I slide my chips in to match without hesitation. “Call.”
The heat from her gaze is unmistakable now. She’s staring at me, studying my face, but I don’t flinch. Her fingers toy with her stack of chips, the clink too rhythmic to be casual. She’s thinking. Calculating. Trying to unnerve me.
“Raise,” she says, her voice dripping with the same ice-cold certainty that gets under my skin. “Forty thousand.”
She raises the stakes without even a hint of hesitation, and her elbow brushes mine again as she leans forward slightly to toss her chips into the pot.
I can feel the tension radiating off her. It’s like electricity simmering over the top of her skin that lashes out at me whenever we touch.
I take a breath, keeping my expression neutral. There’s a chance she’s bluffing—she’s capable of that. But I’m not folding. Not to her.
“Call,” I say evenly.
The dealer burns the last card and flips over the river: queen of spades. My pulse quickens. I’ve got the straight. Ace, jack, queen, king.
She doesn’t move at first. She just stares at the cards in front of us.
Then she casually pushes all her chips forward, the pile growing into a mountain. At least half a million, if not more.
“All in,” she says, almost bored, though I know better. There’s a fire in those words, a challenge.
My mind races. She’s putting everything on the line, and it’s either a power play, or she has something equally deadly in her hand. I glance at her from the corner of my eye. She’s too calm, too composed. It’s infuriating.
“I call.” The words slip out before I can second-guess myself, and my chips join hers in the center of the table.
Around us, there’s an intake of breath. Even the croupier stares with wide eyes at the million dollars that now sit before us in plastic chips.
She finally turns her head toward me, and I meet her eyes. There’s no amusement there, just cold calculation.
She flips over her cards—king of spades, king of clubs. A set of kings. Strong. Deadly, even.
But not enough.
I reveal my hand, letting the cards spread across the felt.
“Straight,” I say, the word rolling off my tongue with satisfaction.
For the first time since we started playing, I catch the faintest flicker of something in her eyes. Fear, perhaps.
She doesn’t let it show for long, though. That mask of hers is back in place before anyone else can notice. She leans back in her chair, crossing one leg over the other, her posture deceptively casual.
“You didn’t specify how many rounds,” she finally announces, stubborn and almost childlike.
“I didn’t take you for a sore loser.”
Her eyes flash dangerously. “You know nothing of loss.”
Her chair scrapes back just as the dealer slides the mountain of chips toward me, and I feel the victory, the weight of it, in every fiber of my being.
I can’t let her back out of our deal.
I stand up a moment later, flicking a plastic chip to the dealer. “Have this ordered for me?”
He catches it and nods once. If he says anything at all, I don’t hear it. He’s already shooting through the room after the blonde in the red dress.
It’s not hard to spot her moving through the crowd with the elegance of a dancer, turning heads wherever she goes.
That feral part of me wants to lash out at every man who deems himself worthy enough to look at her.
