by Nell Stark
Synopsis
Annie Jump Navarro is an Ivy League math whiz kid who has won numerous Internet poker championships under the handle supern0va. But when the Feds crack down on legislation making the funding of online gambling accounts illegal, most of Nova's assets are frozen. Her sponsors will only continue to support her if she can win a championship bracelet at one of the live events of the World Series of Poker. She heads for Vegas, where she meets Vesper Blake, an ambitious but jaded casino host who has seen too many fools flock to the strip only to leave broke and humiliated. Will Vesper be able to successfully coach the volatile Nova to win at live poker? And will Nova be able to convince Vesper that she should take a gamble on true romance?
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All In
© 2014 By Nell Stark. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-109-3
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First Edition: June 2014
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Credits
Editor: Cindy Cresap
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design by Sheri([email protected])
By Nell Stark
Running with the Wind
Homecoming
The Princess Affair
All In
By Nell Stark & Trinity Tam
everafter
nevermore
nightrise
sunfall
Acknowledgments
I was first introduced to poker in graduate school and played sporadically during my dissertating years. The buy-in was $5, the blinds 5 cents/10 cents. Everyone else in the room was always male. I could never remember the winning order of hands, and I always asked silly questions, but the boys were happy to take my money and I was happy to soak up the ambience. I’m grateful for all they tried to teach me, even if it never stuck.
Since I wear my heart on my sleeve and have the poker face of a puppy, I needed to do quite a lot of research for this project. Two books were especially helpful: Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed and Deke Castleman’s Whale Hunt in the Desert. Despite my effort, my first draft required substantial revision. I am fortunate enough to have both a wife (Jane) and an editor (Cindy) who are well-versed in the game, and I am more grateful than I can express for their help.
Jane not only fine-tuned my poker sequences—she also supported and encouraged me throughout my writing process. Like a gambler, I would feel on top of the world one moment, only to hit rock bottom the next. For her love, patience, and guidance, I am eternally grateful.
As always, Cindy Cresap’s editorial wisdom and advice—coupled with her wit and humor—have honed both the style and substance of this book, and I deeply appreciate her input. I also remain indebted to Radclyffe for giving me the opportunity to publish with Bold Strokes Books, and I would like to thank all of the wonderful, hardworking, and selfless people at BSB—Sandy, Connie, Lori, Lee, Jennifer, Paula, Sheri, and others—for helping to market and release quality product year after year. The members of Team BSB, including our many fellow authors, continue to inspire us, and I count you all in my extended family.
Finally, thank you to the many readers who have been so generous with their support and feedback over many years. This book is for you!
For Jane, la miglior fabbra
Chapter One
“We’re late!” Nova let the screen door bang shut behind her and turned toward the driveway. Sunlight glinted off the hood of her Jeep, and she raised one hand to shield her eyes from the glare. It was a beautiful morning by anyone’s standards—the sapphire sky was broken only by small, cottony cloud wisps borne on a warm spring breeze. Next door, Mrs. Bransen’s pink terrycloth bathrobe fluttered as she watered the white carnations encircling her mailbox. She looked up, scowling fiercely across the narrow strip of grass separating the two houses. Nova smiled and waved. Nothing was going to dampen her good mood on the day she became a homeowner.
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Emily called from inside the house, prompting an even deeper frown from Mrs. B. “We have plenty of time.”
In a burst of practiced motion, Nova vaulted into the driver’s seat, slotted the key into the ignition, and gunned the engine. Emily climbed aboard the conventional way a few moments later. “I see we’ve managed to piss off the bitch again. And since when are you a morning person?”
“Don’t worry about her.” Nova grabbed her Oakleys from the cup holder as she accelerated down the street. Mrs. B hadn’t been happy when Nova and five of her fellow graduate students had rented the house two years ago. And once she’d figured out they were all lesbians, her front yard had become a forest of anti–marriage equality signs. She probably thought they were all sleeping together.
Nova grinned. About that, at least, Mrs. B was right. “We’ll never have to see her again after today.”
“Thank God.” Emily leaned back in her seat. “Do we have time to stop for coffee?”
“No. But I’ll buy you breakfast once I’m done at the bank.” Nova glanced over in enough time to catch Em’s grimace. “Did you know that sixty percent of all coffee drinkers claim they need a cup of coffee in the morning? How’s it feel to be in the majority for once?”
Em cracked one eyelid. “For someone who gave up on school, you know too much.”
“Never let school interfere with your education,” Nova quipped. The quote was one of her favorites.
“How’d you do last night? Rake in the big bucks?”
“Didn’t log on. I was too busy packing.” Nova rarely missed the chance to play at least a few hands of online poker, but in this case, the promise of moving had trumped her need for a fix.
The new house was a beauty. Set on a hill, its backyard had an oblique view of Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay. It boasted Brazilian cherry floors, an orange tree out front, and four bedrooms. That was clutch, because Nova wanted her privacy. They all had to double up in their current house, and most of the time, it hadn’t been a problem. But now she could turn the master bedroom into her own personal poker haven, to be shared by invitation only.
As she accelerated onto the highway, she pictured how they would spend the summer. While Em studied for the bar, Sandra and Monique plodded away at their doctoral research, and Liz and Felicia wrote their dissertations, she would spend her days surfing, her evenings grilling out on the redwood deck, and her nights playing online hold ’em. The sweet life.
When she pulled up to the bank, Em halfheartedly reached for the handle. “Don’t.” Nova rested one hand on her shoulder. “Stay here and take a little nap or something.”
“Sure you don’t want me to come with?”
“For the closing? Yes. To get a check cut? No. Just relax.” Nova moved quickly toward the doors. Her nose wrinkled as she breathed in stale air laced with the scent of carpet cleaner. The sooner she got this over with, the sooner they could go have breakfast at her favorite café overlooking the water.
She had two choices in tellers: a twenty-something brunette with brightly painted nails, or a stout, middle-aged man. That w
as a no-brainer. As she stepped toward the woman, she smiled to show off her dimples. The teller was probably straight, but it never hurt to be charming. Just in case.
“Good morning…” Nova glanced down at the nameplate pinned to one lapel, just above the barest hint of tan cleavage. “Diane. I need a bank check, please.”
“I can certainly help you with that.” Diane barely even glanced at her before turning to her monitor. The sharp clacks of her swift typing exuded professionalism. Chagrined, Nova wondered if she was slipping. “What is your full name?”
Nova cringed. “Annie Jump Novarro. But you can call me AJ.” Ever since the age of six, she had insisted on going by her initials. Inside the poker world, though, she was Supern0va, reigning Royal Flush champion. “Nova” for short. Increasingly, her online handle was becoming more real than her given name.
Diane didn’t react to the invitation. “Account number and driver’s license, please?”
“Here you go.”
“And the amount of the check?”
“Four hundred and forty thousand dollars.” Nova waited for Diane to register surprise at the large number, but her face remained expressionless. Tough crowd. How many twenty-four-year-olds were there who could meet the bank’s demand for a forty percent deposit on a one point one million dollar home?
When she had walked through the door a month ago to apply for her mortgage, she’d been whisked into one of the little cubicle offices by a sallow-faced loan officer who informed her that she was a “high-risk investment” due to her profession. Nova smothered a smile as she thought back on that conversation. She had known going in that banks didn’t much like lending money to young professional poker players. But as she had told the dubious loan officer, “High-risk investments are the only kind worth making.” So what if she didn’t look good on paper? She had almost a million dollars of poker winnings to her name. So far.
“There seems to be a problem, Ms. Novarro.”
Shaken out of her reverie, Nova frowned. “A problem?”
Diane spun the computer screen to face her. “Insufficient funds.”
Nova stared at the screen in disbelief. It claimed she had just over thirty-one thousand dollars to her name. A wave of fear closed over her head, and her ears began to ring. “There’s been some kind of mistake,” she managed to choke out, belatedly realizing just how trite those words must sound. “I had the money transferred yesterday.”
“Perhaps you should check with your transferring institution.”
“Yes.” Nova forced the word out between lips that felt suddenly numb. “I’ll do that right now. Thank you.”
She retreated to the far corner of the bank, where an ATM machine flickered in invitation. When she tried to thumb through her contacts list, she realized her fingers were trembling. She had to stay calm. Take deep breaths. In goes the good air; out goes the bad air. This was all a simple misunderstanding. Maybe there had been an Internet glitch yesterday when she put in her transfer request to Universal Account Systems, the holding company for her online poker bankroll. All she had to do was to give them a call. No problem.
But instead of a ringing phone or a human voice, a series of beeps pierced her ears. “We’re sorry,” a mechanical voice coolly informed her. “The number you dialed is not in service.”
“No.” Nova fought the urge to sink to the floor as dread swept through her, tying her stomach in knots. “No, no, no. This is not happening.” Desperately trying to keep the panic at bay, she opened the Internet browser on her phone and navigated to the website where, less than twenty-four hours earlier, she had arranged for her money to be transferred.
What she saw made her stumble into one of the bucket seats in the waiting area. Gone was the homepage to which she was accustomed. Instead, the seal of the United States and the seal of the FBI framed a block of text that sent her churning stomach right into her toes. The feds had shut down Universal Account Systems pending an investigation into money laundering.
Her funds were out of reach, perhaps indefinitely. There would be no house. No master bedroom poker haven. No redwood deck. Nowhere for any of them to sleep tonight. Head pounding, ears ringing, Nova staggered toward her car. She opened the door, collapsed inside, and, not wanting to meet Em’s gaze, rested her forehead on the wheel. Visions of Brazilian cherry floors and flowering orange trees shattered behind her eyes.
“What happened?” Em’s voice was shrill with alarm. She laid a hand on Nova’s shoulder, but it didn’t feel comforting. “AJ? What’s going on?”
“There’s no money,” she croaked.
“What do you mean, there’s no money?”
Still unwilling to look up, Nova fumbled for her phone and passed it over. A few seconds later, Emily cursed. “What the hell? How did this happen?”
At first, Nova didn’t answer. She wanted to disappear. She wanted to punch something. She wanted to vomit. Anxiety constricted her throat, making it impossible to suck in a deep breath, ushering in the familiar claustrophobia. As the suffocating tightness pervaded her chest, she latched on to the strategies she’d honed since childhood.
1842 x 2359 = 4,345,278. The square root of 3,969 is 63. 57^4 = 10,556,001… As she forced her brain to focus on the numbers, the pressure slowly began to ease.
“Are you okay?” Em squeezed her arm. “AJ? You’re scaring me.”
Nova took a long, slow breath, and when her lungs didn’t seize up, she dared to raise her head. Her cheeks were tingling slightly, and dark flecks danced at the corners of her vision. She’d come close to hyperventilating. So much for preserving even a modicum of cool under pressure.
“Damn it,” she whispered. “Brazilian cherry floors! An orange tree out front!”
“Can you explain to me what this”―Em brandished her phone—“means? The government can’t just take your money away from you, can they?”
Em’s questions twisted the knife in her gut, but they also forced her to think. “They can. It’s happened before.”
“It has?”
Nova held out her hand for the phone. Now that her brain was working again, her priorities were falling back into order. “I’ll explain the whole thing later. Right now I need to make a call. And I need you to do me a favor.”
“What is it?”
“Get on the line with our landlord and try to get our house back.”
*
Moonlight filtered through the broken blinds in the living room, illuminating the nearly empty pizza box on the table. Felicia’s psychotic cat had destroyed the slats last year in an attempt to catch something on or outside the window. Doubtless, the replacement cost would be taken out of their security deposit once they moved out. Whenever that was.
Nova broke a tiny piece of crust off her uneaten slice and rolled it between her fingers. Thankfully, their landlord had not yet found other renters, and he’d been happy to sign them to a new contract. At an increased price, of course. Even Em’s formidable negotiating skills had failed in the face of their desperation. They weren’t homeless, but they were paying almost twenty-five percent more than last year.
Nova reached for her beer, found it empty, and wearily got to her feet. “Anyone need another?” At the resounding affirmative chorus, she headed for the kitchen, carefully picking her way around towers of haphazardly stacked boxes in the process.
As she returned with an armful of bottles, the front door closed behind Monique, who had been obliged to stay on campus late to teach her Intro to Computer Science class. The original plan had been for her to meet them at the new house, and she looked none too happy at the radical change. Hands on her hips, ebony hair curling around her shoulders, she cut an imposing figure.
“AJ, I love you. But what the hell!”
“Are we really going to have to live here for another year?” Liz’s voice was plaintive.
“I almost went and told off Mrs. B this morning.” Sandra, seated at Liz’s feet, wrapped her arms around her knees. “Glad I was too lazy.”
Nova’s jaw clenched at their whining. Instead of doling out the beers, she dumped them onto the carpet. “Have a little heart, will you? I know we’ve all had a shittastic day, but do you really have to make me feel worse? I lost almost a million fucking dollars!”
Monique sat down. Liz seemed chagrined. When Nova retreated to the couch, Em gently patted her knee. “We’re just trying to understand what happened.”
Nova scrubbed her palms across her face and tried to rein in her temper. She had singlehandedly torpedoed their plans. They deserved to be frustrated. They also deserved answers. She reached for a beer and poured her anger into twisting off the cap.
“Okay. Online gambling’s been illegal since 2006 when Congress passed a moronic act called UIGEA that made it so banks can’t fund gambling sites. So now, if you want to play, you have to transfer money through a third party—a company that will hold or transfer your bankroll.”
“But isn’t that still illegal?” Felicia asked.
“Well, it’s kind of a gray area, because the holding company isn’t a bank. They’re always ostensibly selling something. Mine sells phone cards.”
“Phone cards?” Liz’s brow wrinkled in confusion.
“Let’s say I want to deposit ten thousand into my account. I arrange to purchase ten thousand dollars’ worth of phone cards, which I can either sit on or transfer to my poker account at Royal Flush. It works the same way if I want to cash out from my poker account.”
“That’s money laundering.” Monique was shooting her a hard stare.
“Call it what you want!” Nova could feel her blood pressure rising. “The whole law is bogus. Poker isn’t a game of chance like fucking roulette or craps or baccarat. Poker is a game of skill. The law shouldn’t even apply!”
