She looked down at he
r hand. Two threes. She gave him a dulcet smile. “You’re on.”
He lay down his hand. Two jacks. “Pay up,” he said.
“I’m not wearing a bra.” She didn’t bother to hide her smirk
“I know.”
Okay, point to him. She resisted the impulse to wrap her arms around her body. It would only draw more attention to her breasts beneath the loose cotton shirt.
He picked up the cards, shuffled, and dealt again. “You are wearing knickers. I’ll up the ante. Two hundred thousand against the knickers, and I won’t even look at my hand.”
“You don’t need to – you cheat.”
His smile was cool. “Live dangerously, Sister Beth. I’ll tell you what – you take my hand, I’ll take yours.” He pushed the cards across the table towards her.
She should get the hell away from him, now while she still could. “I don’t think …”
“Coward,” he said.
She picked up his hand. Three nines. She bit her lip, looking distressed. “This isn’t a good idea.”
She couldn’t read his face, whether she’d managed to fool him or not. “Call,” he said.
She put the hand down, allowing a triumphant smile to curve her mouth. “You shouldn’t have offered to switch hands. There’s such a thing as being too cocky.”
“I don’t think you want to be talking about my cock now, do you?” He laid out his hand. A flush – all hearts. “Pay up.”
“No.”
“You don’t welsh on a debt of honor, Sister Beth.”
“I’ll pay you the extra two hundred thousand.”
“We’re up to three if you count the bra you’re going to have to hand over when I take you back to your room. And no deal. Some things are worth more than money.”
“You’re a degenerate.”
“True enough, but we’ll get to that later. In the meantime strip off those jeans and hand over the panties.”
She didn’t move. He seemed lazy, relaxed, but there was no humor in his hard eyes. They were dark, intent, and predatory and she knew he wasn’t going to back down.
And then he smiled at her, like a Bengal tiger sizing up a stray lamb. “I’ll tell you what, my angel. All or nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can deal. You’ve told me you know how to cheat, though I have yet to see any proof. I won’t even look in case you fumble. You win, you get all your money back, including the reward for delivering you out of the jungle, and you get to keep your underwear to yourself.”
“And if you win?”
“You know the answer to that. Time’s up. We have unfinished business no matter how much you want to deny it. Time to stop running away. Deal.”
She picked up the hand and began to shuffle.
MacGowan leaned back, watching her fiddle with the cards. She did so obsessively, stopping at one point to examine the deck, front and back, looking for anomalies. There were none – his ability to cheat more devious than that.
He had no idea why he would win this particular hand, a hand he wouldn’t even touch. A bloody fortune was riding on it, a large enough amount to ensure a comfortable stretch of time, though with his tastes nothing would last forever. Money came and money went. The Committee, for all its abandoning him like flotsam, paid him obscenely well. He had twice the amount he was wagering in a bank in the Cayman Islands. And he was going to make damned sure he was compensated for those years in captivity. Though killing Peter Madsen might make collecting that back pay a little difficult.