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“Almost. A walk, I should think.” He took his jacket off and cast it onto the sand, then rolled his shirt sleeves up. “It might do something to shake off the time change.”
“Lead the way then.”
He started down a path that took them down near the beach and could have sworn at the absurdity of getting sand in his custom-made shoes. Shoes he’d bought with his own money and not the money earned by other people’s suffering. There, a reminder that he had transcended his blood in some way.
“So what do you do in New York?” she asked.
“I gamble with other people’s money.”
“What?”
“I deal in investments,” he said. “And I’m very good at it.”
“Isn’t that a bit unstable?”
“Sure. Can be. But I’ve made enough of a profit that I’m sitting on stable assets of my own, and I’ve made some wise purchases and investments myself.”
“Including an island.”
“I won this,” he said.
“You won it?”
“In a card game. It was one of the more interesting gambling experiences of my life. Yes, I was a literal gambler there for a while. At first with other people’s money.”
“How?”
“Card counting is a particularly useful skill. I happen to have the gift. I was a kid living on the streets doing card tricks for tourists and a rich guy picked me up, offered to kit me out to play in the casinos with his money, for a cut. I said ‘of course,’ naturally.”
“Naturally,” she said.
“I won a lot of money. And I got to keep part of it. Rented myself an apartment, started offering up an underground service. Until I had enough money to go gamble for myself at least once a week.”
“And?”
“I ended up in a high rollers’ game. There were things in that pot by the end that you wouldn’t believe, including a night with a man’s wife, which I turned down, by the way. But the island... I took the island.”
She looked hard at him, blue eyes glittering. “You’re really twenty-six, Alex?”
“Yes. And I was eighteen when I was doing that. From there, I figured I better decide what to do with the money I’d earned. So I walked away from the casino and started looking into investing. And I proved to have a knack for that so I thought...why not do it for other people? An extension of where I came from.”
“A self-made man,” she said.
He laughed. “None of us are really self-made, Rachel. We’re made with the aid or misfortune of other people. In my case, people had to lose money so I could gain it. Now, the people I make money for are aided by me, as I am by them. You are made by your father, by the media, and you were to be finished by Ajax, am I right?”
“Finished?”
“It’s how you were going to spend the rest of your life in comfort. You found a man who would close the loop neatly on everything you’ve built.”
