Retreating a safe distance from the hotel, Rowan took out her cheap mobile and dialed the number Paracelsus had sent her. It went to voice mail, which meant he wasn’t in a place where he could speak to her freely.
She’d have to word the message carefully in the event someone else picked up his phone. “This is Dee from Aphrodite Dry Cleaning. We have two orders ready for immediate pickup. Would you call back at your earliest convenience, sir? Thank you.”
She ended the call and headed back to the restaurant, where she found Dansant standing in the alley.
“Hi.” She’d taken off at the busiest time of night, she realized. “I had to, um, take a walk. Get some fresh air.”
He looked her over. “You’re covered in snow.”
That she was. She shook out her hair, brushed off her clothes, and smiled. “Better.”
He gave her another long look before he went back inside.
The entire line was working furiously to make up for her absence, but Rowan knew better than to babble excuses or try to make apologies when they were in the weeds. She washed her hands and went back to her station, trying not to feel the angry glares at her back as she worked.
It took the better part of an hour to catch up with the orders, but Dansant took out some gratis appetizers and amuse-bouches to placate the waiting diners. Rowan didn’t take another break for the rest of the night, and kept working by finishing the cleanup while the other line cooks ate together and rested.
Lonzo stayed behind to vent his spleen, and Rowan stood silently and took it as her due. When he was finished calling her seven kinds of a lazy broad who didn’t know her ass from any sort of depression in the ground, and offered his opinion of her state of mind, her value to the restaurant, and the dismal potential of any future offspring she might produce, he told her to report an hour early the next day to make close, personal acquaintance with the next delivery of squid. Then he let her make her official apology, accepted it against his better judgment, and went home whistling.
Dansant had his turn next. “You did not deserve that.” “Not all of it. Maybe seventy- five percent.” She recalled she was speaking to the owner of the restaurant that, according to Lonzo, she might as well have set fire to. “I am sorry that I was so inconsiderate tonight, Chef.”
“Why did you leave?” he asked. “Where did you go?”
“I had a run-in with that homeless kid who hangs around the alley.” She blew out a breath. “She’s in trouble, and I thought I could help. But she rabbited on me, and I went after her.”
His eyes narrowed. “You pursued this child in the snow, in the streets, in the middle of the night?”
“It wasn’t the middle of the night. It was ten o’clock.” Oh, that made all the difference. “I’m fine. Nothing happened.”
“You cannot run about the streets by yourself at night,” he told her. “As we both well know, it is not safe.”
“What are you, my mother?” She didn’t know why she was so angry, and tried to clamp down on her temper. “I appreciate the concern, but I can take care of myself, Dansant.”
“I disagree.”
“I’m not afraid of the streets. I used to live on them, remember?” She turned her back on him. “Just let it go. I’ll clean squid until everyone feels better about me.”
“You are like a child.” He spun her around, and he wasn’t Dansant anymore; he was some dark, furious stranger with rough hands that dragged her up off her toes. “You run about as if all the world were blind to you. They see you, Rowan. They see how lovely and young and vulnerable you are, and they know they will never have someone like you. It drives them mad. It makes it easy for them to give in to their urges. When you don’t think of these things, when you run off like that, you make it easy for them.”
“You think I ever had a choice?” There went her temper, right out the window. “When I was a kid, my mother went crazy. One night she just snapped and came after me with a knife. She almost killed me, and then she went and took a bath to wash off the blood, and slit her wrists. My father blamed me, and became a drunk, and I had to . . .” No, she wasn’t going to think about that. “I ran away a year after she died. Since then I’ve been on my own, and no matter what you think, I don’t make it easy for anyone. I can’t.” She swallowed against the break in her voice. “Least of all me.”
He brought her face to his and kissed her, hard and fast. By the time she went rigid with shock he had wrenched his mouth from hers.
Dear God. That kiss had lasted all of ten seconds, but in that time he had taken her from furious to aching. All of her nerves were jangled, her ears buzzing, and she had her hands on him. She wanted him, right here, on the floor if need be. And that desire, that soul- shredding wanting, was as strong with him as it had been with Meriden.
Dansant swore in French and set her down. “You’ve made your choice. I cannot stay.”
Without another word he left her there to stand and stare after him, her heart pounding, her hands knotted at her sides.
Rowan knew then why she had become so angry with him. Why she bitterly resented everything she’d said to him in the office, and every moment since. Dansant was wrong; she hadn’t made a choice. No woman would choose this.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, she’d fallen in love.
“Paracelsus?” The counterfeiter squinted through his thick glasses at the business card. “What kind of name is that?”
“One you will not forget, my friend.” Taske collected the small stack of plastic cards, folded documents, and a brand-new passport. “Thank you for your excellent work.”
“The identity won’t hold up under a microscope,” the man warned as he accepted an envelope of cash and thumbed through the edges of the bills. “It’s only good for public use and to fool the cops. Your girl messes with the FBI or another agency, they’ll rip it to shreds.” He took another folder from his bag and handed it over. “The originals you gave me. I don’t keep ’em or dispose of ’em.”
“A wise policy.” He held out his gloved hand. “Until we meet again.”
“Yeah, hopefully not in the joint.” The man shook his hand and left.
Taske placed the keys to the motel room on the table before exiting himself. When he reached his car, which was parked two blocks from the motel, his driver met him at the back passenger door to open it for him.
“There was a call for you, Mr. Taske.” He handed him his mobile. “They left a voice mail.”
He checked the number on the missed calls list. “Thank you, Findley. Take me back to the hotel, if you would.”
As they drove from New Jersey back to New York, Taske listened to the voice mail Rowan had left for him. He was not aware of any other Takyn residing in New York, so her request for him to pick up two “orders” perplexed him. He called her back at once.
“Thanks for getting back to me,” Rowan said. “The situation has changed. I’ve found a kid who may be Takyn. I’m not sure what happened to her, but for the moment she’s homeless and pretty desperate.”
“How old is this child?” he asked.
“Maybe sixteen. I know, she’s too young,” she said before he could speak, “but she has the tattoos on her forearms.”
“I won’t remind you how many people in this country voluntarily have their forearms tattooed.” He didn’t care for the way her voice sounded. “And she is far too young to be one of us.”
“What if there were others after us?” she asked. “They could have started the experiments again somewhere else.”
“There is always a remote possibility of that,” he conceded, “but what makes you believe this child is Takyn? Did she demonstrate some ability?”
“No,” Rowan admitted. “She saw me shift, though, and she didn’t freak out. She doesn’t seem to know anything about us, but I didn’t scare her. She asked me some really strange questions, too. You remember, the kind I used to ask you when we first met online.”
“ ‘Who did this to me, where can I find them, how hard is it to kill someone, where can I buy a gun?’ ” He chuckled. “Yes, my dear, I do remember. But until we can verify that this child is one of us, we must proceed with caution.”
“I know where she’s squatting, and I think with some backup I can coax her out of there and talk her into coming with us.” She hesitated. “If I’m wrong, then we can take her someplace safe, get her the help she needs.”
“You have a compassionate heart, Aphrodite.”
“When it’s not being schizophrenic,” she muttered. “How much more time do I have here?”
“I purchased traveling identification for you tonight. Jessa will have something more permanent prepared by the end of the week. I expect you should begin packing up your things tomorrow, and if all goes well we will arrange our rendezvous for the next day.”
“So soon.” She sounded startled. “Okay. Besides the kid, there’s only one problem left. I haven’t a fucking clue what you look like, P.”
Taske laughed. “I’m rather hard to miss. Does that phone of yours accept photo images?”
“Too cheap for that.”
“Well, then, you should be on the lookout for the tallest man in the immediate vicinity with silver-blond hair, a full beard of the same shade, dark Asian eyes, and a very inconvenient limp which requires him to employ a mahogany cane bearing the head of silver lion.”
“Wow. He sounds gorgeous.”
He eyed his gloves. “He would gladly trade it all to be a short, dumpy accountant from Cleveland, I assure you.” A tingling sensation in the base of his spine made him reach forward and tap on the divider glass. Findley nodded and pulled off to park the limo in front of a busy nightclub. “I must attend to something else now, my dear. Keep your phone at hand, and I will see you soon.”
