He stiffened. “Your Highness will do.”
She didn’t realize she’d spoken his name aloud. Glancing to the right and left, she matched his sardonic tone. “So you’re using your title now.”
His blue eyes burned through her. “It is mine by right.”
She knew it was true. His great-grandfather had been one of the last great princes of Russia, before he’d died fighting the Red Army in Siberia, after sending his wife and baby son to safety in Alaskan exile. As a poverty-stricken child, Vladimir had been mocked with the title at school. When he was twenty-five, he’d told her that he never intended to use
the title, that it still felt like a mockery, an honor he hadn’t earned—and was worthless, anyway.
But apparently, now, he’d found a use for it.
“You didn’t always think so,” Bree said.
“I am no longer the boy you once knew,” he said coldly.
She swallowed. Ten years ago, she’d thought Vladimir was the last honest man on earth. She’d loved him enough to give up the wicked skills that made her special. When he’d held her tight on a cold Alaskan night and begged her to be his bride, it had been the happiest night of her life. Then he’d ruthlessly deserted her the next morning, before she could tell him the truth. When she needed him most, he’d stabbed her in the back. Some prince. “What are you doing here?”
His lip curled. Without answering her, he turned away. “The table is full,” he said to the other players. “We do not want her.”
“Speak for yourself,” one of them muttered, looking at Bree.
Looking around, she jolted in her chair. She’d forgotten the other men were there, looking at her like hungry wolves at a raw mutton chop. The beautiful, sexily dressed women standing in a circle behind them were glaring as if they would like to tear her limb from limb. Perhaps she’d taken her act a little too far.
Feel nothing, she ordered her shivering heart. I have ice for a heart. She looked away from the large, powerful men and sharp-taloned women. They couldn’t hurt her. The only man who’d ever been able to really hurt her was Vladimir. And what more could he do, that he hadn’t done already?
One thing, a cold voice whispered. Ten years ago, he’d taken her heart and soul.
But not her virginity.
And he never would, she told herself fiercely. Bree didn’t know what Vladimir Xendzov was doing in Honolulu, but she didn’t care. He was ancient history. All that mattered now was protecting Josie.
To save her little sister, Bree would play cards with the devil himself.
With an intake of breath, she lifted her chin, ignoring Vladimir as she looked around the table. “It is for this first game only that I offer my body. If I lose, the winner will get me, along with all the money in the pot. But if I win—” when I win, she amended silently “—I will only bet money. Until I possess the entire amount of my sister’s debt.”
As she spoke, her heart started to resume a normal beat. Bluffing, playing card games, was home to her. She’d learned poker when her father had pulled her up to their table in Anchorage and taught her at the tender age of four. By six, shortly after her mother had died two months after giving birth to Josie, Bree was a child prodigy accompanying her father to games—and, when he saw how much money she could make, his partner in crime.
Leaning forward, she looked at each man in turn, ignoring the death stares of the women behind them. “What is your answer?”
“We are here to play poker,” another man complained. “Not for hookers.”
Bree twirled her long blond hair slowly around one of her slender fingers and looked through her lashes at the Silicon Valley tycoon. “You don’t recognize me, do you, Mr. McNamara?”
“Should I?”
She gave him a smile. “I guess not. But you knew my father, Black Jack Dalton.” She paused. “Have you enjoyed the painting you paid him to steal from the archives of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles? When did you learn it was a fake?”
The Silicon Valley tycoon stiffened.
“And Mr. Vanderwald—” she turned to the gray-haired, overweight man sitting beside her boss “—twelve years ago you were nearly wiped out, weren’t you? Investing in an Alaskan oil well that never existed.”
The Belgian land developer scowled. “How the devil did you—”
“You thought my father conned you. But it was my idea. It was me,” she whispered, lowering her eyelashes as she ran her hand down the softly worn leather of her black motorcycle jacket. “It was all me.”
“You,” the fat man breathed, staring at her.
She was doing well. Then, from the corner of her eye, she felt Vladimir’s sardonic gaze. It hit her cheek and the side of her neck like a blast of ice. Her heart skidded with the effort it took to ignore him. He was the one man who’d ever really known her. The mark she’d stupidly let see behind her mask. She felt his hatred. Felt his scorn.