It Takes a Thief by Kay Hooper

Author:Kay Hooper [Hooper, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance
ISBN: 9780553219630
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 1989-02-01T06:00:00+00:00

Six

The clock on the mantel ticked steadily on in the quiet of the room. The only light came from a lamp suspended low over a round table near the window. Cigarette and cigar smoke rose upward to disappear Into darkness, each tendril following the eddies and currents always present in even the most still room and caused now by air-conditioning and the breathing of the five men seated in comfortable chairs, cards in their hands or stacked neatly or flung down haphazardly on the green baize of the game table.

For serious gamblers such as these, poker chips remained in a caddy and out of the way: the rule was cash on the table. Stack of bills, arranged according to individual habit, lay before each man, and in the center of the table was a careless heap of money, all hundred-dollar bills.

The current pot was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars.

Three men had folded, and they sat back, smoking or sipping their drinks, watching silently as the remaining two played the hand out. It was a game of bluff now, and had been for more than an hour, each man steadily raising the stakes in an effort to make the other lose his nerve and fold. Neither of them had requested a new card since it had become a duel. In fact, Dane's cards were stacked facedown near his relaxed hands, and he hadn't so much as looked at them in almost half an hour. Each time Garrett Kelly tossed a stack of bills into the pot, Dane simply matched, then raised the bet.

And it became increasingly difficult for Kelly to duplicate Dane's relaxed, almost indifferent air. He toyed with his cards, putting them down and picking them up a dozen times. He lit cigarette after cigarette. His peculiarly colorless eyes probed sharply across the table as he sought to find a hint of strain in that tranquil, handsome face, some sign of hesitation or uncertainty in the vivid eyes.

He found no crack in Dane's composure, and by this fourth night of playing against him, no man at the table was surprised by it. At least two of the men had gulped silently upon discovering that Dane never raised the bet in increments of less than five hundred dollars, but they were wealthy men and experienced gamblers, and had adjusted. What they continued to find incredible was Dane's utter stillness.

He appeared boneless in his chair, requiring neither cigarette nor drink as a prop, and having no apparent need to change position to ease the strain of sitting for so long. At the beginning of the hand, when there was much more activity around the table, his deep, charming voice had been heard as often as the other men's, but once the play had come down to only two, he had fallen silent. And as Kelly's tension increased, Dane seemed to become even more unruffled. His brilliant eyes appeared as serene as twin violet lakes, his lips remained curved in a crooked half smile; and his graceful hands moved only to flick more money into the pot.

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