Seven-Card Stud

by Ava Drake

  Not that he dared even contemplate getting involved with one of his competitors here. This was perhaps the biggest poker tournament of all time. No way was he going to risk his shot at taking home what was surely a massive prize just for a hot piece of ass. Still. Collin’s was a damned tempting piece of ass.

  They ate and traded small talk over everything but cards—the weather, how gigantic the Rock of Gibraltar was in person, how wild it was to walk across the runway of the main airport to enter the tiny country from Spain.

  And then Collin surprised him by asking frankly, “Why are you really here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not just here for the vacation to the Mediterranean coast to play some cards. You have an agenda of some kind.”

  Maybe it was the bald honesty with which the question had been asked that prompted Oliver to answer equally honestly, “I’ve been itching for years to prove that I’m the best poker player on earth. And now’s my chance.” Which frankly worried him about this tournament. It was as if someone knew his fondest wish and had set this whole thing up to lure him in. A patently ridiculous thought, he knew. Still, it had been a hell of a piece of bait to dangle in front of him.

  “Why haven’t you just played a bunch of professional poker tournaments and proved you’re the best that way?” Collin asked.

  Oliver winced. In for a nickel, in for a dollar. “I’m not allowed to play poker pretty much anywhere.” He added hastily as Collin’s eyebrows sailed upward, “I’ve never cheated or ripped anyone off. I’m just too good. The casinos have to ban me, or I’ll take their customers for too much cash at the poker tables.”

  “Rough problem to have,” Collin muttered.

  “Actually, it does suck. There are a finite number of casinos on earth, and I can only play each of them once or twice before they kick me out. I could have made a good living at it. Instead, I—” How to describe essentially being homeless to this neat, organized man? “—can’t,” he finished lamely.

  “Who are the other top players to watch out for?” Collin asked, glancing around the dining room.

  “They’ll emerge in the next two or three days and pull ahead in the overall chip count. Chance will get overwhelmed by the mathematically superior decision makers. Antonio Mastrianak, the bald guy over by the window, is a four-time world champ, and if I’m not mistaken will be the chip leader after today. He had a big-ass pile of chips in front of him when I walked past his table earlier.”

  Collin folded his linen napkin beside his plate. “So tell me. What do you do during your downtime to relax besides surf?”

  His gaze shot to Collin’s. Surely that wasn’t a proposition. Not out of Mr. Stuffy Pants. “If I can’t surf, I swim. If there’s a hot guy around, and we’re into each other….” He shrugged. There. That was as blatant an invitation as he could possibly throw down.

  Collin shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  Oliver was feeling no little frustration himself. He leaned forward. “I can’t read you, and it’s making me nuts. Am I sensing ‘I’ve got a hard-on and how am I going to stand up?’ discomfort out of you, or ‘Crap, I wish this guy would quit dropping hints’ discomfort?”

  Collin opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “Both.”

  Surprised, Oliver leaned back in his seat and nodded slowly. “Outstanding. I can work with that.”

  COLLIN was shocked at how forward Gun was being. He got that the guy was tense and looking to blow off some steam, and goodness knew, he was wound tight himself. Trying to pass as a real poker player among the best of the best in the business was beyond nerve-racking.

  He’d read every book he could get his hands on and could recite back nearly every word of them. His boss had even arranged for a retired professional poker player to give him hasty lessons. But the reality of an actual tournament was so much more daunting. He had yet to figure out the most efficient order in which to do the various mental calculations that were necessary before every single action, be it placing a bet or folding. Frankly, he’d gotten damned lucky today to only be down about fifty thousand dollars from his original one million.

  Collin asked, “Would you mind if we went back to your room and talked a bit? I’d love to pick your brain about something.”

  Gun looked genuinely surprised. But then those brilliant eyes of his lit up like blue fire, and Collin’s dick leaped to attention, willing and ready to report for duty. Good grief. His own libido was dying to help him fail at this difficult assignment. He only wanted to talk, for God’s sake! Well, he wanted to do more than talk, but he had no intention of doing more than that.

  When they got to Gun’s room, Gun offered him a beer out of the minifridge.

  “No thanks. I need to keep my head clear.”

  “Whatever floats your boat,” Gun replied, taking a swig out of a brown longneck.

  “I have a question about how you play poker.”

  “Hey, dude. Pros don’t talk shop, and certainly not in the middle of a tournament.”

  Crap. He really, really needed someone’s help. And he suspected every expert the Wild Cards might call to ask for advice was already here. He opted for a sliver of honesty. “You might have already noticed, but I’m not actually a professional poker player. I was sent here by my employer with orders to do my best.”

  Gun grinned around the end of his beer bottle. “Yeah, I noticed.”

  “What gave me away?”

  “Pretty much everything.”

  “Okay, so here’s the thing I wanted to ask you. And I understand if you don’t want to answer me. But maybe this isn’t a trade secret or classified information. What order do you do the math in when you’re working a hand?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you calculate the odds on your own hand first, or do you start by working up the odds of what the other guys are holding? I assume you think about the odds of a certain card being turned over on the flop of the dealer’s cards last.”

  “Well, yeah. The flop is the last thing to worry about. First thing to look at is how the other guys are betting. You have to get an idea of what’s in their hands before you start looking at the possible hands your cards might make based on what you think they’re holding.”

  “So you read the other players first before you do any math.”

  “Sure. If they’ll give you a hint. Some of the players here won’t give you a read at all, so you have to watch the pattern of their betting over a few hours and get a feel for when they fold and when they play a hand.”

  “Yes, but pros bluff enough to make that difficult.”

  Gun shrugged. “Most pros think they bluff randomly, but human beings are creatures of habit. They fall into patterns whether they want to or not. Even a bluffing pattern can be read if you look for it. Dude, I could teach you all the numbers of the game, although that would take weeks or months, but the human psychology of poker—that beast takes years to master.”

  The good news: in Collin’s line of work, reading and interpreting human psychology was a key part of the job. He’d been a human intelligence analyst—first for the British SAS and then for Wild Cards, Inc.—ever since he’d graduated from university. Patterns of behavior, he knew how to spot.

  He confessed, however, “I have no idea how to bluff.”

  Gun frowned. “Sure you do.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How old were you when you came out?”

  “I don’t see how that has anything to do with—”

  “You are out, aren’t you?” Gun demanded in shock.

  “Well, sort of.”

  “Explain.”

  This was really none of Gun’s business. But Collin had been the one to initiate this whole conversation, so it wasn’t like he could really take offense at where it went. He sighed. “In my own life, I’m out. My coworkers and friends know. My family prefers to live in denial. They do technically know I’m gay, as in I told them outright once many years ago.
But they declared it an unfortunate phase, and we never spoke of it again. They pretend I outgrew it, and I live my own life.”

  “Perfect.”

  He blinked at Gun’s strange pleasure at what was a constant source of pain in his life.

  “We’re talking about bluffing,” Gun reminded him. “Closeted people become extremely proficient liars by necessity. They have to live a lie.”

  Collin stared. He’d never thought of it in those terms before.

  “Think about how you hold your face, your entire body, when you’re passing as straight with your family. How you check your words and gestures—every little nuance of behavior—and consider what it will reveal before you follow through with it. Bluffing is pretty much the same. You have to focus intently on what you’re doing.”

  Huh. He definitely knew what Gun was talking about. There had been a time in his life when he’d lived in that careful, secretive space all the time. Maybe that was why he excelled at his particular line of work. And maybe it would make him a half-decent bluffer, now that Gun had pointed it out.

  Gun was speaking again. “…trick, then, is to pick up on when other players are really focusing hard on their own physical actions.”

  Collin nodded. “So you use the concentration required to pull off a good bluff to reveal the bluff attempt.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Then I should concentrate on my actions that intently every hand. That way, when I do bluff, I won’t give it away!” he exclaimed.

  “Now you’re catching on,” Gun replied, grinning.

  Lord, that man’s smile was sexy. It stole the oxygen right out of Collin’s lungs.

  “How did you figure out the correlation between being closeted and bluffing?” Collin asked curiously. Gun struck him as the type who wouldn’t have given a flying fuck what anyone thought when he’d figured out he preferred boys over girls.

  “My old man can be a bit of a control freak. I had to play along with my orientation being a ‘youthful rebellion.’ At least until I left home and went to college. My father was embarrassed by my lifestyle choices.”

  Collin knew the bitterness in Gun’s voice all too well from personal experience. At least they had that in common. “He does know it’s not a choice, right?” he demanded.

  Gun rolled his eyes, and they shared a look of commiseration. An awkward silence descended between them, and Collin took a deep breath and started to turn for the door.

  “Wait,” Gun blurted. “Don’t go.”

  Startled, Collin froze in the act of leaving.

  Gun pulled out a deck of cards from a suitcase lying in the corner and plopped down on one side of the king-sized bed. Quickly he shuffled and dealt six pairs of cards faceup and five cards in front of himself, facedown.

  Slowly Collin sat down beside him. Gun was making up reasons for him to stay? What did it mean? How could it mean anything other than the obvious?

  Nonetheless, he listened intently as Gun rapidly explained how each imaginary player was likely to react given the cards in front of him. This was the thing the books and lessons had been missing—the synthesis of math and psychology. He leaned forward, studying the cards intently and running the numbers in his head from this fresh perspective that included behavioral factors.

  “Okay, so you’re hand number six,” Gun said. “What will you do?”

  He looked up and grinned. “I thought pros don’t give away their trade secrets. I’m not going to tell you what I’d do.” He knew what he would do in this case; he just wasn’t going to share.

  Gun laughed, and his entire face lit up with humor. The sound of it was infectious, and Collin’s own grin widened.

  Gun threw an arm over Collin’s left shoulder. “God, I like you, and I have no idea why. You’re so freaking proper and uptight.”

  Their gazes met, and the laughter faded from their expressions. Gun’s eyes were absolutely mesmerizing, an endless sea of sapphire he could lose himself in. “Thank you for the lesson,” Collin managed to choke out past an inexplicable tightness in his throat.

  “My pleasure,” Gun mumbled back.

  They leaned in a little closer to each other. “What’s your real name?” Collin asked.

  Gun’s mouth quirked up into a funny little half smile. “Oliver. Oliver Elliot.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Oliver.”

  “Likewise, my dear Collin.”

  Oh my. They completed the short journey, and their lips brushed against each other’s lightly. It was a chaste little peck, not at all what he was used to from his lovers, who usually fell on him voraciously and went straight for furtive sex without fanfare or foreplay.

  The muscular arm fell away from his shoulder, and Collin straightened, clearing his throat.

  Oliver murmured, “I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t have done that. But you’re just so damned exasperating and irresistible.”

  He smiled ruefully. “Thank you, I think.”

  “Aww, man, I didn’t mean it like that. You’re pretty cool beneath all that starch and… wool.”

  “I’m not entirely British, you know.”

  “Get out!”

  “My mother’s English. Dad’s American, so I’m a dual citizen. I was born in England but went to Princeton for university. My parents moved to America while I was there, so I moved back to England for graduate school and got a job in London. One thing led to another, and I’ve never gone back to the States.” Desperate to distract himself from the way his heart was pounding and those generous, warm, lips that made him think dirty thoughts, Collin asked a little breathlessly, “Where are you from?”

  “California. San Jose, originally. Stanford University. Lived in Las Vegas for a while when I was still playing poker, and then I went to Santa Cruz. Best surfing in California day in and day out. And Mavericks is only about an hour away.”

  “Mavericks?”

  “Best big waves on the West Coast.”

  “Another surfing reference, right?”

  “Give the man a gold star!”

  God, he was tempted to lean forward and kiss all that laughter and sunshine in Gun’s—Oliver’s—face. Nobody’d warned him this mission would include a guy he couldn’t keep his hands or mouth off of. It was supposed to be a routine in-and-out operation. Stick around a few days, just long enough to figure out what the deal with this tournament was, and then return to base. Which was why they’d sent in a desk jockey like him. Except he was mighty tempted to take his sweet time figuring out what was going on around here and prolong his time with Oliver.

  “Do your friends and family call you Ollie?”

  “Not if they want to live. Like I told you, my nickname on the beach is Gun, and that’s what everyone except my parents calls me. They tend to introduce me to people as their son, The Disappointment.”

  “From what I’ve seen, you’re an impressive guy. Why would they be disappointed in anything about you?”

  Oliver’s gaze softened. In what felt like a moment of candor out of the surfer, he mumbled, “They wanted me to work in the family business, but I refused. They cut me off financially, but I still refused to cave in to them. I’d rather be homeless than be their puppet.”

  “Puppet” was an interesting word choice. It spoke of strings that went far beyond simple familial duty. Collin’s psychology-trained self red-flagged Oliver’s family dynamic for later investigation and analysis.

  Oliver dealt several more rounds of cards and quickly analyzed them while Collin paid fierce attention. He learned more about poker in those few minutes than from all the books he’d read. What struck him most, though, was how blinking fast Oliver ran the complex calculations of various odds. Collin was fast, but Oliver’s mental speed was nothing short of stunning. The guy might look like a bum, but he had a world-class mind beneath that scruffy exterior.

  “What did you study at uni?” Collin finally asked.

  Oliver shot him a crooked grin. “What else? Math.” A pause. “I probably ought to di
sclose that I had a PhD in math by age nineteen. Did my postdoc work in probability. I was a full professor at Stanford by age twenty-four.”

  “Wow. That explains a lot about why casinos hate you.” And maybe it explained a little about his odd attraction to Gun/Oliver. He never could resist a brilliant mind. “If you don’t mind my asking, why the whole beach bum persona? There’s got to be more to it than pissing off your family.”

  Oliver gathered up the cards and shuffled them idly. “That’s a perceptive question.”

  “And that’s not an answer.”

  “You have to understand. My father is a powerful man. Intense. Saying he pushed and pressured me is like saying a volcano is a little bit warm. I had to get away from not only him, but everything he stood for. I couldn’t breathe.”

  Collin made a sympathetic noise. He knew plenty about suffocating families. His might have been well-meaning, but their failure to acknowledge who he was still stung. There was a reason he’d stayed in England after college and never gone back to New Jersey. Having totally killed the mood by bringing up their shitty pasts, he rose to his feet. “Thanks for the poker lesson. I owe you one.”

  Oliver moved swiftly around the end of the bed, blocking his path to the door. “You owe me one what, Collin Callahan? What do you want from me?”

  Collin stared, startled. Another revelatory choice of words. “I don’t want anything from you. I’m merely expressing gratitude and willingness to reciprocate.”

  Oliver moved aside so he could pass. “Fuck. I’m sorry. It’s just this tournament putting me on edge….”

  “What about it is putting you on edge?”

  “There’s a vibe…. Something’s wonky about it. Wonkier than the giant entry fee, no announced prize, and ultraprivate location.”

  Fascinating. Oliver felt it too, did he? Collin shrugged. “This definitely is a strange tournament. If nothing else, we’ll know by the end of it who’s the best of the best.”

  “That’s the thing. I think there’s more to it than that.”