Like lightning striking twice. She shuddered.
Someone came to stand directly behind her, she felt their warm breath caressing her nape, though she only registered it vaguely. Her attention was fixed on that tormenting little ball and the rhythmic clacking noise it made as it jumped from compartment to compartment in a playful mix of ivory, red and black.
And the tension, the pulsing sense of building expectancy that was the real draw, the actual smell of madness, permeated all around her like a poisonous drug no one could resist.
‘Yes!’ Her father’s victorious hiss hit her eardrums like the jarring clash of a hundred cymbals as he doubled his reckless stake—just like that.
The gathered crowd began enjoying his good fortune with him, but Caroline wilted like a dying flower. Her heart was floundering somewhere down deep inside her. She felt sick, she felt dizzy—must have actually swayed a little, because an arm snaked around her waist to support her. And it was a mark as to just how weak she was feeling that she let that arm gently ease her back against the hard-packed body standing behind her.
This was it, she was thinking dully. There would be no stopping him now. He wouldn’t be happy until he had lost everything he had already won—and more. She didn’t so much as consider him winning, because winning was not the real desire that drove people like him to play. It was, quite simply, the compulsion to play no matter what the final outcome. Winning meant your luck was in, so you played until your luck ran out, then played until it came back again.
A fine shudder rippled through her, making her suddenly aware that she was leaning against some total stranger. With an abrupt tensing of her spine, she managed to put a little distance between them before turning within that circling arm to murmur a coldly polite, ‘Thank you, but I’m—’
Words froze, the air sealed inside lungs that suddenly ceased to function as she stood there, staring into a pair of all too familiar devil-black eyes that trapped her inside a world of complete denial.
‘Hello, Caroline,’ Luiz greeted smoothly.
CHAPTER TWO
HER heart flipped over, then began to beat wildly. ‘Luiz…’ she breathed through lips gone too numb to move while, No, her mind was telling her. She was hallucinating—dreaming him up from the depths of her worst fears—because this place and her father’s madness were all so synonymous in her mind with this man. ‘No.’ She even made the denial out loud.
‘Sorry but—yes,’ he replied with a real dry amusement slicing through his lazy tone.
But it was an amusement that did not reach the darkness in his eyes, and the room began to blacken around its edges as yet another dizzying sense of pained dismay took the place of shocked numbness.
‘Please let go of me,’ she said shakily, desperately needing to put some distance between the two of them before she could attempt to deal with this.
‘Of course.’ The hand was instantly removed. And for some crazy reason she found herself comparing his ready compliance with the complete disregard the stranger in the basement had shown when she had made the same request of him.
A man who had reminded her of Luiz. A man she hadn’t liked on sight, whereas Luiz she…
‘Your father’s luck is in, I see,’ he remarked, his gaze now fixed on what was going on behind her.
‘Is it?’ Scepticism sliced heavily through the two short syllables, bringing his dark eyes back to her face.
But Caroline could no longer look at him. It hurt to look at him. For Luiz personified everything she had learned to despise about her father’s disease. Obsession, machination, deception, betrayal.
Bitterness suddenly rose to almost completely engulf her. She went to spin away from him, but at the same moment the crowd began to surge in, jostling her in their eagerness to congratulate her father, wanting to demonstrate their delight in seeing someone beat the bank against all the odds for once. Luiz’s arm came back, looping round her in protection this time against several elbows being aimed in her direction, and Caroline found herself being pressed so close to him that she would have to be dead not to be aware of every hard-packed nuance of the man.
Her heart-rate picked up and her breathing grew shallow. It was awful. Memories began to flood her mind. They had been lovers once. Their bodies knew each other as intimately as two bodies could. Standing here, virtually imprisoned by the crowd closing round them, was the worst kind of punishment that fate could have doled out to her for being stupid enough to agree to come back here.
It was a knowledge that filled her with a kind of acrimony that poured itself into her voice. ‘Still playing games for a living, Luiz?’ she shot at him sarcastically. ‘I wonder what the management would do if they found out they have a professional in their club.’