Where the hell was Sarah?
She couldn’t have blown through three hundred dollars in quarters yet, surely. Even if she never won a jackpot, it still took a certain amount of time to feed twelve hundred quarters into one of these machines. And since, all protests to the contrary, she was clearly a novice, he doubted she had figured out that she really needed to put in more than the minimum bet at one time to hit the big jackpots.
So where was she?
He’d even checked the blackjack tables in case she’d decided to venture into riskier territory. In between a couple dozen apologies for interrupting various hands, he’d questioned dealers and a couple pit bosses as well. He’d found one dealer who remembered Sarah. Apparently she had only played a few hands, but the dealer remembered complimenting her on her dress. They’d bonded over the imperative of only ever buying hot cocktail dresses on sale.
Well, a few hands of blackjack could have cleared her out if she’d fallen afoul of some bad cards. But he’d already tried calling her room and her cell phone, looking for her poolside and at the spa, and now he was getting a little nervous. Not to mention pissed off. He’d walked more in the past two hours than he usually did in an entire day lately and his leg was aching like a bitch. She was a grown woman, but this was still a town where you could get into some serious trouble without even trying, and if anything happened to Tyler’s little sister, J.D. would be missing a limb or two by the time his best friend ran him out of Chicago.
Twenty minutes of polite verbal pushing and a little Hollywood name-dropping later, he was introduced to the floor manager. Amazing what being a nominee for an untelevised awards ceremony could get you. He explained his concern, wondering what the odds were that they’d let a nonemployee into the video security room for a look at the live feeds. He described Sarah to the man.
“…about five-nine, slim, long straight dark hair, wearing a short—very short—red sparkly halter dress. Looks like she could find trouble without going to any, if you know what I mean.”
“And the guest’s name, sir?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t know her by name. She’s not a regular here. Sarah—”
The man smiled and turned J.D. by the elbow as he began walking down to the floor.
“Ms. Tyler, yes. I thought from your description that you might be speaking of her.”
Ms. Tyler?
“You know Sarah Tyler?” He didn’t mean to scoff at the man, but there was obviously a misunderstanding.
“Of course. I make a point of paying close, personal attention to guests like Ms. Tyler.”
The floor manager led him swiftly past the blackjack tables and deeper into the horseshoe-shaped card tables.
“Let me guess. Beautiful young women?” Though the attitude was unexpectedly unprofessional for a casino manager, he could hardly blame the man.
The man glanced over his shoulder at J.D., brows drawn together and a frown on his face. Behind him, in the back of the room, a large crowd had gathered around a poker table where a hot game was clearly in play.
“No. Guests who are serious card players. Especially when they’re winning.”
“Excuse me?”
Silence fell over the crowd in an instant as they approached, which distracted him as much as the man’s response. That, and the glimpse of a naked ivory back, perfectly bisected by a thin red rope that sparkled in the lights shining down on the table.
Piled in front of the woman was a mountain of chips, a mountain range of chips. The Colorado Rockies had nothing on this leaning tower of black and yellow chips. And as he pushed through the silent crowd with a growing sense of horror, he saw that her hands were braced at the base of the pile, fingers spread wide and palms scraping the baize surface of the table.
He knew what came next.
“Well, Billy,” the woman said, her voice carrying easily in the quiet, “I’m betting you dealt me better cards this hand than the last.” The dealer shook his head and grinned. J.D. could hear the laugh racing beneath her voice, her good humor no doubt enhanced by whatever had been on the rocks melting in the glass by her elbow. “And if not, you’ll have to ask Mr. Rossetti here to tip you for me, since I won’t have a chip left to my name.”
The crowd erupted, nearly drowning out the beginning of the inevitable next sentence.
“I’m moving all—”
He shoved a grandmother in a polyester pantsuit to the side and yanked the high roller out of her chair, faking a hearty laugh.
“Sweetheart! Here you are!” The multicolored mountain of chips shuddered as he interrupted her push forward for the classic “all in” bet and then collapsed like a hillside over the San Andreas fault line, oozing in a landslide toward the already enormous pot in the middle of the table. Frustrated shouts burst out all around him. “I’ve been looking for you all over!”
Security men stepped into the corner of his vision. He welcomed their approach and hoped it would prevent him from being beaten to death by the crowd. But this was Vegas. There was one thing this town liked even better than gamblers. So he made the only gamble that was left to him.
“What’s a newlywed gotta do to get five minutes alone with his wife?” he shouted to the crowd with a grin.
He slicked a hand down her back and over her hip until it rested possessively on her butt, fisted a hand in her hair, and tilted her face up to his. He only paused for a split-second to hiss at her, “Sarah, what the hell are you doing?”
Then he crushed his mouth to hers and prayed.
Chapter Four
Later that evening, Sarah would explain to J.D. exactly how close he’d come to being assaulted with a highball glass and five laminated playing cards. The man from Florida had been losing steadily to her for the past half hour, and when J.D. yanked her out of her seat, the guy had started to rise, eyes darting furiously between the scotch and soda he held in one hand and the cards clutched flat against the table in the other, as if he couldn’t decide which to pitch at J.D.’s head first: the drink that was numbing him to the pain of his losses or the hand he hoped would turn his losing streak around.
But although she kept her wits for long enough to remember to leave her cards on the table before she braced her palms against J.D.’s shoulders—she wouldn’t for a moment risk the charge of card tampering—what happened after that became a little hazy.
She hadn’t processed anything he’d said, although he was clearly pretty steamed about something. But his mouth spent only a moment hovering over hers before beginning an assault on her senses that would have put a lesser woman in the hospital. She parted her lips, not sure if she were going to protest or say please, and his tongue plunged in, forcing her mouth open wider as his hand in her hair pulled her head back, almost pulling her away from him.
Until she snaked a hand behind his neck and pulled his head down to hers just as hard.
His mouth was rough and hot against hers, his teeth scraping against her lips as his kiss roamed her mouth, not content with one angle, one taste, one touch. He nipped at her bottom lip, and then curved his tongue against hers in a long, slow, sliding dance. She could taste the heat of him, sharp and dangerous against her tongue, not subtle at all.
Then she shuddered as she felt him scrape a single fingernail delicately across the bare skin of her lower back, chasing the edge of her dress as it dipped low at the base of her spine.
The hand in her hair shifted, the clenched fingers spreading wide to wrap more firmly around her neck and spear deep into her hair, their energy shifting subtly from forceful to encouraging. She loosened her own hand against the warm, smooth skin of his nape, and with the other hand smoothed the lapel she’d crushed into a ball of wrinkles.
He was kissing her more softly now, little nipping kisses, as if each time he attempted to draw his mouth away from hers, he was forced to stop for a second and come back to her for one last taste.
Slowly, sound was beginning to register again, mostly cheerful-sounding hollers sparked with
one or two irritated voices protesting something. They stood still under the canopy above the poker table that was there to keep the overhead lights from shining directly on the players’ foreheads. Studies had shown that such lights were draining to a gambler’s energy.
Sarah didn’t think that feeling drained was a problem she would have to face for, say, the next decade or so. Her system was revved, even the slide of J.D.’s palms down the skin of her bare arms sent electric shocks racing down her spine. She hadn’t felt this jumpy since the surge of adrenaline that had hit her earlier in the evening when she thought she spotted J.D.’s ex-wife across the casino floor. A case of mistaken identity, obviously.
J.D. started to straighten, and then stopped, bending over for one last kiss. She could hear someone asking her where her ring was—what ring?—as his lips slid over hers, his mouth’s gentle suction pulling softly at her upper lip. When he stopped and stood up, the swoop in her belly as his dark eyes found hers was enough to keep her speechless for another moment.
Which was just long enough for him to push the long spill of her hair gently behind one ear, lean forward and shatter the mood.
“Do you have any idea what the hell you’re doing?” he said in her ear. She reared back in surprise, which is when she noticed that the look in his eyes was less lustful than worried. He’d shackled her wrists neatly in the tight grip of his hands and seemed to think that he was going to march her away from the table in the middle of a hand.
A damn big hand. And hers to win or to lose, no matter what her own personal Big Brother bodyguard seemed to think.
“Hey, buddy, you got the next fifty years to kiss your wife,” her opponent said crankily as he settled back into his seat. “But first she’s gotta finish with me.”
Wife?
Her brain raced back over the past two minutes, and the details fell into place like a roulette ball clicking at last into the double-zero slot.
He thought he was saving her.
How sweet.
Condescending and not a little bit obnoxious, but still sweet. Now, at least, she understood why the bleached blonde at the end of the table was still blathering on about a ring.
Dredging up a memory from her seventh-grade self-defense class in P.E., Sarah twisted her wrists against the spot where J.D.’s thumbs overlapped and his fingers touched, and broke free.
She wouldn’t call him out on his crazy playacting, but she’d be damned if she’d let him derail her poker hand.
“Never marry a man in Vegas, honey,” she said with a bright smile at crowd, and a nod to the dealer to let him know that play was in no way interrupted. “They’re always promising you the ring will come along later.”
“Ain’t that the truth!” the blonde called back, elbowing the man next to her.
With a cocky grin, she patted J.D.’s cheek with one hand and dared a wink at him. He looked like he’d happily strangle her right then and there. She sat back down in her seat and crossed her legs, knowing that the movement had her skirt riding high on her thigh.
She cocked her head back a little and looked up at her “husband.”
“I think I’ve done pretty well by myself so far, darling, so if you don’t mind…” She turned back to her opponent. Mr. Rossetti glared at her over the stub of the cigar he could only chew on because the Bellagio’s poker rooms, unlike the rest of the casino, were smoke-free. “As I was saying, I can’t match that last raise, so…”
She pushed every last damn chip into the pot without a word.
Then she leaned back in her seat, raised an eyebrow at the man across the table from her and called his bluff.
When he slid a thumb under the edge of the cards in front of him and turned them up just far enough to get a glimpse at them, she knew she would win.
After an hour of matching wits, such as they were—although she felt a bit like whoever it was who’d once said that they declined to enter a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent—she knew that Rossetti only double-checked his cards before betting when he hoped they’d changed for the better since his last look.
Every gambler has tells, and she’d picked up on his after ten minutes.
Mr. Rossetti nodded at the dealer and changed another thousand in chips to match her bet. When the chips were slid in front of him, he called her bet and clamped down hard on the cigar with his teeth.
“Show us whatcha got, honey.”
The fingers that clamped down on her shoulder shouted tension, not loosening even when she patted them before flipping her cards over.
A pair of kings, an ace, a six and a two faced the ceiling.
The collective indrawn breath of the crowd at the meagerness of her hand must have sucked most of the oxygen from the room.
Sarah loved every moment of it, the drama and the risk. Knowing that it was possible that she’d misjudged her opponent and that in two seconds she could be watching the man walk away with every dollar she’d finessed from him.
The man across from her waited a beat before picking up his cards and tossing them lightly toward the dealer. He shook his head.
Not this time.
The whoop of the crowd surged into her like the bright fizz of champagne or the pulse-pounding rush of one of J.D.’s kisses. From across the table, Mr. Rossetti pierced her with a look she imagined he reserved for particularly recalcitrant children. She stared right back, keeping her face calmly neutral out of politeness. She’d always considered it rude to gloat.
The older man’s stern look cracked into a wide grin after a moment and he laughed out loud.
“You’ve got nerves of steel, girlie. Moving all-in with a hand like that.”
“Only at the poker table, sir,” she said and smiled back, meeting his outstretched hand with her own for a firm shake.
“I doubt that.” As they both rose from the table, the crowd began to drift away. Congratulations and companionable pats, from those hoping a little of her luck might rub off on them, landed on her from all sides. Her opponent shook his cigar at J.D. “I’d keep a close eye on this one. She’s liable to lead you on a merry chase.”
“I plan to.”
How was it that the warmth of his breath against her ear, murmuring those words, should raise such a chill on her skin that she needed to shiver to release the tension?
When the person next to her finally moved away, she stepped to the side to avoid the risk of bumping into the hard strength of the man behind her, who was refusing to give her an inch of breathing space.
With a nod to the floor manager, she accepted his offer to change out her winnings, which she ballparked at about twenty-five grand. She didn’t say a word to her shadow, just shook hands and thanked those who offered congratulations before heading to the cage, where she asked the floor manager to keep her winnings in the casino safe. Only then did she turn to face J.D., head cocked to one side, wondering how he was taking her refusal to be corralled by him.
He lifted one dark, straight brow, the only animation in an otherwise bland expression. After a downbeat or two, she gave in and grinned. Her poker face was officially retired for the evening.
“If you recall, I did warn you.”
His nod was calm. Serene, even.
“Yes, you did,” he admitted. A hint of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “You sat there, Sarah Tyler, in your sensible shoes and comfortable slacks and warned me not to let you near any high-stakes poker games.” The look he raked over her kindled heat in her veins until she fairly sizzled with it. “You practically dared me not to take you seriously.”
With effort, she bit her lower lip and controlled the laughter bubbling up inside her. “I’ve never been prone to exaggeration. You might have remembered that.”
“I’m beginning to think I didn’t remember you correctly at all.” He stepped closer, forcing her to tilt her head back just to keep eye contact. Above high cheekbones, his dark eyes were locked speculatively on her face. “I saw what I expected to see. I’m used to looki
ng more deeply through my camera. Without it, I’m a little blind.”
He tilted his head for a moment and his gaze drifted, his thoughts clearly roaming. When his attention snapped back to her, it felt like a spark leaping from his body into hers.
“That’s it. I need to take your picture.”
Ah, no. Uh-uh.
She’d seen too many of J.D.’s pictures not to know what she was getting into. His pictures bared the souls of their subjects. And though she could tell herself from now until the day the universe eventually imploded that she didn’t want him, that she didn’t dream about him during the night until she woke in a sweaty tangle of sheets, she wasn’t fool enough to believe that she could hide anything from J.D. when he had a camera in his hand.
He would see her only too well. And although she might catch his attention for a moment, she knew how quickly that sweet, hot spotlight would move on. The humiliation of having been so naked before him, metaphorically or not, would be unbearable.
Desperate to snap this mood, she forced a gay laugh and punched him in the shoulder like she would her brother.
“Don’t be fooled, boyo. Like I said, Vegas Sarah is just a game. Underneath it all, I’m still just plain old boring Sarah Tyler.” Before he could open his mouth to contradict her, she looped a friendly arm through his and headed for the nearest aisle that ran mazelike across the casino floor. “I’m famished. What kind of death march do you think it’ll take to find a place where they’ll sear me a side of beef in this joint?”
It seemed like he was going to let her get away with defusing the tension, at least for now. The hard muscle of the arm beneath her hand wasn’t the only unrelenting thing about J.D.
Calling His Bluff Page 7