Lorna Tedder Read online

  One of the police officers at the front door skimmed the room and then did a double take. I watched in heart-sinking slow motion as he tapped another officer on the shoulder and inclined his head in my direction. I glanced down. My sarong skirt had caught on the corner of the table, snaring it and revealing one leg of black leotard.

  The second man nodded and disappeared into the crowd. I caught a fleeting glimpse of him halfway around the lobby. When I looked back at the first man, he’d left his post, too, and had started nonchalantly making his way around the lobby from behind me.

  Setup! If I was caught with the artifact, I’d rot in jail until Interpol showed up to haul me back. And that would be if I was fortunate. Along the way, a stray bullet was likely to find me. That had happened more than once with former Adriano employees who’d been captured and expected to face a jury in the States. Employees with far paler reputations in the criminal world than mine. The Adrianos couldn’t allow any of their secrets to come out in exchange for a lighter sentence. As if anyone would believe the Adrianos were anything other than wonderful philanthropists without an ill-intentioned bone in their bodies!

  Weaving through the crowd, I closed in on the elevator. I patted the gym bag, checking for the exact location of the screwdriver I’d need shortly either for defense or for an escape. A tall man sauntered through the swarm of hotel guests, and I matched his steps, keeping him in my line of vision so that for a few seconds neither cop could see me. I dipped into the open elevator, the same one I’d come down earlier, and scrambled up the wall and through the hatch.

  Strong hands caught my feet as I strained upward, but I kicked and the too-big shoes came off in their hands. Barefoot, I dragged my feet to safety. I jammed the emergency toolbox crosswise over the escape hatch. I could hear them yelling below, calling for backup.

  My eyes were still wide in the dark, unaccustomed yet to the absence of light. I fished the screwdriver out of the bag and bit into its handle. I’d need it soon enough. One way or another.

  I reached for the ladder and began pulling myself up, hand over hand, relying mainly on my uninjured knee to push myself along. Adrenaline got me to the second floor. Willpower alone helped me reached the third. My breath came out in wheezes around the screwdriver handle. My eyes adjusted, but the tears of pain blurred my vision. I climbed with my eyes closed, by feel. Fourth floor.

  My escape was a matter of who would get into a corridor first. Me, in a dark elevator shaft with a knee that burned and begged at every grunt? Or several cops who needed to run the length of the lobby, up at least three flights of stairs and then meet me as I tried to pry the doors open? Were I uninjured, the odds would have been in my favor.

  Then I heard a click below and a slight electrical buzz. No. No!

  I climbed faster, harder. The last thing I wanted was to be trapped in that shaft with a moving elevator!

  The elevator car moved up one floor at a time, almost like a warning, reminding me they wanted me alive and not dead. Either that or they were afraid the artifact would be damaged. By the time I couldn’t take another step, it was two floors below me and moving again.

  At the seventh floor, I jammed the screwdriver into the crevice between the doors enough to ease my fingers over the edges and then forced open the doors. The screwdriver slipped, pinging off the sides of the shaft and then skittering across the elevator car below me, bouncing and then falling out of earshot somewhere far below. I tumbled into the corridor, gym bag pulled close, and squeezed my eyes shut as the doors swished together behind me.

  “She can’t have gotten too far,” I heard faintly.

  Cops were in the elevator! The door would open in another couple of minutes and they’d see me lying exhausted on the floor, and I wouldn’t even have the strength to put up a fight.

  I shook myself and struggled to my feet. I pushed hard down the hall, limping as I turned the corner. I hugged the wall, carefully avoiding the video monitors mounted at ceiling level and angled toward the outer edges of the corridors. The elevator dinged behind me, barely out of sight. I stopped cold.

  So did the girl in front of me. A teenager, frozen at the door of one of the suites, key in hand. She stared at me through a mass of dirty tangles. We both knew that she wasn’t supposed to be upstairs. The doorknob jiggled in her grasp and she shoved inside.

  I sprang at her, catching her from behind. We rolled into the room together, me landing on top of her. I clamped my hand down hard over her mouth and with one foot eased the door shut behind us.

  “Don’t make a sound,” I warned. Her eyes studied me, shifting a fretful gaze toward one side of my face and then the other. She looked as though she might cry. I felt bad. She wasn’t much younger than my Lilah. “Shhh,” I whispered, “and you’ll be okay.”

  Outside, the cops pounded up and down the halls, then back to the elevator. The doors swooshed shut and somewhere a faint bell dinged as the elevator stopped on the eighth floor.

  Change of plans. Again. I’d have to stay here for a while. Long enough for the hornet’s nest downstairs to calm down. I had no choice, and by now my taxi was long gone. I slowly pulled my palm away from the girl’s mouth but continued to sit on top of her, pinning her belly-down on the floor.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She covered her face with one hand. “I didn’t mean to break in!”

  I lightened my grip. “This isn’t your room?”

  “N-no. Isn’t it yours?”

  “No.” So the look on her face had meant she not only wasn’t supposed to be upstairs during the fire alarm but she wasn’t supposed to be here at all. “Then if it’s not yours, whose room it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Some guy. I heard him say he wouldn’t be back until after midnight. Maybe not until morning if he got lucky.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I—I stole the key from the maid.” Before I could ask why, she backhanded a trickle of blood from her lower lip and added, “I have to eat.”

  Something twisted in my heart. Helping the girl sit up, I cautioned her with a finger to my lips. “You’re a runaway?”

  “You work for the hotel? You one of their cops?”

  I shook my head. “No. Just somebody in a little bit of trouble. Like you. How’d you get in the hotel after dark?”

  “Didn’t. They only check IDs at night. Walked in here in broad daylight. Stole a key from the maid and I’ve been living here ever since.” She hiked her chin just a little to show me she was proud of her resourcefulness.

  “What do you mean living here? For how long?”

  “Two weeks ago yesterday. People who order room service don’t eat everything on their plates, you know?” Insolence crept into her voice. “And all I have to do is watch people come and go and I figure out when I can slip in and sleep for a few hours. Sometimes I find a room that’s empty all night. I put the Do Not Disturb sign out and nobody bothers me.”

  “You can’t keep doing this forever. You’re going to get caught.” The expression on her face told me she’d come close already.

  “Don’t have to do it forever. Just for three more days. When I’m eighteen, no one can make me go back to my bastard of a stepfather.” She set her jaw. “He won’t ever touch me.”

  I grimaced. She looked like an underage hooker in her belly shirt, jeans that barely covered her butt cleavage and spiked heels that would make a grown woman cry. I recognized the look in her eyes. I’d seen it often enough in my travels. Runaway. Alone. Still proud but one step away from selling her affections to whatever scum would pay cold, hard cash just to keep from going home to a situation that really wasn’t much better. She still had the slightest glimmer of innocence. Something about her touched the mother deep inside me, the part of me that I kept buried, and I wanted her to keep that innocence.

  She was pretty underneath her greasy tangles. She had a nose ring and green eyes. Not as bright as Lilah’s green, but in another time and place she could have been my daug
hter. But my daughter was in a safer place than this girl. At least I hoped she was.

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’d never believe me. Not over her new husband. She’s the one who told me to get out. She didn’t want me.”

  I sighed aloud and didn’t try to hide it. I thought of Lilah when she’d hugged me goodbye at the age of ten and begged me not to go away on the academic expedition to Europe that, in the end, had been a terrible mistake. I’d planned carefully. I’d assured her everything would be all right and Mommy would be back in a few short weeks. Even the beloved auntie and cousins I’d left her with hadn’t been able to cheer her. Maybe she’d known then that I would never return to her. But I myself hadn’t known.

  This girl, this runaway, was tall but too thin, and probably not from choice. She was right about having to eat. The mother in me wanted to feed her, wanted to mother her. And get her into some decent clothes.

  “You’ve been wearing those for two weeks?” I asked, nodding at her too-tight jeans.

  “No, just today. I borrow clothes when I can find them.”

  “You mean you steal them.” I felt like a hypocrite. For once, I was glad not to be having this conversation with Lilah. “You shouldn’t steal,” I said lamely.

  The girl jutted her chin out at me, then smirked at my leotard and bare feet, at the gym bag full of loot. “Who are you to say?”

  I didn’t say. I didn’t say anything at all. What could I say? Except that I didn’t want her or anyone else to live the kind of life that had made me a fugitive from the law as well as from my own past.

  And then I did the unthinkable. I opened the tiny birdcage bars around my heart and let this girl step just barely over the threshold.

  Three hours later, I’d become fast friends with a runaway named Nicole. She was certain the registered occupant of the room wouldn’t be back until after midnight, and I didn’t intend to cut it too close. Things had returned to normal downstairs—or at least it seemed so. I didn’t doubt that the exits were being watched. Eager to please, Nicole had slipped down the hall to the ice machine and filled a pillowcase with ice, which I’d applied to my knee to bring down some of the swelling. My knee still ached, but it was feeling…tolerable.

  Then the girl had slipped out again and returned with fresh clothes for both of us, courtesy of some prim and proper family that was probably still trapped downstairs and waiting for clearance to return to their room. Nicole’s new wardrobe consisted of boy jeans and a band T-shirt, but her curves were still obvious underneath.

  I smiled and turned back to the mirror and the job of making myself over. Nicole had obviously considered it amusing that my new clothes should be so conservative. She’d picked out an ankle-length dress for me, small floral print with a lace-trimmed Peter Pan collar. She aimed to have me mistaken for an English teacher, she said, and I didn’t tell her that I really was an English teacher. Or had been. Regardless, when we left the room together, I wanted to make sure we didn’t attract attention, especially since a few cops might still be hanging around in the corridors.

  I lifted the glass of pomegranate juice—the secret of my youth—from the dressing table in front of me where the room-service waiter had left it and then I drained the last drops. We’d waited until life outside the room had returned to normal, and I’d paid in cash from the stash inside my belt. But as I finished the pom juice, the girl’s reflection in the mirror stopped me cold.

  She sat at the desk, chattering about how she’d evaded the video monitors in the halls, and finishing the last bites of the steaks I’d ordered from room service. She seemed to savor each mouthful. From her constant prattle, I knew how long she’d been on her own and what had driven her to this life on the run, but tomorrow she would have a fresh start. I’d see to it. A chance to rewrite her life. I had connections and I’d drop her off along the way with instructions to take care of her as though she were my own daughter, as though she were Lilah and I was doing for Lilah something I’d never been allowed to do. I wouldn’t send Nicole back to whatever hell had brought her here. Seventeen, almost eighteen, was too young to lose her innocence, and there had been some innocence still in her eyes when I had offered her a decent meal, a hot shower and a chance to leave the city with me.

  I’d been seventeen once, too, and lost after my mother’s death as surely as this girl felt lost after her mother’s rejection. Three events in my life had altered any plans I’d ever made for a bright future: losing my mother, losing my lover and—ten years later—losing my little girl. At eighteen, alone and scared, my fate had been to die at the hands of an assassin. I’d escaped that fate, but all else had been sacrificed. Something about this girl reminded me of myself then. If I could help this runaway, if I could keep her from getting herself killed on the streets, then maybe she could get her life back on course for the bright future I’d never had.

  “Are you done, sweetie?” I asked Nicole’s image in the mirror. I tried to imagine how Lilah would have looked at seventeen, shortly before her guardian had died. A private investigator sent me photographs regularly, but it wasn’t the same. Children can change so much from the time they’re ten until a few years later, especially a girl when she loses her baby chub and gains a few curves.

  Nicole nodded vigorously as I turned to her. “Yes, ma’am. It was delicious.” She’d suddenly started treating me like the mother she said she’d never had, complete with all the little courtesies a stricter mom might expect.

  “Don’t ma’am me.” I slipped on the shoes she’d acquired for me. “Come on. We’re leaving.” I ushered Nicole toward the door as I gathered the gym bag under one arm.

  “Are we going out through the lobby?” Nicole asked while I swept the hotel room with one last glance.

  I shook my head. “Tonight I’m going to show you how to shinny down a fire escape.”

  She giggled. I grinned back at her, then sobered. It was something I would never do with Lilah. My daughter would never know this side of me. To her, I would always be the loving intellectual who’d told her bedtime stories from medieval manuscripts and recited Chaucer right along with her bedtime prayers. I wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to keep her alive, and that meant I’d never read her another story. I couldn’t risk it.

  “Wait,” Nicole said. “I have something for you.” She held up a key with a Mercedes emblem on it. “It belongs to the hotel. They use it to pick up VIPs. I know where it’s parked right now.”

  As I took it from her, I started to ask where she’d picked up the key but laughed instead. Somehow I always ended up driving a Mercedes, and that meant the cops weren’t quite so quick to think I was a thief. I never drove one for long. Safer that way. I’d leave this one with the Sisters in Los Angeles and find something less flashy for tomorrow afternoon.

  By the next evening I would have crossed the border into Mexico with the newest Adriano artifact. The “artifact of the second millennium” would be on its way home. In spite of Eric Cabordes’s bad information.

  Unless the Interpol agent found me first.

  The girl and I left the room quickly, quietly, and headed for the fire escape stairwells. Instead of keeping a low profile, Nicole slipped ahead of me, excited and full of life in the way that only a girl on the verge of womanhood can be.

  I remembered those days. I might have forgotten them if the second tragedy of my young life had not burned those feelings of both foolish bravery and fear into my heart. I’d been barely eighteen and madly in love with Lieutenant Matthew Burns, the young American soldier who’d risked his life to rescue me. Looking now at the girl, at Nicole in all her naiveté, I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to Matthew after he’d smuggled me out of Britain. I had not even known who we were running from, but I’d trusted him when he’d said we were in danger.

  After the third tragedy in my life—losing Lilah—I’d flitted like a gypsy all over Europe, between heists, always a few steps behind where he’d supposedly been
spotted. As long as I held out hope of finding him again, I never dared let another man into my heart, though my bed had been another matter. I had to believe that Matthew was still somewhere out there. My daughter deserved to know her father.

  As for Lilah, I knew exactly where she was, yet I could never see her again. I was dead to her. But better that than have her be dead to me.

  “Which way?” Nicole asked at the bottom of the stairwell.

  One fire door in front of us led back into the lobby area. We took the other door, which opened onto an open grate with rails. I kicked at the ladder, and it extended below us as I tested my weight on the top rung. Nicole climbed down behind me, paying attention as I caught the metal pole with my sleeve and twirled my way to the ground. She mimicked my movements and joined me seconds later on the ground.

  “What now?”

  I smiled at my protégée. “Now you do your thing, kid. Take us to the car.”

  I didn’t complain as we climbed two culverts and dropped to the concrete floor three times to keep from being spotted by security guards in the underground garage. Nicole motioned to the gray Mercedes in a line of luxury automobiles and mouthed, That’s the one. She held out her hand for the key.

  “Uh, no. I’m driving.” I swear she looked disappointed, but I’d been to far more driving schools than she had. I thumbed the door release on the Mercedes’s electronic key, and the vehicle’s taillights flickered. We both tiptoed, hunkered over to keep from being spotted, to the Mercedes, where I discreetly opened the driver’s door and half shoved the girl into the passenger seat before slipping inside and clicking the door shut.

  “Cool,” Nicole whispered. “Do you do that all the time?”

  I steadied my breathing and rubbed my knee. “Yeah, all the time.” Somehow the novelty of it had worn off.