High Card: A Billionaire Shifter Novel (Lions of Las Vegas Book 1) (2 page)

Rent. Food. Gas. You name it.
 

Throw a child or three in there.
 

Father fucked off long ago.
 

Get the picture?
 

Then this big new casino was rumored to be opening up.

Biggest in the world. Run by that gorgeous blonde-haired businessman. Born in California but moved to Europe to make his fortune in…what? Solar Power? Windmill farms? Something like that.
 

Anyway, what’s his name?
 

Landon Stone.

The new casino posted hiring ads everywhere. They couldn’t find enough croupiers and pit bosses and dealers and stickmen and all the other souls needed to keep the world’s largest, most expensive casino running twenty-four-seven.
 

What a fucking hunk of flesh Landon Stone is,
the croupier thought when she first saw the want-ad.
Seems like an all right guy, too. In the news. Donating to shelters and food banks. Might be an okay guy to work for.

So our fifty year old cocktail waitress decided to take a six month dealer’s course. Put herself deep in hoc to do it. She always liked roulette. The little white ball chiming as it bounces across the numbers. How the wheel slowly rolls to a stop, the motion almost hypnotic, like there’s a lesson hidden for her in that wheel, if only she could see it—

Trouble is right now she’s
so green and nervous she keeps bungling the spin. Her hand slipping off the metal rung. The wheel limping along for a few half-assed turns. Juggling the rake around like she’s about to take her own eye out. Glancing back at the pit boss who’s hovering over her like a shadow. Flashing him a tight smile that says
it’s my first night. I’ll get better.

She won’t have a chance to.
 

It’s her first and last night on the job.

I’m hoping to rob her rich-as-hell boss blind.

What do they say. There’s no such thing as victimless crime?

The play won’t hurt Landon Stone or his casino one goddamned bit.
 

But it’ll hurt the croupier. Ruin her last shot.

Wanna know what a grifter calls that?

Lousy luck.

Happens to us all.
 

And that spinning wheel? The table with my five hundred-ten dollar bet riding on it? What’s the life lesson hidden there?

Nothing. It’s a fucking roulette table, not a fortune cookie.

***

“I think…I’d like to change my bet?” I ask my boyfriend, making sure to widen my eyes into a stumped-idiot-girl look. “Can I do that? Is it too late? Is that wrong? I mean I’d—”

Jay runs his index finger over my wrist.

Cut it out.

Fuck him. Chickenshit.

My nerves are buzzing like Nascar.

Just one fix. Up the ante. Raise the stakes. Roll her harder through the curve. For better or worse. I mean, what else does a no-name girl have to look forward to?
 

“But I think I can do that? I mean…the wheel hasn’t stopped?”
 

Two to one odds on a five hundred ten dollar bet’s only a grand and change. Split between me and Jay and the other two that are in on the job, minus the four hundred I have to pay the guy who sold me the intel on the honeypot croupier. That’s like two hundred bucks. Okay, it’s enough to keep the lights on in mom’s apartment.
 

But after that?

Nothing.

“Can I change my bet?” I ask the croupier, a little louder, like I’ve made up my mind. Like I’m a modern woman and can do as I damn well please. “I’m still learning and I think I have a good feeling…” I flutter my hands in front of my face for effect. “I have a good feeling or ha ha maybe it’s the Long Island…but can I?”

The croupier watches the wheel slow, leans on her rake, casts the pit-boss a glance—

Keep your eyes on me, you nervous ninny.

“Is it too late to change?” I repeat, my voice suddenly far too serious for the role I’m playing.

Shit. I’m losing it—

Jack rolls his eyes. “Aww it’s a good bet love keep it where it is.”

“You can still change. She hasn’t called the bets.”

The paunchy middle-aged guy. He’s half-smiling, half-leering in my direction. I give him an eyeful of cleavage in gratitude. “I
can
? She hasn’t…oh that’s
right
. Did you hear that, Jason? The crouper..uh…”
 

“
Croupier
,” the middle-aged guy corrects.

“Croupier!,” I giggle. “She hasn’t called the bets so I can change—”

Jay shakes his head.
 

He doesn’t even have to act looking upset.

“You can change it,” the croupier says, eyeing the wheel and my stack of chips. This is a big moment. If she sees the five hundred brown under the two reds she’ll freak out, tell me I need to call such a large bet.

Then it’s game over.

My gut spins as the rookie croupier studies my chips—

“Is dis the high-rolling table?” a tall, impossibly thin black-haired woman wearing a silver sequined and seductively low-cut gown asks, leaning over the side of the roulette table and blocking the croupier’s view of my stack with her ample tits.
 

Maya. About fucking time.

“More like the sorority house,” the balding middle-aged guy answers. “Here. Mind if I grab you a cha—”

“Sorority? I know not this word. I am from the Russia…”

Maya purrs the ‘r’ in Russia out nice and long. The middle-aged guy licks his lips. The croupier—and everyone else at the table—are all focused on Maya.
 

Which is the point.

Girl’s got my back.
 

Quickly, I slide my stacked chips to the double zero’s in a low-percentage bet called the basket.
 

The basket pays out at eleven to one.
 

Double zero’s are my second luckiest number. I’ve always loved James Bond. I give an excited hoot, then smack my Long Island off the table with my elbow.
 

“Oh shit!” I yelp as the glass hits the green carpet and half-melted ice scatters across the pit floor. “What a
klutz
I am! Jason could you—”

“That’s it for bets folks,” the croupier says.

“But I vant to bet,” Maya pouts.

“And you will, hun,” the croupier says, forcing a polite smile at a customer she obviously finds irritating as hell. “Next spin and the spin after that…”

Jason steps back from the table, waves at a waitress to get help with cleaning up—

The wheel’s slowing. Tick tick tick and the little white ball isn’t doing
anything
right. For a second I lose the act and lean over the table, eyes glued on the bouncing ball. At eleven to one if I lose I’ll owe the house five thousand six-hundred and ten dollars. But that’s also what I stand to win, minus everyone’s cut.
 

My breath stops in my lungs and if anyone with any sense or experience sees me now they’ll know I’m no rookie, they’ll see the flushed cheeks, the laser focus, the way I’m tapping my palm with my index finger real quick, a tell I could never get rid of that made me shit at poker, gave me the street name Miss Palmer, and now the wheel’s crawling around and man do I need this payout, a grand could go a long way to keeping my moms in meds and I could go grocery shopping and fix the fucking blown-out muffler on my 1997 Civic that leaks exhaust into the car at every traffic light—

There’s all that, yeah.

But even better would be knowing I drew an eleven to one score from Landon fucking Stone on the opening night of his soft launch in the largest, poshest most high-tech casino in the world—

Half a spin more. The double zero’s are there.
 

Right
there.

I haven’t drawn a breath.
 

Landon was plastered all over TV for months, bragging about how he spent more on security in his new casino Savannah’s than it takes to
build
most casinos, and wouldn’t that be a laugh, taking a score nicknamed Savannah after a stripper from a high-roller’s red-rug casino of the same name—

The irony’s delicious.

I got this play. I know I do. I
know
it.

The wheel shudders to a halt.
 

Boom.

We need to get the fuck out of here.
 

Now.

“WHO IS SHE?” I ask, eyeing one of the forty screens linked to the closed-circuit cameras above my casino’s roulette tables. There’s a woman at a table who’s not feeling right. Call it a vibe.
 

So yeah, I’m glued to the screen. My breath quickening.

I want to see if she’s going to try and rob me. Takes a bit to focus on that. Because the girl…the truth is I can’t stop looking at her. Wondering how her skin feels beneath my lips. What she looks like with her blouse off. Leaning over me, slipping a leg over my waist, straddling me—

Christ. She’s a thief.
Trash
.

I take a sip of ice-cold water, wishing I could shower with it.
 

I haven’t been in Vegas long, but already I’m learning there are two kinds of people in this town: those who want to rob you blind, and those who want to take advantage of you. Or maybe that’s only one kind?
 

One of my computer guys swallows hard, wipes a line of sweat from his brow. “We’re working on it, sir.”

Sir
.
 

No matter how often I tell my staff to drop the formalities, they still insist on calling me ‘sir.’ I don’t mind the respect. I’ve worked hard to get where I am. Built an international corporation from the ground up. But ‘sir’ makes me feel like a crusty old bastard.
 

I’m still years away from thirty.

The woman on the screen leans into her boyfriend. Kisses his shoulder. Tosses her hair back. A pinprick of anger makes my jaw tense. I don’t like seeing her with that guy. Not at all.

She’s mine.

The thought arrives in a flash.
 

There’s a heat to it. An energy.
 

I check my watch as a way to drag my attention from the screen. “I’m due for an engagement in ten,” I say to the security guy, hoping to hurry things along.
 

“Plug her face into the system,” my older brother Blake snaps.

The security guy gives Blake a nervous nod. Hits a button on the keyboard, bringing up a wealth of police data. Moves some images around, codes through a few passwords—

If she is acting, the nameless girl sitting at my high-roller roulette table deserves an Oscar. I can’t see anything suspicious about her. Neither did any of the security paid to watch every patron’s every move.

It was Blake who spotted her.

He has a nose for sniffing out thieves and criminals.

Takes one to know one.

I press my fingers to my eyes, trying to block out the cynical thought. This casino is a new start for Blake. A new leaf. But I can’t help thinking about all the other new starts over the years. The mistrustful, guarded part of me already has this figured out.
 

Blake will do what he always does.
 

Play at being loyal while it suits him. But then he’ll start to slip. The resentment he feels working under me will begin to show. He’ll start undermining our pride, maybe even sabotaging the casino. It’ll all be subtle at first. Then one day…not so much. Blake’s angry at the family he’s convinced always thought he’d be a fuck-up, and so that’s what he became. He’ll start to poison—
 

Blake’s pacing beside me, a wrecking ball of barely-contained aggressive energy. He stabs his thumb at the screen. “That bitch is no college girl. I don’t need a fucking database to tell me that. She’s
working
. Look how she’s watching that wheel. And the idiot croupier—where the fuck did we pick that one up? Fire her. And fire the guy who hired her.”

“Rachael hired her,” I remind my brother.
 

“What? Oh, fuck sake.” Blake takes a long swig of Scotch and chases it with Red Bull. I tell the security geek to keep scanning the Gaming Commission and FBI databases, then pull my brother away from the computer and say under my breath, “You keeping him under wraps? I need you cool and collected today, brother.”

Blake fires me an icy glare. He’s a vicious looking bastard. Narrow faced. Thin. Tiny little eyes perched on a hooked nose.
 

But he’s my older brother. Nothing can change that.
 

No matter how much I might wish it isn’t true—
 

“I’m
nothing
if not cool,” Blake says.
 

“You off the blow?”

“Totally.”

“Totally bullshit. Since when?”

“Since…uh. Fuck it. Stop mothering. I’m good, bro. Really. Just the stress, right? Opening night and all.” Blake’s features twist into a real ugly look, the kind I’ve seen before. It’s the kind of look that means he’s itching to kill someone. “But that bitch. She’s a grifter, Landon. A thief. I mean—opening night! At
Savannah’s
. She’s got stones. I’ll give her that much.”

“She could just be a college girl.”

Blake smiles in a way that reminds me he’s very comfortable assuming the worst about people. “Sure. A fucking college girl—

“Uh, boss?”

“What?” Blake and I snap at the same time. Blake gives me a quick look, then sidles out of my way. He might be Chief of Security and a fifteen percent partner in this enterprise. But I’m the casino’s single President and CEO. It was Blue Line, my Fortune 500 company that bankrolled Savannah’s Casino, and it’s my name engraved in gold on the plaque in the entry foyer—