Wicked Becomes You(81)
“Poor souls,” Gwen murmured.
“A weak mind will break beneath any pressure,” the signora retorted. “I cannot spare sympathy for those who sabotage themselves.”
“True, true,” the Spaniard said. “But I truly believe they are not in their own control. Men in the grips of the fever will gladly risk what they can ill afford to lose.”
Of course, Alex thought. They risked what they could not lose because they thought that they would profit by that risk.
When she had fallen tonight something in him had broken—the frame in which he’d kept the pieces of her, perhaps. She had long since shattered the picture he’d tried to build from them.
No profit was worth the risk of losing her again.
Chapter Thirteen
Gwen had heard a great deal about Monte Carlo’s famous gardens—the long emerald lawns dotted with peacocks, the fountains and footpaths to benches poised at scenic vistas over the ocean. She half expected that she and Alex would flee through them as soon as the carriage came to a stop, but instead he took her hand and led her up the broad white staircase into the casino proper, allowing her only a brief impression of flowering mimosa and the whispering of palm leaves stirred by the cool night air.
In the lobby, a grand marble affair supported by Grecian pillars and run round by a balcony full of merrymakers, they paused to check their hats and gloves. A number of people milled in the lobby, speaking in hushed tones; underneath their voices ran the murmur of distant music. Monte Carlo. She felt dazed. Why were they lingering here? Above, at either end of the balcony, were great murals of the sunrise over a white-walled town—Monaco, she would guess.
After Alex handed over his hat, he drew her a step apart from the others, reaching up to cup her face as though to caress her. When he leaned near, he murmured, “Have you any money?”
Alarm jolted through her. “No,” she whispered. He hadn’t any, either?
He nodded. “Stay near to me, then. I’ll play for ten minutes. The winnings should take us as far as Nice for the night.”
He led her across the lobby, to the small bureau where they wrote their names and nationalities in a great, velvet-covered ledger and received in return cards of admission permitting them entrance into the next suite of rooms.
Card in hand, Alex made no pretense of waiting for the other guests. “Come,” he said to her, and they set out at a rapid pace past the doors to the Reading Room and the famous Concert Hall, where, by the sound of it, a Mozart symphony was underway. Liveried men bowed and opened a set of double doors to the next anteroom, a polished corridor overhung by a dark blue ceiling that boasted a carved pattern of interlocking gold stars. The hush inside was marked; the few visitors who sat on the gilt benches sipped tea and read newspapers. How odd: Monte Carlo felt rather like a library.
On any other occasion, it might have stuck her as acutely unjust that she had no opportunity to explore this notorious place; that she was rushing past its main attractions with nary a glance backward. But all she wished now was to be gone. Barrington might be on the road this very moment. They had no money. No money! All her life, she’d had money in hand and the comforting knowledge of what that money could secure: smiles, service, swift exits. She felt painfully vulnerable without any.
They passed through yet another gilded anteroom, even quieter than the first, before the double doors finally opened into the gaming salons. Here the silence was total, as if all the players at the long tables were holding their breath at once. Men and women hunkered into armchairs of crimson velvet, scowling down at their cards. She followed Alex across the Oriental carpet, past a boy of no more than twenty, who bit his knuckle and followed the roll of the roulette ball, round and round. Amidst all this fierce, wordless concentration, its bump and clatter seemed to make an outsized roar, grating along her nerves.
At the end of the hall, Alex drew up. In this section, each table boasted a delicately engraved silver bowl. He meant to play trente et quarante, then. Gwen had heard of the game; Elma favored it because it had a better return than roulette.
She went on tiptoe to speak into Alex’s ear. “Do you have any coin to gamble with?”
“Only what I stole from the Spaniard.”
Stole! She saw proof of her reaction in the slight smile that crossed his face. On a deep breath, she said, “And are you very good at gambling?”
“Luck is always useful,” he murmured—and then surprised the breath out of her by lifting her hand to his mouth. His lips briefly pressed her gloved knuckles, a pressure as hot as a brand. For a moment, all her sharp anxiety seemed to tip into something hotter and far more pleasurable.