Raintree: Inferno (Raintree 1)

They hadn’t said a word since he’d sat down, yet she felt as if she were in a battle for her will, her force, her independent life. Deep inside, panic flared to candlelight life, dancing and leaping. He knows, she thought, and tensed herself to run. Forget the casinos, forget the very nice money she’d been reaping, forget everything except survival. Run!

Her body didn’t obey. She continued to sit there, frozen…mesmerized.

“How are you doing it?” he finally asked, his tone still as calm and unruffled as if he were oblivious to the swirls and surges of power that were buffeting her.

Once again, his voice seemed to break through her inner turmoil and bring her back to reality. Bewildered, she stared at him. He thought she was doing all this weird stuff?

“I’m not,” she blurted. “I thought you were.”

She might have been mistaken, because in the dancing candlelight, reading an expression was tricky, but she thought he looked slightly stunned.

“Cheating,” he said in clarification. “How are you stealing from me?”

THREE

Maybe he didn’t know.

His bluntness was a perverse relief. Lorna took a deep breath. At least now she was dealing with something she understood. Ignoring the strange undercurrents in the room, the almost physical sensation of being surrounded by…something…she lifted her chin, narrowed her eyes and gave him stare for stare. “I’m not cheating!” That was true—as far as it went, and in the normal understanding of the word.

“Of course you are. No one is a

s lucky as you seem to be unless he—excuse me, she—is cheating.” His eyes were glittering now, but in her book glittering was way better than that weird glowing. Eyes didn’t glow anyway. What was wrong with her? Had someone slipped a drug into her drink while her head was turned? She never drank alcohol while she was gambling, sticking to coffee or soft drinks, but that last cup of coffee had tasted bitter. At the time she’d thought she’d been unlucky enough to get the last cup in the pot, but now she wondered if it hadn’t been pharmaceutically enhanced.

“I repeat. I’m not cheating.” Lorna bit off the words, her jaw set.

“You’ve been coming here for a while. You walk away with about five grand every week. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year—and that’s just from my casino. How many others are you hitting?” His cool gaze raked her from head to foot, as if he wondered why she didn’t dress better, taking in that kind of money.

Lorna felt her face getting hot, and that made her angry. She hadn’t been embarrassed about anything in a very longtime, embarrassment being a luxury she couldn’t afford, but something about his assessment made her want to squirm. Okay, so she wasn’t the best dresser in the world, but she was neat and clean, and that was what mattered. So what if she’d gotten her pants and short-sleeve blouse at Wal-Mart? She simply couldn’t make herself spend a hundred dollars on a pair of shoes when a twelve-dollar pair fit her just as well. The eighty-eight dollar difference would buy a lot of food. And silk not only cost a lot, but it was difficult to care for; she would take a nice cotton/polyester blend, which didn’t have to be ironed, over silk any day of the week.

“I said, how many other casinos are you hitting each week?”

“What I do isn’t your business.” She glared at him, glad for the anger and the surge of energy it gave her. Feeling angry was much better than feeling hurt. She wouldn’t let this man’s opinion matter enough to her that he could hurt her. Her clothes might be cheap, but they weren’t ragged; she was clean, and she refused to be ashamed of them.

“On the contrary. I caught you. Therefore I should have Al warn the other security chiefs.”

“You haven’t caught me doing anything!” She was absolutely certain of that, because she hadn’t done anything he could catch.

“You’re lucky I’m the one in the driver’s seat,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken a word. “There’s a certain element in Reno that thinks cheating is a crime deserving of capital punishment.”

Her heartbeat stuttered. He was right, and she knew it. There were whispers on the street, tales of people who tried to tilt the odds their way—and who either disappeared completely or had assumed room temperature by the time they were found. She didn’t have the blissful ignorance that would let her think he was merely exaggerating, because she had lived in the world where those things happened. She knew that world, knew the people who inhabited it. She had been careful to stay as invisible as possible, and she never used the ubiquitous players’ cards that allowed the casinos to keep track of who was winning and who wasn’t, but still she had done something wrong, something that called attention to herself. Her innocence wouldn’t matter to some people; a word to the wrong person, and she was a dead woman.

Was he saying he didn’t intend to turn her in, that he would keep the matter Inferno’s private business?

Why would he do that? Only two possible reasons came to mind. One was the old sex-for-a-favor play: “Be nice to me, little girl, and I won’t tell what I know.” The other was that he might suspect her of cheating but had no evidence, and all he intended to do was maybe trick her into confessing or at the least bar her from the Inferno. If his reason was the former one, then he was a sleaze, and she knew how to deal with sleazes. If his reason was the latter, well, then he was a nice guy.

Which would be his tough luck.

He was watching her, really watching her, his complete attention focused on reading every flicker of emotion on her face. Lorna fought the urge to fidget, but being the center of that sort of concentration made her very uneasy. She preferred to blend in with the crowd, to stay in the background; anonymity meant safety.

“Relax. I’m not going to blackmail you into having sex with me—not that I’m not interested,” he said, “but I don’t need coercion to get sex when I want it.”

She almost jumped. Either he’d read her mind, or she was getting really sloppy about guarding her expression. She knew she wasn’t sloppy; for too long, her life had depended on staying sharp; the defensive habits of a lifetime were deeply ingrained. He’d read her mind. Oh, God, he’d read her mind!

Full-blown panic began to fog her mind; then it immediately dissipated, forced out by a sharply detailed image of the two of them having sex. For a disorienting moment she felt as if she were standing outside her own body, watching the two of them in bed—naked, their bodies sweaty from exertion, straining together. His muscled body bore her down, crushing her into the tangled sheets. Her arms and legs, pale against his olive-toned skin, were wrapped around him. She smelled the scents of sex and skin, felt the heat and weight of him on top of her as he pushed slickly inside, heard her own quick gasp as she lifted into his slow, controlled thrusts. She was about to climax, and so was he, his thrusts coming harder and faster—

She jerked herself away from the scenario, suddenly, horribly sure that if she let it carry on to the end she would humiliate herself by climaxing for real, right in front of him. She could barely keep herself in the present; the lure of even imagined pleasure was so strong that she wanted to go back, to lose herself in the dream, or hallucination, or whatever the hell it was.

Something was wrong. She wasn’t in control of herself but instead was being tossed about by the weird eddies of power surging and retreating through the room. Neither could she get a handle on anything long enough to examine it; just when she thought she was grounded, she would get tossed into another reaction, another wild emotion bubbling to the surface.