Free Slave Gamble by Claire Thompson

He won me in a
card game.
    I know, that
sounds crazy. It sounded crazy to me, too. If I hadn’t had more than my share
of fine champagne, I might have even slapped him in the face when he told me.
But instead I stood there like an idiot, letting a stranger tell me things that
should have made me blush. The odd thing was, though I’d never met him, I knew
him instantly.
    My stupid
boyfriend, Jim, had been betting at poker, as usual. He’d been drinking copious
amounts of beer too, as usual. But instead of the regular poker night with his
friends from work, where the stakes involved rarely went over twenty dollars,
tonight he’d found himself in a ‘real’ game, and was in way beyond his ken.
    Amelia, my one and
only truly rich friend, was throwing one of her gala bashes, complete with a
veritable Who’s Who list of local celebrities, wealthy business people and
movers and shakers in the community. As a reporter who covered the local scene,
I was familiar with a lot of them, if not personally, at least by face and
name.
    Amelia favored
‘themes’ and tonight apparently the theme was roses. Inside her lovely spacious
home, everything was draped in reds, pinks, yellows and whites. There was a
huge ball made entirely of roses hanging from the chandelier. The scent of the
lush flowers was overpowering, rising from vases all throughout the large
living and dining rooms. All the ‘beautiful people’ were either draped
attractively over the furniture, or out in back swimming in the huge pool or
soaking in the hot tub.
    Jim was somewhere
in the bowels of the house, at his card game, and Amelia was busy being a hostess.
I had stepped out by the pool to get away from the crowd, wondering, as I
usually ended up wondering when I went to these shindigs, what I was doing
there.
    I was smoking a
cigarette and thinking about what I’d tell Amelia as I made my early ‘graceful’
exit. I was deciding if I felt sober enough to drive, and decided that I did.
Jim, who had come with me, could find his own way home. To his own apartment. I
suddenly realized, or more accurately, admitted, something which was already
clearly written on the proverbial wall. Jim and I were history. We were just
about to figure it out, if we hadn’t already.
    A deep sexy voice
shook me out of my reverie.
    “Nauseating habit,
that.”
    I looked around
and saw a GQ kind of guy, with dark hair and eyes. He was wearing a silk shirt,
casually open at the neck, tucked into black jeans over black boots. His skin
was tan, offset nicely against the pale lemon color of his shirt. He was in
good shape, but not from a gym. It was the kind of long lean sinuousness that
comes from skiing and playing tennis; from steering your sailboat or hiking in
the Himalayas. He looked sleek and as if something was coiled inside of him.
Something sexy and possibly dangerous.
    In a word – he was
gorgeous.
    I was probably
staring at him like an idiot. Pointedly, I took a long drag on my cigarette,
trying to look cool and bored. It was so passé of him to criticize my smoking.
    “Excuse me?” I
said slowly, in my best freeze-them-in-their-tracks voice, daring him to
continue.
    “Smoking. It makes
me sick. You’ll have to quit now, you know.”
    “And why is that?”
I asked, annoyed that this stranger, no matter how drop dead gorgeous, was
harassing me about smoking; my mom and Jim did it enough.
    “Because I just
won you in a poker game, and I like my girls to taste sweet.”
    I laughed then,
realizing he was just having me on. Using a very creative pickup line, I
supposed. Still, I found myself intrigued, and as I mentioned, a little lacking
in the judgment department, courtesy of alcohol.
    “Sounds like Jim
really got desperate, huh?”
    “He sure did,
sweetheart. And I’m here to collect on his debt.” He came near and leaned in
close to me. I could smell his scent, something between cinnamon, lemon and
musk, as he bent down and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “You’re