A Gentleman Undone by Cecilia Grant Page A

question he must buy one more, at least. A five or anything lower would guarantee him the trick and the double payoff. He slid his money forward.
    And of course the next card was a six. Hard total of twelve: a ten or a court card would be fatal now. If pure chance governed this hand, he was due for one. If the vexing creature across the table was pulling the strings, she could dismantle him in brutal fashion, having lured him down the garden path with her twos and threes and aces.
    Buy , she’d said. Pure chance was nowhere to be found in this room.
    Will sat back in his chair and tapped his fingers to his lips, letting his eyes settle on her in absent fashion. If shewould give him some sign … he still wouldn’t know whether to credit her. He might imagine something kindling in her empty eyes; some cryptic message meant just for him; some scrambled communiqué that he would decode until it spelled out Trust me . And then could he?
    Little matter. He was bound by the rules to take another card: the only decision was whether to twist or to buy. She had him for seventy-five pounds already, if she was fleecing him. The twenty-five he’d save by pulling up now wouldn’t be near enough to repurchase his pride.
    He sat forward. “In for a pound, in for a hundred,” he said, and found two tens and a five to throw in.
    Like some part of a spring-loaded machine her thumb moved, a single efficient motion tugging the top card off the deck to be caught by her fingertips and tossed down before him.
    He turned it faceup. Ace of spades. His lungs filled with lovely tobacco-tainted air and only then did he realize he hadn’t taken a proper deep breath since she’d first begun to deal.
    “Nicely done, Blackshear.” The fellow to his left was addressing him, an unexpected nudge of generosity from a gentleman whose name he hadn’t bothered to learn. He grinned—oh, and didn’t that face come easily!—and acknowledged the kindness with a nod.
    Good Lord. Two hundred pounds in a single hand. His one-eighty back and twenty more besides. Double the amount he’d worked the six hours previous to amass; more than three times his total Beecham’s take before he’d sat down here tonight. The cards snapped delightfully as he turned them all faceup. Miss Slaughter didn’t even look at him: already she’d progressed to the next man’s turn.
    Play continued round the table, though the game could hold little interest for him now. To quit in thethick of success was discipline of the sweetest sort. And he should hope he knew better than to misprize her gift or to tempt fate—or hell, to tempt her—by staying to risk any of his windfall in even one more hand.
    When the last man had gone bust, and the banker had counted out payment to the three players whose totals bettered her own, Will pocketed his winnings and rose. He hesitated where he was for a second, battling a desire for some tiny acknowledgment of what had passed, intelligible to him and her but opaque to everyone else.
    She didn’t glance up. Rather, she leaned back, all heavy-lidded languor, against the shoulder of the man on whose lap she sat, and lifted an absent hand to graze her knuckles along his jaw.
    Right. Let that be a reminder of what was what. He caught up his gloves and left, jamming his fingers impatiently into their respective sheaths as he went.
    She doesn’t like you. She doesn’t want you. She’s neither generous nor kind . Good, bracing phrases, worth repeating to himself all the way home.
    But every repetition prompted the question: what, then, had possessed her to restore his hundred eighty pounds?



Chapter Five

    T HE WOMAN in the glass wore a faint, enigmatic smile as she smoothed her hands down her indigo front, over the blue silk cords that crossed one another in the center of her bosom and wrapped round beneath it, fettering the gown’s fullness in that crucial region. Where most of her gowns merely hinted at curves, this one owned them