Betting on Hope (36 page)

Tanner stared after her, feeling angry, but sick, too.
She was wrong
. He hadn’t ripped her off. He just hadn’t known. His anger simmered with the false accusations she’d thrown at his head.

But she was right about one thing. She
would
lose the ranch tonight.

She had to, or he’d go to prison. And he wasn’t going to prison.

He’d make it up to her later. Somehow. But in the meantime, he still had work to do.

He lifted off the toilet tank cover, ripped off the baggie taped there, and stuffed the contents into his pocket. Then, he too, rejoined the players in the living room.

“Jesus, took you long enough,” Big Julie said. “I coulda lent you some Metamucil, you need that crap.”

Tanner, his heart pounding, tried to act natural as he refilled his glass and then stopped at the ficus plant, pretending to feel its leaves while he attached a button model camera to a branch, before he returned to the table.

“I’m fine, Julie,” Tanner said as he sat down. “Sorry. Hope and I were catching up on old times.” He glanced at Hope, but she kept her eyes on the table.
Fine.
She could be that way.

“Let’s go, then. I start the deal,” Big Julie said.

Hope jerked her head up at Big Julie’s words.

“There’s no dealer?” she asked. Card games without dealers were more susceptible to cheats. She didn’t want to suspect Tanner before the game had even begun, but she had seen him practicing card tricks almost a week ago. And he was so
positive
that she’d lose.

“Who needs a dealer? It’s just a little card game among friends,” Big Julie said. He sat down and picked up a pack of new cards, broke the seal, and started to shuffle. Drake passed out equal chip stacks to all the players.

Big Julie slapped the deck down on the table in front of Sandy Schraf, who sat on his right.

“Cut,” he said.

The game started.

Hope kept her eyes glued to the table as she watched the deal go around and tried to control her emotions. Anger, disappointment, helplessness, and fear—none of it would do her any good right now. All those feelings would just cloud her judgment in the game. If she was to have a prayer of winning against Tanner, she had to keep a clear head.

Maybe her situation wasn’t hopeless. Just because Tanner knew how to cheat didn’t mean that he would. He might play an honest game tonight because otherwise she might give him up to the other players. Big Julie was no wimp. He’d throw Tanner out of the game—or worse—if he caught him cheating.

And even if Tanner did cheat, she was prepared. She could play to counteract it.

Tanner was no doubt a far more experienced player than she was, but she still had a chance. Skilled players won, but even skilled players got bad cards and bad breaks. Books were written about excellent players who had losing sessions, losing streaks. Players who lost their nerve.

She glanced Tanner. He didn’t look like he’d lose his nerve.

She’d have to play her very best—better than she’d played all week—and she’d have to have luck, too, if she was to win. If she waited for the right cards and played them aggressively, like Marty—and Tanner—had told her all week, she could win.

Tanner was a professional poker player and a known card cheat, but she’d won two hundred fifty thousand dollars in one week. And even professional poker players and known card cheats had to respect that.

Chapter 26

Tanner was cheating.

She thought she’d been prepared for the possibility, but the blind rage that swept over her when she saw him do it stole her breath and left her shaking. She wanted to lunge across the table and strangle him with her bare hands.

Just like Derek. He was
just like Derek.
A laughing, charming, handsome
devil
who’d run over your heart and steal your purse, and then leave you, bleeding and wounded, wondering what you’d done wrong when he got what he wanted and walked away.

How could she have been so stupid? Why did she fall for it? She’d
known
what would happen if she got mixed up with Tanner.

If she let him get away with it, he’d take the ranch—her life—from her.
Just like Derek.

She didn’t know how to tell the other players. And she wasn’t sure that she should. No one else had noticed, so it would be her word against Tanner’s. And she didn’t want Big Julie to shut down the game, which he might do if he thought his “friendly” get-together had been infiltrated by a pro—a
cheating
pro. Shutting down the game was the last thing she wanted.

But she wanted Tanner to stop cheating. Before he stole her home out from under her.

The trick he was using wasn’t complicated. Derek had used the same technique—had
taught
her the same technique. When it was his turn to deal, Tanner gathered the cards, talking the whole time, flattering the winners and inflating their egos. But instead of bunching the cards into the deck randomly, he arranged them the way he wanted them—high cards at the bottom of the deck. That part was easy to spot.

The cheating riffle shuffle was easy to spot, too, if you were looking for it. Tanner held half the deck in each hand and caught the cards at their corners before pushing them together. Riffle shuffles, if done right, kept cards in the deck where the cheating dealer wanted them. Tanner left the face cards on the bottom of the deck. Just like Derek used to do.

Then came the hard part—at least it had been hard for her when Derek taught her the trick. When Tanner cut the cards, he had to palm the high cards from the bottom of the deck. She’d never been able to manage it, but Tanner’s hands were large, with broad palms and long, flexible fingers. Just as Derek had done, Tanner easily concealed the cards in his hand.

After the cut, he put the face cards at the bottom again. He dealt the pocket cards to all the other players legally, from the top, but he dealt the aces and kings to Big Julie from the bottom of the deck.

Simple to spot, if your father had shown you from childhood how to cheat at cards. Simple, if you knew what you were looking for.

There was only one thing that Hope hadn’t figured out. Derek had used this trick to augment his own game, increase his own winnings. Tanner used it to augment Big Julie’s.

Why would Tanner do that?

It was a mystery. Still, whether Tanner wanted to benefit himself or Big Julie didn’t matter. He was cheating. Either way, if he didn’t stop, she’d lose the ranch.

 The first time she saw it, in the first round, on Tanner’s first deal, she was so outraged she hardly knew what to say. “Use a riffle shuffle much, Tanner?” she’d asked, raising her eyebrows pointedly at him. “You don’t see that very often anymore. Among pros.
Honest
pros, anyway.”

Tanner had laughed, glancing at her. “Well,
I’m not a pro
,” he’d emphasized. “So I don’t know much about fancy shuffles.”

Which made Tanner an habitual liar—also just like Derek.

She’d boiled as Big Julie had taken the pot with his pocket aces and the trip ace on the turn. Luck, everyone had called it, but she knew better. Tanner had
handed
Big Julie that pot. Twenty minutes later, when Tanner was dealing on the second round, she said something again. How else could she make Tanner stop? Only by letting him know that she saw what he was doing. That she
knew.
He’d been culling the cards after the last showdown, gathering the high cards together unobtrusively while he talked, diverting everyone’s attention.

“You must play a lot of cards,” she said, trying to sound admiring. “You’ve got the patter of a con artist.”

She’d gone a little too far. The other players stilled at her words—her fighting words.

“Well, listen to the little lady,” Bobby Stackhouse said finally into the silence. “You looking for a way to explain your losses to your boyfriend, sweetheart?”

Everybody laughed except Hope, who gritted her teeth over the insult. As if she had to explain her losses to anyone! As if she weren’t beating Stackhouse by a margin of three to one.

“She probably just hasn’t lost much before,” Tanner said, putting the face cards on the bottom of the deck while everyone looked at her. “She’s so pretty, all the men probably let her win.”

Everyone laughed again, harder this time. So now Tanner wasn’t only cheating on her, he was
laughing
at her, too? No, she definitely didn’t want Tanner to get into trouble with these players. She wanted him drawn, quartered, and hung out to dry, and she wanted to do it
herself.
She’d like to stuff those planted trip aces down his throat, right now, while she showed these braggarts what a
real
riffle shuffle looked like. 

But after that attempt to make him stop, she’d shut up. She’d told Tanner as directly as she could what she’d seen. He’d gotten the message—she knew he had because he’d glanced at her, his own eyebrows raised—but he hadn’t stopped palming the cards.

Trying to circumvent the cheating was exhausting. She couldn’t think only about how to play her best game. She had to think how Tanner was skewing the cards for Big Julie, and how he might skew them because he knew her style of play. She had to shift her strategies constantly, trying new things to keep him off balance. Because although Tanner had helped her get to Big Julie’s table, now that she was sitting here, he was doing his best to wipe her out. He
wanted
her to lose.

She would
not
give up without a fight. She would not give in to his sleazy, dirty, underhanded—not to mention illegal—tactics.

Because if she lost, everything she’d worked for—not just this last week, but for the last ten years—would be for nothing. She would lose the ranch. Her family would have to start over. And that would be Tanner’s fault. Because he cheated her out of it.

How could he do this to her?
Had this afternoon meant
nothing
to him? Did
she
mean nothing to him?

Evidently not. And if she meant nothing to him, he had to mean nothing to her, too.

All she could do—and that was quite a lot—was play her best. If she could push Tanner out of the game, it would be just her and Big Julie, playing for the ranch. Playing honestly, if Tanner were out of the picture.

A big
if.
But not impossible. Even the best card players—even pros—had bad days, bad hands, and bad deals. She had to play her best so she could stay in the game and hope that she would have the skill or the luck to beat him or that Tanner would have a bad break and go down.

The game went on. One by one the other players lost their stakes and dropped out. Four hours into the game, when Hope’s back ached and her eyes burned with fatigue, only she, Tanner, and Big Julie were left.

“You play a hell of a game,” Big Julie said to Hope as he got up and stretched. “They told me you did, and they was right.”

“Thank you,” Hope said as she stifled a yawn, thinking,
you have no idea
. She was playing
brilliantly.
If Tanner weren’t cheating, she might have won by now.

“Yes, you’re playing very well.” Tanner glanced at her, his eyes unreadable. She felt a new surge of anger—she was running out of steam but she didn’t seem to be running out of fury—and she glared back, her eyes narrowing, even as she watched him gather the cards from the last hand, putting all the high cards on the bottom. It was Tanner’s deal.
Another hand about to go to Big Julie.
Well, at least Tanner did have a real idea of how well she was playing.

“You play very
creatively
,” she said, looking at him deliberately and then at his hands. “You intend to play this hand with as much—gusto—as you’ve played all the others?”

Tanner frowned at her quickly. “I just play the cards I’m dealt, like everybody else.” His voice had a sharper edge than usual.

“Hey no need to get testy,” Big Julie said. “We’re just playing a friendly game here. I want something to drink, do you guys want something? Drake!”

Drake appeared silently in the doorway. “Bring us some drinks,” Big Julie said. “Coffee for the lady, right sweetheart? And bring us some a them little cocktail wienies!”

“Better make it mineral water,” Hope said. “I’ve had so much coffee, any more would make my hands shake.”

“Can’t have that, now, can we?” Big Julie asked jovially, helping himself to a sandwich.

“It would be especially bad if the
dealer’s
hands shook,” Hope said pointedly, looking at Tanner. “That might
reveal
something.” Tanner never glanced up as he shuffled, that deceptive riffle shuffle, and put the deck down in front of Big Julie.

Big Julie took a huge bite out of his sandwich and cut the cards, slamming the cut down on the table, winking at her as he did so.

Hope watched in exhausted anger as Tanner palmed the cards during the cut.
He is stealing the ranch from me,
she thought
. Right now, this minute, he’s stealing it from Faith, from mom, from Amber. Hand by hand in this crooked card game, he is stealing our home and our livelihood. We’ll never get it back, everything we have will be gone forever, because of what he’s doing right now.