CARD play the next night was uneventful, other than the other players ribbing Oliver about how he’d managed to stay alive through the latest break in play. It hadn’t escaped anyone that the chip leaders were disappearing at an alarming rate.
“Hey, you know me,” he replied jauntily to his fellow players. “I’m a slippery dude.”
The only remaining woman player, Stacy Kiern, snorted from the next table over. “What’s your deal, Gun? You talk a big line and play the party boy, but you don’t take any of the girls back to your room.”
He grinned and preened for her. “I need to get my beauty sleep if I’m going to look good for you, darlin’.”
She rolled her eyes, and he teased, “When are you going to quit rebuffing me and accept my declaration of true love?”
“Bring it on, buster.”
“Roses are red, violets are blue, take pity on me ’cuz I can’t live without yewww,” he recited melodramatically.
Stacy swore at him robustly as the other players guffawed, and they were all saved from further poetic butchery by the bell signaling start of play.
Oliver kept an eye on Collin, who was seated at the next table with Stacy. He appeared to be having a good night, and his chip pile grew steadily throughout the evening. No one wanted to take over the number-one position on the chip list, and Oliver was not surprised to find himself still on top at the end of play.
Collin had moved up in the standings into thirtieth place, which was a hell of a showing for an amateur. But then, Collin was frighteningly smart and already had the tools to be a great poker player. He just had to learn how to put them all together. And the guy was learning fast.
After tonight, the field was down to one hundred and five players. The next night’s play should bring the total down to the magic one hundred.
Collin returned to his own room, and Oliver trudged back to his, shocked at how much he missed Collin every minute that they were separated. He was not surprised to see that the threads and bits of paper he’d placed in doorjambs and drawers, like Collin had showed him how to, had all fallen.
His father had obviously ordered his room searched in spite of the Do Not Disturb sign on the door. The bastard never had respected any boundaries between them. But then, he was beyond respecting his father’s boundaries too.
Oliver dared not underestimate George or his cronies. He’d known vaguely as a kid that his family was involved with certain shadowy elements—guests who came and went in the middle of the night, secret meetings while he was told to stay in his room, financial assets that his father’s legitimate business couldn’t account for.
But now he had to seriously ask himself if his father was some sort of underworld kingpin. All the signs were there. Even the intensifying psychopathic tendencies. Was his mother okay? She’d always been in the background, a pale moon orbiting her big, aggressive husband. She’d barely spoken to Oliver, as if she had no idea what to say to him. The feeling had been mutual. He’d never had a clue what to say to her, either.
Oliver checked his watch. He’d surreptitiously slipped Collin a note during a break in play earlier, dropping it in his lap as he walked by, inviting Collin to meet him in the gym’s sauna two hours after play ended. He’d felt stupid doing it. He wasn’t in fifth grade anymore, for crying out loud. But Collin was increasingly paranoid about surveillance in their rooms and refused to have sex anywhere he thought they might be overheard.
He stripped down in the locker room, wrapped a towel around his hips, and headed for the sauna, praying that Collin would be there. He wasn’t. Oliver sulked in the heat and had just dumped a ladle of water over the hot rocks to create a blast of steam when the sauna door opened. He looked up hopefully.
“Is there room in here for me?” Collin asked.
He’d come. “Shut the door and lock it behind you,” Oliver answered in relief more intense than he cared to admit.
“More steam. It fogs up the glass in the door,” Collin muttered as he dropped his towel and moved forward.
In moments, Collin’s body was drenched in sweat, and it was arguably the sexiest thing Oliver had ever seen. They came together, slippery and strong, making more creative use of the tiered benches than Oliver expected their builder had imagined. The sex was hard and fast at first, but as the heat sapped their breath, it slowed to a more languid, lazy pace. They took turns topping, which was maddening by the end. Finally, when they were both exhausted, sated, and lying limply on the benches, they got around to talking.
Collin said, “I got a call from my boss. They think Stacy Kiern may be running the homicidal hookers. They’ve spotted her talking surreptitiously to several of the girls.”
“Huh. I hear she’s a real ballbuster. I can say from personal experience that she’s a hell of a poker player,” Oliver added, “I expect her to end up at the final table for sure.”
“Just be careful around her, eh?”
“Is there any way to deflect her and her girls away from killing me?” Oliver asked.
Collin winced. “Your spectacular move to the top of the leader board has cemented you as target number one around here. The best bet for you is probably to knock her out of the tournament.”
“Assuming I can get seated at the same table with her,” Oliver replied. “First time I am, I’ll see what I can do.”
Except, when the table assignments were posted, it turned out to be Collin who would be seated with her in that night’s play. Collin left to go catch some shut-eye in his room, and Oliver barely slept all day. Instead he spent the time poring through every bit of video on Stacy’s play. She was very, very good. He picked up a few small hints he could pass to Collin, but that was it.
As the remaining players filed into the ballroom, he fell in beside Collin and muttered, “Watch for her to twirl her hair on bluffs. Sometimes she chews the inside of her cheek when she’s got a hot hand. Bluffs about one hand in ten, folds middling cards about half the time.”
That was all he had time for before Collin peeled away to his own table. It was a dangerous gambit for Collin to go after Stacy directly. If she figured out he was targeting her, she might very well turn her cadre of homicidal hookers on him too. And as far as they could tell, he’d managed to fly below her radar prior to now.
As if the fates were taunting him intentionally, Oliver ended up seated with his back to Collin and Stacy’s table. He couldn’t even keep an eye on them from afar. Nervous as hell, he peeked at his first cards. Here went nothing.
IT was not in Collin’s nature to provoke killers into coming after him. But when the alternative was Oliver being the target of said killer, it turned out Collin had balls of stainless steel.
The trick was to time his attacks on Stacy when she was showing tells of a mediocre hand or an outright bluff and when he had decent cards to work with. Patience was the name of the game. He might only get two or three hands all night where everything lined up, but when they came, he had to jump on them.
Judiciously, he dropped a comment early on about what an honor it was to play with someone of her fame and success. Might as well cast himself as an amateur sycophant in her mind. He accentuated his erratic play early, the way Oliver had suggested he do intentionally. He went down a couple hundred thousand chips, but that was the plan. Make Stacy think he was ripe for the kill.
And then a hand came down where he was staring at a pair of pocket aces—his down cards—and Stacy reached up to twirl her hair and then pulled her hand back down to her cards. He’d picked up on an additional tell to her bluffing. Her pulse accelerated very slightly, and a faint flush climbed her neck. The lighting had to be just right, and a person had to have been watching her pulse for a while to see the change. But this was his moment. Now to lure her into a big bet.
Blessedly, one of the other players came out betting aggressively, which allowed Collin to hang around in the hand, merely matching bets and raises as Stacy focused on driving the other guy out of the hand. The river card—the fourth out of the five dealer’s cards—turned, and it was an ace. Along with the pair of eights the dealer had already revealed, Collin now was sitting on a full house, aces over eights. There were no flush or straight possibilities in the dealer’s turn cards, which meant he almost certainly had Stacy beat. Time to move in for the kill.
He made a wild bet, easily twice what it should have been if he’d been sitting on a great hand and been trying to milk Stacy for more chips out of her stack.
She frowned, staring him down while she tried to figure out what the hell he was thinking. He let one corner of his mouth quirk up in a self-deprecating smile as if to apologize for being such a pain in the ass to a big pro like her. It tipped the scales, and she not only matched his bet but raised it substantially.
It was his turn to stare and scowl, as if flummoxed by her response and unsure how to respond. His stack was bigger than hers by a bit, and he pushed the entire pile forward. “All in,” he declared.
It was a ballsy bet. If she matched it, pushing in all her chips as well, whichever one of them lost the hand would be out of the tournament. The mountain of chips in the middle of the table was huge, though, and had to be tempting as hell to her. Particularly if she thought she had him beat. He figured she had a full house with eights over one of the other small cards in the dealer’s hand forming the smaller pair. God only knew what she thought he was holding in his hand.
The pause while she considered her move stretched out until finally one of the other players groused, “C’mon, Stacy. Grow a pair or fold.”
Collin could have kissed the guy. It was the exact right thing to say to push the woman into matching his bet.
She snapped, “It’s my bet, asshole,” then paused just long enough to make it clear that matching his bet had been her decision and had nothing to do with the nudge from the other player. “All in.” She pushed her whole stack of chips forward.
Play at the surrounding tables stopped as other players craned to see the action at their table. All-in bets were unheard of at this point in the tournament, with everyone being so cautious about not climbing too high or falling too low in the standings.
The final card turned, a five of spades of no use to either of them.
Stacy flipped over her cards triumphantly. “Full house. Eights over sixes.”
He let her have the moment, nodding and murmuring, “Nice cards.” He turned over his cards and laid them down on the table. “Aces over eights.”
A gasp went up all around them. Stacy pushed back from the table, swearing up a blue streak. “This isn’t over,” she snarled.
He looked up at her, met her furious stare with a cold one of his own, and said icily, “It’s not over for me, but it is for you.”
She whirled and made a noisy exit from the room. Collin collected the massive pile of chips the dealer had pushed his way and began the lengthy process of counting and stacking them. He felt the stares of dozens of people upon him, reassessing him cagily. Crap. He’d just given away the fact that he was no lucky amateur bumbling along without having any clue what he was doing. He’d just entered the big leagues.
A bunch of players came over when play ended to congratulate him for knocking out Stacy Kiern. Apparently she was a highly respected player, and everyone was glad not to have to go up against her.
The leader board was updated, and he was stunned to see his name at number eleven overall in the chip standings. He’d had no intention of vaulting to such prominence. He’d only wanted to eliminate a threat to Oliver.
Of course now the question was, had he just made a big fat target of himself? Assuming they’d been right about Stacy running the hookers, he should be safe now as an almost-top-ten player. In theory.
He ate from the buffet on the assumption that his food could not be poisoned if he ate from the communal pot, as it were. Several of the other players invited him to sit with them, and he was happy to oblige, falling back into his bumbling amateur schtick, expressing amazement and honor at getting to play with the likes of them.
The talk was all about having finally arrived at the magic one hundred players. In point of fact, they were down to ninety-four players after tonight’s play. Everyone expected the minimum bets to go up significantly and for the pace of play to increase sharply. The players seemed happy about that. This two-week marathon had taken its toll on everyone’s patience and concentration, apparently. He knew the feeling.
He ducked into a public restroom after the meal to wash his hands. The lobster that had been served tonight was messy, and he had butter all over his fingers. He’d been in the empty bathroom for about thirty seconds when someone slipped in and disappeared into a stall. The door was closed for about ten seconds, and then in the mirror he spied a masked figure surging out toward him.
He spun and ducked, lashing out with his foot and connecting hard with his attacker’s knee. The guy grunted and swore in Spanish as Collin attacked aggressively, his elbows and fists jabbing in a fast flurry. His years of training took over, and he attacked, not stopping to think about anything. A fist connected hard with his jaw, and then something sharp and searing hot slashed his side.
He got in a punishing punch that broke his attacker’s nose with a loud crunch, and the guy staggered back, blood spouting everywhere. Hand over masked face, the guy turned and fled, with Collin in hot pursuit. But only a few steps beyond the bathroom door, the stitch in his side became so excruciating he was forced to stop, gripping his waist.
Hot wetness under his hand made him look down, startled. A bright red stain was spreading fast through his shirt. He’d been cut.
Swearing under his breath, he made for the elevator and punched in Oliver’s floor. Holding his side as best he could, he hurried down the hall and banged on Oliver’s door.
“What the hell are you doing here? It’s not the top of the hour—”
He barged past and pushed into the room, heading straight for the bathroom. “I’ve been stabbed.”
“What the hell?” Oliver exclaimed.
Collin stripped off his shirt and mopped at the six-inch-long cut that was bleeding freely. “It’s a surface wound, but it’s deep enough to need stitches.”
“Christ, that’s a lot of blood!” Oliver exclaimed in alarm.
“I promise you, I’m not dying. I’ve seen a lot worse than this.” He didn’t add that he’d only seen such wounds by remote camera feed and that his training in trauma medicine was entirely theoretical. “I need you to clean the wound, slow the bleeding, and stitch it closed. I would do it myself, but it’s in an awkward place, and I can’t reach it.”
Truth be told, he had no idea if he could stitch his own skin without passing out. He’d seen field operatives do it before. Most stayed conscious. But a few did not.
“You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Oliver, I need your help.”
“You need a hospital!”
“And yet you’re all I’ve got. We’ll need your vodka and the hotel’s sewing kit from the nightstand. I’ll talk you through it.”
Oliver hustled around the room, getting all the supplies Collin listed.
Meanwhile, he lay down on the bed with a bunch of towels under him and another one pressed hard over the wound. “It’s a slice-style cut, so it’s all about getting the wound closed in order to stop the bleeding.”
“This is so gross.”
“Emergency field medicine. Just do it,” he ground out.
Oliver pulled a face, but with determination soaked the thread and needle in vodka. “Ready?” he asked grimly.
“Do it.” Collin gritted his teeth together, bracing himself. But nothing could have prepared him for the breathtaking agony as Oliver poured vodka over the open wound. He cried out in spite of his resolve not to and frantically grabbed for a washcloth to stuff it in his mouth. He clamped down on the dry terry cloth in blinding pain.
Oliver leaned down over his side and commenced sewing. The first pierce of the needle through his flesh felt like a hot volcano erupting against his side, and he panted in a valiant effort to maintain consciousness.
The next thing he remembered, he blinked up at Oliver, who was staring worriedly at him. “Welcome back, Collin. Don’t pass out on me again, okay? You scared the hell out of me, and I don’t know what to do next.”
“How long was I out?”
“Couple minutes. Long enough for me to, umm, sew you together.”
“Is it still bleeding?” The pain was back, but now it was more of a sharp ache underlying the searing heat from before.
“It’s seeping.”
Collin considered. “Let’s go ahead and bandage it, then. I’m not likely to pass out while you do that. I may swear a bit, though.”
“Swearing I can handle. But, um, what are we bandaging it with?”
Dammit. All the field operatives he usually worked with carried small first aid kits in their gear. “I guess you’ll have to go down to the front desk and claim an injury. Get antibiotic cream, some gauze pads, and tape.”
“Collin, I’m not a moron. I know what it takes to bandage a boo-boo.”
He smiled up crookedly. “Sorry. I can be a bit of a micromanager when I’m under stress.”
“You don’t say.”
It took upward of a half hour for Oliver to go downstairs, come back with a first aid kit, and bandage his wound. But at the end of it, Collin had a reasonably repaired side and a gray-faced Oliver who looked ready to pass out himself.
Collin stood up carefully and borrowed a clean shirt from Oliver. “Get some sleep. I have to go back to my room, since the cameras saw me come in here.”
“What you need to do is quit the damned tournament and go home,” Oliver declared forcefully. “I’ll win the thing, and when I do, I promise to tell you what the mystery prize is.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m holding my own very nicely, thank you very much.”
“You’re not a professional, and you’re not a crook. This crowd is too rough for you.”
“And you are a crook?” Collin shot back.
“I’ve played with these guys before. I know how they roll.”
“In case you forgot, my job is to study guys exactly like these and predict their actions. I likely know them better than you do.”
“Then you know they won’t hesitate to kill you if they find out who you really work for and what you’re doing here,” Oliver said. “My father, or Stacy Kiern, or whoever sent that attacker after you, will try again. And I can’t—I won’t—stand around and watch you be killed.” His voice sounded a little ragged. The catch in it made Collin’s heart flip-flop. Oliver really cared about his safety. Well, hell.
“I feel the same way about you, Oliver.”
“And that’s sweet of you, Collin. I never thought I’d meet a man like you and have you actually think I’m not a total asshole….”
Collin didn’t like where this was going. He sensed regret in Oliver’s voice and opened his mouth to tell Oliver not to make any rash decisions after the shock of seeing one of them wounded.
But Oliver cut him off before he could speak, saying grimly, “Don’t come to my room again. You had the right idea before. We need to be done with each other for both our sakes. I can’t be your Girl Friday and sew you up anymore. And I refuse to watch you die. We are done, Collin. It’s over between us.”
Panic exploded in Collin’s gut. Please God, let this just be the shock of blood and having to sew up Collin’s side talking. “The tournament will be over soon,” Collin soothed. “We’ll talk then.”
Oliver’s jaw was set stubbornly, and he refused to answer, turning away to stare out the window at the Mediterranean.
Collin took a tiny sliver of comfort in Oliver’s pained expression. At least there was still passion between them in some form. He’d long held that hate was not the opposite of love. Apathy was. If Oliver was upset or even hated him a little, they still stood a chance of transforming that anger into more congenial passion. Later. After this madness concluded and they were well away from Oliver’s father.
But as he let himself out of the room, Collin had to wonder what would really happen after the tournament ended. Would Oliver go back to his big waves and meaningless existence, or would he come out of retirement and travel the world, playing cards wherever he could get permission to play? Either way, an intelligence analyst based in England didn’t fit into the picture. More than just his side ached as he trudged dejectedly back to his room.