Fidelity Files (15 page)

I RECOGNIZED Parker from his picture right away. As I scanned the tables at the Bellagio Poker Room I assumed the other early-thirty-something guys scattered around the room were friends of his, judging by the way they were all dressed: ready to hit the clubs once poker was deemed no longer entertaining.

I gave my name to the poker room manager standing at the front podium, along with one of the several hundred-dollar bills I had stuffed into my small white leather Versace clutch.

"Table number 13, please," I said quietly, motioning ever so slightly toward the table where my subject was seated.

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.

It was like having our own personal referee of the game, the dealer's only purpose being to make sure we each knew the rules, we each knew the stakes, and neither one of us got hurt in the process...well, at least not physically.

Little did the dealer know he was chaperoning the exchange of much higher stakes than just sixty dollars.

Parker's move was exactly what I had anticipated. He read my earlier hesitation and interpreted it as fear. Fear that my hand might not be good enough. This was, of course, exactly how I wanted him to interpret it.

Now, without any hesitation, I immediately pushed all my chips into the center of the table. "All in," I declared.

"Re-raise. Make it three hundred," the dealer broadcasted after counting my chips.

Re-raise, make it your fiancé,
I thought.

Parker scrutinized me. As did the rest of the table. Who
was
this girl? She sits down looking relatively clueless in her tight jeans and revealing top, and in only twenty minutes she's managed to get a pot up to nearly six hundred dollars.

I kept a straight face, only revealing a very small, select portion of my intentions. Just enough to keep things interesting.

By this time two of Parker's buddies had appeared from a nearby table and were standing behind him, observing the action.

I was sure he had the three kings. If not, he would have folded. Especially with the flush possibility on the board. Which means he'd had me beat until the last card fell.

Three kings is a very difficult hand to fold, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't. And I was certain that by the end of the night he would wish he had.

Parker called my raise and pushed a large stack of chips into the middle. The dealer instructed us to flip over our cards. The look on his face was one of pure horror. The only hand that could have beaten him was staring back from my side of the table. I couldn't help but silently observe the interesting foreshadowing of the situation.

"She pulled the heart on the fucking river!" he groaned to one of his friends.

I smiled as the dealer pushed me the large pile of chips. "Sorry, that's just the nature of the game," I replied, half sympathetically, half gloating. It was exactly the combination he would respond to.

He sucked up his manly pride, and in a sincere voice and a very sportsmanlike manner, offered up a courteous, "Good hand."

"Thanks," I replied, as I attempted to stack up all my newly earned chips.

I pretended not to notice as Parker and his friends made a joint decision to call it a night at the poker tables and move on to a club. I strained my ears to hear where they were planning to go, but unfortunately, I wasn't able to catch a location.

"Well, it's been nice playing with you," he said in the general direction of the table, but more specifically to me.

There were a few murmurs from the other players, reciprocating the sentiment, and I looked up and said, "Yes, a definite pleasure."

Before leaving, he turned back around, as if he were going to say something else, but all that came out was, "Maybe I'll see you around."

I smiled. "Maybe you will."

And he would.

AS SOON as the boys were out of sight, I scrambled to throw my

chips into a rack, grab my stuff, and make my way to the cashier.

I cashed out with exactly $650 more than I had started with.

As I stuffed the bills into my bag and headed toward the front entrance of the casino, I made a mental note to start taking on more assignments where I got to make an extra 650 bucks on the side. Not a bad arrangement at all.

I hid myself from view as I watched Parker and his ten or so friends hop into a consecutive series of taxis in front of the hotel. I would have to find out their destination before I went upstairs and changed into my "clubbing" uniform.

After the last cab pulled away from the curb, I walked outside and approached the taxi attendant. "Can you tell me where those guys went?" I asked, slipping a hundred out of my bag and into his hand.

He looked down at it, his reaction implying that this kind of request was not uncommon around here. "The Palms," he replied calmly and resourcefully, as if I had only asked him where the nearest ATM was.

"And what's the name of the club there?"

He looked down at my bag, the very direction from which his hundred-dollar bill had just emerged.

I groaned. "I don't think so," I said, turning on my heels and heading back toward the front door. I was quite certain the concierge would be happy to tell me the name of the club inside the Palms Hotel... for free.

"The nightclub Rain is there," he called after me.

I turned back around. "Thank you for your help."

"I get off at midnight. Can I look for you there later?" he asked with a flirtatious raise of his eyebrows.

"I don't think so," I said again, before returning to the casino.

An hour later I reemerged into the cool desert-night air in a slinky turquoise dress, a pair of "intention to fuck" heels, and an eye makeup job worthy of a
Vogue
photo shoot. (Mostly because I copied it from one.)

"Palms Casino?" the taxi attendant asked me with a smart-ass inflection and a sly smirk.

"Yes, thank you," I said flippantly, as if our previous encounter had never taken place.

He put me into the next cab and I was off, ready to accidentally bump into Parker Colman for the second time this evening.

TONIGHT, AS Ashlyn, I was supposedly partying with some friends at Club Rain in the Palms Casino. The rest of my party had already decided to hit the dance floor, but I was much more in the mood for a drink.

So I proceeded to squeeze by a group of thirty-something guys on my quest to reach the bar. Among them was a tall brown-haired man, masculine, good looking, obviously there to celebrate his bachelor party because he was wearing several Mardi Gras beads around his neck and a giant leopard-skin pimp hat on his head.

As I pushed myself past the group, a sense of recognition flashed over the man's face.

"Hey, I know you," he said.

He had obviously been drinking. I could smell the alcohol on his breath. For some reason, this seemed to make me smile.

The recognition transferred across the small space between us and onto my face as well.

"Yes, you do. What a coincidence. Twice in one night. Lucky me."

"No, lucky
me,
" he insisted. He turned to his buddies. "Look, it's the girl who took all my money."

A few of his friends recognized me immediately and whispered something inaudible into the bachelor's ear.

"I'm Parker." He extended his hand.

I shook it firmly, then allowed my palm to slide seductively away from his as I retracted it. "Ashlyn."

"Pretty name. Can I buy you a drink?" he offered.

"I don't know.
Can
you, after I took all your money?"

He laughed. "Well, technically you should be buying
me
a drink. But that would be so un-chivalrous of me. So I guess I'm going to have to manage."

"Jack and Coke," I replied with a smile, clearly intrigued by his good looks and gentlemanly manners. And I made no effort to hide it.

"Hey, that's what I'm drinking!" he said, holding up his half-empty glass. It certainly hadn't been his first.

"You have good taste," I remarked.

"Evidently, so do you."

He was good at this. I was impressed.

The bartender poured me a drink and I held my glass up next to his. "To Vegas?" I suggested.

"To things happening
in
Vegas..." he insisted.

". . . and staying there."

We toasted and I took a long gulp from my glass. The bachelor looked on, once again impressed by this mysterious and very attractive woman standing in front of him, practically oozing sex. But then again, this was Vegas. Everything oozes sex in Vegas.

"Do you want to dance?" he asked me.