The Highest Stakes of All. Sara Craven

off the game.

      She’d hoped, after the incident in Australia the previous year, that she’d be let off the hook, but her reprieve had only lasted a couple of months. Then it was business as usual, responding, when Denys signalled by brushing his forefinger across his lips, as if she was on auto-pilot.

      She felt a knot of tension tighten in her chest. ‘Dad—I’d really rather not be involved in this.’

      ‘But you already are, my pet.’ There was a harsh note in his voice. ‘If we can’t pay our hotel bill, you won’t be spared. You know that. So be a good girl and collect your dress from Marie Claude. And I don’t want you rushing to get ready this evening,’ he added warningly. ‘You need to take your time. Make sure you look dazzling. So tell those people they’ll have to look after their own brat for once.’

      Joanna sat up very straight. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I won’t. Or you’ll be on your own in that suite tonight, looking down the barrel of this tycoon’s gun.’

      ‘You’ll do as you’re told, young lady—’

      ‘No, Dad,’ she interrupted quietly and firmly. ‘Not this time. After all, you can hardly drag me in there by force, not if I’m to convince this Mr Gordanis that he’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a man.’

      She took a deep breath. ‘But first I’m going to babysit for Chris and Julie, or the deal’s off. And I have to tell you that this is going to be the last time I act as a diversion for you, because each time I do it I feel sick to my stomach.’

      She paused again. ‘You told me you wanted me with you because I was all you had left. Because I reminded you of my mother. So what do you think she’d say if she could see me—paraded around like this, like some—cheap tart?’

      ‘My dear child.’ Denys’s tone was uneasy as well as placatory. ‘I think you’re taking our little deception much too seriously.’

      ‘Am I?’ Joanna asked bitterly. ‘I wonder if the men whose wallets I’ve helped to empty would agree with you.’

      ‘Well, you certainly don’t have to worry about Mr Gordanis,’ Denys said with faint surliness. ‘His bank account will survive a quick raid.’

      ‘I’m not worried about him,’ she said quietly. ‘It’s you.’ She hesitated. ‘Dad—swear to me that if you start winning tonight you’ll get out while you’re ahead. Make enough to cover our expenses here and a couple of plane tickets to somewhere else, then stop.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘Please—I’m begging you. Because I need a real life.’

      He sighed impatiently. ‘Oh, all right. If that’s what you want. But I think you’re being quite ridiculous, Joanna.’

      ‘I can deal with that,’ she said. ‘It’s feeling dirty that I can’t handle.’ She paused again, awkwardly. ‘There won’t be any other—problems, will there?’

      His mouth tightened. ‘That was a one-off,’ he said. ‘As I told you at the time.’

      Yes, she thought unhappily. You told me. So I have to trust you. And I just pray that when tonight’s over I’ll feel able to do that again.

      The dress from the boutique did nothing to reassure her, or lift the bleakness of her mood. It was a black crochet affair, with a deeply scooped neck and a skirt that just reached mid-thigh. The sleeves provided the most concealment, fitting closely to the elbow then flaring to the wrist, but that was little comfort when, underneath, the dress accommodated nothing more than a body stocking, giving the troubling impression that she could be naked.

      She’d looked at herself in the mirror of the tiny changing room with something like despair. ‘Surely there must be something else? Something not quite so—revealing?’

      Marie Claude had shrugged, her eyes cynical. ‘You have a good body. Use it while you are young.’

      So Joanna took the dress back to the suite, and hung it in the armoire.

      She spent the rest of the afternoon washing her hair and conditioning it until it shone with all the rich depth of a horse chestnut, then gave herself a pedicure, painting her toenails in the clear light red that matched her fingertips.

      Lastly, she arranged the cosmetics she planned to use later on the dressing table, together with her precious bottle of Miss Dior, before changing into shorts and a tee shirt, and heading off to Chris and Julie’s bungalow situated on the farthest edge of the hotel gardens.

      Its remoteness didn’t bother Joanna, who loved the sense of privacy imparted by the surrounding hedges of flowering shrubs.

      ‘I expect we’ve been dumped here out of the way,’ Julie had confided. ‘But that’s fine by us. Because if Matt decides to squall we don’t have to worry about disturbing the neighbours.’

      It had another advantage, too, thought Joanna. There was no direct sea view, so she was spared the sight of the Persephone together with her owner and any stray members of her crew who might still be hanging around, behaving like God’s gift to women.

      The sun was getting lower in the sky, but it was still warm, so she let herself in and took a bottle of chilled Coke from the refrigerator in the tiny kitchen, and the copy of Watership Down which Julie had promised to leave for her ‘together with a box of tissues. It’s all about rabbits'.

      ‘And I’ll give you Jaws,’ Chris had teased. ‘By way of contrast.’

      She settled herself with a sigh into one of the cane chairs on the small verandah, relishing the peace, longing to start her new book, but unable to dismiss from her mind the horrors she knew were awaiting her later that night.

      She had watched poker games in the past until her eyes glazed over, as they often did when a game continued through the small hours into dawn. But that was through boredom as much as tiredness. She had tried at first to establish some kind of interest in the game, but she still didn’t follow its intricacies or understand its attraction.

      In fact I wouldn’t care, she told herself, if I never saw another pack of cards as long as I live.

      But she wasn’t likely to be bored this evening. Far too much depended on it, and the role of mindless dolly-bird would be even more difficult to sustain than usual.

      It was a good ten minutes before Chris and Julie arrived with the baby, looking harassed.

      ‘He’s been really grumpy at supper,’ Julie reported. ‘Started crying and threw his food on the floor. I could feel waves of disapproval reaching me from the nannies all over the room.’

      She unstrapped a red-faced Matt from his pushchair and lifted him out, whereupon he began to cry again, a steady, bad-tempered wail.

      ‘Leave him to me,’ said Joanna, sounding more reassuring than she actually felt. ‘Go and have a smashing meal together, and I’ll bath him and get him settled.’

      Julie looked at her with a mixture of doubt and relief. ‘Well, if you’re quite sure …’

      Half an hour later, Joanna wasn’t certain of very much at all. Matt was standing up in his cot, roaring with discontent and shaking the bars, only desisting when Joanna picked him up and held him.

      ‘You haven’t got a temperature,’ she told him. ‘And I don’t think you’ve got a pain anywhere. I suspect, my lad, you’re just having a major strop.’

      Any attempt to get him back in the cot, however, met with stern resistance, so in the end Joanna bowed to the inevitable, heated up his milk, and carried him out to the twilit verandah, settling his squirming red-faced person gently but firmly in the crook of her arm.

      ‘This had better not become a habit,’ she said, dropping a kiss on his silky head.

      By the time he’d drunk nearly all the milk his eyelids were drooping, but he was still attempting to cry intermittently as he fought against sleep.

      ‘Drastic