by Nora Roberts
At the bar, Gideon’s hand froze in the act of lifting his beer.
She was dressed like a man. Though no one would mistake her for one, he admitted. Not if you were blind and on the back of a galloping horse. But there was something primitively erotic about the way she moved inside that traditional pin-striped suit.
The music was hot, edgy American rock, and her lighting a steamy and smoky blue. He found it clever and ironic that she’d select Bruce Springsteen’s “Cover Me” to strip to.
She knew what she was about, he realized as she tugged the tailored jacket off her shoulders, moving, always moving, pulled it off.
While the others on the stage had been spinning or sliding, shaking or shimmying, this one was dancing. Sharp, complicated moves that demonstrated genuine style and talent.
Though when, with one of those sharp moves, she ripped the breakaway trousers aside, he lost track of the style for a moment.
Christ, she had legs, didn’t she?
She used the poles as well, doing three fast circles with those long legs cocked up. Her hair tumbled free, past her shoulders in a straight rainfall of rich brown. He didn’t see how she opened the shirt, but it was flying around her now, revealing a scrap of black lace over high, firm breasts.
He tried to tell himself they were likely manufactured, and either way they had nothing to do with him. But he found saliva pooling in his mouth when she stripped off the shirt.
To clear his throat, he sipped his beer, and watched her.
She’d made him from her first turn. She couldn’t see him clearly, and wasn’t concerned enough to worry about it. But she knew he was there, and that his attention was on her.
That was fine. That’s what she got paid for.
With her back to the audience, she slid a hand down her back, flicked open the catch of her bra. Crossing her arms over her breasts, she spun back. There was a light dew of sweat on her skin now, and a small grin—ice cold—on her lips as she made eye contact with the men in the audience she’d deemed most likely to part with folded money.
She tossed her hair back and, wearing nothing but the heels and a black G-string, lowered to a crouch so they could see what they were paying for.
She ignored the fingers sliding over her hips and registered the money tucked under the G-string.
She eased back when one overenthusiastic patron reached for her. In a move that could have been mistaken for playful, she wagged a finger at him. And thought, Asshole.
She came up in a one-armed backbend, then using her legs surged to her feet.
She played the other side of the stage in much the same way. But here she got a better look at the man at the bar. Their eyes met, held for two beats. He held up a bill, cocked his head.
Then he went back to sipping his beer.
SHE WISHED SHE’D been able to make out the denomination of the bill. But she thought it might be worth five minutes of her time to find out how much he’d pay.
Still, she took her time, cooled off in the shower, then pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. It was a rare thing for her to go out into the club after a performance, but she trusted Karl and the other muscle Marcella kept on tap to keep her from being hassled.
In any case, most of the patrons kept their attention onstage, toward the fantasy sex, rather than scoping out the real women in the area.
Except for Slick, she thought, at the bar. He wasn’t watching the stage. Though in her professional opinion the current act was one of the more creative ones. His gaze stayed on her as she crossed to the bar. And on her face—which she gave him points for—rather than on her tits.
“You want something, Slick?”
Her voice surprised him. It was smooth and silky and without any of the hard edge he’d expected from a woman in her line of work.
Her face did credit to her body. It was hot and sultry with those dark, almond-shaped eyes and the full, red-slicked mouth. There was a little mole, a beauty mark, he supposed you called it, just at the lower end of her right eyebrow.
Her skin was dusky, adding a touch of erotic gypsy.
She smelled of soap—another illusion shattered. And sipped idly from a tall bottle of water.
“I do if you’re Cleo Toliver.”
She leaned back on the bar. She wore tennis shoes now rather than heels, but the jeans were black and molded tight to her hips and legs.
“I don’t do private parties.”
“Do you talk?”
“When I have something to say. Who gave you my name?”
Gideon merely showed her the bill again, watched her gaze flick on it and narrow in speculation. “I think this should buy an hour’s conversation.”
“It might.” She’d reserve judgment on whether or not he was a moron, but at least he wasn’t cheap. She reached for the bill, annoyed when he moved it just out of reach.
“What time do you finish here?”
“Two. Look, why don’t you just tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.”
“Conversation,” he said again and tore the bill in half. He handed her one part, pocketed the other. “If you want the rest of it, meet me after closing. The coffee shop in the Wenceslas Hotel. I’ll wait till two-thirty. If you don’t show, we’re both out fifty pounds.”
He finished his beer, set down the glass. “It was an entertaining performance, Miss Toliver, and lucrative from the looks of it. But it’s not every day you can make fifty pounds by sitting down and having a cup of coffee.”
She frowned when he turned to walk away. “You got a name, Slick?”
“Sullivan. Gideon Sullivan. You’ve got till two-thirty.”
Four
CLEO never missed a cue. But neither did she believe in giving her audience the appearance she’d rushed to hit one. Theater was rooted in illusions. And life, like the big guy had said, was just a bigger stage.
She strolled toward the coffee shop at two minutes to deadline.
If some jerk with a pretty face and a sexy voice wanted to pay her for some conversation, that was fine by her. She’d already determined the exchange rate from Irish pounds to Czech koruna, using the little calculator she carried in her bag to figure it to the last haleru. In her current position, the money would go a very long way.
She didn’t intend to make her living stripping off her clothes for a bunch of suckers for long. The fact was, she’d never intended to make her living, however temporary, dancing naked in a Prague strip club.
But she’d been stupid, Cleo could admit. She’d walked straight into a con, blinded by good looks and a clever line. And when a girl was flat-ass busted in Eastern Europe, in a city where she could barely manage the simplest phrase in the guidebook, she did what she could to make ends meet.
She had one thing on her side, she thought now. She never made the same mistake twice.
In that regard, at least, she was not her mother’s daughter.
The little restaurant was brightly lit, and there were a few patrons scattered around the tables having coffee or a late meal. The company, such as it was, was a plus. Not that she was particularly worried about the Irish guy making a move on her. She could handle herself.
She spotted him at a corner booth, drinking coffee and reading a book, with a cigarette smoking away in a black plastic ashtray. With those dark, romantic looks, she thought, he’d pass for some kind of artist, a writer maybe. No, she decided, a poet. Some struggling poet who wrote dark, esoteric free verse and had come to the great city for inspiration as others had before him.
Looks, she thought with a smirk, were always deceiving.
He glanced up as she slid into the booth across from him. His eyes, a deep and crystal blue in the poetic face, were the type that shot straight to a woman’s glands.
Good thing, Cleo acknowledged, she was immune.
“You cut it close,” he commented and continued to read.
She merely shrugged, then turned to the waitress who stepped up to the booth. “Coffee. Thr
ee eggs, scrambled. Bacon. Toast. Thanks.” Cleo smiled when she saw Gideon studying her over the top of his book. “I’m hungry.”
“I suppose what you do works up an appetite.”
He marked his place, set the book aside. Yeats, Cleo noted. It figured.
“That’s the point, isn’t it? Working up appetites.” She stretched out her legs as the waitress poured her coffee. “How did you like my act?”
“It’s better than most.” She hadn’t removed her stage makeup. In the bright lights she looked both hard and sexy. He imagined she knew it. Had planned it. “Why do you do it?”
“Unless you’re a Broadway scout, Slick, that’s my business.” Watching him, she lifted a hand, rubbed her thumb and two fingers together.
Gideon took the half bill out of his pocket, then slid it under his book. “Talk first.” He’d already outlined how he wanted to approach the matter with her and had decided the direct—well, fairly direct—route would work best.
“You have an ancestor on your mother’s side. A Simon White-Smythe.”
More puzzled than interested, Cleo sipped her coffee, strong and black. “So?”
“He was a collector, art and artifacts. There was a piece in his collection, a small silver statue of a woman. Greek style. I represent a party that’s interested in obtaining that statue.”
Cleo said nothing as her breakfast was served. The scent of food, particularly food she wasn’t going to have to pay for, put her in a cooperative mood.
She scooped up a bite of egg, picked up a slice of bacon. “Why?”
“Why?”
“Yeah. This client got a reason for wanting some little silver woman?”
“Sentimental reasons, primarily. There was a man back in 1915 who was traveling to London to purchase it from your ancestor. He made an unwise choice in his mode of transportation,” Gideon added as he helped himself to Cleo’s bacon. “And booked passage on the Lusitania. He went down with it.”
Cleo studied the selection of jams and settled on black currant. She slathered a slice of toast generously as her mind worked through the story.
Her grandmother on her mother’s side, the one family member who’d been human and humorous, had been a White-Smythe by birth. So his story gelled, as far as it went.
“Your interested party’s waited over eighty years to track down this statue?”
“Some are more sentimental than others,” he said evenly. “You could say this man’s fate was determined by that small statue. My job is to locate it and, if it remains in your family, to offer a reasonable price for it.”
“Why me? Why not contact my mother? You’re a generation closer that way.”
“You were closer geographically. But if you’ve no knowledge of the piece, that’s my next step.”
“Your client sounds pretty screwy, Slick.” Her lips curved as she bit into her toast. Her eyebrows winged up, making the beauty mark a velvet period on a sexy exclamation point. “What’s his definition of a reasonable price?”
“I’m authorized to offer five hundred.”
“Pounds?”
“Pounds.”
Jesus, Jesus, she thought as she continued to eat with every appearance of calm. That kind of money would fatten her get-out-of-Dodge fund. More, it would help her get back to the States without losing face.
But the man must have tagged her as an idiot if he thought she was buying his story from top to bottom.
“A silver statue?”
“Of a woman,” he said, “about six inches high, holding a kind of measuring spool. Do you know it or not?”
“Don’t rush me.” She signaled for more coffee and continued to plow her way through the eggs. “I might have seen it. My family has a lot of dust catchers, and my grandmother was the world title holder. I can check on it, if you add another fifty to that,” she said with a nod toward the note sticking out from under Yeats.
“Don’t wind me up, Cleo.”
“A girl’s got to make a living. And the extra fifty’s less than it would cost your client to send you to the States. Plus, my family’s more likely to cooperate with me than a stranger.”
Which is bullshit, of course, she thought.
Considering his options, Gideon slid the half bill across the table. “You’ll get the other fifty if and when you earn it.”
“Come by the club tomorrow night.” She plucked up the bill, stuffed it into her jeans pocket.
Not an easy feat, Gideon mused, as those jeans appeared to be painted on.
“Bring the money.” She slid out of the booth. “Thanks for the eggs, Slick.”
“Cleo.” He closed a hand over hers, squeezed just hard enough to be sure he had her attention. “You try to hose me, it’s going to make me irritable.”
“I’ll remember that.” She tossed him an easy grin, tugged her hand free, then strolled out with a deliberate swing of hips.
She made a statement, Gideon mused. Any man with a single red corpuscle would want to fuck her. But only a fool would trust her.
Eileen Sullivan hadn’t raised any fools.
CLEO WENT STRAIGHT to her apartment, though calling the single room an apartment was like calling a Twinkie a fine dessert. You had to be either really young or stupidly optimistic.
Her clothes were hung on the iron rod that was screwed into a water-stained wall, stuffed into the banana-crate-sized dresser with its missing drawer, or tossed where they landed. She’d decided the problem with growing up with a maid was you never learned to be tidy.
Even with its single dresser, cot-sized bed and lopsided table, the room was crowded. But it was cheap and boasted its own bath. Such as it was.
While the room wasn’t to her taste—and she was neither really young nor in any way optimistic—she could cover the weekly rent with one night’s tips.
She’d installed the dead bolt lock herself after one of her neighbors had tried to muscle his way into her room for a free show. It gave her a considerable sense of security.
She switched on the light, tossed her purse aside. She went to the dresser, pawing her way through the top drawer. She’d had a considerable wardrobe when she’d landed in Prague, and a great deal of it had been new lingerie.
Bought, she thought viciously as she shoved through silk and lace, to delight one Sidney Walter. The prick. Then again, when a woman let herself spend a couple grand on undies because she was hot for a man, she deserved getting screwed. In every possible sense.
Sidney had certainly obliged her, Cleo thought now. Heating up the sheets in the presidential suite of the priciest hotel in Prague, then strolling away with all her cash and her jewelry and leaving her with a hefty hotel bill.
Leaving her, she added, flat broke and mortified.
Still, Sidney wasn’t the only one who could cash in on an opportunity when it slapped him in the face. She smiled to herself as she yanked out a pair of athletic socks, unrolled them.
The little silver statue she uncovered was badly tarnished, but she remembered what it looked like when it was shiny and clean. Smiling to herself, Cleo rubbed a thumb over the face with absent affection.
“You don’t much look like my ticket out of here,” she murmured. “But we’ll see.”
