Page 32 of One Night with a Prince

Chapter Seven

Something as innocent as whist can be a

prelude to seduction.

—Anonymous,Memoirs of a Mistress

Christabel fetched the cards and headed back to the parlor, then froze just outside the door. Dear Lord, perhaps letting Byrne into her home so late at night was a mistake. He’d clearly been aroused by her sitting on his lap earlier. What if he tried to act on it?

She mustn’t let him stay. She would tell him she’d changed her mind. But when she entered the parlor to find that he’d already pulled the card table out from the wall and set chairs before it, she faltered. He did have a point about hedging their bets. She did need to learn how to play better if she was to partner him. And they didn’t have much time before the house party…

“You found the cards?” He seemed oblivious to the intimacy of the small room where earlier he’d seen her half-dressed.

Surely if he were bent on seduction, he wouldn’t be sitting down at her card table. And it wasn’t as if he could stay the night—he had his club to hurry off to.

“Yes.” She set the deck on the table. Still nervous, she stood there uncertainly. “Would you like some refreshment? Wine? Brandy?”

“No. And none for you either.”

She blinked. “Why not?”

He shuffled the cards, then pushed them toward her for her to cut. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Half of winning at cards consists of staying sober when no one else is. It gained me many a trick when my cards were against me. I learned that from General Scott. He won two hundred thousand pounds at whist primarily by abstaining from drink at the tables at White’s.”

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“Oh.” She sat down. If Byrne were so bent on winning that he would eschew strong drink, then he clearly wasn’t thinking about seduction. She cut the cards, then handed them back to him, intrigued when he began to deal two piles. “How can we do this when we don’t have four people?”

“We’ll play two-handed whist. The strategy is different, but it will teach you how to use your trumps more effectively. That was your weak area tonight.”

“I see.” She squelched a niggling disappointment at his focus on the cards. She didn’twant him to try seducing her, for pity’s sake. Not at all.

“For the first few hands we won’t keep score, and after each trick, I’ll tell you how you might have improved your play. Once you’ve grasped the rules, we’ll play a real game with real stakes.”

She nodded. He finished dealing them each thirteen cards, then set the other half of the deck aside and turned up the top card.

“Now, the thing about two-handed whist is…”

For the next hour, Byrne’s entire attention was on the cards. And on beating her. She caught on to the rules fairly quickly, but couldn’t figure out how to beat him. Every time she thought she had him, he tossed onto the table a card she’d forgotten to account for. Nor did it help that he could predict, almost to a card, which cardsshe held. It was uncanny.

It was infuriating. Losing to Lady Jenner had been bad enough; losing to him was maddening. And she couldn’t even claim that her surroundings distracted her. Byrne allowed no jokes, no pointed questions, nothing but his matter-of-fact explanations of where she’d gone wrong in her play. After losing four rounds to him, she was eager to wipe that calm expression off his face. Well into the fifth round, she examined her cards, then played the ace of spades with a flourish.

“I told you never to lead with the ace,” he said.

She tipped up her chin. “Unless I had the king, too.”

“Are you strong in trumps?”

Blast, she’d forgotten about that rule. “No.”

He trumped her ace with a two and took the trick. “How you handle your trumps is everything in whist, Christabel. Tell me how many trumps you think I have left in my hand.”

“Two,” she snapped, without stopping to think.

He raised that maddening eyebrow of his. “You’re angry.”

“Of course I’m angry. I’m losing. Again.”

“You can’t let losing make you angry.”