Seducing Zeb (Tarnished Saints Series) (4 page)

She thought about going back and taking him up on his offer. But she couldn’t. She didn’t want to ever let herself be taken by a man again. She just wanted stability and security in her life and was willing to do almost anything to get it. But this man wasn’t whom she wanted. He was a lawyer for God’s sake. He was a liar, a manipulator, and a cheat.

J
ust like her, she realized sadly, stepping from the room and closing the door behind her.

Chapter 3

“I fold,” said Zeb, sliding his cards across the poker table. His brother, James was sitting n
ext to him at the little second-rate casino on the edge of Vegas called the Diamond Dust Casino. It was small and run-down and not very crowded since it was still early in the day. Zeb would have liked to have gone to one of the classier casinos that were on the strip, but James insisted on coming here – because this is where Catalina worked.

Zeb had
filled out the papers for the annulment earlier, and he and Cat had signed them. Then he’d been trying to make amends with his brother the rest of the morning, but James was still sulking about the whole wedding incident. Lunch together hadn’t gone well, and he only had Cappy to thank that she’d decided to invite herself and join them, and fill the awkward silence between him and James with her constant nonsensical chatter.

“B
et,” mumbled James, not looking at Zeb but instead looking at his hand of cards as he pushed a few of his chips forward. He didn’t have many left at all, though Zeb had quite a few.

“Call,” said another player
as the process continued around the table.

“
You can’t keep ignoring me,” said Zeb, looking at the flop – the three cards faced up at the center of the table and wondering what cards James had in his hand to actually want to place a bet.

“I can and I will,” James grunted as the dealer laid down
the turn card, which was a two of hearts.

“Check,” James said
, tapping his cards on the table passing the betting to the next person, but Zeb wasn’t paying much attention as he was trying his hardest to make things right between him and his brother again.

“You are being a big baby about the whole incident,” said Zeb. “And you’re acting like I married Cat on purpose, which you know I didn’t.”

“Do I?” This was the first time James looked over to Zeb and the expression on his face was not pleasant.

Before Zeb knew it, t
he dealer laid down the river, or last card of the spread and it was another two. When the bets were placed and came back to James, Zeb realized his brother only had a few chips left.

“Looks like you
’re out of chips, James. Now lets head to the bar so we can talk this whole thing out.” Zeb reached out to collect his own large stack of chips from the table.

“No!” s
aid James. “I don’t want to fold.”

“
All right. Want to borrow some of mine?” Zeb split his pile in two, giving half to James.

“I don’t want anything of yours, not even your damned wife,” spat James, pulling something from his pocket.
“I want to use this for my bet.” He flipped open the small box to show both the wedding rings he’d bought for his marriage.

“Whoa, that’s nice,” said one of the poker players with a whistle.

“What’s that worth?” asked another of the men.

“James, wha
t the hell are you doing?” asked Zeb in a low voice. “Put those away.”

“Why should I?” asked James. “I obviously don’t need them any more now that you stole my bride.” He pushed the box forward on the table.

“You stole your brother’s bride?” asked one of the men.

“What a low-down bastard,” said another.

“No, it’s not like that,” Zeb told them with a shake of his head. “I didn’t even know I got married.”

“Drunkard,” he
heard another of the men say under his breath.

“I’m sorr
y, sir, but you need to use chips,” said the dealer. “You’ll have to fold and go next door to the pawn shop and sell that and then come back with chips.”

“May as well sell them, as
they’re nothing to me anymore.” James reached out for the box, but Zeb’s hand snatched it away first.

“I’ll buy these from you, James. How much are they wor
th?” He pushed half his pile of chips over to his brother. The chips were worth well over five thousand dollars and he knew that probably more than covered the cost of the rings.

“More than that,” said James, eyeing up the rest of Zeb’s pile. Zeb h
ad a stack left worth another five grand and knew his brother was only saying this because he was pissed at him.

“By all means, t
ake the rest of my stack,” Zeb said sarcastically, and pushed the rest of his chips over to his brother and snapped closed the ring box and stuck it in his pocket. This was a no-limit table and he knew that in James’s misery he had probably just pissed away more than he could afford. Zeb had money and he didn’t mind giving it to James. Not if it was going to buy peace again between them.

“F
ine,” said James, scooping Zeb’s chips in front of him.

“What’ll it be?” asked the dealer, as it was James’s turn to bet
.

“I’m
all in,” said James pushing the entire stack of chips into the center of the table.

“What?” spat Zeb, his eyes going to the community cards and rea
lizing that there was nothing there worth anything other than a pair of deuces.

A few more folds came from the table except for one man who sat next to James.

“James, that’s a lot of money. What the hell are you trying to prove?” Zeb asked.

“Who said I was trying to prove anything?”

“Well I only hope you have some damned good cards in the hole to at least pull off a full house or you just pissed away a lot of cash.”

The man next to James went all in as well, and now it was time to see who won. Zeb felt a knot in his stomach and almost died when the man next to him uncovered his cards a
nd showed that he had a pair of queens and used the cards on the table to get a full house.

“Better luck next time,” Zeb told his brother, knowing that James always seemed to have bad luck follow him plus he wasn’t known for making good snap decisions. Zeb had no doubt in his mind that James probably had nothing
at all in his hand and was only bluffing.

Slowly, James turned his cards over, displaying a pair of deuces.

“Damn!” the man next to him swore as the dealer announced that James had just won the pot. Zeb just stared at his brother’s cards, realizing that he won with four of a kind.

“You won? With fours deuces?” asked Zeb, still not able to believe it. “And you didn’t even know you’d have a chance until you saw the turn and river cards but yet you kept betting.
You pulled one of the stupidest moves ever known in poker and ended up winning.”

James just looked over and smiled
as he collected his winnings. “Well, we both win then, don’t we? I get the money and you get the girl.”

Zeb didn’t answer. He was feeling more like the l
oser right now. Because he not only just lost a lot of money by giving it to his brother but he also lost his bachelorhood. And Catalina was far from being a prize of any kind as far as he was concerned.

* * *

Catalina was at her blackjack table, just having started her shift when she heard the shouting and cheering from across the room and looked up to see Zeb and James slapping hands together in the air at the poker table.

“What’s going on?” asked one of her players, looking up toward the noise.

“Herbert, let’s go to the poker tables!” A woman came rushing over who was obviously the man’s wife. “Some cowboy just won a fortune.”

“Let’s go,” shouted another of her customers, and the entire table grabbed their chips and headed away from her.

“Cat, can you hear me?” came the voice of her boss and ex-boyfriend, Denny Gianopoulos over the hidden speaker in her ear.

“I hear you,” she said softly,
smoothing her hair over her ear and trying to look nonchalant, glad no one was at her table to know what she was doing.

“Good, then get your
ass over to that poker table right away cuz some cowboy is walking away with the jackpot. I think it’s the same cowboy that was in here last month and kept winning at your blackjack table. The one you were supposed to take care of. So now you have a second chance to make good. You know what to do.”

“Crap,” she sai
d under her breath, realizing Denny wanted her to hustle James. She hated having to be deceitful, but if she didn’t obey Denny he’d see to it that she’d not only lose her job but he’d blacklist her from working anywhere in Vegas. He had connections and he had ways of getting what he wanted. And Denny Gianopoulos never let anyone walk out of his casino with a large amount of winnings.

“What’d you say?” came De
nny’s voice over the earpiece.

“I said – I hope he doesn’t go to the craps table. And i
t’s crazy that he won again.”

“He’s too
lucky and needs to be brought down. Now get over there and lure him back to your table and work your magic.”

De
nny wanted her to do something she never felt good about. Whenever someone won a lot of money in his casino, it was her job to bring the man over to the blackjack table, using whatever method it took. Denny wanted her to flirt, smile, laugh, and insinuate they might get lucky with her as she bent over in front of them letting them get a glimpse of cleavage or a peek at her long legs. Then she’d deal them bad hands by cheating, all the while coercing them to keep playing, until they’d lost everything they’d previously won.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do
this,” she whispered, causing Denny to turn into a maniac at the other end.

“I see him on the monitor and he’s collecting his winnings and leaving the table. Now get your ass over the
re already and do what I tell you, or you’re fired and can go back to flaunting your tits in that dance hall.”

That an
gered Cat. Especially since Denny knew that the reason Cat was fired from being a showgirl was because she refused to dance topless. And she could never go back to dancing now anyway. She was too old at the age of thirty, and well past her prime for a profession that was for the young. No one wanted a dancer that old, because they knew that her looks were going to start to fade soon and her body wasn’t as supple as the twenty-year-olds.

“Get going!” he screamed in her ear, and she jumped at his bark.

“Ok, ok,” she said, putting down her deck of cards and heading over toward the crowd.

De
nny was slipping, she realized. Because as soon as he reviewed the tapes from last month, he’d know that the only reason James had won so much at her blackjack table in the first place was because she liked him and was dealing him good hands. But if Denny hadn’t been so busy bedding all the new cocktail waitresses than maybe he would have caught the fact she was pulling one over on him.

She wanted to leave
Denny now more than ever, since he had announced to her last month that he’d be marrying her sometime soon. And with him there was no negotiating. She didn’t want to be married to a man like him, but she also was afraid of being alone. She’d worked for his father for so long that this was the only place she knew as home. She didn’t want to go back to being poor and living on the streets, and that’s why she had made the decision to marry someone else before she ended up stuck with that louse for the rest of her life. And so she’d chosen James to be the man she’d marry, as he’d promised to take her far away from here and she’d hide on his ranch. But that obviously hadn’t worked out now anyway.

She hadn’t gone to bed with De
nny in over two years now, and she wished in her heart she hadn’t been suckered into doing so in the first place when his father passed away and the rat took over the family business. His parents, Cadmus and Sophia, were a nice old couple and had taken Cat in at her young age of eighteen after she’d dropped out of school and lived on the streets for two years after her mother died, and then thumbed a ride to Vegas.

The Gianopoulos’
s were the only family Cat knew. And it was Cadmus’s idea she use the name of Ebony in the casino to protect her identity from the many men who came to gamble. If it hadn’t been for Denny’s parents, Cat didn’t know where she would have ended up. But in the days before Denny took over, there was no cheating the customers. In the past few years things at the Diamond Dust Casino had gotten really bad. She didn’t like doing Denny’s dirty work, but until she found a way to get out from under his thumb, she would have to comply. Because even living with a louse like Denny wasn’t nearly as bad as having to be on her own. She never wanted to be alone again.

Cat pushed her way through the crowd, hiked up her dress and pulled down the bodice to expose a little more cleavage and stepped forward to do the job she hated more than anything in the world.