Raintree. Linda Winstead Jones
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She began to feel overwhelmed by the things around her. No, not overwhelmed; that wasn’t the right word. She tried to nail down what she was feeling, but there was an alien, unknown quality to the very air around her that she couldn’t describe. This was unfamiliar, and it definitely carried the edge of danger that had so alarmed her when she’d first become aware of it.
As Dante Raintree strolled closer, she realized that everything she was sensing centered on him. She’d been right; he was the danger.
He moved with indolent grace, but there was nothing slow or lazy about him. He was a tall man, about eight or nine inches taller than her own five foot five, and though his excellently tailored clothing gave him a lean look, there was no tailor skilled enough to completely disguise the power of the muscles beneath the fabric. Not a cheetah, then, but a tiger.
She realized she had avoided looking him full in the face, as if not having that knowledge would give her a small measure of safety. She knew better; ignorance was never a good defense, and Lorna had learned a long time ago not to hide her head in the sand and hope for the best.
He sat down across from her, and with an inward bracing she met his gaze full-on.
The bottom dropped out of her stomach.
She had a faint, dizzying sensation of falling; she barely restrained herself from gripping the arms of the chair to steady herself.
His hair was black. His eyes were green. Common colors, and yet nothing about him was common. His hair was sleek and glossy, falling to his shoulders. She didn’t like long hair on men, but his looked clean and soft, and she wanted to bury her hands in it. She shoved that idea away and promptly became snagged by his gaze. His eyes weren’t just green, they were green, so remarkably green that her first thought was that he was wearing colored contacts. A color that darkly rich and pure couldn’t be real. They were just very realistic contacts, with tiny black striations in them like real eyes. She had seen ads for those in magazines. The only thing was, when the candles flared and his pupils briefly contracted, the color of his irises seemed to expand. Could contacts give that appearance?
He wasn’t wearing contacts. Instinctively she knew that everything she saw, from the sleek blackness of his hair to that intense eye color, was real.
He was drawing her in. Some power she couldn’t understand was tugging at her with an almost physical sensation. The candle flames were dancing wildly, brighter now that the sun had set and twilight was deepening outside the window. The candles were the only light in the now gloomy office, sending shadows slashing across the hard angles of his face, and yet his eyes seemed to glow brighter with color than they had only a few moments before.
They hadn’t said a word since he’d sat down, yet she felt as if she were in a battle for her will, her force, her independent life. Deep inside, panic flared to candlelight life, dancing and leaping. He knows, she thought, and tensed herself to run. Forget the casinos, forget the very nice money she’d been reaping, forget everything except survival. Run!
Her body didn’t obey. She continued to sit there, frozen…mesmerized.
“How are you doing it?” he finally asked, his tone still as calm and unruffled as if he were oblivious to the swirls and surges of power that were buffeting her.
Once again, his voice seemed to break through her inner turmoil and bring her back to reality. Bewildered, she stared at him. He thought she was doing all this weird stuff?
“I’m not,” she blurted. “I thought you were.”
She might have been mistaken, because in the dancing candlelight, reading an expression was tricky, but she thought he looked slightly stunned.
“Cheating,” he said in clarification. “How are you stealing from me?”
Chapter Three
Maybe he didn’t know.
His bluntness was a perverse relief. Lorna took a deep breath. At least now she was dealing with something she understood. Ignoring the strange undercurrents in the room, the almost physical sensation of being surrounded by…something…she lifted her chin, narrowed her eyes and gave him stare for stare. “I’m not cheating!” That was true—as far as it went, and in the normal understanding of the word.
“Of course you are. No one is as lucky as you seem to be unless he—excuse me, she—is cheating.” His eyes were glittering now, but in her book glittering was way better than that weird glowing. Eyes didn’t glow anyway. What was wrong with her? Had someone slipped a drug into her drink while her head was turned? She never drank alcohol while she was gambling, sticking to coffee or soft drinks, but that last cup of coffee had tasted bitter. At the time she’d thought she’d been unlucky enough to get the last cup in the pot, but now she wondered if it hadn’t been pharmaceutically enhanced.
“I repeat. I’m not cheating.” Lorna bit off the words, her jaw set.
“You’ve been coming here for a while. You walk away with about five grand every week. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year—and that’s just from my casino. How many others are you hitting?” His cool gaze raked her from head to foot, as if he wondered why she didn’t dress better, taking in that kind of money.
Lorna felt her face getting hot, and that made her angry. She hadn’t been embarrassed about anything in a very long time, embarrassment being a luxury she couldn’t afford, but something about his assessment made her want to squirm. Okay, so she wasn’t the best dresser in the world, but she was neat and clean, and that was what mattered. So what if she’d gotten her pants and short-sleeve blouse at Wal-Mart? She simply couldn’t make herself spend a hundred dollars on a pair of shoes when a twelvedollar pair fit her just as well. The eighty-eight dollar difference would buy a lot of food. And silk not only cost a lot, but it was difficult to care for; she would take a nice cotton/polyester blend, which didn’t have to be ironed, over silk any day of the week.
“I said, how many other casinos are you hitting each week?”
“What I do isn’t your business.” She glared at him, glad for the anger and the surge of energy it gave her. Feeling angry was much better than feeling hurt. She wouldn’t let this man’s opinion matter enough to her that he could hurt her. Her clothes might be cheap, but they weren’t ragged; she was clean, and she refused to be ashamed of them.
“On the contrary. I caught you. Therefore I should have Al warn the other security chiefs.”
“You haven’t caught me doing anything!” She was absolutely certain of that, because she hadn’t done anything he could catch.
“You’re lucky I’m the one in the driver’s seat,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken a word. “There’s a certain element in Reno that thinks cheating is a crime deserving of capital punishment.”
Her heartbeat stuttered. He was right, and she knew it. There were whispers on the street, tales of people who tried to tilt the odds their way—and who either disappeared completely or had assumed room temperature by the time they were found. She didn’t have the blissful ignorance that would let her think he was merely exaggerating, because she had lived in the world where those things happened. She knew that world, knew the people who inhabited it. She had been careful to stay as invisible as possible, and she never used the ubiquitous players’ cards that allowed the casinos to keep track of who was winning and who wasn’t, but still she had done something wrong, something that called attention to herself. Her innocence wouldn’t matter to some people; a word to the wrong person, and she was a dead woman.
Was he saying he didn’t intend to turn her in, that he would keep the matter Inferno’s private business?
Why would he do that? Only two possible reasons came to mind. One was the old sex-for-a-favor play: “Be nice to me, little girl, and I won’t tell what I know.” The other was that he might suspect her of cheating but had no evidence, and all he intended to do was maybe trick her into confessing or at the least bar her from the Inferno. If his