Praise for Tara Taylor Quinn’s
WHERE THE ROAD ENDS

“Quinn smoothly blends women’s fiction with suspense and then adds a dash of romance to construct an emotionally intense, compelling story….”

—Booklist

“Tara Taylor Quinn takes readers on a journey…and brilliantly explores the emotions involved.”

—Romantic Times

“Quinn ties you up in knots emotionally as her wonderful voice explodes into the mainstream….”

—Reader to Reader

“One of the skills that has served Quinn best…has been her ability to explore edgier subjects.”

—Publishers Weekly

“With mesmerizing prose, Quinn takes the reader through the darkest of shadows, weaving danger and intrigue into every step, until at last emerging into a dazzling world of new possibility and metamorphosis…. Where the Road Ends comes very highly recommended.”

—Wordweaving

“Emotionally complex and powerful novel… Moving and deep, this book has much to say about priorities and love…. Look for a great future for this author.”

—Huntress Reviews

Dear Reader,

I’m still celebrating your response to my debut for MIRA Books. Where the Road Ends was out last summer, and I can hardly believe it’s time for another release.

I bring you Street Smart with a bit of trepidation and a whole lot of heart. The trepidation comes from your expectations, which I don’t want, ever, to disappoint. This is not like any other book I’ve written. It explores topics I have not explored before and never thought I would. And yet, as with every single story I tell, it comes from within me. My work seems to happen on its own, almost in spite of me. The people, their lives come from somewhere deep inside. How they get there, I don’t question. What to do with them, I don’t ask. I sit. I think and feel. I type. And I give them—my characters—to you.

I offer you Street Smart with my very best wishes.

Tara Taylor Quinn

I love to hear from readers. You can reach me at P.O. Box 15065, Scottsdale, AZ 85267 or check out my Web site: www.tarataylorquinn.com.

Street Smart
Tara Taylor Quinn

www.mirabooks.co.uk

To the coolest girls I know—

Patricia Potter, Carol Prescott, Lynn Kerstan and Mary Strand. I’m a lot smarter because of the four of you. And looking forward to how much smarter I’m going to get!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

1

She pushed as hard as she could. Pushed until her insides felt as though they were ripping away from her bones. There was supposed to be time in between. Time to breathe. To maintain sanity. Instead, one wave of mind-altering pain followed another.

How long she’d been lying there, Francesca Witting had no idea. She’d lost track of time during the night. It was all a blur to her now. Pain. Despair. Determination.

And fear.

Something was wrong. She didn’t have to see the worried expressions on the faces of the medical personnel as they examined her, measured, watched screens, to know that. If her instincts weren’t insistent enough, her body was telling her that this son of hers was not coming into the world as nature had intended. He wasn’t helping enough. Or she wasn’t. Instead of sliding down the birth canal, he was tearing her apart from the inside out.

Terrified, she rode the pains, accepted them, for they meant she was still alive—and that maybe he was.

Most of the time speech flew around her, over her. Tense, staccato words—orders she couldn’t understand. In a language she knew only peripherally.

Francesca was used to being alone. Was in Italy now, alone, by her own choice.

She’d just never thought she’d die this way.

Never thought she’d die without seeing Autumn again. Without knowing that her runaway half sister who’d been missing for more than two years was safe and well.

People she’d never seen before—and didn’t really see now—came and went from the little gray-walled room. Touching her. Mostly she couldn’t feel them. The searing pain from within left no room for other sensation. When she could focus, she saw them, all moving quickly in their green scrubs, their hair covered, their features serious. Intensely engaged. Most were wearing thin plastic gloves. Or pushing fingers into them. Or peeling them off.

Few paid attention to the American woman’s face. Their concern was lower down, inside the tented sheet, on the miracle that was becoming a tragedy.

Francesca’s legs had been spread in stirrups beneath that sheet for so long the position felt permanent. A lot more permanent than her life, or the tiny life that she prayed was still alive, struggling inside her.

“Aahh.” She heard the wail, but didn’t immediately identify it as her own. As she’d been doing for hours, she stared at a green light ticking off seconds on a monitor to one side of her left knee.

For the past hours she’d alternated between sweating and getting chills from wet skin touched by the room’s cool air.

A nurse adjusted the IV connected to her right hand. Probably because the excruciating pain in her lower abdomen was on the downward slope of its current wave, Francesca was aware as the IV needle moved beneath her skin. It hurt.

Another nurse, a fairly young one, stepped up to Francesca’s shoulder, offering her ice chips and indistinguishable Italian words in a kind voice. The woman’s mouth was pinched, her eyes carefully guarded.

Francesca barely had the energy to shake her head. If she had to swallow, she’d choke. Gripping the bed-sheet with clenched fists, she turned her head on the soaking-wet pillow they’d changed more than once. Her short damp hair stuck to the side of her face.

The woman tried again, bringing a spoonful of chips to Francesca’s parched lips, her tone encouraging. With a breath she hoped would be deep enough to get her through the next seconds of pain, Francesca allowed the chips to rest against her closed lips. The ice was cold, on the left side of her bottom lip and the right side of her top. Very cold. Cold enough for her to feel. She thought about those cold spots. Concentrated on them. As hard as she could. Until nothing existed but those tiny sensations of cold.

In that split second of relief a vision of Antonio’s compelling face flashed before her eyes. His coal-black hair. Eyes that were almost black in color and yet so full of warmth—of intelligent compassion—that they drew her relentlessly.

Oh, God, Antonio. She hadn’t told him…Couldn’t. His life was elsewhere. Irrevocably tied to another woman. A disabled woman. But it seemed as if, somehow, he’d come here, to this place.

Her face aching with the smile that was attempting to force its way through tight cracked skin, Francesca blinked, hoping to bring his face into clearer focus. His face, with its permanent shadow of a beard that would be thick and full were it permitted to grow longer than twelve hours.

Had someone found out? Called him from halfway around the world? Because she was dying? Or his baby was?

Another pain rose to unbearable levels and she couldn’t hold on to his image.

Don’t leave, my love. Stay. Just for a few minutes.

Blinking the sweat and tears from her eyes, Francesca sought out her only remaining source of strength. Antonio’s smile. And saw, instead, a younger face in glaring light. A concerned gaze. A few escaped tendrils of brown hair sticking out from beneath a light green, tied-on cap. A female face.

She blinked again. The pain wasn’t subsiding at all.

“Antonio!” The word was a scream inside her mind. In the room, it sounded more like a harsh whisper.

Antonio.

Her biggest sin.

He was one of the few people who’d managed to penetrate the defenses she’d wrapped around herself after she’d left home and the stepfather who’d hit her and the mother who’d been too emotionally battered to help her. Defenses that had served her well as she became the determined Italian-American photojournalist who’d managed to make a name for herself with her pictures and accompanying text by the time she was thirty.

The nurse was leaning over her, placing her face so close to Francesca’s, Francesca could hardly breathe, let alone make out what the woman was trying to say.

Turning her head to the side as her lower stomach twisted inside out, ripping away from her spine, Francesca took one last breath.

“Antonio!”

His face was there again. Just his face this time. Floating above her.

And then everything was dark.

Gian was a popular name for Italian boys. But that wasn’t why the little guy’s mother named him that. Gian meant “God is gracious.” And that was the reason Francesca had bestowed the name on her little son. Because the powers that be had been gracious that morning two and a half months ago and preserved the life of the infant who’d been almost strangled by the umbilical cord in his mother’s womb.

Francesca was trying to be quiet so as to not wake her paternal grandmother. Sancia Witting, the current matriarch of an old Italian family that had immigrated to Italy from Wales centuries before, needed her afternoon siesta. Rolling up a dozen summer-weight sleepers Francesca stuffed them into the far corner of the second of two oversize dark green duffels on the double bed in Sancia’s guest room. Gian, who’d been asleep for more than an hour in his portable crib, wasn’t a concern. This son of hers could sleep through a minor hurricane, as he’d proved three weeks before when a debilitating storm had hit the coast of Naples, waking all within a hundred-mile radius. But not Gian.

His washcloth and hooded towels were next. The lotions and powders that left his little body so sweet-smelling already lay secure in a plastic bag in the other duffel, along with a week’s worth of disposable diapers padding all her cameras. This late-spring time out of time with her newborn son—and the grandmother she’d just met the month before—had been without doubt the most joyful she’d known since her father’s death almost twenty years before. But life was calling on her to begin moving again.

Actually, although she’d never admit as much to her overprotective grandmother, Francesca had done the calling herself. She’d left messages for a couple of magazine editors who were always eager for a Francesca Witting piece.

She’d had calls back from both. And now she and Gian were off to spend June in New York, Boston and San Diego before returning to Sacramento to introduce him to the grandmother who didn’t yet know he existed. Francesca had sold the piece she’d come to Italy to do almost a year before—an in-depth look at Italian people through their weathering of disasters. And she’d been asked to do a follow-up piece highlighting the similarities of their character and culture to Italians living in neighborhoods in America. This time she’d have a companion during her travels.

The little guy was sleeping so soundly he hadn’t moved since she’d put him down. She’d have to wake him soon or he’d be up all night. Gian’s favorite four rattles and a stuffed horse his great-grandmother had given him went in next, beside two pairs of soft-sided shoes.

In the many months since Francesca had left her home in Sacramento, she’d visited families in Sicily who’d lost loved ones in a train crash a couple of years before, those who were affected by Etna’s boiling lava spewing forth, and the parents of children who were killed when an earthquake leveled their school. A freelance photojournalist with enough money to follow her artistic inclinations rather than take one of the many job offers she’d received from national magazines and Reuters and newspapers all around the state of California, she’d done the story of her career.

It was while she was visiting Milan, where she’d documented people whose loved ones had died in a plane that had crashed into the top floors of a thirty-story building two years earlier, that Antonio Gillespie, her former boyfriend, had arrived on business from Sacramento. His father-in-law was a retailer with upscale shops all over the states. Antonio, who was second in command, had come to finalize a deal with one of Milan’s top designers. And to take a break from the wife he’d described as more of a child than a woman since the car accident that had left her brain-damaged and paralyzed.

Francesca hadn’t been able to stay angry with him for having kept the woman a secret during the two years she’d known him, hadn’t been able to hold on to feelings of betrayal, because she’d understood. Especially now, glancing over at her tiny son who gave himself as completely to his sleep as he did his play. Her heart was open wide and filled with forgiveness. Gian’s father was an admirable man who could not heartlessly send the woman who’d once been his life partner to an institution, in spite of the instant and undeniably rich attachment he and Francesca had shared since she’d first interviewed him for a story she’d done on the debilitating impact of fashion in America. This was the man she’d tell Gian about when he grew up and asked questions about the father he didn’t know.

Folding, stuffing, Francesca remembered that last scene in Sacramento. Another retailer had told her that Antonio was married, that the company she’d thought his own actually belonged to his father-in-law. He hadn’t tried to deny it. To lie. And in the end, after she’d heard the heart-wrenchingly sad story of a fairy tale gone wrong, she hadn’t been angry. Just devastated. And had left the States to get over him. He’d known that. But he’d been as lonely as she….

The sound of dishes rattling in the kitchen across the small villa brought Francesca back to the task at hand. Her grandmother Sancia was up from her siesta and would be expecting Francesca to join her for an afternoon snack. And she still had all her own clothes to pack into the other half of the second duffel.

Although she’d spent more than nine months in Italy before she’d contacted her father’s mother, introducing herself to the grandmother she’d never known, Sancia was probably the real reason Francesca had come to this country. Looking back, she could recognize the quest that had driven her halfway around the world at a time when her mother had needed her at home.

Nothing in life had made sense anymore. Nothing, other than her career, had made her happy. She’d begun to question her basic beliefs, her decisions and motivations, even her ability to offer compassionate stories to the world.

So she’d come to Italy with some half-formed hope that she might find what she was missing among the people of her father’s land. That the culture, the values, the heart and soul of Italy would give her what she could not seem to provide for herself. A solid sense of self. Of direction.

Almost a year later, contemplating her trip home, she wasn’t sure they’d produced anything quite so significant. But these long months had given her Gian.

And he’d given life meaning.

Finished packing, she went to wake her son.

Five weeks later.

God, it was sweltering. Carrying a single duffel filled mostly with cameras she hadn’t used in more than a month, Francesca climbed the steps of Lucky Seven, an extended-stay motel off the Strip, to the room she’d just rented. Las Vegas in July was hell.

She’d forgotten that.

Just as she’d forgotten anything of value in taking pictures. She hadn’t picked up a camera since that last day in Italy, when she’d packed them in the bottom of a bag. Nor did she intend to.

She’d buried any meaning her life held in a little old cemetery a couple of miles from Sancia Witting’s home.

The phone was ringing as she pushed her way through the door of her two-room suite.

“Hello?”

A cursory glance told her the room was clean.

“This is José at the front desk, Ms. Witting.”

“Yes?” What was he bothering her for? She was tired. Hot. Lacking even an ounce of the capacity it would take to be civil to other human beings.

“I have that number you asked for. The one for the used-car dealer.”

She wasn’t planning to be in town for more than a week. But she had to get a car now that she was back in the States—she’d sold her Mustang before she’d left for Italy—and figured that, rather than paying for a rental, she’d buy one here. She’d drive Autumn back to Sacramento when they returned together.

“That was quick,” she told José now, duffel still on her shoulder as she scribbled the number on the envelope he’d given her downstairs with her receipt.

“My friend’s at work tonight. He’ll be there all weekend, too.”

“Great, thanks,” she said, conjuring up enough energy to say a pleasant goodbye and get off the phone. Car-shopping on a Friday night in Vegas. Just what she wanted to do.

But then, she thought, dropping her duffel on the bed, there was nothing in the entire universe that Francesca Witting wanted to do. Except not think about that crib with the too-still infant. That Italian cemetery.

And she wanted to follow up on the phone call her mother had received that week from her younger sister. A runaway, Autumn had been missing for more than two years. Earlier this week, she’d been in Las Vegas. Francesca was going to find her.

And get Autumn’s ass home where it belonged.

“Luke, have a seat.”

He’d rather stand. But he sat in one of the lushly upholstered high-backed chairs across from his boss and mentor’s oversize mahogany desk. The chairs were gold now. The year before they’d been maroon.

Luke preferred the maroon.

“How’s your mother?” Amadeo asked.

Fingers steepled at his lips, Luke shrugged. Luke Everson didn’t talk about his mother. Amadeo Esposito knew that.

And still, without fail, every time he saw Luke he asked.

Glancing beyond Luke’s left shoulder, Amadeo gave a slight nod, dismissing the two “companions” who were never more than a few feet away. Their feet moved soundlessly on the plush maroon carpet that had recently replaced last year’s golden brown. Maroon and gold were Esposito’s colors. Always had been.

When the heavy wood door clicked shut behind them, Amadeo met Luke’s gaze, his dark eyes narrowed. “You want to tell me what’s going on at the Bonaparte?”

A lesser man might have been intimidated. Most men who came in contact with the owner and CEO of Biamonte Industries—a conglomerate that owned a tenth of Las Vegas—were intimidated. Italian-born Esposito, while having no Mafia affiliations or connections, was a very rich and sometimes ruthless man who knew how to use his money to get what he wanted.

Amadeo Esposito did many things Luke wouldn’t have done—or would’ve done differently.

But Luke had known the man all his life. He’d seen Amadeo cry at his daughter’s funeral fifteen years before. And then again at his wife’s.

Amadeo had cried with Luke at Luke’s father’s funeral three years before.

“There’ve been too many big wins.” Luke told Amadeo what he already knew.

The Bonaparte, one of the Strip’s newest and most elite casino-hotels, was Luke’s personal responsibility.

Esposito waited. He was not a patient man, something Luke had never respected about him.

Leaning forward, Luke rested his forearms across his knees. “There’s no apparent pattern,” he reported. “The winners come from all over. All ages. An eighty-year-old woman from a retirement village in Phoenix, a twenty-two-year-old Wall Street wannabe and everything in between. They hail from no particular part of the country, come at no particular time, stay in no particular hotel, frequent no particular casinos, stay no particular length of time. For some, this is their first time in Vegas. Others are veterans. FaceIt found nothing.” Luke named the high-tech surveillance technology that, in conjunction with an Internet security database system, was capable of identifying casino cheaters, card counters and those associated with them.

Esposito’s face tightened.

“With the new digital-recording system, plus the incident-reporting and risk-management software, we’ve been able to call up every aspect of each case individually. We’ve tracked tape from each dealer down to every single time a drawer opens—and there’s absolutely nothing.”

“What about dealers?” Esposito demanded. “New technology only means that crooks find new ways to get around it. We’re only as good as the people who work for us.”

Luke shook his head. “Everyone checks out,” he said. “I talked to Jackson, and he vouched for all of them, as well.”

Arnold Jackson was not only the best dealer they had, he was the closest thing Luke Everson had to a personal friend. He was as much a part of the family as Luke himself—and one of the handful of people Esposito trusted.

His tanned face creased in a frown beneath dark silver hair, Amadeo leaned forward. “There is one pattern,” he said, his voice lowered to the decibel of dangerous. “All the wins are at the Bonaparte.”

The back of his neck aching, Luke shook his head. “It’s beginning to look like there are at least two others.” Luke named them both—well-known strip resorts—listing the dates and exact amounts of the wins in question. “And there’s no pattern in the locations,” he added. “One’s new, one’s been around for years. One is independently owned, one’s part of a corporation.

“And none have any relationship, either past or current, with Biamonte Industries,” he said, summing up what they already knew. He added, “I’ve been working with the security directors to run a check on all current and past employees to look for someone in common to all three—or even to two of us. Nothing significant has turned up.”

“I don’t believe in coincidence.”

Sighing, Luke sat back, running a hand through his blond hair. “I’ve viewed and reviewed the tapes. Didn’t even come up with a case of enlarged pores.” Luke wondered how many of the gamblers they caught counting cards every year knew that something as innocuous as their skin could give them away.

Amadeo didn’t reply for several moments. Moments that would’ve seemed endless had Luke not been fully aware of the older man’s habit of focusing silently when he had something to ponder.

“There is one pattern here.” Esposito’s usually nonexistent Italian accent slipped into his speech.

Raised brows were Luke’s only response.

“No two wins took place at the same time.”

“Anything else would just be stupid,” Luke said.

Nodding slowly, Amadeo said, “And it would also allow a person or persons to be at those tables, as a bystander, guiding the potential winners and waiting in the wings to collect a share of the take.”

In Luke’s opinion, Esposito had underestimated his ex-marine officer protégé.

Luke elaborated. “The operation would have to be large enough to hire a different player for every win. We have two thousand cameras out there, Amadeo, with a several-yard radius around every table. There isn’t a single instance of anyone in the vicinity sharing even a slight resemblance with those in the vicinity of the other wins.”

“So maybe we’re dealing with a damn good makeup artist,” the older man shot back, sitting up straight. “For God’s sake, man, this is Las Vegas, home of illusion.”

“And home of the people who can spot illusion with eyes half shut.”

“You’ve had the films studied by someone who’d know?”

Luke replied with a slow nod. “Three.”

“Carson Bova.” Esposito named the city’s best.

“Of course.”

“Follow up on the payout.” There was no mistaking his words as anything but an order. “I want to get inside the personal finances of every single winner. I want evidence of increase equal to the full win.”

Technically it couldn’t be done.

But Luke nodded. He already had someone on it.

“And run another check on every single one of our security staff.”

Already done. But he didn’t bother telling his boss that. Amadeo needed to be the one giving the orders. Luke stood, his polished black shoes sinking into the carpet.

“How’s the baby thing going?” Esposito asked, his voice, his whole demeanor, softer and more compassionate as he asked the question.

It was this side of the man that Luke trusted. His godfather, whom he honored and cared about. He still couldn’t stand Amadeo in his business life.

“I filled out the paperwork,” he replied. Amadeo Esposito had given Luke this chance—hooked him up with an agency in town that specialized in finding children for families who didn’t qualify for regular adoptions. Luke hadn’t even known such a place existed.

Coming around his desk, Amadeo stood mere inches from Luke, his eyes warm and personal. “What’s the next step?”

Luke glanced at his watch. He was on the clock. Had work to do. “A series of checks into everything from my medical history to grades in elementary school, by the sound of things,” he muttered, stepping toward the door.

“Luke?”

He turned back.

“You’ll have your son.”

Anticipation filled Luke’s chest, but only for a brief instant. Still, after he’d passed Amadeo’s current thugs in the outer office, he couldn’t help a satisfied nod.

If Amadeo said he’d get his son, he would.

2

She had her car—a “used though still in excellent condition” Grand Cherokee. A single woman on her own didn’t need anything so big, but Francesca didn’t know how much stuff Autumn had accumulated in the two years she’d been gone. A shopping cart full?

Her half sister had called her mother from a pay phone. For anonymity? Or because that phone on the street was her home phone?

Just before eight on Saturday morning, Francesca drove slowly down the Strip, only minimally distracted by the visual cacophony of fantasyland elite mixed with the gutteresque. The opulent signs and landscaping stood beside parking lots filled with potholes and garishly lighted marquees advertising souvenir mugs for ninety-nine cents, beer and three T-shirts for twelve dollars.

Already older couples strolled the sidewalks hand in hand, stepping aside periodically as the occasional man hurried from one casino to the next, exuding an air of desperation—and the desperate hope of someone who’s broken free.

Did they ever eat, those occasional men? Francesca wondered. Or did they live on anticipation and the free cocktails offered so readily at the blackjack tables?

Traffic wasn’t too bad, but she moved slowly, taking in as many loitering places as she could. Autumn had made that call just a few blocks from here.

Spring Mountain Road. Sands Avenue. The streets followed one after another, just as her map had indicated they would. It all had a “Twilight Zone” feel to Francesca, not only unfamiliar but completely outside the bounds of reality. Was this surrealistic place her sister’s stamping ground?

The thought of her beautiful now-seventeen-year-old sister living somewhere on these streets was just too painful to hold on to. Francesca glanced once more at the written directions and highlighted map on the console at her right elbow. The police had said there was nothing they could do with the phone lead. There’d been nothing to trace. Francesca understood that runaways were a dime a dozen in their fine city. And the police had a hell of a lot more to do than Francesca did.

She could sit by that pay phone booth all day every day for the next year if that was what it took to get a lead on her sister’s whereabouts. Sit there holding the camera she’d unpacked that morning and tossed in the back seat just so she’d look as though she had some purpose, something to do.

One more intersection and she had to turn right. And then take an immediate left. She’d been in the city a little more than twelve hours. Long enough to buy the car and get some much-needed sleep—via the help of potent prescription sleeping pills given to her by a sympathetic Italian doctor who’d been unable to ease her pain. He’d offered the escape of powerful drugs instead.

There were nights when Francesca cried out of sheer gratitude to him.

Her first impulse was to ignore the ringing of the cell phone plugged into the car’s power outlet. But there was only one person who’d be calling. And as much as she didn’t want to talk…

“Hi, Mom,” she said, without looking at the caller ID on the phone’s display.

“What did you find?”

She should’ve kept her number private.

“It’s barely past dawn, Mom,” she said, her eyes filling with tears for the sad woman who, living all alone, had aged ten years in the one Francesca had been away. After the death of her first husband, Francesca’s father, Kay Stevens’s life had gone inexorably downhill. The sudden heart-attack death eighteen months before of the bastard who’d been her second husband—Autumn’s father—should’ve made things at least more bearable.

But it hadn’t.

“You don’t sleep a lot,” Kay said softly, but with the barest hint of the steel she’d instilled in her older daughter sometime before her second husband had come on the scene and attempted to beat it out of both of them. “In the three weeks you were home, you never slept more than four hours a night. Something happened in Italy. I know it did. Why won’t you tell me about it?”

A bus stop caught Francesca’s eye—an uncomfortable-looking bench with a couple of panels overhead, to block out rain, maybe. It certainly didn’t offer much shade.

No one was sleeping on it. Had Autumn ever?

“There’s nothing to tell.” The response drained her, but not nearly as much as the truth would have.

As much as she craved her mother’s nurturing hand, she just didn’t have the capacity to talk about the year in Italy that had changed her life forever. Not her brief time in Milan with Antonio. Not the long, slow and frightening birth of her son. And most especially not the moment she’d reached into his crib that last afternoon at Sancia’s, not the autopsy, nor the grandmother she’d left behind.

Nor did she believe her mother any longer had the wherewithal to offer a nurturing hand.

“I think you should at least try to call Antonio,” her mother said again—a suggestion she’d made many times in the month since Francesca’s return. “Let him know you’re back in town.”

“No,” she said, as she had every single time. “I went to Italy because I found out he’d been married the entire two years I dated him. Why on earth would I look him up on my return?” Other than these reminders from her mother, she didn’t think about the man who’d fathered her child. Not anymore. He’d been buried right along with the rest of her heart.

“You said his wife was brain-damaged from that accident….”

“Which doesn’t make him any less obligated. Any less married. And if we’re going to continue to discuss this, I’m hanging up.”

Kay’s sigh was heavy. “Will you call me as soon as you get to the phone booth? Let me know what you find?”

“Unless Autumn left a calling card or some graffiti on the side of the booth, a vacant piece of property owned by Sprint isn’t going to tell us much.”

“I just thought there might be some homeless person around who’d know—” Kay broke off. Into the silence that followed, she muttered, “I know, I’m being presumptuous.” For a brief moment she sounded again like the confident and capable college professor Francesca had known during the first ten years of her life. “This initial phase is your job. Mine comes when we get her home.”

She’d find her sister. Francesca couldn’t think any further than that. If life required more than one step at a time, she’d be paralyzed.

Inching past a red sign with white blinking lights—at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning—proclaiming Welcome to the Candlelight Wedding Chapel, and then, next to it, a big hot-dog placard, Francesca had to wonder if it was an all-in-one deal—nuptials and a wedding supper without leaving the parking lot.

“I’ll hang up now,” her mother said after another pause. “Call me as soon as you know anything.”

“I will, Mom.” I told you I would.

“Anything,” Kay repeated. “Anything at all. I think—”

Francesca’s thumb flipped to the off button just before she dropped the phone back to the console. If asked, she could always say they got disconnected.

Circus Circus was offering free chips and salsa with the purchase of a drink. Francesca made her turn, paying more attention as she got closer to her destination. The phone booth, only a few blocks from the Lucky Seven, could have been reached through backstreets if Francesca had known how to navigate them. With all the construction going on around and behind the Strip—another new casino, road repair, a golf course apparently being shoved in somehow—she hadn’t bothered to try.

Another block, and there was the phone. Right in front of a billboard advertising the Striptease Gentlemen’s Club.

And across the street, a McDonald’s—an old-fashioned rendition of the famous hamburger joint with the ground-to-ground golden arches that were hardly seen anymore. A return to yesteryear? A sign that things were going to be okay again?

Shaking her head, she turned off the engine and settled in, staring at the corner across the street. She knew there was no going back. Ever. Not for her.

And not for Autumn. Her sister had been gone for two years. No matter where she’d been, what she’d been doing, there were bound to be irrevocable changes.

Francesca understood that.

She wasn’t sure her mother did.

Fifty-five-year-old Sheila Miller, blackjack dealer extraordinaire, sat at the kitchen table in her little breakfast nook Sunday morning, phone in hand. She’d dialed three times.

And just as often, pushed the disconnect button.

She had to call. If anyone would know who was behind the recent series of big wins at the tables, Arnold Jackson would.

Stomach growling, Sheila gave a cursory glance at the mass of notes and bills strewn across her table where breakfast would’ve been if she weren’t so desperate to lose weight. No matter how she looked at it, she was in deep shit.

With sweaty fingers, Sheila slowly pushed in the numbers she knew by heart.

Her friend and co-worker, Angie Madden, had asked all up and down the Strip for information on the wins. It had to be an inside scam, but no one was talking. That would make sense if Sheila’d been the one asking. She was the straitlaced fuddy-duddy among them. But not Angie. She’d been the queen of scam for years—someone another scammer would trust—or want to brag to.

The home Angie owned didn’t come from her ten-year-old divorce the way most people thought. It had been purchased, instead, with money she’d slowly siphoned off her table—and from the cut she took helping others do the same. She’d developed a solid reputation among the old-timers. Most of them had either used her help or were friends with someone who had. They didn’t take a lot. And only when they were really in a bind. The well would dry up if they got too greedy.

Most times the take wasn’t much at all by casino-loss standards—an electric bill here, an engagement ring there. More often than anything else, it covered the huge medical deductible on their health plan.

The silver-haired Angie Madden had helped more dealers on the Strip than Sheila could count, and not a single one of them was talking.

Just Sheila’s luck. The first time in thirty years she wanted to know about the seedier side of a blackjack dealer’s life, and she was coming up empty.

Arnold answered on the fourth ring, his voice more gravelly than usual.

She paused long enough to swallow. “I’m sorry, did I wake you?”

“Who is this?”

Feeling the heat come up her face, Sheila stared at the floor. Though Arnold had only been around a few years, he’d quickly become known as the most sought-after bachelor among the dealers. He was smart. Good-looking. And completely true-blue honest.

Which was what made Sheila crazy for him in a way she hadn’t been crazy for a man since the end of her disastrous first marriage thirty years before.

She might be attracted to Arnold, but she wasn’t ready to deal with that. She still had ten pounds to lose.

“Oh, sorry.” She tried for a chuckle and ended up with a cough that probably made her sound as embarrassed as she was. “It’s Sheila Miller. We served together on the dealers’ continuing education committee last year.”

It had been shortly after the holidays. She’d been good and fat then.

“Sheila. Yes, I remember. You were the one who came up with the final justification that clinched our funding.”

He had a good memory. That probably meant he remembered the fat, too.

“I was just calling to find out what you know about this series of big wins. My friends and I are getting concerned. Until we know who’s behind them we’re all suspect. I figured you’d make it your business to find out, especially since most of them are happening at the Bonaparte.”

“All I know is that they’re happening,” the man said. She heard some rustling, wondered if he was getting out of bed. If he slept in the nude. Or if he’d just snuggled deeper beneath the covers.

Alone?

“I’ve been at this job for thirty years,” Sheila told him, folding back the corner of her most recent financial analysis—the one that had kept her up most of the night. If she didn’t figure out who was behind this scam—and get in on it—she was going to lose everything. “And not once in all that time was a series of wins this big ever a coincidence.”

So it had been stupid to use her entire life savings to buy some land outside the city and contract to build a little house on it. She’d thought she could afford it. And after thirty years of sucking up rich jerks’ smoke and developing varicose veins standing at a blackjack table, she deserved something more for herself.

“I’m not happy about the situation,” Arnold said. “As you said, whether it’s an inside job or not, it makes us all look bad.”

And every single night when she came home there were more messages from her builder letting her know about additional expenses. Permit fees and truss calcs and engineering expenses. She’d borrowed—twice—against the condo she’d bought twenty years before, hit up every friend and almost-friend she knew.

“At the Bonaparte they’re running extra security checks on all of us,” Arnold continued.

Shit. Just what she needed. If the Bonaparte was running checks, so would all the casinos. Her debt was going to turn up and she’d be a prime suspect. Double shit. How could she get in on the scam, assuming she found the source, if she was a prime suspect at the same time?

Sweat trickled between her breasts, gathering uncomfortably at the under-wire of her D-cup bra beneath the white blouse she wore to work.

For years she’d watched the others run scams with absolutely no accountability. But the moment I even think about it, they’re suddenly running extra security checks.

Her rotten luck.

Which was why she was a fifty-five-year-old, slightly plump single dealer in Las Vegas with the reputation of being straitlaced and definitely not up for a game.

“You want to have dinner tomorrow night?” What the hell. She was in debt. She was fat. If the wins were an inside job, Jackson would eventually find out. And for the first time in thirty years, she had the hots for a guy.

“I’m working tomorrow night.”

Yeah, well, it was as good excuse as any. At least the man was nice enough to preserve her pride.

Hanging up the phone, Sheila went over to the counter to cut up some fruit.

Sunday night, when the darkness had grown to the point that the strangers she approached on the street corner could no longer see the picture she had to show them, Francesca gave up for another day. Gave up, but couldn’t go back to the Lucky Seven as she had the previous two nights. The black spots on the walls were beginning to take on the image of climbing bugs. She had to keep getting up to make sure they hadn’t really moved, that she didn’t have to kill them. And she was wearing socks at all times in case the stains on the carpet were from something gross.

Socks in 105° F temperature.

How she ended up at the Bonaparte, Las Vegas’s newest casino, and touted as the most opulent, Francesca didn’t know. It was a fantasyland. And she needed to escape.

She’d been in the casino almost an hour, no longer aware of all the loud and unfamiliar sounds consuming her brain. She’d found a nickel video slot she was slowly beginning to figure out as she continued to spend two dollars and twenty-five cents with each push of the button. She still wasn’t sure how she kept racking up credits, but she knew now that when the genie said “yes!” three times in a row, that was a good thing.

Bells rang around her. A recorded voice periodically called out “Wheel of Fortune!” not too far away. She was pretty sure she kept hearing Alex Trebek call out his famous “Let’s play Jeopardy.” Another slot machine based on a TV show?

“Cocktails?” asked a waitress whose breasts were falling out of the purple piece of fabric that was supposed to be a top. It was the fourth time she’d been around.

Instead of politely declining as she had previously, Francesca requested a bottle of water and was relieved when the scantily clad woman responded cheerfully as though the request was quite normal.

Wondering how much the water would cost in a place that had marble casements for its slot machines, Francesca pushed the button again and jumped back, heart pounding, as a siren went off and a light on top of the machine started to flash.

Great. Her first time gambling, first time in a casino, and she’d screwed up the machine.

Could you go to jail for that?

Of course not, she immediately answered herself, fighting back her automatic sense of gloom and doom. But you didn’t have to be in Las Vegas for more than a couple of hours to know that the city took its security seriously.

In the two seconds it took her to consider slipping away, a distinguished-looking man, wearing a three-piece navy suit with a navy-and-white-striped tie that had to be real silk, was by her side, blocking her escape.

“Congratulations!” he said, sticking a card into the machine after which the alarming noise immediately ceased. “Eighteen thousand coins. Not a bad win!”

Eighteen thousand coins? How much was that in nickel land?

“Someone will be here shortly to take care of this for you.”

His voice was pleasant, reassuring, though his smile was as empty as her heart.

“Take care of it?” she asked, wishing now that she’d stopped back at the motel to change out of the tight skirt and skimpy top and knee-high black leather boots she’d worn that day as an attempt to blend into her corner.

“Any win above a thousand coins is paid by an attendant,” he explained.

Francesca was still trying to figure out how much money eighteen thousand nickels really was.

She kept coming up with nine hundred dollars. But that couldn’t be right. She’d only been playing nickels.

“I’m Luke Everson,” the man said, his smile a bit more genuine. “I’m the head of security here. If you have any problems, don’t hesitate to let us know.”

“Problems?” Had she just won nine hundred dollars?

“You looked scared to death when that machine went off.”

“It was a siren.” And the genie hadn’t even said “yes” once.

“I take it you haven’t done this much before.”

He’s not much older than I am. He’d seemed so much older at first. “Uh, no, this is a first.”

“Is it your first time at the Bonaparte, as well?” The conversation was routine, uninvolved, as though she were one of a million of the same cloned human being.

She nodded.

“Well then, I’m glad we’ve given you such a warm welcome. I hope you’ll be back to visit us often.”

There was nothing personal about the invitation. Nothing personal about his manner. Despite his blond good looks, the man somehow managed to exude absolutely nothing. Did he have that much control, or was he just as empty inside as she was?

Either way, his reticence put her more at ease than she’d been in a month.

“Thanks,” she said. Relaxing against the high back of her stool, she glanced up at him. “Did I just win nine hundred dollars?”

“Yes,” he said, grinning down at her in a way that left her confused. He was empty. So was she. This wasn’t supposed to have happened. “And I have to tell you,” he added, “you’ve got to be the least excited winner I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t make for great PR, you know?”

She might have apologized if people hadn’t descended on them. The waitress with her water—turned out it was free—and the attendant with her money. Before she noticed, Luke Everson, head of security, was gone.

And she’d won nine hundred dollars. As she headed out into the brightly lit night with her money she wondered if the stack of bills in her shoulder bag meant her luck was changing. Did this mean she’d find Autumn tomorrow?

Or had she just wasted what little luck was coming her way?

If so, she wanted to give the money back.

All those steps to climb. Autumn Stevens started up the six flights of concrete steps Sunday night, viewing the task as good exercise. She had to. If she allowed even one second of negative thought, she’d never make it up them at all.

And she had to get up there. Her bathroom was in the apartment on the sixth floor and she had to puke. Praying she’d make it in time, dying at the thought of having to clean up her own barf again, especially through six flights of open stairs, she tried to calm her stomach as she lifted one foot and then the other.

As always, calming thoughts rested on her big sister. Francesca was her knight in shining armor, never mind that she wasn’t a man. She was strong. Resilient. She could do anything. Or at least, that was how Autumn had viewed her when she was younger.

Hadn’t Francesca proved her knighthood by getting away from the bastard who’d fathered Autumn—and then proceeded to beat the crap out of all three of the women in his care?

Bile rose to her throat and Autumn quickly switched focus. Last she’d heard, Francesca was in Italy. Antonio had told her. Back when she’d thought him dear and sweet. When she’d felt certain there’d never been a kinder man. Or one more in love.

With the same woman Autumn adored above all others. Her big sister.

God, she missed Cesca. It had been the worst part of leaving the hellhole she’d grown up in—missing her sister’s occasional visits.

If she wasn’t such a chickenshit she’d ask Antonio if he knew of a way to contact her, if she was allowed to do so. Life looked pretty damned hopeless at the moment, but Cesca would know what to do.

Autumn reached the fifth flight. Had to stop for a second to swallow. Rub her stomach. Calm herself. As soon as she got upstairs, she’d be alone, in her own space, with no need to keep up appearances or tell half truths. No need to lie.

She started up the last flight with the contents of her stomach still in place. There was no point in calling Cesca; Autumn wouldn’t tell her anything.

She couldn’t.

Not if she wanted to live.

And so far, in spite of everything, that was the choice she’d made.

And continued to make…

3

The imprint of four-by-eight-inch bricks against her back was a more familiar sensation than the mattress on her bed at the Lucky Seven. In the past seventy-two hours, Francesca had spent most of her time leaning against that brick wall behind what had to be the least used phone booth in all of Las Vegas. The second day on this corner she’d stood with one foot crossed over the other, dressed in a short, tight denim skirt with four-inch black heels and a skimpy spaghetti-strapped black tank top. The next, she’d planted her shoulder blades against that wall, her rump on the ground and her head lolling back, dressed in rags she’d scavenged in trash Dumpsters. She’d washed them until they were almost too threadbare to wear and then dirtied them up again.

And on Tuesday evening she was there again, leaning one shoulder, her butt and the sole of one thick-soled black boot against the now-familiar wall. This time she was in jeans shorts, a T-shirt that left her belly bare and some black leather wristbands. Looking, she hoped, the way Autumn might have looked when she’d been there.

In the sweltering one-hundred-plus summer temperatures, her feet were sweating profusely in the ankle-length boots.

But she’d garnered nothing in her disguise as a prostitute—except a couple of offers that had insulted her with their low amounts. As a homeless woman, she’d been spit at once and had a couple of dollars thrown her way.

Both characters had attracted more attention than the photographer she’d pretended to be the first few hours she’d staked out the corner her little sister had visited less than two weeks before. Of course, if she’d bothered to take the lens cap off her camera, she might’ve drawn some interest. As a general rule people liked to have their picture taken.

As a nonnegotiable rule, Francesca was through with taking pictures.

A couple of businessmen, dressed all in black from their shiny wing-tip shoes to the suit jackets on their backs, passed by, their sunglasses a bit suspect in the gray evening dusk. But then, this was Las Vegas. It hadn’t taken her a day to figure out that it took one hell of a lot of street smarts to live in this town.

For once, Francesca let the passersby go without question or comment. They couldn’t have any knowledge of her little sister. They just couldn’t.

Derek, call me. Bobbee loves Tom. For a good time call… She stared at the graffiti scribbled in pen, black marker, even pencil on the metal sides of the phone booth. There was much more scribbled inside, bits and pieces of which she randomly recited during her sleep—and to her mother when she called, just so she’d have something to say. After the third day, she’d managed to convince Kay that those calls were doing neither of them any good and she’d phone her as soon as she had news to report. Francesca hoped she wouldn’t hear from her again for at least a few days.

Cars sped around the corner. Others slowed, stopped as the light changed, and still she stood there, leaning nonchalantly, as though she had nowhere to be, nor a care in the world.

She could play this role relatively well. The first part of it was completely true.

A small group of teenagers walked by, young men decked out in black leather and boots, with spiked hair of varying colors and body rings. A couple of them eyed her up, down and back up again. Her stomach tensed but this was what she’d hoped for. Attention from the young crowd.

“Hey, you guys from around here?”

They stopped. Glanced at her with hooded eyes. “Yeah, maybe.”

“You ever seen this girl?” She passed over a two-year-old photo of her sister. It had been taken right before Autumn left home. Francesca had been shocked when she’d first seen it. The pink hair, the piercing at the corner of her sister’s lip, the leather choker were all completely foreign to her.

“Nah, but I wouldn’t mind meeting her,” the tallest guy said.

“Yeah,” echoed the shorter fat one. “You know where she hangs?”

They were nothing but a bunch of tough-acting little kids. Francesca turned away without another word.

Talking in short spurts, the group passed. Five minutes later, a homeless woman shuffled by.

She shook her head silently when Francesca showed her the picture. Francesca gave the woman a five dollar bill. Her reward was another sad shake of the head.

And then a couple of men walked by, their hands full of the cards picturing naked women, phone numbers scrolled across them, that were passed out on the Strip every night of the week in this bizarre and twisted town.

It was one of those times she was thankful not to have Autumn recognized.

“Wonder how much they’re paid,” she muttered as they headed toward the Strip. The colorful glittering lights that made that part of town look like day even in the dead of night were beginning to pop on.

A minute later the streetlight changed. A mother hurried across the street with two little children hanging on to the frayed edge of her shorts, a bag of groceries under one arm. The youngest child, a boy, was crying. Judging by the dual streams of grime running down his face, he’d been at it a while. Francesca watched them turn into the rock-strewn drive of the rent-by-the-month apartment building next to where she was standing. The little girl turned back to look at her. Francesca feigned sudden attention to the massage parlor across the street. It was either that or the pawn shop on the opposite corner, and she’d already read their colorful though roughly painted windows more times than she could count.

Or she could cry.

And then, from out of nowhere, a young girl was inside the phone booth. Francesca had no idea where she’d come from. She’d had her head turned for less than a moment.

The girl was maybe seventeen, but probably younger. She dialed a number she appeared to know by heart. She was little, blond, though she had on an oversize T-shirt and shorts that were longer than most girls her age in this town were wearing. Francesca couldn’t see her shoes inside the phone booth. Nor could she see her face.

Every nerve in her body stiffened as she waited for the girl to finish. She moved forward slowly, as though waiting to make a call, taking deep breaths to calm the tension in her chest. She was a journalist, albeit usually one who hid behind a lens. Still, on more than one occasion, she’d collected some pretty hard-to-come-by information to complete a story.

Francesca was right there at the door of the phone booth just as the girl emerged.

“I’m sorry, were you waiting to make a call?” the girl asked. Her smile was sweet. The look in her eyes made her seem older than Francesca’s mother. And she was at least six months pregnant.

With no ring on her finger.

Choking back the animal wail that rose to her throat as she stared at the girl’s belly, Francesca detached herself. She was a professional—and nothing but. It was a trick that had become habit years ago.

For the first time since…well, for the first time in many weeks, Francesca almost wished she had a camera. This girl was a story that needed to be told.

Just a story. Not a person.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, watching the girl. “I, uh, need to call a cab.”

The girl, standing just outside the booth, smiled again. Her petite features would have been beautiful if life hadn’t tampered with them far too early. Her unlined skin was rough where it should’ve revealed the freshness of youth. And those eyes…

Would her little sister have eyes like that? Could Francesca bear to find out? Could she look in Autumn’s eyes and not lose what little hold she had on any desire to live?

She could only look at the girl’s eyes. Not her belly.

“Well, if that’s all you need, save yourself the fifty cents and just walk a block up there,” the girl was saying, pointing toward the Strip. “There’re always a ton of them milling around.”

“Thanks.” Francesca wondered what someone her sister’s age would say. It had been less than fifteen years since she was a teenager, but it seemed like fifty. She’d felt more confident as a prostitute. “You need a ride?” she asked. “We could share.”

“Nah,” the girl said. “My ride’s coming.”

On a street corner? Was that the call the girl had made?

“I had an appointment up the street. They’re picking me up there.”

And she hadn’t been able to use the phone at her appointment? The reporter in Francesca asked questions while the big sister prayed this child could help her. She’d talked to more than a hundred people in three days.

But before she could haul out her picture, an unmistakable look of fear appeared on the younger girl’s face. “I gotta go,” she called as she turned, and ran across the street—against the light. She’d been watching a navy sedan stopped at the corner of the Strip, waiting to turn toward them.

If she hadn’t had only one mission left in life—to find Autumn—Francesca would have followed her. Followed the blue sedan to see if the girl climbed inside. And to see who was driving.

Could’ve been her mother, of course. And maybe the girl had sneaked away to call her boyfriend.

But somehow Francesca didn’t think so.

This girl had seen too much of life to be afraid of a little parental displeasure. And the fear on her face had been more than concern about being grounded.

Sliding down the familiar brick wall, welcoming the heat against her back and ignoring the light scrape of brick against skin, Francesca wondered, not for the first time, if she had the stomach for what might lie ahead.

Or, more accurately, if she had the heart.

Because she’d figured something out during these days on the streets. If Autumn was more than a passerby, if she’d been living in this town, finding her means of survival here, she wasn’t going to be anything like the young girl Francesca remembered.

And chances were, she’d done things, seen things, her older sister had never, in all her travels, done or seen.

Deciding to give the dinner she’d packed in her satchel to the next homeless person who passed, Francesca leaned her head against the wall and closed her eyes. She’d covered some pretty brutal things during her career. Natural disasters. Murders. Fires. Crime scenes.

Those she could handle.

The death of innocence she could not.

“You have today off, don’t you, Luke?”

Finishing the toaster waffle and coffee he’d fixed himself before dawn Thursday morning, Luke didn’t even lift his glance from the morning paper as he nodded. But the muscles in the back of his neck, and everywhere else he could possibly feel tension, stiffened. He’d hoped to be gone before she got up.

With things growing more tense at work every day that an explanation for the big wins eluded him, and no news on the baby front, he’d made plans for a little stress relief.

“What are you going to do?”

Be free. Out. Away from you.

“Jump.” He spoke almost belligerently, hating himself for doing it even while he deliberately chose the word.

She sank into the chair next to him, her short gray hair askew, her lined face bare and ancient. “Please, son,” she said, watery blue eyes filling with tears. “Please don’t.” She took a deep breath, looking down at the table, one shaky hand clutching the other. “Not ever again,” she said, her voice stronger as her gaze turned on him. “I can’t stand it,” she said. “I can’t sit here knowing that you’re up there, jumping out of planes, falling to your death. I just can’t stand it.”

He’d known his announcement would upset her. He hadn’t expected the shrill voice, the panic in her eyes. He’d been skydiving for years. Had honors packed away in a box from his years as a marine, when he’d been one of the best jumpers they’d had.

It was the one thing he did on a regular basis, just for himself.

“Mom,” he said, his voice softening even as his chest constricted. “You know I’m not going to fall to my death.” He’d expected a fight today—about her wanting him to spend his day off at home, with her. He’d assumed that if she’d caught him before he left, their argument would’ve been about his leaving the house. Not this.

“Luke, no!” Her translucent, bony hand clutched his forearm. “You have to promise me! You’ll never go up there again. You can’t! If you jump, you’ll die. I just know it!” She was sobbing, screaming. He didn’t have to look at her to know the lost, glazed look that would’ve come to Carol Everson’s eyes.

“Mom,” he said, trying to emulate the calm but firm tone his father had always used. Trying, and—as always—failing. “I’ve been jumping since I was sixteen. You’ve watched many times—as recently as last month. Dad explained it all to you, remember?” Turning from the table he leaned forward, holding both of her cold hands between his own warm fingers. “You’re okay with this,” he reminded her.

Jumping was the only thing that had kept him sane during his years as a teenager in this house. He’d joined a club at school and, with the help of his father, had managed to hide it from his mom until he knew for sure he was going to like it. Then they’d had to convince her he was perfectly safe doing this.

“No, Luke!” Her eyes glistened wildly, her entire body starting to shake in the long flannel nightgown she was wearing in spite of the fact that it was summer and she lived in the desert. “I can’t allow it! Please, Luke! I saw a documentary on deaths from skydiving on television last week. Please tell me you won’t go! Not ever again!”

Tears streamed down her face as Luke looked helplessly on.

“The documentary was about the teams that perform aerial tricks. I don’t do any trick jumping,” he said slowly, softly. “I always wear a backup chute. I don’t take any unnecessary chances. I don’t even free-fall very far anymore.” He mentally crossed his fingers on that last one. Free-falling was the best part of the jump and he held the state record.

“No!” She choked. Luke handed her the half-drunk glass of water he’d poured for himself. She didn’t even see it. “Drink,” he said, raising it to her lips.

The glass lay against her lower lip, but he didn’t tip it. Her mouth hung open, unresponsive, and he knew what would happen if he attempted to force the liquid into her. It would dribble down her chin to her chest while she remained completely unaware.

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, God.” She was rocking back and forth, shaking her head.

Setting the glass on the table, Luke stood, frowning as he stared down at her. She wasn’t going to take skydiving from him, too. Anxiety disorders or not, she just wasn’t.

“Mom.” He tried again, squatting down, meeting her at eye level. He lifted a hand to her face, drying the tears, cupping her cheek. “It’s okay. Shh, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, Luke,” she said, her voice trembling with emotions he would never, in a million lifetimes, understand. “It’s not okay. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

With a heavy sigh he dropped his hand. Straightened. “I’m here, aren’t I?” Shame warmed his skin as he heard the resentment he spent his life trying not to feel. Or at least to hide.

“It’s not okay!” she screamed, rocking, crying, this small pitiful creature who’d borne him.

“I’ll stay home today.” He heard the words, uttered a thousand times before, as if from a distance. Mostly he felt the familiar and deadening weight of obligation and debilitating resentment. Only thoughts of the life that was coming, the son he’d soon have, kept him calm.

“No!” she screamed again. “Tell me, Luke! Promise me!” Head raised, exposing a neck that was so thin, so frail-looking, he could hardly believe it. “You won’t ever jump again!”

Staring at her, Luke couldn’t make the words come. It had been this way for as long as he could remember. It had started with birthday parties. If his father was home he’d been able to go, but as an executive with Biamonte Industries—a position he’d needed to hold to pay his wife’s medical expenses and to keep her world contained enough to allow her to live outside a professional facility—Marshall Everson had had to put in ungodly hours, which also included a fair amount of travel. In later years there’d been dates, games, even a senior trip that Luke had to give up. He’d never been able to sustain membership on a team, be on student council, run for class president, join a club. He’d skydived. It was something he could do privately. On his own time or, rather, the time his father arranged for him.

“Mom…”

It was going to be different with his son. He was going to hire a nanny, ten nannies if he had to, to ensure that his son had all the opportunities he had not.

“Say it, Luke!” Falling forward with the force of the sob that followed, she lay there, chest to her knees, moaning. “Oh, God. I’m going to be…”

Luke grabbed the kitchen trash, put it in front of her and turned his back. When she was finished he handed her a wet cloth, wordlessly waiting while she wiped her face.

She’d be calmer now, at least for a while. She’d be able to swallow her medication and give it time to work.

But this wasn’t the end of it. He knew that.

Just as he knew the woman was slowly sucking the life out of him.

He needed his son, a boy to teach all the things he loved, to play ball with, explore with, watch horror movies with. A boy to bring vibrancy and enthusiasm and messy science experiments into his home.

A son to carry on the Everson name.

A child to give hope and purpose to his future.

A reason to live.

On Thursday evening, just before dusk, Francesca was sitting on her corner, dressed like a teenage homeless person, holding a battered McDonald’s cup out to passersby with a hand that was gloved—even in the July heat—although her glove was fingerless. She’d been observing others for five days and, if nothing else, had a pretty clear idea how to portray any number of characters. For some reason, a lot of the homeless folks covered their hands in some fashion.

Perhaps for trash-digging?

It was a story she’d have wanted to do were she living in another lifetime. With another heart.

She wasn’t showing around the picture as much, though it was always close at hand, securely tucked into the waistband of her torn-and-dirty pair of too-tight jeans. A lot of the same people were coming by. And were starting to notice her.

So she was now permanently homeless—at least in the role she played. It was the only reason she could think of that would allow her to hang out continuously at the same corner. Homeless people seemed to pick a place and stake it out as their own personal property. Probably some kind of homing instinct.

A cop stopped at the corner. She and her mother were in contact with the Las Vegas police and she knew her presence could be explained in a sixty-second phone call if necessary. Still, she’d noticed that a lot of homeless people tended to avoid the eye of anyone in authority. Francesca studied the once-white tennis shoes on her feet.

Did they avoid those glances out of shame? Or fear of punishment? She shrugged the thought away. Everyone had problems. Heartaches. Hard lives. Some were just more obvious than others.

The job she’d done on those shoes wasn’t half bad. She’d had to rub them against the cement in the parking lot outside the Lucky Seven for more than an hour to get that ragged hole in the toe. She’d thrown away the laces and then she’d tossed the shoes around in a big bag with dinner leftovers, shaken them off and left them outside to dry.

For all that, they were the most comfortable pair of shoes she’d had on all week.

The door of the phone booth creaked. Forcing herself to stay in character, to appear disinterested, Francesca slowly turned her gaze toward it. She felt as if she now knew that small booth more intimately than she knew her own body. After five days, she really didn’t expect much. She just didn’t have anything else to do. Anywhere else to go, to look.

She had nowhere to be. Not that week. Not for the rest of her life. Until she ran out of money and needed to eat. But with the savings she’d amassed, that wouldn’t be for a long time. And it wasn’t something she particularly cared about one way or the other, anyway.

A woman stood in the booth, her back to Francesca, dialing quickly.

Francesca had no idea how she was going to earn money when she needed it again. She had no desire to pick up a camera. No inner voice guiding her to the perfect picture. Though she had a few of her cameras in her bag at the Lucky Seven, she hadn’t touched them since that first day in town.

She watched the short brunette, of indeterminate age, as she talked. And then the woman turned.

She couldn’t be more than twenty. If that.

And she was pregnant.

That made the seventh pregnant woman this week. Seven times she’d lost her breath as the sight slammed into her. With practice it was supposed to get easier.

It didn’t.

And this one was so young, barely a child herself. How could she possibly cope? Birth was hard.

And mothering so much harder. What would she do if she went to her baby’s crib one afternoon, reached for him, expecting to pull that tiny warm body into her arms and found it limp and—

No. Forget it. Just forget.

Professional detachment was slow in descending, but as it came Francesca was reminded of the pregnant girl she’d seen in that same phone booth a couple of days before. The girl who’d inadvertently turned up in Francesca’s dream last night.

In the old days that had meant a story for sure.

Today, Francesca was only irritated by the distraction from what mattered. There was no anticipation, no “aha” moment, no real vision of what would be. Just a nagging idea that if she’d had anything left in her, she could have done something. Taken photographs. Told a story…

Still, as the girl finished her conversation, Francesca approached her, holding Autumn’s picture. Her gaze remained at eye level.

“Excuse me,” she said, “I’m looking for my friend. She told me to look her up when I got to town but she moved. The last address I had for her was in those apartments.” She nodded toward the rent-by-the-month place next door. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen her, would you?”

It was one of the lies she’d perfected over the week.

The brunette glanced at the picture. And away.

Another dead end. Francesca wasn’t surprised. She knew she’d have to turn over a lot of nonessential pieces before she found the right one.

And then she realized the girl hadn’t said no. She was looking at the picture again.

“Do you know her?”

Shaking her head, the girl studied Francesca—obviously taking in her tattered clothes, dirty hair, lack of makeup. Even the shoes she’d so carefully aged.

“You hungry?” she asked instead.

No. Not for a long time. “A little.”

“I’ll bet it’s been a while since you had a good meal.”

She shrugged, leaving her shoulders hunched defensively as she’d seen a twenty-something homeless guy do the other day on her way home. He seemed to pretty much hang out in an alleyway between the Lucky Seven and a tattoo parlor.

The girl dropped a buck in the tattered McDonald’s cup. “There’s a discount food mart the next block over. You can get a lot there.”

“Thanks.”

Apparently the gaunt cheeks she’d seen in the bathroom mirror at the Lucky Seven that morning added credibility to the part she was playing. Good to know her lack of desire for any kind of food had paid off somewhere.

“Where you staying?” the young woman asked.

“Around.”

The girl looked at the photo again. She was withholding information. Francesca’s deadened instincts surged for the briefest of seconds.

“You sure you haven’t seen her?” she asked, scuffing her feet. “I could really use a turn of luck.”

“Maybe I have,” the girl said. “I’m not sure.”

Maybe. Those dormant instincts became a little more sharply honed. “Do you have any idea where that might’ve been? Or when?”

The girl, staring at the photo one more time, shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m probably wrong.” She laughed a little nervously. “I’m always thinking I’ve met people before when I haven’t.”

No way, babe. You aren’t getting me this close and then backing up on me. “If there’s a chance you’ve seen her, ever, can you think where it might’ve been?”

With a hand hovering protectively over her extended belly the girl peered down the street, back at the photo and then once again glanced at Francesca’s attire.

Francesca couldn’t take her eyes off that hand. Or breathe.

“You from Sacramento?” the girl asked.

Oh, my God. Eyes raised, Francesca gasped. Coughed. She knows her.

Pain gave way to an excitement that challenged her dormant emotions. Francesca nodded slowly.

The girl nodded, too. Looked back down the street. And then said, “If I’ve seen her, it was probably at Guido’s.”

Guido’s.

Trembling, Francesca scuffed her feet again. “Where’s that?”

The girl gestured toward Las Vegas Boulevard. “Not far,” she said, backing away. “It’s just on the other side of the Strip.” She named a street Francesca had never heard of. “You can walk from here, easy.” She was at the corner by then, and as the light changed, she turned and hurried across the street, heading in the same direction the girl of Francesca’s dream had taken earlier in the week.

Guido’s. An Italian name.

4

It took her fifteen minutes to find Guido’s. But only because she had to walk back to the Lucky Seven and get her car. And then it was another twenty before she actually approached the door. After having seen the place, she’d gone to the motel to change before going in. The crowd seemed too “young adult.”

In her short but not too short denim skirt and tight green T-shirt, she figured she’d blend in just fine. So long as no one looked too closely at the newly acquired lines of strain adorning the corners of her mouth and eyes.

As far as she could tell, if you ignored the thrift store across the street that had so much stacked in side you could hardly see through the window, Guido’s was an almost-nice neighborhood hangout, with a pizza and sandwich sign above the door, in addition to the requisite Vegas marquee with glitter ing lights—this one proclaiming that the city’s best pool and dart games could be found inside. Sitting in the parking lot, she’d actually been relieved. It didn’t seem like a place where her sister would’ve gone to turn tricks. Or model for any of those millions of cards that people used for sidewalk decor each night.

It felt good to think that Autumn had frequented a place as normal-looking as this.

With a deep breath for luck, or strength, or just enough air to endure, she pulled open the darkened glass door. For all she knew, Autumn was in there right now, sharing a pizza with a friend, throwing darts—although her sister had never been the sporty type—waiting tables, even. Anything. Just there.

Francesca panicked. What if she didn’t recognize her? Kids changed a lot from fifteen to seventeen. And the police had warned her that runaways, because most didn’t want to be found, often drastically changed their appearances.

She jumped as pool balls clacked to her left, followed by the sound of at least two dropping into pockets. Voices were little more than white noise, all blending together until she couldn’t make out a single conversation. A strange mixture of New Age and rock music played in the background, but not as loudly as she would’ve figured for a young adult hangout.

As her eyes adjusted slowly from the bright Vegas sun to the track-lighted room with its dark paneling and wood floors, Francesca couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t ready for this. Wasn’t ready to feel again.

Not yet.

Maybe never.

Thoughts of crawling into bed, hiding under the covers and being thankful that her baby sister was alive while she slept away the next ten years consumed her. Ten years from now Autumn would be an adult. With a real life. In control of that life. She’d come back then.

Except if the cops were to be believed, her sister could be involved with all kinds of dangerous people, just to survive. If she wasn’t rescued she could well be dead before ten years were up. Las Vegas runaways had a relatively short life span.

“You coming or going?” The voice was male. Appreciative. And right in front of her.

“Sorry.” Francesca tried to smile at him. “I don’t know,” she answered. He looked Italian. Somehow that made a difference. “I, uh, I’m hoping to meet a friend of mine.”

“You new to town?”

“Yeah.”

He was older than she would’ve expected. Older than she was. Midthirties, she’d guess. Dark hair, tall, broad, nice brown eyes. A friendly smile.

His presence calmed her—unlike the feeling that had haunted her on and off since meeting her own empty future in the eyes of the man at the Bonaparte the other night.

“If you want to wait for your friend, you can have a seat at the bar,” this man said, walking toward the long, polished dark wood counter with padded leather stools. It ran along the entire length of the building, completely dominating the back wall. “We’re a family-owned place,” he added. “No one will bother you.”

Walking with him toward the bar, Francesca wondered if he was included in that no one. Or if this was just one of the nicer pickup lines she’d heard. Mostly she wondered if any of the girls in the room would turn out to be Autumn. Since she had no idea what to expect, she couldn’t be certain that her sister wasn’t there.

“You work here?” she asked her companion, sliding onto a stool about halfway down the bar. There were quite a few people milling around, but the stools on either side of her were vacant.

“My pop owned the place,” he surprised her by saying, meeting her on the opposite side of the bar. “What can I get you?”

“A diet cola?”

He grinned. “You sure about that? I make a prickly pear margarita that I’m rather proud of.”

“In a pizza place?”

“It’s Vegas.” His smile was contagious. With a white towel he wiped down the space in front of her.

“Okay, one margarita.” Any more than that and she wouldn’t be able to take her sleeping pill.

Glancing around, she was pretty sure Autumn wasn’t there. Her sister could disguise a lot of things—like hair color or style—but, even in the town of illusion, she couldn’t make herself shorter than five-five or change her delicate bone structure.

“By the way.” He set down the glass he’d pulled from a rack above his head, wiped his hand and held it out to her. “I’m Carlo Fucilla. My friends call me Carl.”

“Carlo,” she repeated. “A good Italian name.” Not that she’d necessarily have known that—or noticed—a year ago.

His handshake was warm, firm, but no stronger than her own. “My grandparents came to the States to get married,” he said. Glass in hand, he stood directly in front of her, although with the bar between them all she could see was his white, short-sleeved polo shirt from the waist up. “My grandfather had been married before and the Catholic Church wouldn’t sanction his second marriage. Neither would their families. So they came here to start a new family.”

“And how’d they do?” The voice belonged to Francesca Witting, photojournalist, who’d recently returned from a year spent traveling all over Italy forming a composite of the challenges and strengths of its people. Francesca Witting, who was supposed to have done a follow-up story on Italian families in the United States. The voice was misplaced.

“They were married for sixty-five years,” he told her as he backed away.

Exactly the type of family she would’ve been looking for a month ago. If life hadn’t changed the rules so drastically.

As she sat there today, her shutter finger didn’t itch even a little bit. And she couldn’t care less how Carlo would look on film.

When her drink appeared Francesca sipped greedily, grateful that the man—who hadn’t oversold himself in the margarita department—hung around in between serving his other customers. Although, it didn’t take her long to figure out that she wasn’t the only one he was friendly with. He seemed to truly like people.

Enough to remember his customers after they left? To remember Autumn? And how did she find out without raising his suspicions? Without having to explain more than she wanted to?

“You said your father owned this place, past tense. He doesn’t anymore?” she asked when he was once again standing in front of her. He did seem to be stopping there more often than anywhere else. She’d noticed a while ago that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“He died a couple of years ago.”

Death. Caskets. With lids that slowly closed, choking out any hope that there’d been a mistake. Funerals. Raw earth, freshly shoveled…

“I’m…sorry.” He didn’t know her, or anything about her. The anonymity was protection.

“It’s okay.” He shrugged, called out to some other customers, asking if they were ready, and excused himself as he moved down to pour beer into frosted mugs from one of the six or eight taps across from the cash register.

Ten minutes passed. Then twenty. Thirty. Carl had been right when he’d told her no one would bother her. Besides an occasional smile sent her way, she was left completely alone. People came. And went. And every single time the door opened, Francesca’s heart skipped a beat. And then settled into the familiar plod of disappointment. She was thinking more and more about showing Carl Autumn’s picture.

But why would she be asking questions about the friend she’d supposedly come there to meet? This was different from a street corner.

There was no way she was getting this close only to have someone tip off Autumn and have her run again. The setback would be too much. She’d become obsessed with finding Autumn. Her sister’s unexpected phone call to Sacramento had pulled Francesca out of a dark and dangerous place. Autumn had become a reason to live.

Second margarita in hand, she was glad she’d come. It felt good to be around people. To be no one in no man’s land, with nothing to do but let the alcohol numb what little was left of her ability to feel.

“So is this bar still in your family?” she asked the only person she knew in Las Vegas, if she didn’t count José at the front desk at the Lucky Seven. Or the head of security at the Bonaparte.

Carl, filling some bowls with snack mix, nodded. “Technically my brothers and I own it together, but they all had different interests, so I run it.”

She liked his shrug. And his grin.

“How many brothers do you have?”

“Three.”

“And you all share the profits?”

“Nah.” He grinned. “There wouldn’t be enough to go around. They’ve got pretty expensive tastes. I take a manager’s salary. The rest goes to Mom for as long as she’s alive.”

“Does she work here?” It didn’t matter. None of this mattered, Italian family or not.

He waved toward a side door leading to a back room. “Try taking a step into the kitchen and you’ll find out.”

A strong woman. Francesca liked that. And thought, for the brief moment before the pain descended, about Sancia. Loving, brokenhearted Sancia. Francesca would never have looked up the elderly woman, introduced herself, if she’d had any idea of the agony she’d bring with her.

She’d called her once since returning to the States, but neither of them had been able to speak through their tears, and she hadn’t repeated the experience. Later, when she was better, she’d visit Sancia again. Maybe.

“Looks like your friend’s a no-show,” Carl said after she’d been there for more than an hour.

“Yeah.”

It was an opening. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to take it yet. Didn’t want to risk blowing her cover. Not many people handed around pictures of their friends, asking if anyone had seen them or knew anything about them.

She wanted to be able to come back to Guido’s. Waiting was much more pleasant there.

“So…” He hesitated, looking a little sheepish. “Is this the first time you’ve been stood up?”

His assumption was kind of nice. But then, he couldn’t know what life was like for a woman who’d loved a man who was married to someone else.

“I wasn’t stood up,” she said now. “I was meeting a girlfriend….”

His obvious pleasure in that news was gratifying. To her ego at least. The rest of her couldn’t care less.

There were a lot of young girls hanging around. Dressed-for-dates young women. They were a friendly bunch. Autumn wasn’t among them.

She had a third margarita. Might have gone for a fourth if her car hadn’t been in the parking lot. While the trade-off—a possible night in a jail cell for DUI—would in some ways be worth the numb and almost peaceful oblivion she was finding, she couldn’t let herself lose even a day on the hunt for Autumn. It would just make the trail that much longer. Provide that much more opportunity for the rains to pour down and wash away Autumn’s tracks. Because come they would. They always did.

“You sure you’re okay to drive?” Carl asked her just before midnight as he walked her to the door.

Most of the crowd had disappeared, although there were still a couple of twenty-something guys shooting pool, a few friends sitting at the bar, and a table or two occupied in the corners of the room. All these people were younger than the real Francesca Witting.

“Positive. Three’s my limit.”

“So, you think the margaritas might be good enough to bring you back for seconds?”

Was the next night too soon? “Is that an invitation?”

“Well…” He shrugged again, though not with any lack of confidence. “I’d probably have taken my chances on a dinner date, but it’s a little tough for a guy in my position to date much, since I work almost every night of the week.”

She tried hard—harder than she’d known she could—to overcome her immediate defensiveness. “I’m sorry,” she told him, wishing she could feel the sentiment. “I don’t date.”

“Not at all?”

“No.” Unequivocally.

He studied her for several seconds. “Well, then,” he started slowly. “Are friends out of the question, too?”

“Um, I don’t think I’ll be in town long,” she said.

“So, you aren’t coming back?”

Yes! She had to. “I’m not leaving yet.”

“How about tomorrow, then?”

The invitation played right into her hands. Francesca nodded.

His grin made her wonder if she’d made a big mistake. But she had to be back tomorrow night. And every night after that until she found her sister. Or got another lead that took her to the next waiting place.

The street corner by day.

Guido’s by night.

Life could be worse.

The woman was beautiful. Tall. Slender. Wavy blond hair. And compassionate. It was that last quality that captivated Luke. Sure, he liked his women gorgeous, but in this town of tinsel and illusion, what attracted him most was real softness. Inside softness.

Las Vegas was filled with beautiful women. They could be found—and had—anywhere, anytime, at any age, for anything a guy wanted.

“Let’s take a picnic out to the desert,” Melissa Thomas suggested when Luke picked her up early Saturday evening.

He’d met the social worker while coaching basketball at the local crisis center and quickly found that she was unlike any woman he knew. Ambitious, driven, and motivated completely by her compassion for the underprivileged children she worked twelve-hour days serving.

“Sounds great,” he told her, rounding the car to open her door. He’d missed his jump again that morning, and a sojourn with nature sounded almost as good as the time alone with Melissa. “I’ve got a blanket in the trunk and we can run by the deli for the rest of it.”

“Including a bottle of Italian wine?”

It was a taste he’d introduced her to, compliments of the tutelage he’d received growing up at the knee of Amadeo. A little-known sparkling wine from the region of Campania, rather than the more famous wines from Tuscany and Napoli. The deli wouldn’t have his favorite, but there’d be a decent choice.

“You got it.” Luke took her hand as he backed his Jaguar out of her driveway. She was giving him an evening of freedom, an evening away from bustling restaurants with waiters and managers whose friendliness was professional. Impersonal. Away from glittering people and traffic and city noise. There was very little he wouldn’t give her in return.

Melissa had been married once. In college. All Luke knew about it was that her young husband had been unfaithful and the marriage had ended abruptly. She’d been living alone for almost ten years. Owned a small home in one of Las Vegas’s gated communities.

Luke had been dating her for six months. They didn’t see each other all that often. They both worked a lot. And he had his ever-increasing responsibilities at home—responsibilities about which Melissa knew nothing. Still, they’d fallen into a state of being comfortably exclusive.

He checked his cell phone while she was at the deli counter making her choices, relaxing when there were no calls. The Allens, old friends of his parents who lived in the same gated community as Luke and his mother, had invited Carol over for dinner and a movie. They’d been planning to pick her up fifteen minutes ago, but there was always the chance she’d refused to go with them. Which often meant the onset of an episode that required Luke’s attention. The Allens could handle it, of course. But Luke didn’t like to accept their help for his own leisure purposes. He needed to be able to call upon them when he was at work and just couldn’t get home.

“All set.” Melissa joined him, carrying several containers. Pocketing his phone, Luke took them from her and got in line to pay.

“Work?” she asked with a disappointed frown. Carol, work—it was all one and the same as far as Melissa knew.

“Nope,” he told her with an easy smile. He was looking forward to the hours ahead.

“Well, thank goodness.” Luke loved the way she cuddled up to his side, both her arms wrapped around one of his. “Not that I ever like it when we have to cut a date short, but it would be particularly hard tonight.”

He grinned down at her. “Why’s that?” Was she feeling the same anticipation—and need—that he was? They hadn’t made love in a couple of weeks, and while ordinarily he’d take that in stride, since he’d started seeing Melissa, he had sex on his mind a lot.

She was an incredible lover. Wild without being too wild, tender, wanton. She made the most incredible noises when she came. And she was funny. Luke had never associated sex with laughter before. Would’ve thought the one would detract from the other. It didn’t.

“Because I have something I want to talk to you about.”

Huh? “Okay, good,” Luke said, briefly wondering what he’d missed. He felt her arms wrapped around his middle, her palms under his T-shirt, against the bare skin of his belly. Funny how such a casual touch could be so erotic.

Yes, he was looking forward to the evening. And to her.

He was a lucky man.

Sheila Miller was going to get lucky tonight. A waitress friend of hers in the high-stakes room at the Bonaparte had assured her that Arnold Jackson would be off at nine.

“Could you take Spring Mountain Road, please?” She tried to ease back on the authoritative tone that came so naturally and had lost her more than one relationship as she addressed the cabbie. “There’s less traffic there this time of night.”

The man, who apparently had little mastery of the English language, nodded wordlessly. She hoped he’d understood her.

On the freeway, with cars traveling much faster than the speed limit, they were in the slowest lane. Sheila wanted to scream. To take over. She sat forward, peeling her bare back from the vinyl upholstery in the back seat of the ten-year-old sedan. And chewed on the end of her tongue to keep it silent.

It wasn’t the guy’s fault that she was nervous, had to pee and should’ve driven her own car. But then she would’ve had to drive herself home in order to get to work in the morning.

Home. Where, on her table, lay the envelope she’d received in the mail that afternoon, threatening fore-closure and worse….

“Tell me, fella, you think—” Sheila started and then shut up. She couldn’t believe she’d almost asked the cabbie if he thought she was overdressed. She really was losing it. Anyway, if the black, kneelength halter dress was too much, it was too late to do anything about it. And she looked damned good in it. Especially for a fifty-five-year-old woman. The thirty-five pounds she’d lost had left behind a waist that accentuated her breasts; unlike most of her friends, hers hadn’t drooped after menopause.

Arnold had to notice. She couldn’t get the man off her mind. For the first time in thirty years, she’d fallen for a guy. Hard. And she was also running out of time. If she didn’t find out who was behind the streak of wins that was causing such a ruckus up and down the Strip, she could very well end up in jail for misrepresentation. When extra building costs on her dream home kept popping up—to the tune of thousands each time—she’d promised her condo to a loan shark as collateral on a twenty-five-percent-interest loan. With her salary eaten up by daily expenses, she was about to miss her first payment. And the condo was already mortgaged to the hilt. To two different banks.

Word on the street said the scam was an inside job. That meant Arnold was going to find out about it. In a business where employer trust was paramount, he protected his integrity above all else. She recognized that because she’d always been just like him.

And like him, she was determined to find out what was going on. Pronto.

But unlike him, it wasn’t to protect her integrity. Not this time. She valued honesty above all else—except her freedom. She could go to jail for misrepresentation because she’d put her condo up for collateral twice. The only chance she had was to get in on the Strip scam before it was over. As soon as the perpetrators got wind that the other side was close, they’d shut down. They always did.

Her biggest fear was that the scam would be history before she could cash in. She had absolutely no idea what she’d do then.

5

By the time Carl took his break shortly after ten on Saturday night, Francesca had already reached her margarita limit.

A third night without sleeping pills. She had to get to bed before the buzz wore off.

“You aren’t leaving, are you?” he asked Francesca. She stood just after Rebecca, the young woman who’d been waiting tables all evening, had gone behind the bar to relieve him.

As had happened the night before, and the night before that, the place had been filled with young people earlier, mostly young women calling greetings to others who came in the door. But slowly the crowd had thinned to some guys shooting pool and throwing darts at one end of the room, with people at a few scattered tables here and there. For the past half hour, the door had only opened as someone left.

Autumn wasn’t coming.

“Yeah, I should get back.” It was light before six in the morning these days. She had an appointment with a phone booth.

Hands in the pockets of his jeans, Carl nodded. “You can’t spare another fifteen minutes to sit with me?” His dark eyes were warm, welcoming.

She’d refused the night before. But three shots of tequila weren’t going to wear off in fifteen minutes. And her room at the Lucky Seven was so…empty. “I guess I can.”

What am I doing? There was no place in her schedule for friends. And no life in her heart.

Still, when he asked if she’d like to share his tomato-and-basil pizza, she didn’t say no.

She shouldn’t have stayed. Sitting alone with Carl at a table in the comfortable back corner of his bar was very different from sharing casual hit-and-miss conversation as he worked. More intimate.

He wanted to know too much.

She’d almost prefer talking to her mother.

The information she offered him—that she was from Sacramento, that she was a photojournalist taking some time off, even that she was half Italian—wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He wanted to know why she wasn’t married, but that wasn’t up for discussion.

“Who’s your artist?” she asked, pointing to the wall across from them instead of answering his question. She’d noticed the watercolors the night before—various depictions of wine bottles with muted purple flower backgrounds. She’d described them to her mother when she’d called to tell Kay about the fairly positive identification of Autumn at Guido’s. She’d had a hard time convincing her to stay in Sacramento and let Francesca find out what they needed to know. Only the threat that Autumn was more likely to run again if she found out Kay was in town had ultimately worked. Francesca had hated using it.

“I don’t know the artist. Are you currently involved with anyone?”

He’d pushed the last piece of uneaten pizza aside, his forearms resting on the table as he peered at her.

“You don’t give up, do you?”

He grinned, spread his hands. “You’re a woman. I’m Italian.”

“Yeah, right.” Head bent, Francesca half smiled. “I’ve been watching you for two days, buster. And a womanizer you’re not.”

Sitting back, he narrowed his eyes. She hadn’t seen him look so serious before. “That’s true,” he told her quietly. “But you intrigue me, Francesca. You hide so much more than you show.”

Longing for her sunken mattress at the Lucky Seven, Francesca moved around some crumbs on the dark wooden table. “You’ve got an impressive imagination.”

“No, I’ve got an uncanny ability to read people.” If the words had carried even a hint of bravado, a hint of anything other than sincerity, she’d have had no problem getting up and walking out.

Instead, she sat there, unfocused and quietly panicking. She couldn’t like him. Didn’t want to feel anything.

She only wanted to find Autumn.

And her sister had been at Guido’s.

“I’m a little disappointed my friend didn’t show this weekend,” she said, working hard to concentrate through the fog of exhaustion she’d brought upon herself. “I was really looking forward to seeing her.”

“Did you call her?”

She shook her head. And then wished she hadn’t as the thickness inside her skull didn’t keep up with the movement. “I tried. There was no answer.”

“You think something happened to her?”

Holding her head perfectly still, Francesca shrugged. “She moves a lot. Not being able to reach her for weeks on end isn’t all that unusual.” An understatement if ever she’d heard one.

“Still,” he said, leaning on the table again, bringing his face with its kind brown eyes closer to hers. “She must be pretty special if you came all the way from Sacramento just to see her.”

“Like I said, I’m taking some time off, anyway, and hadn’t seen Vegas in more than twenty years. It sounded like fun.”

Or might have if fun wasn’t so far removed from what her life had become.

And then, because she couldn’t wait any longer, Francesca pulled out Autumn’s picture. “But you’re right, she is special,” she said. “See?” Instead of the photo with the pink hair and the lip ring, this was an age progression of Francesca’s favorite portrait of her sister. Autumn was one of those girls whose guileless beauty, even as a child, caused people to take a second look.

The lighting in the bar was more atmospheric than illuminating and Carl sat back, holding up the photo as he studied it.

“I’ve seen her.” His words made her heart pound—and brought an unexpected and instant rush of tears. Francesca camouflaged them by bending down to her bag on the floor, rustling for her car keys. She clutched them as she slowly sat back up.

“In here?” she asked when she could trust herself.

He nodded. “I’m pretty sure.”

“Recently?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so, or I’d remember better. But I know she’s been in. Seems to me she was here all the time a while back. Hanging out with a bunch of girls. And then she quit coming in.”

Damn. It was the first in a string of words that Francesca screamed silently. And, had she been in her room, would’ve said out loud.

“That’s the way it is with them,” Carl continued, his gaze on a couple who’d just approached the bar. “One by one they seem to drop out of sight.”

“What’s that about?” she asked, with no possible solutions of her own to offer. She frowned, wishing her head was clearer. That was it for margaritas. Period.

“I’m not sure.” He handed the picture back to her as they stood. His break was over, which no doubt explained his preoccupation. “They’re young and they’re female,” he said. “I figure it’s either the result of hurt feelings or finding a boyfriend. Girls that age seem to forget they ever had girlfriends when they find a steady guy. My job is just to provide a relatively safe place for them if they choose to come here.”

Didn’t paint a pretty picture of her sex, but remembering back to her own teen years, Francesca had to admit Carl was at least partially right.

So did that mean Autumn had a boyfriend? Hurt feelings? Or had her sister dropped out of sight for other reasons? Like needing to pay the rent?

According to the Vegas police, too many runaways ended up working the streets to stay alive. The city abounded in prostitution opportunities. The younger the prostitute, the better, as far as some johns were concerned.

“What do those girls do?” she asked Carl, afraid to hear the answer. They walked to the door together, and she liked how he felt beside her, strong, reassuring. As though no matter how bad his answer, it would still be okay.

An illusion in the town of illusions.

“I have no idea.” Not a great answer, but better than the one she’d feared.

“How do they all know one another?”

Standing in front of her at the door, blocking the bar from her view, he shrugged. “I’m not even sure they do know one another before they start hanging out here,” he said, his focus fully on her again. “I run a clean, safe place. Word about that kind of thing tends to spread in a town like this. Someone meets someone in line someplace and mentions coming here sometime….” His voice trailed off.

“You’re probably right,” she said, her hand on the door. Other than their initial handshake, he’d never touched her. But Francesca felt as though she’d been hugged. It had been a long time. “While I’m in town, would you mind if I hang out here a bit? See if I hear anything about my friend?”

Carl grinned. “I’d be happy to have you….”

Carl’s words had been more than acquiescence to her request. They’d contained a not-too-subtly-veiled invitation.

If she came back, she’d be encouraging him.

He was a nice guy. A man comfortable in his own skin. And gorgeous skin it was, too.

He brought comfort to a life bereft of human intimacy.

Out in the darkened parking lot, she slid into her car, a new weight added to emotions that were already overburdened.

The flicker of candle flames reflected in Melissa’s eyes, adding dimension to an evening already beyond the realm of everyday life. Sitting on a blanket in the Nevada desert, lighted votives along the edges of their little clearing, Luke knew a peace he’d hardly ever found in his life. A sense of well-being.

“A perfect moment.”

The surprise in Melissa’s eyes matched what he felt as he heard himself say the words out loud. Luke Everson wasn’t prone to fanciful thoughts. To anything that he couldn’t completely control.

“A perfect moment,” she repeated softly, her gaze, only inches from his own, alight with things he couldn’t describe—yet knew he recognized.

Leaning forward, he touched his lips to hers, lightly. Once. Twice. Passion flowed around them, between them, inside him. Yet passion wasn’t all….

“Luke?”

“Mmm-hmm?”

She pulled his hand onto her lap, cradling it between hers, smiling at him. A womanly smile that blended with the charged atmosphere.

“Can we talk about something?”

“Of course.” They’d been talking all night. About anything. Everything. She was a great conversationalist.

“I mean really talk.”

“Certainly.” Focusing on her serious expression, he banked all passion for now. “What’s up?”

“Well…” She looked down, giggled.

Giggled? Melissa didn’t giggle.

“I, uh…” Meeting his gaze, she was completely serious again. “I don’t quite know how to start.”

“I didn’t realize we had a problem communicating,” he said, frowning, curious about what Melissa would say. He wasn’t used to seeing her embarrassed.

But the news wasn’t bad. He could tell by looking at her.

“I want to adopt a little girl.”

Wow. What an unexpected thing. Coincidental. He and Melissa really did think alike.

“Say something.”

“I’m not sure what to say.” They could exchange names of adoption agencies.

Her brows drew together, her eyes filling with concern made sharper by the candlelight. “Are you mad?”

“Of course not! Why would I be mad?”

“It’ll be a major change.”

“Change is inevitable.” He’d known it was coming for them, eventually. If not before, it would happen when he got his son. He’d have a lot less time to spend with her then.

“Luke?” She moved closer, her legs resting on top of his. “You are mad, aren’t you?”

She was beautiful. It felt damn good to spend time with her like this. “No,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I’m not mad at all.”

“So, what do you think?”

“Girls are nice.” Sounded inane, but he meant it. Nice for a family. Or a single woman. Not for a single man to raise alone. A girl had needs that only a mother could meet. “Do you have an agency in mind?”

He thought about mentioning Colter, but considering the fees the agency charged—due to their specialty in successfully maneuvering hard-to-complete adoptions—he decided not to. He didn’t want to steer her wrong. Being a woman, Melissa wouldn’t have to spend that kind of money. From what he’d learned during his frustrating rounds of applications in the past couple of years, adopting a child appeared to be much easier for a single woman, rather than a single man.

“No, but I have a child in mind,” she said, a sweet smile, an excited smile, spreading over her face. “Jenny came into the system a couple of months ago for counseling. Yesterday her parents’ rights were severed, making her eligible for adoption, and the foster parents don’t want to adopt.”

“How old is she?”

“Three.” The enthusiasm the single word carried told its own story.

“It’s a great age.” Of course, these days, to Luke any age was a good age.

“So, you think I should pursue this?”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’ll be okay with it?”

Running a finger along her cheek, down to her neck, he moved aside a lock of hair that had fallen forward. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“We-ell…” She was frowning again. Holding his gaze but frowning. “It’s going to affect you, too,” she said slowly. “At least I hope it is.”

He caressed her neck slowly, just beneath her ear where she was most sensitive. “You’re worried that we aren’t going to have alone time.”

“Well, yeah…” The frown didn’t dissipate. If anything it grew. “But…Luke, I thought we were building something here.”

“I agree!” There was no reason to frown. “What we’ve built is great. The best I’ve ever had. I wasn’t speaking lightly when I said the moment was perfect. I haven’t had a lot of that in my life.”

She pulled away. Emotionally more than physically, although there was nothing tangible to show him that. “What we’ve built,” she repeated. “Not what we’re building? You think our relationship is…static? That we can’t build it any further?”

“What? You’re upset because I’m happy with where we are?”

The ground was hard beneath his butt.

“I’m upset because I thought we were on our way to something more.”

“And we are,” he told her. “We always are, every single day that we wake up alive.” It was hot. Especially with all the candles around them. Damned hot.

What kind of bullshit was he spouting?

How long would it take the Jag to cool down when he turned on the air? Halfway back to the city? Three-quarters of the way?

“I thought we were moving toward a lifetime together.”

There was wine left in the bottle. He couldn’t take it in the Jag like that. It might tip over. He’d split the cork. He hated to waste it, but he supposed he could pour it out. Get a snake drunk.

“I have every hope of knowing you for many years,” he said, even though he knew the reply had been too long in coming.

“Uh-huh, I’m beginning to understand what that means.” Her tone was different than anything he’d heard from her before.

She was packing up the remains of their picnic, putting the bread back in its plastic bag, wrapping up the cheese, throwing used napkins in a separate bag. They’d finished off the roasted-chicken-and-rice salad.

“Beginning to understand what?” he asked, arms resting lightly on raised knees. Ordinarily he’d be helping her clean up, but she seemed to want to do it all herself.

“That you have no intention of having this relationship go anywhere but where it is. Like to the altar, for instance.”

He grabbed the wine. Dumped it out. Then wished he hadn’t. He could’ve used some to pour down his throat. That feeling was coming again. The one where he felt as if he was stuffed in a tube, his arms and legs cramped against his body, a constricting tube sealed top and bottom.

It happened every time.

“I grew up an only child.” Those were more words he hadn’t meant to say. It was a testament to Melissa’s importance to him. “My father was a great guy—a hero to me not just while I was a kid but until the day he died.”

She was watching him, her expression open. And somehow, under the protection of the dark desert night, he spoke of things he’d never before put into words.

“And my mother…” Luke stopped as shame spread through him. “My mother was—is—needier than a newborn babe.”

“Needy how?” Her words were like whispers of wind, encouraging him, without judgment, to continue.

“There’ve been various diagnoses over the years—pretty much every time a new professional was consulted—and the new medications or treatments that accompanied them. My father tried everything, from the purely scientific to the holistic, and even saw a medical intuitive for a while. But the upshot is that she suffers from several different anxiety disorders that, taken together, cripple her. The experts are pretty solid on panic and obsessive-compulsive disorders, plus agoraphobia, which comes from severe social-anxiety disorder. All I know is that emotionally she’s about as stable as a rotted-out, three-legged wooden chair.”

“That’s pretty unstable.” Melissa moved closer. She didn’t touch him, almost as though she sensed that doing so would be too much for him. With that feeling there, invading him, her touch wouldn’t be helpful.

It was over between them. He knew it. Just as he knew that he owed her this explanation. Something he’d given none of the other women he’d dated.

“She should have been hospitalized—or at least could’ve been, very easily—but my father would have no part of that. My whole life I watched him give first consideration to her emotional health in every decision he had to make. He tolerated her clinging, her dependency on him. From canceled trips, missed parties, to having to uninvite friends he’d asked over, my father just took it all in stride with a cheeriness that never seemed to falter.”

The man was unbelievable. Everything Luke was not.

“Why?”

“He loved her.” He’d never gotten why that meant his father had to be a prisoner. “He said her condition was part of who she was and he accepted that. He got her the best help money could buy. And the rest, he just…accepted.”

“Must’ve been hard for you, growing up with that.”

Yeah. It had been. Until sometimes he’d wondered if he was going to join his mother in her inability to handle life.

But he’d made it through. He just wished he could have done it the way his father had, with heroism intact.

“I resented the hell out of her.”

“I’m not surprised.”

He glanced at her, read the understanding in her eyes. With raised brows he asked a silent question he’d never voice.

“It’s a natural reaction, Luke. You’d have to be pretty much inhuman not to resent her. It sounds like her illness robbed you of a good deal of your childhood.”

“I had to step in when my father’s promotions required some business travel and late-night meetings. My plans were always subject to cancellation based on her mental state.”

That was why—about two minutes after his father’s retirement—Luke had joined the marines for the sole purpose of getting out of Las Vegas as fast as he could.

“Like I said, you’d have to be inhuman not to resent that.”

“My father didn’t.”

“Your father was an adult when he took on that responsibility. He’d already had his formative years. Had a chance to be formed into a man.”

Luke grinned at her, though he didn’t feel at all lighthearted. “You sound like a juvenile counselor.”

“I am one.” She played along with his pitiful attempt to introduce a little levity into an evening gone to hell. “So…I’m fairly certain there’s a reason you chose to tell me all of this now.” She sat with crossed legs, her hands resting behind her.

“I was in the marines during my twenties and when I dated, it was with some vague idea of escaping my childhood, my family, by marrying and starting a family of my own. On terms I could live with.”

Raising her knees, she rested her arms on them.

“And every single time I developed an intimate relationship with a woman, I’d start to feel trapped.” There, the truth was out. Hurting her was hell. Worse than hell.

He met her gaze, braced for whatever anger she might send his way. Although he hadn’t meant to mislead her, he’d obviously done so, and he’d take the full blame. A little smile tilted her lips.

“How could you expect anything else?” she asked. “You were trapping yourself. Trying to control things that aren’t meant to be controlled. Trying to fit life and love into a box into which it couldn’t possibly fit.”

She was good. He’d give her that. He also trusted her. “How so?”

“You were going about the whole process for the wrong reasons with the wrong goal in mind. There was no possible way for your heart to find peace.”

He was sure she was right. But what, exactly, was she trying to tell him? What should he do? What should he have done differently?

“Dating—marriage—isn’t supposed to be an escape,” she said softly. “And love can’t be forced. From what you describe, you were looking at each woman you dated, not for who she was, but as a means of escaping your mother. You wanted escape, but what you were attempting to do would only have trapped you further. In a loveless marriage you didn’t really want.”

Maybe.

“You know what gave your father the ability to remain cheerful despite the stress of coping with your mother’s situation?”

He shook his head. Lord knew he’d tried. Sober. Drunk. Sick. Healthy. He’d tried. He’d tried figuring it out while floating in the sky all by himself after he’d jumped out of a plane at twenty thousand feet. He’d tried praying. He’d even gone to a psychic once.

“It was love.” Melissa’s whisper pierced the warm night. “All you have to do is fall in love.”

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