Betting on Love

by Alexis Abbott

  “Jerry Laskin has been cheating,” the dealer grumbles, pointing an accusing finger.

  Gasps and arguments break out through the room and some of Carl’s guys start to hulk toward Jerry, cracking their knuckles and scowling with rage.

  “I knew it,” Carl says, shaking his head and sighing. “I knew you just couldn’t play clean if you wanted to. Dirty, cheating bastard.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jerry growls, looking at the young man who just sold him out, hatred in his eyes.

  “Come on, give it up!” snaps one of the security guys, looking at Jerry with frustration.

  Carl raises a hand, a rather worrying look of intrigue on his face. “No, no. Let’s not cause any trouble over this. My opponent may feel intimidated by me to the point of stooping to cheat. I can understand that. I do have that effect on others sometimes,” he says smugly.

  “Oh, can it, you slimy weasel,” grunts Jerry.

  “In fact,” Carl says, interrupting his opponent, “as a show of good sportsmanship and confidence, I will continue the game, despite my enemy’s inability to play it straight. But there’s a catch. If you’re going to cheat, then it’s only fair I pull my own trump card, as well.”

  There’s no sound as we all wait breathlessly for his next words.

  Carl slowly stands up and brushes off his suit, looking at Jerry with a raised eyebrow.

  “Not even your dishonest ways will stand up to my secret weapon,” he says, then turns to look at me, to my horror. “You will play my protege. Hadley.”

  I’m speechless, staring at my boss in shock. I can’t move. This isn’t how it was supposed to go.

  “Come along, sweetheart. The game is still going. Don’t make us wait,” Carl chirps, ushering me into his chair. I can’t refuse. My own life is on the table.

  I make brief eye contact with a rather puzzled and concerned Dom as I slide into the seat and scoot up to the table. Jerry looks much more relaxed now than before. It’s easy to see why. Not only is he being allowed to continue playing despite getting caught red-handed cheating, but now he’s facing a woman. I can tell he underestimates me. Immediately. But that’s his downfall. My boss may be a good player, but he’s got nothing on me.

  And Jerry learns that very quickly. Maybe he thought watching me for a single game was enough to know me, to be able to head me off, but he’s dead wrong. The game takes a turn. I win hand after hand, eliciting muffled gasps and cheers from the crowd. The smile hovering on Jerry’s face is fading, downturning further with every loss. Before long, I’ve got the game in the bag. Jerry’s skills are dwarfed by mine. Even with the nervousness prickling in my veins, I’m in control here.

  “I can’t believe it,” Jerry mutters roughly to himself, eyes bugging.

  “You lost,” Carl says gleefully, clapping his hands. “How wonderful! I knew my Hadley would never let me down. You see now what you’ll be missing out on! To think, I might’ve lost my girls to you. Do you understand what an asset the girl is? And she’s still mine. How lovely.”

  “You must have cheated somehow,” Jerry shouts, standing up abruptly. His chair is knocked aside as he stands there fuming and panting, his eyes glaring at Carl with venom. His hands ball into fists. “I won’t let you win,” he snaps, reaching for the gun he had stowed at his spine. But before he can even get there, the air is split with a deafening CRACK!

  Everyone screams and ducks down, reacting to the gunshot. And when the reverberations calm down just enough, I turn to see Carl recocking his gun with a big grin on his face. On the floor lies the body of Jerry Laskin, his head crowned with a spreading pool of bright red blood. Carl just killed a man! In his own club! In front of a crowd of witnesses.

  And, to my horror, Dom is nowhere in sight.

  “Well, it’s been fun,” Carl says lightly, running toward the exit with his gun pointed outward. The security guards all fall back with their arms up in surrender, the crowd making a wide berth for him to pass through.

  “No!” I shout, feeling our carefully-laid plans slipping through my fingers right in front of me. It can’t end this way. It just can’t. I make a dive for the exit, tripping over Jerry’s corpse and careening into the wall beside the door. Carl gives me a look of pure loathing and hastily grabs me, yanking me to his chest and pressing the cold barrel of his gun against my temple. I can scarcely breathe for fear, my eyes wide and searching for someone to save me.

  “Now! You will all stand back and let me leave, and if anyone tries to stop me, I will put a bullet right through this brilliant, beautiful head here,” Carl announces, tapping my temple with the end of the barrel.

  I whimper, feeling my legs start to tingle and go numb as mortal terror grips my entire body. This is the end. It has to be. All my clever calculations of risk and rewards, my understanding of psychology and why people act the way they do, my manipulation of events and circumstances all just crumbles away.

  I made a bad call.

  Slowly, Carl turns to open the door to escape, still gripping me in his arms. I know I have only one last shot. If I’m going to die, I’m going to die fighting, not later on after some extended period as a hostage. So I summon up my bravery and strength and twist my body around just far enough to knee Carl in the balls. He grunts with pain and glares at me, a bright fire of loathing lit up in his eyes.

  “You little bitch,” he snarls. This is the end. I know it.

  But in a flash of color and sound, something hits him with enough force to make him drop me to the floor. I fall down with a cry of surprise, whipping my head around just in time to see the gun fall out of Carl’s hands. In a split-second reflex, I catch the piece before it hits the ground. Just a moment later, before I can figure out what’s even going on, Carl’s body is the next thing to fall. He lands awkwardly, facedown with his legs all bent, and I know instantaneously that he is dead.

  I look up with wide eyes and a trembling chin to see Dom looming over me, his powerful chest rising and falling heavily. He wipes his hands on his pants and spits on the broken body on the floor.

  Dominick

  “You—you killed him,” Hadley whispers breathlessly as he I take her hand, pulling her to her feet.

  “I did. For Vanessa. For you. For all the women he’s ever hurt and all the women he was intending to hurt. You’re free now, Hadley.”

  She stares at me, and beneath her carefully practiced facade of calm and collected, I see something lingering in her eyes. Relief. Something she’s been terrified to admit to me, to herself, but she knew the risk if either of those men won. They weren’t going to let her ever walk away from them. She knew too much.

  And Hadley knew it. She was always going to be the ace in their back pocket.

  We’re done being played at a game we’ve mastered.

  Bullets start flying, but I put my gun away—this isn’t a war I’m starting, it’s a coup.

  We just need to get out of here alive. The fire is coming from Carl’s bodyguards, and I can hear some of the other security enforcers in the casino firing back, but I only have one thing on my mind: get us out of here.

  I take Hadley by the hand and run with her as fast as we can move, keeping low and weaving our way to an exit one of my associates has ready for me. In the blink of an eye, we’re out of the casino floor and winding our way through the back halls. The sounds of gunfire get more distant as we hurry down to the parking garage.

  “Are your men in position?” Hadley asks me through panting breaths as we run.

  “Hell of a time to ask,” I can’t help but chuckle as we move through the hallways that I’ve used for ages with the other security personnel. “Yeah, unless we’re about to run into a trap, we’re good to go.”

  “And if we are?”

  In response, I take out my gun and keep it at the ready as we get to the elevator leading down to the parking garage.

  But when the doors slide open a few moments later, I’m greeted by the exact sight I had arrang
ed: a valet and two enforcers standing beside Jerry’s own armored limousine, door open and waiting for our escape.

  “I hear gunfire,” one of the enforcers says as we rush to the limo. “Is it done?”

  “Yeah,” I say, giving him a curt nod as Hadley hops into the vehicle. “Jerry’s dead. Carl’s dead. All their deals are dead. It’s just us now. Cover our asses on our way out, and when we get back, you’ll be rewarded for it.”

  He nods, and I return it before climbing into the limo with Hadley, and we pull off.

  With the partition closed, Hadley and I ride in silence for a few long minutes, sitting opposite each other and breathing heavily. Finally, my face breaks into a smile, and Hadley can’t help but do the same. The next moment, we start laughing, and I feel like I’m walking on clouds.

  “It feels wrong to be laughing right now,” Hadley says, even though she can’t keep the grin off her face.

  “Maybe,” I say, moving over to her side of the limo and wrapping my arm around her, hugging her tight to me and kissing her on the cheek. “But I think we’ve earned the right to laugh whenever we want.”

  “I’ve worked through a lot of elaborate plans,” she says with a wistful sigh, “but never thought I’d succeed in making one like that work.”

  “You don’t give yourself nearly enough credit,” I say, smirking. “Did you have any trouble on your end?”

  “Not half as much as I expected,” she says, leaning back and crossing her legs. “Just like we planned, I tipped off Carl to let him know that Jerry was going to have him killed regardless of how this game worked out, and he believed me when I told him I’d rather work for him than Jerry. And we obviously know that Carl found the gun you planted for him in his room.”

  “Not my best breaking and entering, but it got the job done,” I say modestly. “Give a desperate man the means to undo himself, and he does all the work for you.”

  “The strangest thing is that part of me wants to feel bad about it,” she says with a soft smile that soon fades. “But not after what we found out about him doing to Vanessa. If that’s how he treats us, then there’s no way it wasn’t part of a pattern—Vanessa wasn’t the first of us he’d abused, I’m positive about that. All the people who left his team... I just figured it was a risky life, and too much travel. There’s always turnover in this line of work. I feel so blind. I didn’t see it at all...”

  “It was easier than I worried to get some of the other enforcers on my page,” I say. “There are going to be a few messes to clean up, but that game we played is every bit as much the last nail in his coffin as the bullet was.”

  “So, what happens now?” Hadley asks. “Is anything stopping us from carrying out the rest of the plan?”

  “Stepping in to fill the power vacuum, get the girls back together, and use Carl’s methods to bankrupt every other hotel in the area for us to buy out?” I say, cocking my head to the side with a wicked smile. “The idea of leaving Vegas in chaos is tempting, but no, nothing’s stopping us. What do you say, partner?”

  I run my hand through Hadley’s hair and take a gentle grip on it, tilting her head back and leaning in close, breathing up her neck and feeling her shiver as a blush comes to her face.

  “Want to play the long game with me?” I whisper into her ear.

  “Forever,” she purrs back.

  I can’t hold myself back. We’ve been skirting with danger the entire time that we’ve known each other, even plunging headlong into it. Now, it’s no different. I can’t resist her, whether we’re alone in a hotel room or in a getaway car after killing one of the most powerful men in Nevada. She’s mine, and I want to show her that.

  My lips press against her neck, and I breathe in the fragrant perfume she wears. I can smell it with my cologne, and it makes my heart beat faster. My hands reach over and grope her body through the staggeringly expensive dress.

  I feel her soft skin and the rich fabric covering it, and it makes my cock swell in my pants. My teeth brush against her neck, sharp edges against smooth softness, and I want to bite her. Something primal and possessive is slowly awakening in me, pushing away every other instinct I have except the one to take Hadley and make her mine, as if she already isn’t. I can taste that in the air, like a pheromone. We belong to each other, even here in the middle of the storm.

  My arms tighten around her, and I hug her to me. While I feel her body pressing against mine, I feel one of her hands wandering up my leg toward the growing shaft below my belt. Those hands have been so skillful, so subtle, and all they want to do right now is please me as much as I want to please her. It’s as much of a rush as the gunfight earlier, but with such a greater reward.

  Her hand finds my thick bulge, and I feel it send a pulse through my whole body, telling me how right she feels. I cup her face in my hand and bring our lips together. It’s a gentle kiss at first, but it soon explodes into so much more. We can’t keep our hands off each other. We start touching everywhere we can. Her hand strokes my cock through my pants, and I work one of my hands under her dress.

  I push the fabric aside and slide two fingers into her wet pussy, feeling how desperate she is for me. She’s no bystander swept up into things by chance. She’s just as deadly as me in many ways, and that’s such a turn-on that I’ve never encountered before in my life.

  I start stroking her from within, dragging my fingers up the insides of her wet depths and feeling her body shiver around my hand. Our tongues play with each other in our mouths while I finger her, and my cock pulses with desire more and more with each passing second. She’s already high-strung and ready to be plucked. All it takes is for me to find the right spot.

  And I do.

  Color fills her cheeks as I get a steady rhythm in her, and she starts pushing her hips up in time with me. She pants through her mouth as her eyes lock onto me. I can see the windows getting steamy as I grope her breast with one hand while fingering her with the other, and I feel like this girl is totally in my power right now.

  Soon, she digs her grip into the seat and my leg, and she lets her head fall back onto the seat as her whole body shudders. I can feel her come, and I stop her from squealing in delight by pressing a kiss to her lips. I feel her moan through my body as she comes, writhing in my grasp with every stroke.

  Once her orgasm comes to an end, I slide my hand out of her and stick my fingers into my mouth, watching her eyes. She smiles as I lick her off me, and as soon as it’s done, I open my pants to let my cock free.

  It sticks straight up, swollen and ready, and Hadley knows what to do. She hikes up her dress before I can even get a grip on her, and I guide her hips toward me. She wastes no time—she knows what she wants, and what she wants is me to fill her up as soon as possible.

  I pull her back down onto me, and her pussy envelops my shaft to the hilt. Even I have to let out a groan of pleasure unbidden. It’s a hot, wet, overwhelming feeling that awakens every resting nerve in my body. I grip her hips and start rutting up into her without any hesitation. We’re past the point of taking our time and feeling each other up. We want to fuck, and we want to do it fiercely.

  My hips hammer into her hard and fast. Hadley holds onto the seat and pushes back in time with me, never losing her share of control as I pound deep into her pussy, my thick crown gliding across her g-spot over and over again. Her hair is a mess, and her gown is half draped over me, and all that disorder only makes her more enticing to me.

  The cock pulsing between her legs is thicker than ever, and my balls are so swollen and sore that I’ve never been more eager to release inside someone. I reach up and grab her breasts from behind, fondling them and squeezing them as I rock into her. The sounds of her gasping fill the limo.

  We assassinated two crime lords and are fucking in the personal limo of one of them. The rush is beyond anything I thought I’d encounter when I first came to Vegas, and now, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

  Hadley is teasing me as we go, clenchi
ng herself when she thinks I least expect it, trying to get me to release. My grip tightens on her, and I slide back down to her hips to remind her who’s in control. But it’s not that easy—Hadley and I are two people who know exactly what we want out of a lover, and we find it in each other perfectly. She’s no pushover, and I’m no slacker. Our relentless, adrenaline-fueled fucking is a hot mess of all our desires wrapped up and burned so beautifully together that it’s like a high.

  I never want to come down from it. And with Hadley at my side, I never will.

  Almost hypnotized by the rhythmic feeling of my cock sliding in and out of her with such precision, it’s still no surprise when I feel Hadley starting to get tense again, ready to release. She squirms on top of me, trying desperately to keep from letting herself go. It’s like a competition between us. She starts pushing her hips in such a way that I feel white-hot pleasure running through the whole length of my shaft, so close to making me release. It’s a deadly tug of war that could go on forever, and I have no intention of backing down.

  But our desires are our undoing. We rut into each other with such ferocity and zeal that soon, we both realize at the same time that we’re about to lose control of our endurance. Hadley lets out a whimpered curse at the same time as I feel my nerves betray me, and the last warning of precum spills into her before my whole body readies itself to burst.

  We come together in sweet, adrenaline-fueled bliss. My shots of hot, virile seed fill her up while her body tenses and relaxes in one unending cycle that wraps us both up and holds us together in time. I’ve never felt closer to another human being, and she’s the only one I ever want to feel close to again.

  When it’s finally over, she slides slowly off my cock and flops down next to me, breathing heavily and smiling at me with lidded eyes.

  “This isn’t over, you know,” I say to her in a thick voice. “There’s still a lot of work to be done.”