Gambler's Woman

  “You decided you’d show me what respectable really means, hmmm? Okay, I can understand why you did it. But that doesn’t make it right for the McGregors to put you on the spot like that. In my world, no one would dream of inquiring so pointedly into someone’s background. The only thing that counts is that a person knows a little gambling etiquette and can cover his or her losses.”

  “Well, this isn’t your world!” He was right, of course, but that was the way things were.

  “No,” he agreed quietly. “It’s not, is it? But my first observation still holds. Folks play rough in your world.”

  She hadn’t thought about it quite like that before. If anyone had asked her, she would have said the gambling world was far more ruthless. Now she realized she was seeing matters from a sightly different perspective because of Jordan. “Perhaps. But I have to play by the rules in my world.”

  “Do you? When you’re in my environment, you make the rules work almost entirely in your favor.”

  “I don’t have as much control here,” she sighed. “It’s different. Jordan, I’m sorry about putting us both on the spot this afternoon. I guess I was beginning to lose my temper.”

  He shrugged. “I’m surprised you got so carried away. After all, it would be far easier to hide the real truth about me if we were just having an affair than it would be if we got married. People are prepared to allow a certain privacy to a couple involved in an affair. If we were to get married, someone would be bound to wonder what the hell I really do for a living, and once the questions started in earnest, it would probably be impossible to stop them, wouldn’t it?”

  She heard the hard note in his words and felt a strange pang of uncertainty. What did he want from her? Surely he wasn’t actually suggesting marriage, even obliquely? Or did his desire to live a portion of his life in her world extend that far? “Jordan? Are you….are you saying you might want to get married?” She didn’t know what made her ask the question. Alyssa only knew she couldn’t seem to prevent the words from coming out. In the next instant, however, her doubts were firmly set to rest.

  “No,” he declared with a harshness she had never heard from him. “I’m not suggesting marriage. I’ve never really considered going that far with a woman, but if I did, I sure as hell would not want a wife who felt she had to hide my real occupation from all her friends and coworkers! Let’s get something straight, Alyssa. I enjoy occasionally playing charades in your world, but I wouldn’t want to try living them continuously. It wouldn’t work. Sooner or later, as I said, the questions would get a little too pointed, and everything would fall apart.”

  “But you’re willing to have an affair with me, is that it?” she asked tightly, aware of a sharp sense of pain and loss. Which was ridiculous. How could you lose something you never really had?

  “That seems to be all that’s available to me, doesn’t it?” he returned dryly. “I’m sure you’re no more eager to risk marrying me than I am to have a wife who’s embarrassed about my background even though she sneaks out occasionally to go slumming in my neighborhood.”

  “That’s not fair!” she retorted, stung. “You’re the one who’s always been so opposed to marriage! You’ve told me that a gambler doesn’t make good husband material on more than one occasion!”

  “So I have,” he agreed in a suspiciously neutral tone. “So why are we arguing, hmmm? We’re both agreed that marriage is extremely out of the question for us in spite of what you said when you got carried away in front of your boss this afternoon. Shall we change the subject?”

  Alyssa blinked owlishly, wondering at the restlessness she was experiencing. She wanted to go on arguing about how they couldn’t possibly get married, yet they were in perfect agreement on the matter, weren’t they? Hadn’t Jordan just said so? Damn it to hell! Why was she feeling so unsure of herself and the situation? Everything was under control. Soon Jordan would be going back to Vegas, and further downstream she would be able to tell the McGregors gently that the marriage plans with Jordan just hadn’t worked out. She would tell them that, of course, after the promotion decision had been made. She wouldn’t want to take the risk of having the news make a negative impact on McGregor’s ultimate decision. It would be safer to wait.

  Yes, she told herself determinedly, that was the real reason she would wait to make her announcement. It would be safer for her career.

  “How did I do this afternoon, honey?” Jordan asked, interrupting her racing thoughts. “Did I do a good enough job of losing to satisfy you?”

  She slid him a speculative glance as he parked the Camaro in her drive. Damn it, if he wanted to change the topic, she’d show him she could do just as good a job. The discussion of their nonmarriage was definitely closed. “I thought we lost brilliantly together,” she drawled.

  “We did, didn’t we? Could have won just as brilliantly, too,” he murmured, sliding out of the front seat and slamming the door behind him. “We play rather well together.”

  “The McGregors enjoyed winning,” she reminded him as he followed her into the house.

  “Anything to please the McGregors.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “That was the whole point of the afternoon, Jordan,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t look at me like that. Except for your faux pas concerning the issue of marriage, everything went perfectly.” He swung around on his heel and headed for her kitchen. “I need a drink. A real drink. Didn’t I see some cognac in one of these cupboards this morning? How about a glass before we go to bed?”

  Bed. Alyssa stood very still in the center of her living-room floor and listened to the sound of his banging cupboard doors open and shut in the kitchen. It was late. Time to go to bed.

  A frisson of sensual tension laced with feminine resistance spread through her nerve endings as she stood staring at the empty kitchen doorway. She needed time to think, Alyssa realized. She was nervous and uneasy. The afternoon had taken more out of her than she would have guessed. Standing there now, waiting for him to reappear with the cognac, she felt the strangest desire to run and hide from him. Something had to be dealt with in her head before she could risk letting herself be seduced again by Jordan Kyle. Something vitally important.

  Not understanding fully her own motivation, Alyssa glanced down the hall toward her bedroom. A part of her longed for escape behind a locked door tonight. She needed a place and time to be by herself. But in another moment Jordan would reappear in the kitchen doorway, and as soon as he touched her, she would be lost.

  Without stopping to think, she turned on one heel and started toward the safety of her room. Alyssa had taken two hurried steps before his voice caught her in mid-stride.

  “Going somewhere?” The dark, dangerous drawl was heavy with a sardonic tone.

  She halted abruptly, her eyes closing once in quiet despair and resignation before spinning slowly to face him. Jordan stood in the kitchen doorway, one hand holding the cognac bottle and two glasses. His eyes raked coolly over her tense figure before returning to collide with her own wary, silently pleading gaze.

  “Jordan, please. I…I want to sleep alone tonight,” she whispered starkly, not knowing any subtle way of asking him to let her go.

  He pushed himself away from the doorjamb and moved deliberately to the white overstuffed chair by the window. Flinging himself down in a careless sprawl, he poured a snifter of cognac and set the bottle on the low glass table beside him. Without a word, he lifted the snifter and took an appreciative sip. During the whole process, his eyes never left her.

  Alyssa didn’t know what to do. She felt trapped, unable to retreat or attack, wholly at his mercy.

  “Well? What are you waiting for? Permission to go to bed? You’re excused.” He waved her off with one hand and took another swallow of the cognac.

  “But, Jordan…” she began uncertainly. She couldn’t even guess what he was thinking.

  “Don’t worry about me. I saw where you keep the extra blankets in the hall closet this morning.
I’ll sleep on your couch. Good night, Alyssa.”

  Anger began to simmer in her unexpectedly. How dare he be so damn casual about the situation? “What are you going to do?”

  “Put a large dent in this excellent cognac,” he returned readily, pouring out some more. He leaned his dark head back against the white cushion behind him and gazed at her through narrowed lids. “And then I’ll go to bed. Don’t worry about me, Alyssa. I’ve been taking care of myself for a very long time.”

  Yes, she thought, he had. Whirling, Alyssa fled down the hall to her room. Safe behind the shelter of her door, she sagged against it and heaved a deep sigh, which she told herself was one of relief.

  When her knees had stopped trembling in reaction, she made herself begin the process of getting ready for bed. But with every move she made, every routine she went through, she found herself listening for sounds from the living room. What was Jordan doing? Was he just going to sit there and get quietly drunk? The thought made her strangely sad. The instinct to comfort surged within her as she turned back the covers and crawled into bed.

  But there was no need to feel sorry for him, she scolded herself. She was the one who needed the consolation! She was the one who was facing potential disaster by allowing him to stay even one more night under her roof.

  Why had he followed her? Why couldn’t he have stayed in Vegas where he belonged? Dejectedly, she punched the pillow, taking out her frustration on the defenseless object. Everything would have been just fine if Jordan had kept to his world.

  Or would it? How long would she have been able to conduct an affair like that, slipping back and forth between fantasy and reality? Was that what she really wanted for herself? An affair was an affair, after all, and sooner or later it ended.

  That thought made her cringe a little beneath the sheet. In a blinding flash of awareness, Alyssa realized that she didn’t want her affair with Jordan to ever end.

  For long moments, she lay staring wide-eyed at the shadowy ceiling. But all affairs ended, and a situation as precarious as the one she was in should probably be concluded as quickly as possible. Jordan had made it clear he was not going to be content to be relegated to her fantasy life, and in all honesty, Alyssa couldn’t quite convince herself she really wanted him to be. A man like Jordan moved into one’s world and made himself a part of it whether or not either party wanted it that way. How could she even look at another man during the week knowing Jordan would be waiting for her on the weekends, even assuming she could bring herself to separate totally her real world from the slightly dangerous, disreputable fantasy one?

  She had let herself be plunged into a reckless situation from which there was no escape now that Jordan had infiltrated her life. Having insisted on sleeping alone tonight, all she could think about was the man drinking her expensive cognac out there in her living room. She wanted Jordan in a way she had never wanted any other man. No, it was so much more than desire.

  He was all wrong, a mistake on her part, a dangerous miscalculation, yet she had fallen in love with her mathematical gambler.

  Alyssa lay tensely in the bed, stunned by the full meaning of that revelation. She was in love. It shouldn’t have been possible, but there was no way to deny it now that the truth had been faced. So much for the safety of sleeping alone, she thought wryly. There had been no safety at all in her whirling thoughts.

  And what was she supposed to do now?

  Before her restless mind could pursue that course of thought, it was diverted by the soft, sure sound of the bedroom door being opened. The shiver of fear and sensual tension she had experienced earlier went through her once more. Alyssa didn’t stir. In that moment, she didn’t think she could have moved so much as an inch.

  From her half-curled position on the bed, she watched the shaft of light from the opening door as it widened and spread out on the carpet, seeking her. Through nearly closed eyes, she waited tautly for whatever was to happen next.

  Jordan’s lean, dark form filled the doorway. The light was behind him, and she could not read the expression on his face, but she sensed the male power in him—an ancient plea and an equally ancient demand.

  “I have discovered,” he said very quietly and too distinctly, “that I do not care for drinking alone.”

  Alyssa held her breath. Was he awfully drunk? How much time had passed since he’d slung himself down into that chair and started pouring cognac? How much time had she lain there coming to the shattering conclusion that she was in love?

  He came gliding silently across the carpet toward the bed and halted to stand beside it, gazing down at her still form. “I have also discovered that I do not care for sleeping alone when the woman who belongs to me is only a few steps away.”

  Alyssa found her voice, although it proved only a breathless whisper. “Are you very sure that I belong to you, Jordan?” Why did so much seem to ride on his answer?

  He watched her broodingly, his golden eyes the only visible features of his face. Even they were shadowed and unreadable in the pale light. “Do you doubt it?” he countered softly.

  “Oh, Jordan, no. Not tonight.” Alyssa put out a hand, and an instant later her fingers were seized in the warm manacle of his sure, enthralling grip.

  “I didn’t think you could, Alyssa. I knew you were tense after what happened during the bridge game, but I didn’t think you could go on denying me all night long.” The words were a husky groan of desire and satisfaction.

  He came down beside her and gathered her into his arms, his hands possessive and seeking on her body, and Alyssa gave herself up to the magic with a soft sigh. This was the man who could read her mind. Hadn’t she learned that much during the bridge game? He seemed to know her body and her mind the way he knew numbers and cards and dice.

  It was dangerous for a woman to give herself to a man who knew her so intimately. But it was also irresistible.

  On Monday morning, when she returned to work and her gambler returned to Las Vegas, Alyssa promised herself, she would sort out the reckless tangle she had created by trying to weave reality and fantasy together.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MONDAY BROUGHT WITH IT NO GREAT improvement in the clarity of her thinking, however. Alyssa felt as though she wandered through the day in a haze, performing her duties, dealing with coworkers and clients and generally acting with some semblance of normality.

  But she didn’t feel normal. She hadn’t felt anything approaching that condition since Saturday night when she had acknowledged the truth of her feelings about Jordan.

  Thinking back to those unnerving moments as she sat at her desk, Alyssa automatically reached for the sheet of paper that she had found on Sunday after Jordan had kissed her good-by and started out for the airport. When she had discovered the paper, half hidden under the white chair where he had sat drinking cognac, Alyssa had realized how he had been occupying his thoughts that night after the bridge game.

  He had been drawing Pascal’s triangle. The rows of numbers in the shape of a triangle were a simple, classic aid to calculating probabilities. Each number in the table was the sum of the two numbers above it. Had Jordan sprawled in the chair that night trying to sort out his own thoughts by concentrating on the clear, utterly logical progression of numbers? A tiny smile edged her lips as Alyssa considered the image that presented. Jordan had spent a long time drinking cognac and playing with math in an attempt to keep from coming to her bed, and in the end he had failed.

  Carefully, she refolded the sheet of paper. Some women took out pictures of their lovers and gazed at them fondly. She had only a sample of his math to look at until next weekend when she boarded the plane for Las Vegas.

  He had made her promise to return to the gambling city just before he had climbed into the rented Camaro.

  “I have work to do,” he’d said, smiling wryly at he stood beside the car and framed her face with rough palms. “It may not be particularly respectable work, but it pays well, and I have to get back to it. You’ll b
e on the Friday-night flight this time? No unexpected prior commitments?”

  “I’ll be on the flight,” she’d promised, looking up at him with eyes that glittered with a suspicious dampness. She loved the man and didn’t know quite how to tell him. She wasn’t even sure he’d want such a confession from her. All Jordan had demanded and received was the admission that she belonged to him.

  Sooner or later, Alyssa thought as she pushed the paper with Pascal’s triangle on it into her purse, they would have to arrive at some reasonable way of handling the passion that existed between them. How long would it be safe to conduct an affair? How long before the truth came out and shattered her carefully structured world? What would she do when the inevitable moment arrived?

  Time enough to worry about it when it happened, Alyssa told herself, picking up a desk-top calculator and going back to work. She would deal with the situation when it occurred. In the meantime, there was no reason not to have the best of both worlds, was there? And there was another possibility….

  She thought again of the mathematical work on the sheet of paper. Jordan was good. He not only had natural ability; he’d taken enough formal classes from time to time to learn about things like Pascal’s triangle. On Sunday afternoon, she’d discovered him pouring over one of her textbooks on probability, and when she’d said something about one of the theorems in it, she’d been surprised to discover that he knew all about it.

  His math might have heavily slanted toward gambling applications, but he had ability and some general knowledge. What if she got him a job? A real job? What if she made him truly respectable. Would he consider marriage?