Chapter 4
"What's the hurry, Mal?" Scooter asked as he grabbed the door before it could slam into him. "People can't want a drink that bad. It's not even ten o'clock yet."
Mallory pointed to the beer in Scooter's s.h.i.+rt pocket. "Then what's that for? The fish?"
Scooter grinned. "h.e.l.l, I'm not most people. Besides, Reginald told me I could have all the free food and drink I want if I would stay on the boat for the whole thing. It's just like one of those all-inclusive vacations to Cancun. 'Cept no one's naked and I ain't gotta speak Mexican. Anyways, I plan on getting my money's worth on the drinking part since I'm sorta missing out on the whole naked thing."
Mallory took one look at the grinning Scooter and held in a sigh. She wasn't about to explain that he could hardly get his money's worth since not only wasn't he paying - he was being paid to take the ride. And since most of the poker players were men - unattractive, older men-she didn't think he was really missing much on the naked end of things, either. "That's great, Scooter. Listen, I need to find Reginald and I'm kind of in a hurry. Did you see which way he went?"
Scooter nodded. "He said he was going back to his suite for a shower. He'll be back after that."
c.r.a.p. They were right back to the old, unattractive, naked man thing. The bathroom was probably the only place Reginald could go that Mallory wouldn't follow, but she didn't have the time to wait on Reginald to finish showering.
Mallory motioned Scooter over to a corner of the kitchen and glanced around to make sure no one would hear. "Something's not right here, Scooter. This list of players is all wrong. My uncle is so mad about some of them being here, and that doesn't make sense. It's almost like he didn't make up the invitation list. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
Scooter scrunched his brow for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah, I guess it's kinda weird that he would put Father T at your table. Heck, Father T blabs everything people say in confession, and he's supposed to have a contract with G.o.d on keeping that a secret. He's probably already told everyone you're a cooler."
Mallory nodded. "That's what I'm afraid of. I figure I can pa.s.s most of it off as him being drunk, but I don't know that it can last for a week."
"So what are you going to do about it now? It's too late to change everything."
"For now, I'm going to keep him drunk, which shouldn't be difficult. But if I knew what my uncle was up to, I'd have a much better idea of how to play this out long-term." She thought a moment more, then looked Scooter directly in the eyes before she could change her mind. "I need you to do something for me."
"Anything for you, Mal, you know that."
"Good. I need you to stay as close to my uncle as you can without him noticing. Remember everything he says, even if it doesn't sound important. Whatever he's up to is bound to be a huge problem, and I have no intention of being caught in the middle."
Scooter's eyes widened and he gave her a big grin. "You want me to play Sherlock Holmes? That's the coolest thing ever."
Mallory stared at Scooter in surprise. "You read Sherlock Holmes?" Surely not. In the seven years she'd lived next to him, Mallory had never seen Scooter read anything but road signs or advertis.e.m.e.nts for a sale on beer. Well, and that one time she'd caught him in his ba.s.s boat with a copy of Penthouse, but neither of them spoke of the matter and she did her best to keep it in the far back reaches of her mind.
"Of course, I read Sherlock Holmes," Scooter said. "Spent most of junior high with a book under my desk instead of listening in history-I mean, who cares about dead people? Heck, Mallory, every boy wanted to be Sherlock Holmes - or Dale Earnhardt."
"That's great, Scooter. You play Sherlock Holmes, then. We'll save Dale Earnhardt for a car chase, if it comes to that."
Scooter scratched his head. "Um, Mal, I don't know how to tell you this, but Senior ain't driving anymore since the accident and all. If you want a car-chase person, then I might have to be Junior."
"Junior, it is."
Scooter rose to his full height and stiffened his posture. "`My name is Sherlock Holmes,"' he said, in the worst British accent Mallory had ever heard. "'It is my business to know what other people don't know."'
With a nod, Scooter flattened his back against the casino wall, glanced both directions, then slowly crept toward the hall. When he reached the end of the wall, he pulled his pocketknife from his jeans, opened it and stuck the blade into the open walkway, apparently attempting to use it as a mirror.
Mallory gave a silent prayer of thanks that no one had been entering the kitchen when Scooter had decided to stab at the open doorway and watched in dismay as he gave her a thumbs-up and inched sideways through the opening.
Mallory hesitated a second or two but finally strode off toward the coffeepot, already regretting having put Scooter up to anything requiring stealth and finesse. It didn't take a genius to know this was going to be a disaster.
Jake shuffled the cards again while stealing glances at Mallory as she served the drinks to the players. The woman was a complete anomaly - clearly smart enough to rein in the Redneck Lynch Mob that the players had formed against him this morning, but not smart enough to figure out that all that incidental touching she managed to do while serving was a complete waste of time.
And Reginald St. Claire was only making the situation worse by encouraging her ridiculous beliefs. Jake noticed that Mallory was the only attendant not carrying her own tray. A kitchen worker had trailed behind her with the drinks and placed them on the serving table, then reminded her to call him for pickup before dismissing himself. Jake surmised Mallory was encouraged not to carry anything breakable. At least not in ma.s.s quant.i.ty.
Why in G.o.d's name she'd brought the drunken priest more alcohol, Jake didn't even want to know. At this point, the priest was the least of his worries. Based on the players' lack of reaction to Mallory, women were obviously not going to be a distraction and that clearly put all the responsibility on Jake. They had barely even looked at the mound of partially exposed b.r.e.a.s.t.s as she leaned in to place drinks in front of them. They were too focused on the game, which was a real shame. b.r.e.a.s.t.s that stood at attention with no bra, if she'd been telling the truth, were worth at least a glance.
He was just trying to decide if there was a tan line buried somewhere in that s.h.i.+rt when he felt someone's eyes on him. He lifted his gaze to the table beside them and saw Brad smiling at him. The other dealer gave him a thumbs-up and grinned. Jake held in a sigh and turned back to his table. His only objective at this tournament was to fly below the radar until he was ready to bust Silas, and twice already Brad had caught him acting like a h.o.r.n.y sixteen-year-old.
If he didn't get his act together, Brad might want to hang out or something equally as painful. Drinking beer, entertaining loose women and watching NASCAR. Or, even worse, one of those fis.h.i.+ng shows. If it was hunting season, he'd probably be expected to kill something and wear a funny hat.
He waited until Mallory had taken her seat at the end of the table to start dealing. The first hand had gone well. Silas had won a bit of money, and Jake had been smart enough to bow out early. If he continued to play smart, he might have a chance. All he needed was one exchange of cash.
At least he hoped that would be enough.
Finished with the deal, he pushed the card shoe over to the left and lifted the edge of his cards from the table. No f.u.c.king way. The handful of hearts seemed to smile up at him. A royal flush on the deal? The odds of pulling a royal on the deal were less than him actually knowing those NASCAR drivers, like Mallory had suggested. Granted, a royal flush wasn't as bad as drawing five of a kind, but neither hand was believable.
Before he could stop himself, he glanced over at Mallory. She was staring directly at him, the briefest of smiles on her face. No f.u.c.king way. She could not have made this happen. But it was obvious from the amused look on her face that Mallory knew he'd drawn a good hand.
Disgusted, he glanced around the room, wondering if St. Claire's security people were closely watching the camera that showed his hand. He needed to ditch a card but couldn't afford for one of St. Claire's flunkies to see it happen.
He raised one hand to stroke his jaw and tried to clear all expression from his face. If he dropped one card, Mallory might think he'd
If St. Claire's goons were watching the cameras, he could always say they were mistaken. He seriously doubted they were recording everything, so unless he kept tossing away winning hands, he shouldn't have a problem.
Mind made up, he yanked the ace out of his hand and tossed it on the pile of discards. The worst thing that could happen is she would a.s.sume he was a risky gambler. The last thing she should guess is that he was intentionally trying to throw the hand.
Pulling cards from the shoe, he dealt replacements to all the players and dropped a single card with the rest of his own, praying for anything that didn't make a winning hand. And frustrated at himself for fearing the worst. He had nothing to worry about and that was just reality. The shoe contained six decks to help cut down on the card-counting ability of some of the better players. So even though the card existed in the decks another five times, the odds of him drawing another ace of hearts were incredibly minute.
Even so, he found himself clenching his jaw as he lifted the edge of the card off the table.
When the red "A" made its appearance, it was all he could do to hold his blank expression in place. He blinked once to make sure he was seeing clearly. A second glance revealed a red diamond, and he slowly let out the breath that he'd been unaware he'd been holding. It wasn't the loss he'd been hoping for, but it wasn't another royal flush, either.
He turned his attention back to the table and waited for his turn to bet. Silas had opened with five thousand, so Jake knew he was holding something worthwhile. The man next to Silas folded and it was on to the drunken priest.
The priest studied his hand for a moment, then swayed a bit in his chair, studied the cards again, took a drink of Jack Daniel's and cleared his throat to speak. Jake steeled himself for the onslaught of garbled scripture but the priest elected to butcher the shortest verse in the Bible.
"Father Thomas wept," he said and tossed his cards, facedown, onto the table.
The man next to Father Thomas gave a sigh of relief, and despite himself, Jake almost smiled. On the previous hand, they'd gotten the entire 23rd Psalm. Sort of.
The other player folded also, so it was left to Jake to bet. He knew what he should do - what he would do if he were playing for real and for keeps - he'd see the five and raise it another. h.e.l.l, if he were playing for keeps, he'd have run the table on the royal, but winning some cash wasn't his primary objective. In fact, it wasn't an objective at all. It was only necessary to win enough to keep him in the game and force more money out of Silas.
Mallory knew he had drawn a good hand and if he folded, she'd be able to tell something wasn't right. Then she'd run straight to her uncle.
d.a.m.n it.
Call or raise? It should have been simple, and by G.o.d, it was. He grabbed some chips off the stack in front of him and tossed them onto the pile.
"I'll see your five and raise you five," he said, and lifted his gaze to the hard stare of Silas Hebert.
Silas studied Jake's face for a moment, then tossed in the required chips. "Call."
Jake laid his cards on the table and watched Silas carefully for any change in expression. Silas seemed momentarily surprised with the display, but finally nodded and flipped his cards over, displaying his own straight, six through ten, but not the same suit.
"You almost pulled it," Silas said to Jake.
Jake nodded. "Would have been a first."
Silas studied him again. "Would have been the first time in over thirty years of card playing that I'd seen it."
Jake met the man's eyes, forcing himself not to look away, but he felt his confidence drop. Silas was issuing the challenge. He had his doubts Jake had drawn the hand fairly and was letting him know he'd be watching very closely from now on.
Jake reached across the table for the spent cards and put them with the other discards. No problem, he thought. The royal was a fluke, a freak of nature and statistics colliding to give him a heart attack. He wasn't cheating, so there was nothing Silas could catch him doing. From now on, the cards would flow normally, and he'd have to rely on his own playing ability to control the table. He could do this. He'd been preparing for years.
As he reached for the shoe, he looked over at Mallory, perched sideways on her stool, her long legs seeming to flow endlessly from the seat. As his gaze moved up the long lines of her body to her face, she gave him a smile, then winked.
It was going to be a very long day.
It seemed to Mallory that lunch would never come. The play on the table was definitely swinging to Jake's advantage, and she couldn't be happier with the results. That first hand was almost overkill, but since then, things had settled down to a steady stream of chips in Jake's direction. Not that Mallory believed for one moment that Jake gave her any credit for his growing pile of chips. h.e.l.l, based on the way she was dressed for the tournament, Jake probably didn't give her credit for an IQ higher than her bra size.
And for absolutely no reason she could explain, that bothered her.
She knew he found her attractive-had caught him eyeing every square inch of her body outright. And the blush that crept up his neck when she winked had clinched it. But the reality was, Jake McMillan probably thought she was a two-bit hustler, like her uncle. He had no real cause to suspect differently, and definitely no reason to attribute to her an advanced degree or a high IQ.
Which should have been nothing new, really. Certainly men, especially men in Royal Flush, rarely acknowledged intelligence in a woman. Of course, they would have had to be smart enough to recognize it, but that was another issue. The reality was, in Royal Flush intelligence wasn't exactly what men were looking for in a mate. A late-model truck with good tires and a ba.s.s boat got you a heck of a lot more mileage than a college education.
Not that Mallory was in the market for a man. She'd dated a couple of guys since college but always with the same result-one disaster after another.
Guy #1 had been really sweet and tried desperately to work around the issues. Fortunately for him, he'd only run the gamut of car repairs, failed watches and one twisted ankle while dating her. Well, and that one incident with his suede jacket and a trout, but that could have happened to anyone. Still the jacket had been the last straw, and Guy #1 had waved a hasty good-bye from the parking lot of J.T's Bar, his car already loaded with his belongings. Apparently, it wasn't enough to just stop dating her. He'd decided leaving the state was required, and just like that, he was gone.
Guy #2 had been a whole other story. Brash and c.o.c.ky, loud and egotistical, he was exactly the kind of man she would usually have avoided. But she was younger then and year after year of being without the company of a man had left her lonely and ripe pickings for the first guy with the b.a.l.l.s to ask her out-and hey, he still had one of them, right? After she'd put Guy #2 into an ambulance, she'd learned that he'd only dated her on a bet. Apparently, there had been some kind of betting pool about how long a man could date her without acquiring an injury requiring medical attention.
Guy #2 had lost that bet and something a little more important, but that was hardly her fault. She'd told him not to put a loaded gun in his pants pocket and that snake wouldn't have bothered him besides. It certainly hadn't been any reason to panic and shoot off a body part.
She let out a sigh and focused back on the game in front of her. Her life was what it was, and nothing she could do would change it. G.o.d knows she'd tried.
"We have time for one more hand before lunch," Jake's voice broke into her thoughts.
She took in a deep breath, hoping to clear her mind, focus on the game in front of her, but the musky smell of Jake's cologne wafted through her nostrils and caused her vision to blur momentarily. Such a tiny thing, that scent, so sensual and masculine all at the same time, but it seemed to draw her toward him, mind and body.
Turning her gaze to the table, she watched as Jake deftly dealt the cards across the table, making note of the way his strong hands operated with a light touch and exact precision, pulling and placing each card with finesse and accuracy. Long fingers, too. Lots of uses for long fingers.
She sat up straight on her stool and lifted one hand to study her nail polish. Where the h.e.l.l had that come from? Of all the men in the world Mallory had come in contact with, Jake McMillan had seemed the least interested of all. Why in the world was she working the most important event of her life and having a fantasy about the fingers on a man that most likely thought she was a bimbo, or even worse, a criminal?
This would never do. She needed to regroup her thoughts, remember who she was and what her future was-concentrate on shutting down the table before the end of the week so she could get the h.e.l.l out of Jake's line of sight as soon as possible. Emotionally, she may not have been in the market for a man, but apparently no one had sent her body the memo.
She made a mental note to pick up new batteries on the way home. It was definitely time for new batteries.
Jake looked up from his cards and locked his gaze on hers. She felt a blush start to creep up her neck at being caught ogling him, and she had little doubt that he knew exactly what she was doing. It was probably written across her forehead.
Giving her a slow s.e.xy smile, he winked.
It was going to be a very long day.
CHAPTER FIVE.
Mallory waited until the last hand of the morning was played out, careful to avoid any more concentrating on fingers or hands or anything else long and hard, then counted the men's chips and gave them each a slip of paper with the tally. Slips of paper in hand, they all headed out of the casino and into the restaurant with Jake close behind.
With her focus back on the game, Mallory had sensed that something was off. Yet she couldn't put her finger on exactly what. Certainly, given the players, there was any number of possibilities for the "off" category, but as she turned her attention to the men, one by one, she finally had to admit that the feeling was coming from Jake.
But d.a.m.ned if she knew why.
His play seemed to be aboveboard. A bit on the conservative side, but perhaps that was just his style, or maybe he was a bit nervous and would loosen up more as the tournament went along. With the run of luck he'd had, he should have been a bit more confident, but not only had he remained somewhat reserved, he'd seemed almost hesitant about most of his betting.
She looked at the table, the final round of hands still face-up in front of each player's seat, then cast her gaze to the card shoe. She glanced around the room, ensuring it was empty, then lifted the top card from the spent pile in the card shoe before she could change her mind. This card should be the one Jake threw on the last hand.
But what she saw didn't make sense at all.
If this card were indeed the one Jake had thrown, then he'd tossed out a full house and ended up with only three of a kind. Sure, he'd still won the overall, but there was no logical reason for a player to throw a full house, and Jake McMillan had not seemed the least bit stupid. Well, if the dealer didn't have the table under control, at least she did. Besides, it was very possible the cards had been placed in the shoe in a different order than discarded.
She returned the card and started across the casino to the kitchen. At the moment, her biggest worry was finding out what Reginald had gotten himself into.
As soon as she stepped inside the restaurant, Mallory scanned the room for Scooter, wondering if he'd had any luck tracking Reginald. She hadn't caught sight of her uncle the rest of the morning. What could the scoundrel find more important than overseeing his own tournament? At this point she was willing to try anything to get information. Even Sherlock Scooter.
She heard her name and turned toward a small table in the corner of the room where Scooter was standing on a chair waving his arms at her like he was trying to direct a plane. Amy sat quietly next to him. The expression on her face was an interesting combination of amus.e.m.e.nt and horror.
Mallory lifted one hand to Scooter, hopefully giving him the signal to get off the chair and stop drawing attention to the table. Scooter shot her a huge grin and hopped off his chair, banging his knee against the table, which, in turn, caused a gla.s.s of water to tip over. Amy jumped up from the table before the worst of the flood could reach her and glared at Scooter as she mopped at her skirt with a table napkin.
Mallory tried not to smile. She wasn't the only one that could make a mess of things.
By the time she reached the table, the gla.s.s of water was righted and Amy's skirt would probably survive the experience, although based on the look on Amy's face, Scooter's fate was questionable. Mallory was also happy to note that the tables surrounding them were unoccupied, which made not being overheard a heck of a lot easier.
"Hi, guys," she said, and slid into her seat. "How's the tournament going so far?" she asked Amy.
Amy nodded and her expression cleared from scowling to enthusiastic. "It's going great! I think I'll be able to take out one of my players after lunch. That makes one down on the first day."
Mallory stared at Amy, a bit surprised. She'd known her friend was brilliant, but running a player out in less than a day, especially the players at this tournament, was nothing short of a miracle. "That's incredible, Amy. Not that I doubted your skill, but a day? Wow!"
Amy gave her a huge grin. "The idiot made it easy. He hates women and refuses to believe I can play cards. So no matter what indicators there are that I'm holding a ringer, he won't fold. Even the politician called him stupid."
Mallory smiled. "You've reached an all-time low when a Louisiana politician starts demeaning your intelligence. I guess you didn't bother to mention to the politician that he'd be working for you someday?"
Amy shook her head, the grin still in place. "It hasn't come up, but I might give him a heads-up when he's leaving."
Mallory was about to reply when she saw Amy's grin fade as quickly as it had come. Amy's eyes centered on something directly behind her and based on the look of disgust she now wore, Mallory knew it couldn't be anything good. Turning around in her seat, she looked straight into the fake smile and huge, annoying cowboy hat of Walter Royal.