Page 13

CHAPTER 13

I EXITED THROUGH the double doors and followed the plushly carpeted corridor back towards the hotel reception. A night porter manned the desk, slumped down in his chair and looking as bored as I felt.

“Excuse me?”

He glanced up.

“Is there a bar or a lounge somewhere here? Other than the carnage back there, I mean.” I gestured back at the way I came.

“Of course, madam. The Thornton Bar is down that corridor, last door on the right.” He straightened up and pointed at a door on the other side of the room.

My eardrums rejoiced as the music faded, and it wasn’t long before I found myself in an oak-panelled bar. It was straight out of an old oil painting—the sort of room where a bunch of country gents would retire after dinner. They’d smoke cigars and discuss the important things, like how many pigeons they’d shot that afternoon.A series of dusty tapestries on the walls spoke of a slower-paced life, before the days of cars, aeroplanes, and the internet.

If only things could be so simple now.

The bartender looked like a relic from the past too. I sat down with my water, relishing the peace and resigning myself to a few hours of waiting.

Yes, I was still bored, but at least my head had stopped pounding. The room was almost empty—the only patrons were a couple in the corner having a quiet drink and a man at the bar staring into his glass like it held the answer to life’s troubles.Then the door crashed into the wall, disturbing the peace. All heads swivelled toward the newcomer.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

He lowered the average age of the customers by a decade or two. I guessed he was around thirty, and he’d have been considered handsome if his nose hadn’t been broken one too many times.The guy ordered a round of drinks, and the barman poured them so slowly that watching him would have benefitted from time-lapse photography.

“Have you got a tray?”

The barman shook his head and shrugged. Service with a smile in this place.

I wandered over. “Need a hand?”

“Thanks, you’re a lifesaver. Do you want to order one for yourself?”

I looked back at the bar, where the old man was wiping a cloth backwards and forwards across the same bit of surface, over and over again.

“Perhaps not, eh? I have to leave at two, and Mr. Cheerful would still be pouring it.”

The stranger laughed and rolled his eyes. Between us, we grabbed the six drinks on the bar plus the glass of water I already had, and I followed him towards the lift.

“I’m Mark. I’d shake hands, but…”

“It’s fine. You’re staying here?”

“Fortunately not. Have you seen the mess through there?” He jerked his head towards the Hunt Ball.

“It’d be hard to miss.”

“Yeah, you’d have to be deaf. Me and some friends got talked into bringing our kid sisters. They’ve got to be accompanied by responsible adults.” He gave a wry laugh. “My mother thought I fitted the bill.”

“I’m here with friends. And when I say ‘here with friends,’ I mean my job is to shovel them into a car at the end of the night.”

“Nightmare, isn’t it? We learned from last year, so we’ve rented a room.”

“Sounds cosy.”

“Not like that. We’re playing poker.”

The lift arrived and Mark pressed the button for the second floor with his nose.A poker game. That sounded more fun than the debacle in the ballroom. Would they let me stay?I figured I had two minutes to convince them.

As it turned out, that was easier than I thought. I backed through the door, and when I turned around, I found myself face-to-face with Luke Halston-Cain.The room was more of a suite, and he raised an eyebrow as he thumbed the stack of poker chips on the table in front of him.

“I see you managed to pick up Ash,” he said to Mark.

“Less of that talk—I’m spoken for. Anyway, she was the one who came over to me. It must have been my magnetic personality.”

“Or your inability to carry a round of drinks. I offered to help with the glasses. That hardly translates as wanting to strip you naked and do you over the bar,” I said.

That got a laugh from five of the men and a snort from the sixth.

“Makes a change from most of the women down there,” the man sitting next to Luke said. I didn’t recognise him.

Mark put his armful of glasses on the table, leaving wet rings on the polished surface. “Yeah, walking into that ballroom would be like taking a shortcut through shark-infested waters on your way home from the butcher’s shop.”

“Although if Luke doesn’t stop eating my crisps, I’ll march him downstairs and handcuff him to the bar. The women can take turns,” another of the men said.

“I’ll buy you another packet,” Luke said then turned to me. “Are you staying? You don’t seem drunk enough to hang out downstairs.”

I grinned at him. “Thought you’d never ask.”

He introduced the other players. Ben was the guy on his left, the one who’d had a dim view of the female partygoers, and his dimple distracted me while Luke waved at the other three, so I missed their names. I cursed myself—with regulation non-swear words only, of course—because I never used to lose my focus like that. In my head, I christened the blanks as Huey, Dewey, and Louie. That seemed to work. As Ben divvied the chips up, I gathered that they weren’t close friends of the others, anyway, but rather they’d been brought together by a shared desperation to avoid the havoc downstairs.

“Want me to deal the first game?” I asked.

Luke raised that eyebrow again. At least he hadn’t had Botox. “You know how to play poker?”

Come on, dude, it’s the twenty-first century. Women were allowed into casinos.

“I’ve played occasionally.”

“In that case…” He pushed the deck of cards in my direction. “Deal away.”

Game on.