The dancer was totally nude except for an incongruous pair of ballerina's toe-shoes. Her body glistened with sweat or oil and jiggled in about five directions at once as she did various obscene things with her hips, but if she had I.D. saying she was twenty-eight, it would be about twenty years too young.
"How do they get away with this?"
Brian thought he'd been muttering to himself, well under the noise-level, but he must have spoken louder than he thought.
"F-f-fix. Newspaper says, woman who owns this p-p-place, lives with a cop."
Her teeth were still chattering, even though the room felt hot after the winter storm. The house kept the furnace at full blast for the dancers.
The table sat right by a hissing radiator, and Brian thanked blind luck. Now he could get that soaked jacket off her and let the heat go to work while he figured out some explanations--ones he could sell whether they were true or not. He pulled out a chair for her and held the shoulders of her coat while she wriggled out of it.
Her body-smell steamed up from the sweater underneath and Brian's nostrils flared. Doors clicked open in his brain, and he felt as if someone had picked him up and moved him across a chessboard into an entirely new game. He suddenly knew why Liam had been stalking her.
Brian hung her coat on the radiator to dry and fumbled for a seat. His brain and his hormones tumbled over each other, racing along in overdrive as his mind followed tangled connections and his body responded to genes older than the human race.
And it explained her apparent age. Twenty-eight was still nearly a child, for her kind . . . .
A waitress wiggled her way towards them through the flashing strobes. A topless waitress, he noticed, wearing nothing but a pair of high heels and skin-tight purple Lycra pants that molded her legs and butt and showed no trace of a panty-line.
"Get you anything?" The way she hung her painted breast just in front of Brian's nose, it looked like an open-ended offer. The joint was more than a bar . . . no cover charge for the show. They must make money the old-fashioned way.
"Coffee, if you've got it."
The waitress lifted an eyebrow. "Cost you as much as a drink. Four bucks."
"Irish coffee," the girl said. "Two. Make that doubles on the whiskey."
"Six bucks for the doubles."
The girl handed over a twenty. "Make it three of them and keep the change."
The waitress threaded her way back through the maze of empty tables. Brian's gaze dismissed her in its ceaseless prowl of the shadows: he wasn't all that interested in her or the dancer. This redheaded stranger, on the other hand . . . .
And if she wasn't interested in him, she would still draw Liam's brothers, cousins, and nephews like moths to a pheromone trap. Did she realize it? Could he use her again . . . ?
The sound system was too loud for talk. He studied her in silence, as she soaked up heat and expanded from her knot of fear and cold. She could be pretty or even beautiful, if she made the effort. She definitely wasn't dressed for sex-appeal, not with those loose jeans and baggy green sweater. Either she wore no makeup or a powerful understatement, and he hadn't caught any hint of perfume in that wash of her musky smell. He saw no rings, no jewelry except a crucifix.
She didn't know who she was, what powers she could summon.
Brian's thoughts spun, leading him nowhere. His only anchor was the need to watch the exits and the entry stair. Nobody declared truces in the ancient war he fought.
He had followed Liam. Someone could be following him.
The waitress reappeared from wherever the coffeepot lived. She set three steaming mugs in the center of the table, taking no sides in the division of three drinks between two people, eyed Brian, and aimed her breasts at him again as if firing a broadside from a frigate.
Brian wasn't interested. She shook her head at his lack of response, gave the redhead a searching stare as if trying to figure out what she had, and wound her way back through the tables again. Her rump twitched irritation at the wasted effort.
The girl swiveled around and poked through the pockets of her jacket, pulling out the .38 and a speed-loader. Five fresh rounds clicked into the cylinder, and the gun disappeared under the table rather than back into her pocket. Suspicious little witch.
The noise stopped, and the dancer vanished through one of the exits. So. The blessed quiet meant it was time to use that tale he hadn't manufactured. The redhead had already inhaled half of one mug and sat there, one hand hidden, glaring at him with hard distrust.
"Okay, Galahad, talk! Who are you, who was that in the alley, and what exactly happened back there?"
Her attitude was reasonable, given what she'd just been through. However, if he spent any more time with her, he'd have to persuade her that firearms could be unreliable in the wrong company.
He kept his hands on the table and tried not to think too much about where those chunks of lead were aimed. The ones he'd dumped in the trash had been hollow-points--nasty little things.
Send her off on a tangent. "Pawn to Queen Four."
"Huh?"
"Chess. I just thought it was time to try a different opening."
She smiled. It was the first time he'd seen her smile. Granted, she hadn't had much reason. And then a shot of mischief flashed through her eyes and she became a different person, a person he
