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As if she had the courage to stop him. Annie’s heart hammered. She crouched, frozen.
The brown loafers shifted, then quickly moved away.
Annie sighed and stood, knees spongy with relief, forcing herself not to turn around to see where the man had gone. That was Sam’s job.
She poured her chips out to the cashier, who frowned at the obvious breach in protocol.
“Sorry,” Annie said with an apologetic smile, helping the woman stack the chips.
CHAPTER THREE
ANNIE THRUST THIRTY-SIX dollars at Sam, who was still huddled over his beer with the cell phone glued to his ear. At the other end of the bar, the cashier who’d handled Annie’s chips whispered in Tiny’s ear.
“I need you,” he said, before hanging up and pushing her hand away with a frown. Obviously, she’d interrupted him making a hot date. “What did you think you were doing out there?”
“What did I…” For the love of Pete. “I thought I was helping you out.” What did he think she was doing? Annie tossed the bills he’d refused on the scarred, dark wood bar.
Sam leaned closer, as if sharing a secret. “He could have made you.”
It didn’t matter that Annie’s own imagination had tumbled in similar directions just moments ago. What had Sam done about his fears? Nothing. Never mind that he had broad shoulders made for defending others. He was only interested in protecting his tush, not hers. “Well, the least you could do is back me up if you thought he was such a threat.”
“I never left the room.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “Did you even notice he’s gone? What do I need to do to get your attention, bare my breasts?” She had been stripped of her prospects, classified as an unacceptable employee and given the heebie-jeebies by a professional gambler. Events had pushed her beyond the rules of propriety she’d conditioned herself to live by.
“Que pasa, Knight?” a deep voice boomed from the other side of the bar. Tiny filled the space behind the counter. “Was the guy a cheat or just lucky?” He cracked his knuckles just by squeezing his hands into fists.
“We can’t say for sure,” Sam said at the same time Annie declared, “Oh, yeah.”
The two of them exchanged frustrated glances.
Sam recovered first. “This is Annie Raye, my card-counting expert.”
She arched a brow at Sam before extending a hand across the bar, to be swallowed in Tiny’s giant one. “Nice to meet you.”
The man’s shadowy eyes looked her up and down, then up and down again with a glance meant to put her in her place. And then he scowled. “Wait a minute. Brett Raye’s daughter?”
The way Tiny said it, as if he’d heard of her before, made Annie queasy. By now her name should have meant nothing. Which could only mean one thing.
Dad.
Why couldn’t he let her reputation fade?
“You’ve heard of her?” Sam asked, looking slightly perplexed.
Annie started to sweat again.
“Brett Raye isn’t welcome here.” Staring in the area of Annie’s cleavage, Tiny rolled his tongue around in his mouth as if searching for some bit of food he’d missed at lunchtime, to make room for a bit of Annie. “And after today—”
“He’s a player,” Annie interrupted, fighting the urge to slump her shoulders and hide behind Sam. Instead, she buttoned her jacket up to her neck, even though the combination of pearls and material nearly choked her. She wasn’t a woman men stared at like that, or someone who got tossed out of casinos. At least not anymore. “Isn’t that what you wanted to know?”
“Is he better than you?” Tiny asked.
Sam’s laugh came out in a sharp burst of disbelief, unexpectedly refueling Annie’s temper.
“Mr. Tiny, I don’t gamble for a living,” she stated, refusing to look at Sam. What did he find so amusing? “Besides, it’s not a point of being better than anybody. Professional gamblers know which dealers they can beat and what days they work. They know which house managers will toss them out right away and which will let them get by. They may play thirty minutes one day and then not play for as many as five days. They stop playing before the amount they win attracts unwanted attention. They’re inconspicuously efficient.”
Tiny looked over at his blackjack dealer, who was leaning against the table and studying her nails. “Are you saying Yolanda ain’t doin’ her job?”
“No, no, no.” Of all the things she’d said, Tiny had to focus in on the one negative he could most easily deal with. Annie didn’t want to get the older dealer fired. This was just as much Tiny’s fault as Yolanda’s since he’d made the counter.
Tiny eyed the bills on the bar. “How much did you win?”
“Just sixteen dollars.”
He shook his head. “In less than ten minutes, betting the minimum. I’d fire her ass if she weren’t my old lady’s aunt.”
“Here,” Annie scooped up the pile of bills. “Take the sixteen back. It’ll cover Sam’s beer and a tip for you and Yolanda.” She handed Sam his twenty. “Thanks for spotting me.”
Tiny squinted at her. “Is she for real?”
“Down to her blond roots,” Sam said unhappily, pushing away his nearly untouched beer.
Was it any wonder Sam annoyed Annie?
“Maybe I should hire me a blonde.” Tiny gazed out at his bored dealer.
“Yolanda is doing the best she can,” Annie said. “She just needs more training.”
“Tell me about this guy,” Sam said, ignoring Annie. “Have you seen him before?”
“I don’t know about him specifically. They look like everyone else who gambles down here—older, worn-out. Me and the other houses, we want these guys gone. We called Aldo for advice and he said you were the go-to guy.”
“We can deter them from frequenting your card tables by making sure they don’t feel welcome, making it harder to win against your dealers,” Annie suggested. “You don’t just want to end the current problem, but also protect yourself against future gamers.”
Sam’s frown was fleeting as he glanced sideways at Annie. “Can I get a copy of the security tape of the parking lot? I’ll run a search on his plates. We might get lucky and find out he has an outstanding warrant. If so, he’ll disappear.”
“My camera system’s on the blink. Shouldn’t you be following him?”
Sam went on to reassure Tiny of his skills in finding the card counter again. The casino owner didn’t seem impressed.
Able to recognize a brush-off when she was given one, Annie slipped from the bar stool with a sigh. “Thanks for helping, Annie,” she muttered as she walked out the door. “That job at Slotto is going to be yours. Don’t you worry.”
But it was hard not to when it seemed neither of the men noticed her leave.
“THAT WAS A GREAT ACT in there. You had Tiny eating out of your hand.” Sam took Annie by the arm when he caught up to her outside. The afternoon sun warmed his skin. “It would have helped if you didn’t overpromise on that training piece. I can’t deliver on that.”
“I’ve got somewhere I need to be.” She extricated her arm and flipped open her cell phone, then hesitated.
Hesitation. Most un-Annielike.
She closed her phone and made a beeline for her decrepit Toyota. Giving up wasn’t like her, either.
Sam walked alongside and still she said nothing. Normally, he let a woman in a snit stay that way as long as it didn’t interfere with his plans. His agenda for the rest of the day included trolling some of the other small casinos to see if the card counter was going to stretch his streak. If Annie wanted to stew about something, Sam didn’t care in the least. It was time to say goodbye.
“You all right?” he asked instead.
“Peachy.”
Translation? Take a hike.
Sam should be happy. Annie wasn’t going to follow him. So, this was it. He was almost disappointed. “Thanks for your help. As bluffs go, yours was first-class. You nearly had me believing you could spot a card counter.” He pulled forty dollars out of his wallet.
She spun on him, late-afternoon sunlight glinting off her curls. “You thought I was bluffing?”
She might have a shady past, but he’d met a lot of gamblers since he’d arrived in Vegas, and she didn’t fit the mold in the slightest. “Yeah, why do you think I didn’t follow the guy when he left?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Laziness? Incompetence? You spent more time on the phone than watching the game.” She snatched the twenties from his hand. “Your pity money is insulting. You know what I wanted.”
Sam made sure Annie knew he’d watched her tuck the bills into her purse. “Just the fact that you’re going off the deep end without much provocation tells me you couldn’t handle the stress of working at Slotto.”
“You have no idea what went on in there, do you? If you change your mind about that background check, let me know.” Annie slid into her seat and shut him out.
“GRANDPA’S PHONE.” Maddy answered with practiced ease, as if she were his receptionist. No doubt she’d heard her mother take several business calls. Maddy stretched her arm to hand Brett the now ice-cream-sticky phone from the backseat. “It’s for you.”
“They sent Sam Knight.” Ernie sounded rattled.
Brett had known the Vegas casino community would respond to their card-counting venture quickly. He slowed to a stop at a red light. “He’s good.”
“We haven’t gone into the Sicilian. Or any of the other major houses.”
“I thought we’d have more time.” And that they’d send someone less well connected. Sam Knight worked for Vince Patrizio. Brett and Vince shared a past that Brett preferred not to revisit.
“It gets worse.”
“Can I talk again?” Maddy waved her hand in the air at Brett’s shoulder, talking louder than the voice in the tiny speaker pressed to his ear.
“Not just yet, puddin’. Say again, Ernie.”
“Annie was with him.”
“My…” Brett’s voice cracked. “My Annie?”
“Police!” Maddy shrieked, turning her face away from the black-and-white cruiser that had stopped next to them. She kicked frantically against his seat.
With a curse, Brett closed the phone and tossed it onto the empty passenger seat. The officer looked over and Brett tried to smile, while watching Maddy out of the corner of his eye. She was still screaming as if the devil himself had pulled up beside them.
“What’s wrong, puddin’?”
“He’s got a gun,” she wailed, chocolate-ice-cream-spotted hands over her eyes. “Don’t shoot!”
Brett spun in his seat and bit back a curse. His no-account former son-in-law had been arrested while driving Maddy somewhere. When Annie had casually mentioned that detail, Brett had had no idea what effect the incident had had on his granddaughter.
The light turned green and the police car took off.
“He’s gone, puddin’.”
A symphony of honking arose behind them.
Maddy cracked open her eyes, releasing a large tear. Her lower lip trembled as she let out a ragged gasp.
“Police are here to protect us,” Brett said. Unable to ignore all the honking, he turned around and drove. There would be time to wonder about Annie later. Right now his granddaughter needed him.
“No guns. No guns,” Maddy chanted, hiccuping.
“YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO BUY groceries,” Annie’s dad said when he opened the door to her that afternoon.
“I bought meat and vegetables.” She avoided looking Brett in the eye in case he could tell just by glancing at her that she’d played again after all these years. Annie hurried to set the bags down on the counter. “And milk.”
Her father laughed self-consciously. “I guess you’re right. Can’t raise a child on peanut butter and crackers, can you?”
Instead of pointing out that that was exactly how she’d been raised, Annie swept Maddy into her arms. “I hope you didn’t eat too much ice cream.”
Her daughter hugged her tightly. “We—”
“We had one scoop,” Brett interrupted.
With one arm around Annie’s shoulders, Maddy looked at her grandfather and grinned. “The music was loud. I had to dance.”
“Sometimes you’ve gotta dance,” he crooned, doing a little jig.
Sliding to the floor, Maddy giggled and then grabbed her plastic princess dress-up shoes. She swayed and clacked the heels together like a tambourine, creating an uneven beat.
“Are you feeling all right?” Annie asked. Her father didn’t dance.
“Right as rain.” He reached for Maddy, who came willingly into his arms. “I’m a grandpa, you know.”
The sight of the two of them, so happy and at ease, only made Annie feel more alone. She’d been that girl once. Annie sidled around the dancing pair into the small kitchenette. The day had been full of too many ups and downs. She’d done well at the casino and had been irrationally disappointed that Sam hadn’t offered to call Carl Nunes on the spot…or to offer Annie the card-counting-expert job. At this point, even temporary employment had its allure.
Who was she kidding? She’d be a fool to want to get tied up with Sam.
“How did the job go, Annie?”
Oh, it went, all right. Annie froze in the middle of putting milk in the refrigerator, staring inside as if searching for something. The light was burned out and the top shelf was cracked and covered with duct tape. She’d come full circle.
“I’m not sure the job is going to work out,” she said, as casually as she could manage through her tight throat. She’d graduated early from high school and breezed through the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on an academic scholarship. How had she become such a failure?
“That’s too bad.” Her dad deposited a giggling Maddy on the boxy brown burlap couch. “You’ll find something you like in no time, though. You always did manage to get yourself out of a bind quicker than most.”
