“I’m glad you could make it,” Jack said, taking Darrigan’s hand. Damn if it isn’t good to see him again, he thought suddenly. Everything is going to be fine.
Darrigan made a small flourish with his hand as he brought the girl forward. “May I present Miss Esta von Filosik.” Harte smiled warmly at the girl. “Esta, this is a good friend of mine. A very important man in our city, Mr. Jack Grew.”
Jack couldn’t help but preen a bit under the praise. “Miss Filosik,” he said, with a slight nod of his head. This close, he saw that his original impression had been right. Her face was free from any paint and her clothes were so well fitted that they must have been custom-made.
“You must call me Esta,” she told him, offering her hand. She spoke with a foreign lilt to her voice, but it wasn’t the gutteral sound that filled the saloons of lower Manhattan. Instead, it had the refinement of someone well bred and educated. “Any friend of Harte’s is one of mine.”
“Esta it is, then.” He took her hand and bowed low over it, lifting his eyes to take in the shapely bodice of her gown, the creamy expanse of her chest.
She gave him a slow smile, peering up at him through her lashes, but then her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened in a soft oh.
Well, well, he thought with anticipation as the girl stared at him as though she appreciated what she saw. . . .
“We arrived a bit early and were taking a turn around the floor. There’s a table waiting upstairs,” Harte told him. “If that’s all right with you?”
Jack released the girl’s hand. “That sounds fine.”
“Wonderful.” The girl gave him a slow, encouraging smile. “I believe the champagne should still be cold.”
“Champagne, you say?” He looked down at his empty glass, feeling that much better about the days ahead. “That sounds as perfect as you look, my dear.”
DéJà VU
Esta cringed inwardly at Jack’s obvious come-on. A hundred years, and men never figured out that lines like that didn’t work.
As Harte led her back to their table, it took effort to keep her features relaxed. She was still unsettled from the premonition she’d had when Jack had looked up as he bowed over her gloved hand. She’d been overwhelmed by the memory of those same eyes in a darkened hallway, when he was pointing a gun at her before he turned it on Logan.
If Harte hadn’t started talking again, she would probably still be frozen. But she reminded herself that there was no way Jack could know her or remember her: She’d first met him in 1926, some twenty-four years from now. She would be fine. She’d get through this.
Ten minutes later, though, she regretted having him at their table. Harte was a different person around him, condescending and dismissive of everyone, including her. It was a part of their plan, she told herself. He was only giving Jack an opening, using her—the mistreated mistress—as bait. But it was still an ordeal to sit through.
He was even worse than Logan, Esta thought as she listened to the two men bluster at each other. Logan had a sort of natural charm he used to disarm his victims, but Harte’s was something more. Whatever charm he came by naturally had been cultivated and honed with the precision of an artist. It was so overwhelming that his mark had no choice but to be taken in by it.
She did know better, and she’d almost been taken in by it, she admitted, thinking of the warm fluttering in her belly as they’d danced. The moment he’d taken her in his arms, she’d felt trapped and protected all at once, and she hated herself for almost liking the feeling. Hated that she’d had to focus on something—anything—else during the dance, because he was looking at her with an intensity that made her cheeks warm.
The whole ordeal had made her feel things she didn’t want to examine too closely. Unnerved. Unbalanced. And maybe most dangerous of all, unsure.
All part of his game, she reminded herself—a game she had to win.
As she kept half of her attention on the conversation at their table and the other half on the ballroom, she couldn’t help but think that Dakari’s knife might still be somewhere in that building. It grated at her, the knowledge that she was a thief who couldn’t even steal back something that belonged to her. And it worried her, going back to her own time without that bit of proof about what once had been. ?After the way the clipping had changed, who knew what future she’d be going back to?
Jack was nearly through the first bottle of champagne when a flash of coppery hair caught her eye. Down on the floor, Bridget Malone was making her way along the edge of the room.
Esta was on her feet before she realized what she was doing.
“Sweetheart?” Harte asked, a warning threaded through the endearment.
She didn’t care about his warnings, though. He had Jack well enough in hand. She had to try. “Would you gentlemen excuse me?”
“Where are you going?” Harte asked through his clenched teeth.
She could still make out Bridget’s fiery hair moving through the crowd. “Just to powder my nose, darling,” she said with a shy smile. “It will only take a moment. . . . If one of you could direct me?”
“Back behind the bar,” Grew told her as he reached for the bottle again. His face had turned blotchy and red from the warmth of the room and the amount of wine he’d consumed.
She could tell Harte wanted to protest, but she promised to return quickly before he could, and then made her way through the crowd. At first she went in the direction Grew had pointed, but when she was out of view, she cut beneath the overhang of the balcony and headed in the direction Bridget Malone had taken.
When she reached the corner of the room, she found that Bridget had vanished. ?There wasn’t a door or hallway for the madam to have gone through, but the woman was gone. Confusion settled over Esta as she searched for some answer to Bridget’s disappearance.
She found it a moment later when a portion of the wall slid open and one of the waiter girls emerged carrying a tray of clean barware. Before the panel slid shut, Esta picked up her pace and slipped through the opening into the dark silence of an empty hallway.
At the end of the passageway, Esta could just make out the glow of the flame Bridget held in her hand. From the smell of roasting meat that filled the air, the passage was also connected to the kitchens, but Esta wondered where else it might lead and whether it was connected to the lower floors. The room Bridget had kept her in before was below, in the cellar of the building.