clit slowly and deliberately. I sighed deeply and arched my back to grant him full access to my secret parts. He grew more forceful and his tongue became an instrument of pleasure as he seemed to effortlessly control all of my desire with it.
I sighed deeply as my entire body contracted with the most intense orgasm I’d ever experienced in my life. It seemed to spur Francois on as he continued licking me without stopping for even a second. Soon I felt myself going over the edge one more time…and then another…
I was Francois’s feast and he was consuming all of me. When he finally moved on top of me and entered me with his fully erect manhood I grabbed his head and pulled it towards me, kissing him over and over on his moist lips as he rocked his hips up and down in an ancient rhythm of unbridled passion. When Francois finally threw his head back and reached his own incredible climax I felt his entire body tensing and then relaxing as all of our passion and desire finally subsided.
“Sing me something beautiful,” I whispered. Francois picked up his guitar and started playing a gentle tune. When he started singing it was in French and, even though I couldn’t understand the words, I knew that my heart understood its meaning perfectly. I lay back on the couch and closed my eyes.
Everything was perfect and perfectly fucked up all at once.
I was in love with this incredible man but, at the same time, I still heard my mother’s pained voice in my mind whenever I thought of the last conversation I’d had with her. Now I had no idea how I was ever going to get enough money to save her life and my only vague hope was the naked French god sitting on the couch next to me, playing and singing like an angel who’d strayed from heaven. For some reason, the promise he’d made to me after they’d refused to let me gamble at the casino had a ring of truth to it and I blindly believed that he was really able to help me in my quest.
I was going to ask Francois to play me his own favorite song, but the stress and passion of the evening must have gotten to me as I fell asleep on the couch while Francois was playing his guitar.
I woke up the following morning in Francois’s king size bed and he was lying right next to me. He must have carried me off to bed as I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten there.
“I’m glad to see you are finally awake,” Francois said with a big grin, “are you hungry?”
“Ravenous,” I replied and climbed on top of my French lover.
“Mon Dieu, it doesn’t look like we’re going to make it out of this room today,” Francois said as he watched me mounting him.
FRANCOIS
I’d just finished a long conversation with Gary Tomlin and he’d revealed to me the information he’d gathered during his surveillance of Jenny Blake’s mother in Los Angeles.
I sat back on the couch where Jenny and I had made love so intensely just the previous evening and I suddenly saw her in a very different light. I realized that she was far, far more than just a card shark seeking to scam some casinos at the Blackjack tables. She was fighting against the rest of this cold, greedy town to save her mother’s life and it was high time that someone helped her.
Gary had followed Jenny’s mother to an all-night pharmacy and he bribed the cashier afterward to find out what Mrs. Blake had purchased. It turns out she’d bought several Triptan medications, normally indicative of a person suffering from migraines. Gary had the feeling there was more to the whole thing so he bribed the cashier some more and got some further information from her. He finally hit the mother lode as the cashier finally dropped the bombshell.
“You didn’t hear it from me…but word around here is that Mrs. Blake’s got a brain tumor and no money to have an operation.”
It immediately became clear to me what the true reason behind Jenny Blake’s frantic gambling streak in Vegas was. It wasn’t too hard to put two and two together as I realized that she was trying to get enough money together for her mother’s brain operation. I suddenly felt an incredible admiration for my little card counting angel and realized that I was prepared to do whatever it took to make sure that her mother would be able to have the operation she needed to save her life.
I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to work the whole thing though, as I had the feeling Jenny would resent me if I bluntly offered to give her the money. It would be too much - like I was trying to buy her affections or something…and this would leave a sour taste in my own mouth too as I’d quite enjoyed the way we’d both seduced each other, to be perfectly honest.
I decided to give the whole situation a bit more thought and to allow my subconscious mind to work on the problem for a while. I’d found that this approach often produced a sudden insight and enabled me to come up with inventive solutions to whatever problems I was faced with.
I knew that I would not be able to hold off Vivienne’s requests for an update on my progress much longer as she was now beginning to truly pester me with her text messages and, God forbid, I felt one of those hour-long phone calls with Vivienne coming along soon, which would put me in a very difficult spot as I was nowhere nearer finding some way of impressing Vivienne with my casino management skills than when I’d started out on this entire Las Vegas venture. I could still sidestep a straight answer to her inquiries by sending her some enigmatic and surreal text messages, but there would be nowhere left to hide if we had to talk directly and bluntly on the phone.
The greatest challenge now facing me, I realized, was the fact that I would have to act very quickly if I hoped to continue my relationship with Jenny. If she couldn’t do any more gambling on the Vegas Strip, as now appeared to be the case, she was sure to leave Vegas and go look for some other place to get the money together for her mother’s operation. I knew she had the hots for me, but I was not so arrogant as to believe that she would choose to stay with me in Vegas rather than going somewhere else to try and save her mother’s life. The six month period allotted to me to prove my management skills to Vivienne now seemed totally irrelevant, as the true deadline I was facing was no more than a day or two away.
Jenny Blake, in my estimation, would not be in Vegas for more than another night; for two at the very most.
It was time to call upon all of my previous experience and I started racking my brains for any possible solution to the predicament I found myself in. I remembered everything Vivienne had taught me through the years and also recalled some of the incidents that had taught me the most about the estate business, which was Vivienne’s field of expertise. She always looked out for the quickest way to turn around properties in the most profitable way and one of the earliest lessons I’d learned with her was when she took me out to Greenhaven, New York to show me some of the expensive properties on offer there.
“Don’t just look at the houses, try to see what is right there in front of your eyes. This might just give you a clue as to which properties would be the most profitable for us to market.”
I looked at all the marvelous houses as we drove through the rich neighborhood but all of the million dollar properties looked similar to me and none of them even had ‘For Sale’ signs on the front lawn.
We stopped in front of one especially imposing looking house and Vivienne looked at me from the driver seat of her Cadillac.
“Tell me what you see,” she demanded.
“I see a beautiful house and the garden looks like it could win a prize at a show,” I replied.
�
�Is that all?”
“Yes, I don’t see anything else.”
“What about the car in the driveway? Vivienne asked.
I took a closer look at the car standing in the driveway and then it struck me. It was a banged up old Ford and it looked way out of place in front of the exquisite property.
“The car looks like it doesn’t measure up to the kind of class I see in the house and surroundings,” I said.
“Now, was that really so hard to spot?” Vivienne asked.
“Not really, I was just looking at the wrong things, I guess.”
“Now tell me what you make of that cheap old car standing in front of a million dollar property?” Vivienne asked.
I thought about it for a second. I didn’t want to disappoint Vivienne any further by missing another obvious fact; having already missed out on spotting the old car which looked so badly out of place in front of the mansion. Then it struck me.
“Is it possible that the owner of this house is going through some kind of financial trouble and that all of his expensive cars have been dispossessed?”
Vivienne looked at me with a strange expression on her face and I thought for a second that I had disappointed her again by making some very stupid remark.
“You truly are the heir I’ve been looking for all my life,” Vivienne said and gave me a big hug right there in her Cadillac, “well done!”
We’d gone straight to Vivienne’s office after that and she did a search to find out who the house belonged to. Within half an hour she had the phone number of the owner and had set up a meeting with him under the pretext of introducing herself as a real estate agent who wanted to get to know the owners in the area. We’d driven off to meet the owner and, sure enough, he was in deep financial trouble and his Porsche and other expensive cars had already been dispossessed. He was very open to Vivienne’s offer of introducing him to a keen buyer for his house at a price much better than any it would fetch if it had to be sold at a bankrupt auction.
“But we don’t have a prospective buyer yet!” I protested when I was alone with Vivienne after our meeting with the owner.
“Not yet, my little real estate genius, not yet,” Vivienne smiled, “but it's time you start learning that the best things in this business happen when you are running at speed.”
“What does that mean; running at speed?” I’d asked.
“It simply means that you don’t wait for everything to be in place before you strike. You simply believe that all the pieces of the puzzle will fall into place as you move along. In this instance, it means that we are going to believe that the right buyer will be found even as we start moving on the deal.”
Vivienne was right, of course. After she’d obtained the sole mandate to sell the Greenhaven property she soon had several buyers lined up and we ended up making an absolute killing and $500,000 profit on the deal.
I realized that I was now in a situation where I would also have to run at speed. There was no time to set everything up and I would simply have to trust that everything would work itself out as I put some kind of plan in motion to help Jenny.
I felt like I was making some progress now in my planning. I’d decided on a general approach; to move as fast as I could without trying to work out all of the details up front. Now I only had to come up with some kind of physical plan of action.
As I sat there thinking about everything I realized I was actually enjoying the whole process.
My ultimate objective was more than just making money; it was to help the woman of my fancy and to make it possible for us to stay together. Jenny was out there fighting an incredible battle against all of the world, it seemed, and I felt like it was time that someone leveled the playing fields for her. I believed that if Jenny Blake were given a fair opportunity she was certain to win enough money at the Blackjack tables to pay for her mother’s operation; the only problem was that she was now faced with a ban at all of the gambling houses on the Strip with no further opportunities whatsoever to play Blackjack at any casino in Las Vegas.
There was one obvious exception, of course. The Golden Nugget casino. I was in charge of the Golden Nugget, until further notice, and if I so decided, Jenny would be free to gamble at its Blackjack tables. This would, of course, open me up to the most vicious kind of attacks from the other shareholders and it might even be possible for them to have me removed legally as the controlling shareholder of the Golden Nugget on the basis that I’d not discharged my ‘duty of care’ towards the other shareholders, as Peter Parkin had so eloquently put it.
There was, of course, the leverage I held over Peter; knowing that he’d signed off on fraudulent tax returns and I might just be able to use this against him to shut him up. But even if I got Peter to shut up whilst allowing Jenny to play Blackjack at the Golden Nugget it would still hurt the casino’s business in the long run, as Jenny was sure to punish the Blackjack dealers and the financial coffers of the Golden Nugget severely if she was ever given free reins to gamble there.
It appeared to me that the time had come for me to make a final decision about my efforts to please Vivienne by getting the Golden Nugget to outperform its previous financial benchmarks. It was readily apparent to me that I would have to let go of that idea, once and for all, if I hoped to have any kind of chance with Jenny.
The choice was simple; I had to choose between pleasing Vivienne and being with Jenny. Even more importantly, I had to choose between the entire family fortune and Jenny Blake, as I was almost certain to fail in my bid of convincing Vivienne that I would be a worthy heir of the Du Bois millions if I made a mess of the management of the Golden Nugget.
While I was still mulling all of this over in my mind a third possibility suddenly suggested itself to me. What if I could allow Jenny to gamble at the Golden Nugget and I could also make a lot of money for myself and Vivienne at the same time? It sounded preposterous to even think that such a thing might be possible, but I’d been raised in this business by the most preposterous thinker of them all; Vivienne Du Bois!
“That’s the way to go,” I muttered to myself, “a situation where all of us win at the same time.”
The challenge was that I had no idea yet of how this could all possibly be done. But that’s when I thought again of Vivienne’s advice about the best approach to follow in circumstances like these; run at speed and wait for everything to fall in place as I move on the deal.
“That’s what we will do, my little gambling angel. We will run at speed and smash through everything in our way,” I whispered to myself and got up from the couch and put on my jacket. I wanted to speak to the general manager of the Golden Nugget again and was hoping that our meeting might give me some concrete ideas and help me to formulate a final plan.
JENNY
I found myself facing one of those impossible choices which wasn’t really a choice at all. If I stayed on in Vegas my mother was probably never going to have her operation and would most likely not live much longer.
If I had any real option at all I would have just hung around with Francois on the Vegas Strip and enjoyed being in love with him. Yes, I’d finally and irrevocably admitted it to myself; I was head over heels in love with him despite my intermittent attempts to deny it. But all of this was now utterly meaningless. I would have to leave Las Vegas and I got the feeling that Francois was not the kind of man to follow after me.
I’d spoken to my mother again and she sounded about the same as the previous time we’d communicated. She was in a lot of pain but promised me that she would hang in there a little longer. There was simply no way that I was going to let her down and I was already sitting in front of my laptop searching for the best place to relocate to in order to find new and unsuspecting casinos where I could win the last $100,000 I needed for my mother’s operation.
The search on the internet was really just a way to get my mind off of things, as I already had a very good idea where I was headed. I couldn’t go back to Monte Carlo as I was already perso
na non gratathere and most of the other main gambling institutions across the world also had my number.
I thought again of the close call I’d had in Monte Carlo after a private detective had warned all of the casinos there that I was a card counter. At the time I was gambling merely as a way of getting back at the gambling institutions for ruining my youth as my mother was not sick yet, but I already had a very strong drive and motivation to win as much money as possible.
I was sitting at a Blackjack table and was up by about $55,000 in winnings when the Pit Boss walked up to me and started watching me with hawk eyes; speaking into his two-way radio at the same time. I knew that my winnings were now in serious jeopardy as I’d heard of occasions where card counters had been asked to leave a casino without being allowed to take their winnings with them. They were just asked to leave the casino without any explanation offered for their removal although the gamblers knew, of course, that the casino had caught up to the fact that they were not any ordinary losers sitting there to feed all of their life savings to the dealer.