Chapter 2

When we stopped outside the front door, a uniformed man came out and opened the car door for me. I exited, as I had been instructed, without flashing my panties, and stood waiting for Silvester to escort me inside. The driver opened the boot, and he started pulling my bags out.

Silvester took my arm and led me inside. There was a reception hall, with stairs in front of me, and a door either side. On had a sign ‘Bunnies’ over it, while the other had ‘The Warren Restaurant’. I was led upstairs and along a corridor. He opened a door.

“This will be your room, Jacquie. It is well set out for relaxing, but more suited for preparing yourself for work. The wardrobe already has your outfits, and there is an ensuite. The driver and doorman will bring your bags up while I show you around. The casino is open, and your dress is good enough for a visitor.”

He firstly took me to the control room over the casino, where I was introduced to the watchers of a bank of screens. There was a speaker with general sounds from the casino. Then he took me to a room that was set up with the various tables used for different card games.

“Before you start on the floor, we will teach you how to play all the card games, so that you can stand in at any table. We will also teach you how to properly cheat, so that you may sense when things are happening. Not everyone is as good as our main problems.”

As he showed me the restaurant and the casino, he carried on telling me how I would be working. We didn’t interact with any of the staff on duty, but I could tell that they were watching us. Most of the men were looking at me, though, something that I was finding hard to accept. When I had been told that I would look good enough to be a model, I really hadn’t believed it. The thing was that every time I looked at my reflection in a mirror, I was constantly amazed at how good I looked. Too good to have ever gone out with the old Jackson, no matter how rich he had become.

Off the casino, there was a bar, toilets, and a door marked ‘Staff Only’. Through that door was a short corridor with a door either side, marked ‘M’ and ‘F’. He opened the ‘F’ door for me so I could see the restroom, with tea and coffee machine and a fridge.

“You get a rest break after every session on a table. You’re out there for an hour, and in here for fifteen minutes. There are toilets through that door, and the other door leads to a room with lockers so that you can store your own supplies. The third door opens to steps to the control room. If you need to talk to me, I can come down without being seen. There is a staff dining room off the restaurant where everyone has meals. All the croupiers live in-house, in rooms upstairs. The waitresses are from the local district and have their own toilets and changing room. Now we show you to the lady of the house.”

He led me back to the entrance hall and knocked on a door to one side. When he heard the command to enter, he ushered me in. The daughter was sitting behind a large desk, with a view to the outside. She would have seen me arrive. She stood and came to give me a hug and we air-kissed.

“Jacqueline, darling! My word, you’re better than everyone told me you would be. I’m almost jealous of that figure. You look lovely, and you wear the clothes as if you had been born in them. Now, sit down and we’ll talk.”

She led me to a pair of armchairs with a small table between them. On the way, she picked up an envelope from her desk. When we were seated, she handed me the envelope.

“We need to get this out of the way, first. In the envelope, you will find a birth certificate, passport, life story, and employment papers for Jacqueline Angeline Kennedy. They will all stand examination. A bank account has been opened in your name, with a small salary being added to it for the time you were in hospital. Your termination payment from father’s company has been paid into that account. Now, we will need you to log into your old account and transfer the contents to the new one. That will make you the mistress of your own destiny.”

She waved to Silvester, who brought over a laptop and fired it up. I opened my banking website and logged in, trying not to show my surprise at how much I was now worth. She handed me my old phone, turned on, and I did a transfer to empty the account, using the new account details. I got a message on the phone, asking me to verify my identity, which I did, then was asked if I wanted to close the account. When I typed Yes as the reply, it sent me a code number to put into the transfer. After that, it only took a few seconds for Jacquie Kennedy to be much better off.

“I hope that you’re happy with that, Jacquie. The laptop is yours to use. The house wi-fi and phone service goes through a server which is monitored, so any odd traffic will be questioned. It’s more to monitor smartphone traffic in the casino. You can’t get an outside line without going through our system. Some have tried to use phones to pass on the cards other players are holding. The chargers and other things are in your room. The phone is now in your new name.”

“Thank you for that. I won’t abuse the system. Silvester has told me that I will have more training before I go full-time. There are other card games where my skill could be used, I just haven’t used it for anything but poker.”

“You will be adept at all the games we play before you start. You will not be put on the roulette wheels unless there is a real problem with croupiers. I only have a couple of rules for the girls to follow. One is that there are no relationships with the other staff or customers in the gaming room, other than social friendliness; and the other is that everyone refers to me as ‘Mistress’. This place and my social life are separate. I don’t frequent the casino in working hours, but I might dine in the restaurant. That all right with you?”

“Yes, Mistress, perfectly clear and understandable. I knew of you before all this, but never knew that you were anything but a popular socialite. I have worked with your brothers, and I found them all good guys.”

“Right! Silvester will take you back to your room. You will be able to freshen up and then get some lunch in the staff dining room. This afternoon, he will take you to your first training session and introduce you to your teachers. I doubt that I’ll see much of you after today, so good luck and good hunting.”

We stood and she hugged me again. I picked up the laptop, phone, and the package, and followed Silvester from the room. Upstairs, he left me to my own devices. I freshened up, put the contents of my bags in the wardrobe and drawers, and changed my dress. I checked the batteries on both the laptop and phone, then turned the phone off and put it in a drawer.

I sat on the bed and had a think about what I had just learned. It looked as if I was now free to roam at will but needed to be familiar with the whole building first. There was a knock on the door, and I opened it to find Silvester.

“I will escort you to lunch, Jacquie. Remember that here you are just Jacquie, a new hiring. I’ll introduce you to the team leader for the croupiers. Sandra will take you through the initial familiarisation and will be your go-to person if you have any problems. I’ll come to the dining room after you’ve eaten to take you up to see your teachers. After that, I will return to my normal duties, and you won’t see me unless you’ve identified a cheater.”

In the staff dining room, he introduced me to Sandra, and then left us.

“Well, Jacquie. Welcome to Bunnies. I gather that you will be added to our croupier numbers when you’ve had some more training.”

“I will be, Sandra. I need to brush up on the other games. I’ve specialised on poker. I believe that I need to get up to speed with Blackjack, its variations, Baccarat, Texas Holdem. And a couple of others. I’ve played blackjack as a youngster, at home, and we just called it Twenty-one.”

“We are an up-market establishment, so we play Vingt et Un, and you will have to know all the likely numbers in French. Otherwise, it’s pretty easy if everyone behaves.”

We had our lunch and agreed to meet in the casino after my classes. She told me which dress to wear and the level of make-up to fit in. She would take me around to watch the games and get used to the atmosphere.

Silvester came to collect me and took me upstairs to the training room. I was getting the hang of the layout, by now, and would be able to find my way to my room. He introduced me to Chuck and Arnie, two Americans who were to teach me how to cheat. After Silvester had left, Chuck sat me at a plain table and we played some hands of three, four, and five card poker. I found that I hadn’t lost my skills. We had been playing for about thirty minutes, with our piles of matches largely unchanged, when Arnie dropped out of character for a second.

“Stop right there. Arnie, you’ve just cheated but I didn’t see what you did.”

They looked at each other. Chuck smiled.

“Sil told us you were good, but that was amazing. What do you think happened?”

“If you show me your hand, Arnie, I’ll tell you.”

Arnie laid his cards on the table.

“You have exchanged something for that Jack of Diamonds, to give you three of a kind. That card should still be in the pack, and probably is, if we look for it.”

After that, the three of us got on like a house on fire. They started showing me how the change was made, and variations. They schooled me so that I could do it as easily as them, as long as I had long sleeves. When we finished the session, I went for dinner and then back to my room to change.

When I met Sandra in the casino, she showed me around, and we watched some of the games. Most of them were easy to pick up, and I was looking forward to playing them. It was different to how I had played before. Here, I would be the dealer, or banker, for every game, which helped me in card counting. As we moved around, I looked for the camera positions, but didn’t see them. I asked Sandra and she said that they were hidden in the chandeliers and the air-conditioning outlets.

She told me that if I had any problems when I was working, I would have a hidden microphone and just needed to press a button on the tiny unit and tell the control room who I was and the nature of the problem. When I was at a table, the other players would be numbered from left to right, so I could just report number three was a problem, and the guys upstairs would zoom in on that person, then inform security.

As my two weeks of training continued, I became the card sharp from heaven, and surprised my teachers more than once with my card counting skills, as well as my instinct for reading changes in body language. They tried their best, but I was able to pick them eighty percent of the time, which they agreed would make me a secret weapon on the gambling floor.

By the time I started at a table of my own, I knew all the other staff, had eaten with most of them, and had become friendly with the bunnies who lived off-site. I had met quite a few of the regulars, mainly from a higher society than the previous me had been used to, but now, as a good-looking woman, I seemed to have transcended normal boundaries. It was as if they actually wanted to talk to me.

It became work, moving to different tables and different card games during the evening, and taking the breaks as they came up. It wasn’t usual for the croupier to throw in a hand, so my game play was forced into a new level of skill. Some customers walked away with more than they came with, but it was usually other player’s money.

My first cheater was almost funny. A group of finance traders came in, after a good day on the money market. They had been on the booze before they arrived and were quite entertaining. I was running a five-card poker table and two of them took seats as they came vacant. They played like some of the guys that I used to play with, hoping for a lucky hand.

Then one of them changed his body language. It had happened while I was involved with a player away from him. I was certain that he had substituted a card. I put my hand on the table and reached for a bottle of water, taking a sip. Under cover of dabbing my lips, I activated the microphone.

“Jacquie on table seven, my number four has changed, can you look at the video of the last few minutes?”

We continued to play, and the guy won the pot, which was a reasonable one. When I saw his cards, I could see that there was an ace that I was sure was still in the pack. As he laid his cards on the table, two of our security guys came up behind him and asked, firmly, if he could come with them for a little talk. When he wanted to take the chips, he was told that we would look after them for him.

As he was taken away, I collected all the cards from the table and dropped them in a bin at my feet, taking his winnings and putting it to one side. His friend gathered his remaining chips and left. Another two players joined us, and we carried on with a new pack. When I was in my break, Sandra came in and told me that the CCTV had clearly seen him take a card and put it under his shirt, coming out with the ace.

At the next change, I retrieved the bin with the cards for the cleaners to work through and make up new packs. The chips were split, fifty-fifty, between me and the house, with my share as a bonus next payday. The lad had been confronted with the evidence, photographed, and blacklisted from casinos across the country. The odd ace was added to a tally board in the control room with my name at the top.

It hadn’t been a big catch but was a catch all the same. My next one was a few weeks later, on a Saturday night. There must have been a convention in the city, as we were full of studious-looking men who talked about climate change as they played. One of them was a card counter and I did my best to negate his plays. It made him reckless, so he resorted to his less-preferred method, sleight of hand.

I could see him building up to it, so warned the control room to watch him. He was very good, and I didn’t pick up a change in body language, but the camera saw him extract a card from his sleeve when he discarded a card. The security was right behind him. When I looked at the discard, he had used suncream, from his face, to stick the second card to the first. He complained, loudly, when asked to join security in another room, but a quick frisk discovered a plastic card holder strapped to his arm. We did have metal detectors to catch someone coming in with contraptions, but the plastic had got through.

I was later told that he had been under suspicion at other establishments, but never caught in the act. His King was added to my tally. It was after that when Sandra told me that we were having a girl’s trip to see a show in the city. It was to be a Tuesday, one of our quieter nights, and was paid for by the casino as a small bonus for a good job. There were four of us, that evening, all dressed to kill, taken to the theatre in the house Roller. In the interval, we were all in the bar, having a drink, when we were approached by a bunch of dapper men, who insisted on buying us drinks. Sandra agreed on our behalf, and I found myself talking to an assistant to a Parliament Minister. He was very nice. I had become well used to talking with men, by now, but this was altogether different, as he didn’t know what I did for a living, just that I was pretty enough to stand close to.

We went back to see the second half, and I spent much of the time thinking about my present feelings. I hadn’t tested my new plumbing, just dilated as instructed. Now, as I sat there, I realised that I was moist down there, and that I could picture his eyes as he looked into mine. It was a very new experience, and one that made me aware of my new status. When I thought about it more, I realised that all of my training had been about acting like a natural woman, but none had addressed the feelings that I may have after the operations.

When the show had ended, we found our new friends waiting for us in the foyer. They suggested that we all go to a night club that they knew, for some dancing. Once again, Sandra led us into temptation, and I followed her lead. At the night club, the guys were known, and we were given a couple of tables. I insisted that I wanted to stay on lemonade, as I didn’t know what my level of resistance was to alcohol these days.

So, I was perfectly sober as I danced with Fraser, enjoying every touch and the pressure of his hand on my back. He followed my lead and kept off the hard stuff as well, so, we were both fully aware of what we were doing when he kissed me during a slow dance. I had a sudden feeling of helplessness in his arms, as if my very being was to be at his command. If he had asked me, I would have dropped to the floor and let him have his way with me. I must have shuddered, as he pulled his face away.

“Are you all right, sweetheart? If you felt a chill, we can go back to the table.”

“I’m all right, Fraser. It’s just that I feel like the Sleeping Beauty and your kiss has woken me up to the real world.”

“What a fantastic thing to say! I’ve never had a girl say that to me before. Though, there haven’t been many girls I’ve kissed. What with study and work, tonight is a bit of an odd break. Can we see if you’re fully awake?”

We kissed again, and every part of me was sensitive. I could feel my clothes on me, his arm around me, the sudden hardening of my nipples, the dampness in my panties, and the pressure of his lips against mine, with just a hint of his tongue. Unfortunately, Sandra picked exactly that time to tap me on the arm.

“I’ve called the car to pick us up from here. We do have work tomorrow. If you can put that man back in the water, we need to go and freshen up first.”

We all went to the rest room to freshen up. The guys were sad to see us go, but not as sad as I felt. I exchanged phone numbers with Fraser. He knew where we worked, because one of the other girls had told her partner. We made our way towards the entrance, with Fraser holding my hand. Outside, the Roller pulled up and he kissed me again before he allowed me to get in. As we pulled away from the kerb, he gave me a sad little wave.

Back at the casino, I went to bed with my biggest dilator and had the strongest orgasm of my life before going off to sleep, wondering if this happened to real girls. Two evenings later, he was sitting at my table with his eyes on my every move. I stayed professional and friendly as I worked. When I was relieved, he walked away from the table and asked me if we could go out together, one evening. I told him that I would let him know when after I had spoken to my supervisor.

In the rest room, I saw Sandra and asked her about my having another evening off.

“Of course you get time off, Jacquie. Are you telling me that you haven’t taken your days off?”

“No, last night was the first time I’ve been out of the casino since I started.”

“Tell your guy to come back in a couple of days. I’ll have this sorted out by then. You’ve been here around two months, so you should have close to a week of days off to take.”

When I went back to work, I told Fraser that I had some time owing, but would be able to let him know if he came back in a few days. He nodded and went off to the roulette table, to try and win back the money I had taken off him.

The following afternoon, Sandra told me that from now, I was to have one day off a week, and that I could ask for my owed days when I wanted but could only take two days off in any one week, as long as they were weekdays.

When I saw Fraser, I told him this and he asked me to see if I could have the Tuesday and Wednesday of the following week, and that he would pick me up at the casino entrance at ten on Tuesday morning. I asked Sandra and she said it was all right. When I told Fraser that I was good to go, he smiled.

“When I pick you up, make sure that you have your passport and an overnight bag.”

He refused to say any more, and I did have to get back to work. I spent the rest of the shift thinking about his words. Did he intend to get me into bed? The more I thought about it, the more I knew that if he wanted me, then I was his to take.

The days passed slowly until I woke up on Tuesday morning, had breakfast and showered. I had packed an overnight bag with the essentials. I had nightwear and a couple of changes of outfits. At ten, I was at the front door when a Jaguar pulled up and Fraser got out to take my bag from me. He opened the passenger door and gave me a little kiss as I passed him. We drove into the city and to the Eurostar station, going through passport control and onto the train. By lunchtime, we were sitting in a café in Paris, in the sunshine, with the Eiffel Tower in front of us.

They say that Paris is the City for Lovers, and that evening, in our hotel room, we became lovers. The next day, we visited the Louvre and took the train back to London in the evening. We spent Wednesday night in his apartment, and he took me back to the casino for ten on Thursday morning. It was a different Jacquie who kissed him as he gave me my bag. I wasn’t an imitation woman any longer. His love had aroused my desires and I wanted more.

Marianne Gregory © 2024