AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was one of his favorite card games. He liked its simplicity. With two people, he found, it was a good deal more interesting than with several.
For one thing, he could no longer read her. No wry curve of her mouth when her cards displeased her. No agitated tap of her fingers when she’d drawn a strong card. When they’d played with the others, she’d exhibited all these little cues, and her play had struck him as reckless besides. This time was altogether different. By the time they’d played through the deck twice, he felt as though he played with another woman entirely.
He won the first deal and the second and the third.
After that, she won steadily, the pile of coins in front of her growing while his diminished.
As she passed the cards to him to deal, he said, “My luck seems to be turning.”
“So it does,” she said.
“Or perhaps you’ve been playing with me, madame, in more ways than one.”
“I’m paying closer attention to the game,” she said. “You won a great deal from me before. My resources, unlike yours, are limited. I only want to win my money back.”
He dealt. She looked at her card and pushed a stack of coins to one side of it.
He looked at his card. Nine of hearts. “Double,” he said.
She nodded for another card, glanced at it.
Nothing. No visible sign of whether the card was good or bad. He’d had to practice to conceal his small giveaway signs. How had she learned to reveal or conceal them at will? Or had Dame Fortune simply smiled on her this night? She’d won at roulette, a game, as she’d said, of pure chance, though men never gave up trying to devise systems for winning.
She won again.
And again.
This time, when they’d gone through the pack, she swept her coins toward her. “I’m not used to such late hours,” she said. “It’s time for me to go.”
“You play differently with me than you did with the others,” he said.
“Do I?” She brushed a stray curl back from her eyebrow.
“I can’t decide whether you’ve the devil’s own luck or there’s something more to you than meets the eye,” he said.
She settled back in her chair and smiled at him. “I’m observant,” she said. “I watched you play before.”
“Yet you lost.”
“Your beauty must have distracted me,” she said. “Now I’ve grown used to it. Now I can discern the ways you signal whether it’s going well or badly for you.”
“I thought I gave no signals,” he said.
She waved a hand. “You nearly don’t. It was very hard for me to decipher you—and I’ve been playing cards since I was a child.”
“Have you, indeed?” he said. “I’ve always thought of shopkeepers as respectable citizens, not much given to vices, especially gambling.”
“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” she said. “Frascati’s teemed with ordinary citizen-clerks and tradesmen. But to men like you and Émilien, they’re invisible.”
“The one thing you are not is invisible.”
“There you’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve passed within a few yards of you, on more than one occasion, and you didn’t look twice.”
He sat up straighter. “That’s impossible.”
She took up the cards and shuffled them, her hands quick, smooth, expert. “Let me see. On Sunday at about four o’clock, you were riding with a handsome lady in the Bois de Boulogne. On Monday at seven o’clock, you were in one of the latticed boxes at the Académie Royale de Musique. On Tuesday shortly after noon, you were strolling through the galleries of the Palais Royal.”
“You said I wasn’t your sole purpose for coming to Paris,” he said. “Yet you’ve been following me. Or should I say stalking me?”
