The Fidelity Files (Jennifer Hunter #1)(47)

He nodded his understanding and discretion as he slyly relieved me of my large bill.

I followed him through the poker room and was offered a seat directly across from Parker. I felt his eyes watching me as I approached the table and lowered my body into the seat. The low-cut top coupled with my cleavage-maximizing bra was clearly a good choice. I could tell right away that it was working.

A Breast Man.

After hearing Mr. Ireland's depiction of him I'd had a sneaking suspicion he would be. I suppose that's what you get from two years of experience in this game – sneaking suspicions.

I made specific eye contact with him, leaving no doubt in his mind that my first impression of this perfect stranger was a good one.

A delicate smile inched its way across my lips.

He reciprocated quickly before being drawn back into the game as the cards were dealt.

I played my hands carefully. Folding most of them immediately. Waiting for good cards to come my way, just as Ethan, my poker tutor, had instructed me during my lessons. I used the waiting period in between hands to advance my other game, the one that consisted of purposeful, across-the-table flirting: glances, smirks, visual appreciations of his poker skills and resulting winnings.

Tonight I was a player. And not just at poker.

Because this was, in fact, his bachelor party. If Parker was going to cheat tonight, it was clearly going to be with a one-night stand...a fling. Someone who knows how to have fun and knows it will mean nothing in the morning. A girl who doesn't necessarily do this with everyone she meets, but when she meets someone intriguing enough, there's no telling what she might do with him, or to him.

So that's exactly the girl I was.

Twenty minutes after sitting down I was dealt an ace, queen of hearts and I decided to slow play it. Meaning I didn't raise the bet right away. I simply called all bets before me and pretended I had a mediocre hand and was patiently waiting for a card to fall that might improve it. The slow play was a strategy that Ethan thought he had taught me during our lessons. But in all actuality I had been using it regularly for the past two years.

Two more hearts came on the flop, along with the king of diamonds. I now had four cards to a flush. I needed one more heart to complete the hand.

Parker bet, and I assumed he must have had at least a pair of kings, if not three of them. He had been betting aggressively since before the flop, meaning he probably had something good in his hand.

The seven of hearts came on the river, and I now had the flush. I withdrew from my flirting game for a moment to recall my poker lessons. I studied the cards on the table, and it only took me a few seconds to confirm that I had the highest possible hand – which, Ethan had informed me, is also known as "the nuts." And it wasn't until this very moment that I fully understood the meaning behind the nickname, as it seemed to be exactly where I had a hold of Parker.

He bet twenty dollars.

Everyone after him folded and the action was on me. It was just the two of us now.

I felt his eyes watching me with every move I made. He wanted to see if I was as good at poker as I was at tossing seductive glances to relative strangers. It would say a lot about how well I would "perform" later on in the evening, should it come to that.

And by now I was growing fairly confident that it would.

I can usually tell within ten minutes of interacting with a subject whether or not he will fail. It's all part of that men-reading superpower, I guess. Parker was as good as done. And he hadn't even been drinking yet. It was looking like Mr. Ireland's fatherly intuition was dead-on.

Even though I knew I held the highest hand in the game, I pretended to contemplate my decision to call his bet. I pressed my lips together tightly, took another peek at my cards, and fidgeted with my chips.

He watched me intently. Half hoping I would fold so he could feel some sense of conquest over me and half hoping I would call so he could continue to feel the exhilaration of playing these two simultaneous games at once. Although we both knew they had practically merged into one.

I carefully measured out a perfect doubling of his bet and pushed it toward the center of the table.

"I raise," I said, looking up and locking eyes with him. My stare had two meanings: (1) I'm not afraid of you, and (2) I'm not afraid of you.

"Raise, make it forty," the dealer confirmed.

Parker arched his eyebrows, studying me, taking me in, using this unique moment to stare me up and down as if he were only contemplating my bold poker move.

We both knew he was not.

He took his eyes off me long enough to check his two cards and then briefly scan the five cards laid out on the table. Then it was back to studying me.

"Either you made a flush on the river or you've been holding out on me," he said.

I ran my fingers along the side of my chip stack. "I've definitely been holding out," I confirmed with a raw honesty in my tone. "But I'm tired of waiting."

The seven other players observed us. Eyes darting back and forth from Parker to me, then back to Parker. They could sense the sexual tension in the air, feeding off of a mutual love of the game and a mutual thrill of the hunt.

Tonight I was the perfect match for Parker Colman.

He looked down at his chips. "Well, you're not the only one," he said, pushing another twenty dollars out in front of him. "I re-raise."

"Re-raise, make it sixty," the dealer announced.