murmured, his voice dropping to a low, conspiratorial tone.
“Oh? Has Rico been ill whilst I’ve been away?” Charles knew that the trio would have still continued to play poker here every Friday night, calling up a substitute player.
“No, not physically ill. I think he has something on his mind. He’s been quite short with me tonight, and that’s not like Mr Mandretti at all.”
No, it wasn’t. A self-made success story, Rico was inclined to treat the workers in this world much more politely than the privileged people he now mixed with. He liked and admired Charles because he’d earned his money through hard work and not just inheritance. Rico had little respect for the silver-spooned species.
An exception was their host every Friday night.
Prince Ali might have had his fortune bestowed on him through birth, being one of the pampered sons of an oil-rich Arab sheikh. But he was no sloth. Apparently, he worked his royal backside off at that stud farm he ran, very much a hands-on man when it came to his beloved horses.
Rico had stayed at Ali’s property a few times, and seen the man in action for himself. He thought Ali an OK guy, despite his billions, and treated him accordingly.
On the other hand, the fourth and last member of their private poker club wasn’t the recipient of Rico’s total respect. Rico obviously had ambivalent feelings towards Mrs Renée Selinsky. Although Renée had been very working class before making it big, first as a model, then as the owner of a highly successful modelling agency, Rico had difficulty overlooking the fact she’d subsequently married a banker old enough to be her grandfather.
In his eyes, marrying for money—Rico couldn’t conceive that she might have actually loved a man in his sixties—was just as bad as inheriting it.
By thirty, Renée had become an extremely rich widow, and had started buying shares in racehorse syndicates. That was how the four of them had met, because they’d all bought shares in one of Ali’s beautifully bred yearlings.
On the day their colt had run in and won the Silver Slipper Stakes, the three celebrating owners—and one very proud breeder—had discovered a mutual love of poker. The four of them had played their first game that Saturday night in this very suite.
That had been around five years ago. Now the merry widow, as Rico sometimes called Renée, was thirty-five, still a looker, and still possessing that cool, self-contained air which seemed to get under Rico’s skin.
But it was her brilliant brain which niggled Rico the most. He hated it when she beat him at poker. But Renée’s bluffing was sometimes simply superb and totally unpredictable. None of them could match her when she was on her game.
Charles accepted her superiority on those occasions with pragmatic logic and played conservatively, hating to waste his money. Ali often tried to force her to fold by raising the stakes outrageously high, and was sometimes successful. Renée was rich, but not in Ali’s league. Rico, however, would become testy and rude, sniping at her in a vain attempt to break her nerve, then inevitably making the wrong call, folding when he should have stayed in, and raising when she had an unbeatable hand.
Privately, Charles suspected that Rico fancied the merry widow but wouldn’t admit it, even to himself. There was something decidedly sexual in his eyes when he delivered his barbs on these occasions.
There again, Rico was an extremely sexual animal. At thirty-four, he was still in his prime, a Latin-lover type brimming with testosterone and over-the-top passions.
Charles wondered if Rico’s rudeness to the butler tonight had something to do with an overload of male hormones. He’d been divorced over a year now and there wasn’t any permanent replacement in his bed as yet. Which was not right for Rico. He was a man who needed to make love, often!
Some warm womanly love wouldn’t go astray, either.
Charles believed Rico needed a wife, someone who loved him this time, someone like his Dominique who wanted children. But Rico wasn’t about to go down the aisle again in a hurry. Once bitten, he wasn’t shy so much as angry, angry that he’d been taken in by a gold-digger.
The appearance of the man himself in the archway which led into the main sitting room showed Charles that James had the situation spot-on. Rico wasn’t in any way ill. He looked his usual swashbuckling self in black trousers and a black crewnecked top, his thick, wavy black hair as lustrous as ever, his flashing black eyes as clear as a bell. But he was definitely out of sorts, scowling as he quaffed back the last of the drink he was holding. It looked like Chianti. Rico loved his Italian wines, despite having been born here, in Sydney.
“About bloody time you got here,” he snapped without a trace of the Italian accent he adopted for his popular A Passion for Pasta TV show. His parents had migrated to Sydney over half a century earlier, not long after the Second World War; all their eight children had been born here—three boys and five girls—and Rico was the youngest.
Charles couldn’t get his head around the idea of so many siblings. He didn’t have any.
“I’m right on time,” Charles countered calmly, in far too good a mood to be riled by Rico’s burst of Latin temper.
“No, you’re not. The game is supposed to be underway by eight. It’s already five minutes past, courtesy of your gasbagging and gossiping out here with the hired help. Here, James, fill this up again, will you?” Rico said curtly and handed the butler his empty glass.
Charles wondered what was eating at Rico but he decided not to ask. Best to just get in there and start playing poker.
The others were already sitting at the card table where it was always set up, next to the bullet-proof plate-glass window which overlooked the city below. Renée, looking softer than usual in a pale pink cashmere sweater, lifted her glass of white wine in Charles’s direction in acknowledgement of his arrival.
Ali, dressed in blue jeans and a shirt, managed a polite nod as he sipped his usual glass of mineral water. Ali never touched alcohol himself but always supplied the best in spirits and wine for his guests.
“See, Rico?” Renée said in that silky voice of hers as the two men sat down at the table. “I told you he’d show up. Though he’d be forgiven if he didn’t. After all, he’s only been married to that stunner of a wife of his for a month.”
Renée was still a stunner herself, Charles appreciated. Just not his type. Too tall and too thin. And a brunette. Charles preferred blondes, and a softer more feminine kind of beauty.
There was nothing soft about Renée. But she was very striking, with those high cheekbones and unusual eyes. Pale green they were, with rather heavy lids which she emphasised by plucking her eyebrows to the finest of arches. The set of her eyebrows gave her face a range of expressions, none of which were soft or sweet. When smiling, she looked either drily amused or downright sardonic. Unsmiling, Renée carried an air about her which could be interpreted as snobbishness, or at the very least belief in her own superiority. Possibly this had been an asset on the catwalk, where models specialised in looking aloof these days. But not such an asset in one’s social life.
Charles had not liked her to begin with. But first impressions were not always correct, he’d found. He still could not claim to know her all that well, even now after five years’ acquaintance. But he’d warmed to her after a while. Impossible to totally dislike a woman who could play poker as well as she did, and who had what he called strength of character. Renée was always her own person, and he admired that.
It didn’t matter to him if she’d married the banker for his money or not. No doubt she had her reasons. Still, Renée was far too cool and controlled for him. Not like Dominique, who was a wonderful mixture of sweet surrender and wildly impassioned demands.
“Again, Charles,” she’d beg him, even after he thought he was done. But he was rarely ever done with Dominique.
Damn. He shouldn’t have started thinking about Dominique.
After they had cut cards for