The Winning Hand Read Online Free

elevator.
    When the doors closed again, Darcy gave in to her buckling knees and sat on the floor. She hugged herself hard, rocked. If this was some dream, some hallucination brought on by stress or sunstroke, she hoped it never cleared away.
    She hadn’t just escaped, she realized. She’d been liberated.

Chapter 2
    The bubble didn’t burst in the morning. She shot awake at six o’clock and stared, startled, at her reflection in the mirror overhead. Testing, she lifted a hand, watched herself touch her cheek. She felt her fingers, saw them slide up over her forehead and down the other side of her face.
    However odd, it had to be real. She’d never seen herself horizontal before. She looked so … different, she decided, sprawled in the huge, rumpled bed surrounded by a mountain of pillows. She felt so different. How many years had she awakened each morning in the practical twin bed that had been her nesting place since childhood?
    She never had to go back to that.
    Somehow that single thought, the simple fact that she would never again have to adjust her body to the stingy mattress of the ancient bed sent a rush of joy through her so wild, so bright, she burst into giddy laughter, unable to stop until she was gasping for air.
    She rolled from one end of the bed to the other, kicked her feet in the air, hugged pillows, and when that wasn’t enough, leaped up to dance on the mattress.
    When she was thoroughly winded, she dropped down again and wrapped her arms tight around her knees. She was wearing a silk sleep shirt in candy pink—one of several articles of basic wardrobe that had arrived just after her dinner. Everything had been from the boutique downstairs and had been presented to her courtesy of The Comanche.
    She wasn’t even going to worry about the fact that the gorgeous Mac Blade had bought her underwear. Not when it was such fabulous underwear.
    She jumped up, wanting to explore the suite again. The night before, she’d been so punchy she’d just wandered around gawking. Now it was time to play.
    She snatched up a remote and began punching buttons. The shimmering blue drapes over the floor-to-ceiling windows opened and closed, making her grin like a fool. Opening them again, she saw she had a wide window on the world that was Vegas.
    It was all muted grays and blues now, she noted, with a soft desert dawn breaking. She wondered how many floors up she was. Twenty? Thirty? It hardly mattered. She was on top of a brave and very new world.
    Choosing another button, she opened a wall panel that revealed a big-screen television screen, a VCR and a complicated-looking stereo system. She fiddled until she filled the room with music, then raced downstairs.
    She opened all the drapes, smelled the flowers, sat on every cushion of the two sofas and six chairs. She marveled at the arched fireplace, at the grand piano of showy white. And because there was no one to tell her not to touch, she sat down and played the first thing that came into her mind.
    The celebratory, arrogant notes of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” made her laugh like a loon.
    Behind a glossy black wet bar she found a small refrigerator, then giggled like a girl when she saw it contained two bottles of champagne. With the music blaring, she waltzed into the bath off the living area and grinned at the bidet, the phone, the wall-mounted TV and all the pretty toiletries arranged in a china basket.
    Humming to herself, she climbed the curving chrome steps back to the bedroom. The master bath was a symphony of pure sensory indulgence from the lake-sized motorized tub in sensuous black to the acre of counter under a wall-sized lighted mirror. The room was bigger than her entire apartment back home.
    Tuck in a bed, she thought, and she could live happily right here. Lush green plants lined the tiled shelf beside the tub. A separate rippled glass shower stall offered crisscrossing sprays. Lovely clear jarswere arranged on glass shelves and held bath