Tasting Fear (9 page)

They went back to the music table after Charlie left. Liam took Charlie’s advice and switched to coffee. Even so the night quickly took on a dreamlike quality. He was drunk on a different intoxicant, one far more potent than beer. The music thundered, and Nancy’s slender hand, now relaxed and warm, was clasped in his, fingers entwined. They didn’t talk much, with all the noise, but it didn’t matter.

At a certain point in the evening, he noticed a disturbance in the energy of the group. The driving tempo of the music never faltered, but all of the male members of the group around the table except for Eoin were rubbernecking at something behind him. He took a look, and the mystery soon resolved itself. Two strikingly pretty women stood there: a slender waiflike girl with big gray eyes and a mop of long, fire-red hair, and a brunette with flashing dark eyes, lush curves, and full lips. Both of them were standing right by the musicians’ table, smiling. At him.

He glanced down at Nancy, perplexed. She was rolling her eyes. She gestured for him to lean down toward her mouth. “My sisters,” she called into his ear. “They wanted to check you out. And to roast me.”

Her sisters. Well, hot damn. That gave him a warm feeling, and a rush of energy that kicked up the already brisk tempo of “The Three Wishes” to a dangerous driving pace. He looked up at the sisters and gave them a big “here I am, so check me out” grin. They gave each other wide-eyed looks and giggled. They took turns whispering into Nancy’s ear and giggled some more. Nancy turned brick red. He loved it.

He was sorry when they left not long after, before he had a chance to chat, but he hoped there would be another chance soon to charm them and get them on his side. In a less noisy environment, maybe. Dinner, maybe, at his place. When Nancy was there with him. Soon.

Liam looked at his watch when the musicians started packing up, astonished to find that it was well past two in the morning. Eoin was already wangling a ride to his next seisiun, hopeless tunehead that he was.

“I should be getting home,” Nancy said.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” he offered.

“Oh, no. I found such a good parking spot for it yesterday that I couldn’t bear to move it. So I took the subway.”

He stared at her for a horrified moment. “You’re joking, right?”

She looked uncomfortable. “Uh, no,” she said. “Believe me, it was perfectly safe. The trains were crowded when I came out, and it’s not like I can get into any trouble on a crowded Uptown Six. Then the Seven train got me within two blocks of here, and it was pretty full, too. I take the subway whenever I can. It’s so much more efficient, and I—”

“You’re not taking it tonight,” he said grimly. “I’m driving you home.”

“Oh, no. Don’t worry about it. If it makes you feel any better, I had every intention of cabbing it back, given the weird—”

“Have you not been listening at all? Did you hear Charlie? I know you’re not stupid, so are you nuts? Do you have a death wish?”

She looked abashed. “No, not at all. I just try to get through my days as best I can,” she said tightly. “What about Eoin? Didn’t he come with you?”

“Eoin’s fine. Your friends are taking him to a late-night seisiun in Brooklyn. He’ll play tunes all night and wake up God knows where.”

She bit her lip. “It’s out of your way. Really, a cab would be fine.”

The woman had no grip on reality. She wasn’t used to a guy giving a damn whether she got home safely any more than she was used to being kissed.

Tough shit. She was just going to have to get used to it.

Nancy clasped her hands nervously in Liam’s truck. Alone with him in the dark, her doubts came rushing back, mixed with a dose of simmering lust. Funny. She had thought herself in love with Freedy, Ron, and Peter, but she’d never felt like this with them.

Like a live wire with the plastic casing peeled off.

She searched for something neutral to talk about. “I can’t believe what a stroke of luck it was to find Eoin. How old is he, anyway?”

“Twenty-one, if I remember correctly.”

“Just a baby. Looks like he hit it off with Matt and Eugene, too. And he’s available for the tour, thank God. Does he have a green card?”

Liam hesitated. “We’re working on it,” he said guardedly.

“We can help,” she assured him. “Uilleann pipers are rare. It’s a specialized skill. We’ll write letters to the INS about how desperately they need him for this gig or that. It may take a while—” She shot him a glance. “Why are you smirking? Do I amuse you?”

He pulled up at the Midtown tunnel toll booth, batted away her handful of dollars, and paid the toll himself. “You’re a sweet girl, Nancy.”

Nancy’s cheeks grew warm. “I’m not doing anything altruistic. Drafting Eoin into Mandrake is business. He’s saving my ass.”

“And the green card?”

“That’s in my best interests, too,” she retorted.

“Why does it embarrass you when I tell you that you’re sweet?”

She thought about it for a minute. “It makes me feel like you’re condescending to me,” she finally said.

“It makes you feel vulnerable, you mean.”

“Don’t tell me how I feel, please. And don’t psychoanalyze me,” she snapped. “I’m not in the mood.”

“She’s back,” he said. “The tough broad with the attitude. But you don’t fool me. You’re tough, yes. But sweet as honey. And I’m not condescending. Not at all. I salute you for it.”

She was speechless. The naked, exposed feeling was unbearable. The tunnel spat them up into Midtown, and she was intensely grateful for the necessity of giving directions.

“Take the FDR Drive south, to my place.” She held up her hand at his expression. “I swear, I kept my promise. I’m camped out at Nell’s, but I had to take my cat, and I didn’t have enough arms to carry all her stuff yesterday. I need food, I need toys, I need kitty litter. I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but—”

“It’s no goddamn inconvenience.”

That response squelched further attempts at conversation. She just muttered “right” and “left” at the appropriate times until she indicated her own door in Alphabet City. He drove on past without stopping, and found a parking space three blocks down.

Nancy was disconcerted. She hadn’t expected him to find parking. God knows, she never did. She’d expected that he’d drop her off at the stoop and wait as she hustled upstairs. But here he was, parked.

Liam Knightly, at her apartment, at three in the morning. It flung open doors in her mind that she just wasn’t ready to look through.

She lost patience with herself. For God’s sake, the man had just driven forty minutes out of his way to take her home in the middle of the night. The least she could do was to offer him coffee for the drive.

“Do you, uh, want to come up for coffee?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

The word reverberated, invested with infinite shades of meaning. Her knees went rubbery. “My apartment isn’t neutral ground.”

His eyes gleamed. “I’ll be good.”

Hah. Loaded words, if there ever were ones.

Liam slung his fiddle and flute and whistle bag cases over his shoulder and took her arm. He looked around at the block of cramped turn-of-the-century brick town houses as if he expected the garbage cans to animate and attack them. She hauled out her house keys. The bulb that lit the stairs was dim, flickering. The place looked so shabby at three
A.M.
She actually wanted to apologize for her apartment building. Make nervous excuses about real estate prices in Manhattan. She stopped herself. As if. Their footsteps echoed on the stairway. She groped for something to say to break the tension, but her brain had ceased nonessential functioning.

So when the black-clad guys hurtled around the corner of the landing above, she just stared, mouth wide.

Too startled to scream.

“A
w,
fuck
,” Liam hissed. He flung her behind himself. She hit the wall with a grunt. Big. Dark clothes, stocking masks. Meant business.

He was in the air and spinning before his conscious brain kicked in. His heel connected to the chin of the closest guy, who reeled back, right into his companion. It gave Liam a second to regroup—and register the knife that appeared in the first guy’s hand. He danced back, keeping his eyes on the blade, evading his opponent’s lunges, but the landing was small. He had to keep that blade away from Nancy.

His opponent lunged again, jabbing high. Liam parried with his forearm, glad he wore the leather, and rammed the guy’s arm against the wall. The knife clattered to the tiles. He spun to jab a knee into the gut of the guy bolting toward Nancy, but the first attacker did a foot sweep, scooping Liam’s legs from under him. He stumbled against the wall, took an elbow slam to the ribs. In his peripheral vision, he saw the fiddle case slashing through the air.
Crack.
A masculine grunt of pain, limbs flailing, thuds. The second guy was falling down the stairs. Good.

But the first guy was diving for Nancy. She didn’t have time to load another swing with the fiddle case. The asshole barreled into her, knocking her against the wall of the staircase. Her legs gave, she slipped, and they toppled in agonizing slow motion, careening downward, out of Liam’s line of vision.

He hurled himself down the stairs, so fast his feet may not have even touched them. She dangled under the bastard’s meaty arm, her body slack. Stunned. Liam plowed into him with a shout and looped both arms around the guy’s neck. The other attacker was nowhere to be seen.

Nancy’s weight thudded to the floor. The door yawned open, and shadows spun as the guy took a flying somersaulting leap into the dark off the stoop and took Liam spinning with him, over his head.

The world twirled and spun. A battering rain of blows: head, shoulders, back. Pain followed pain in such quick succession, Liam barely had the time to perceive them. Then, a half second sprawled together on the sidewalk, trembling and panting. Christ, the guy’s breath was foul.

Then, the masked thing twisted against him like some huge, muscular serpent and slammed an elbow into Liam’s ear. The fight exploded into movement again. They grappled, grunted, heaved. Liam slammed a hand up under his attacker’s chin, knocking his teeth together. The guy was huge, but Liam whipped the man’s knife hand back with the strength of desperation, ramming it into the rails of the wrought-iron fence beside them that separated the garbage cans from the sidewalk. And again.

The knife fell. Liam jerked part of his weight out from under the guy so that their bodies were crossed. The other man attempted to use his thick legs for traction, spreading them wide. Liam’s hand flashed down, grabbed the guy’s balls. Squeezed, with all his strength.

The guy screamed. Liam lunged for the knife on the sidewalk, scooping it up, and rolled up to his feet in a wary crouch, brandishing the blade. The other guy leaped up, too, still wheezing in pain.
Yeah. Come at me now, pig fucker.

Would be a fine joke on him if the guy pulled a gun.

The man hesitated and backed away. He turned and began to sprint, booted feet pounding the pavement. Liam started after him, but was brought up short, as if there were a rope around his neck. Every hunting instinct screamed to run down his prey.

Nancy.
She had not stirred from where the guy had let her drop in the entryway, and the door was flung wide open to the night, and it was three in the morning, off Avenue B, and he had no fucking clue where that first guy had gone.

The guy darted around the corner. It was quiet and still.

Both men, gone. Liam’s jaw ached with frustration as he leaped up the steps of the stoop and sank down next to her, heart pounding.

He brushed the thick, glossy hair off her face. “Nancy? Are you okay?” His voice was breathless, quavering. “Talk to me, Nancy.”

“I’m okay.” Her eyes fluttered open, and she dragged herself up onto her hands and knees. “I think. Are they gone?”

“Yes.” He helped her up, scanning for injuries. She looked dazed, disoriented, and as pale as a ghost, but there were no obvious marks on her. She let him pull her to her feet, and they held each other for a long moment, swaying and correcting, clinging to each other for balance.

“Wow,” she whispered. “That was…wow.”

“Like I said,” he said into her ear. “One humdinger after another.”

Her laughter had a choppy, hysterical feel. He held her closer, stroking her shaking back. The first time they’d ever embraced, he realized. Strange, that they’d waited so long. Two days, he remembered. They’d known each other for two fucking days. God. It felt like forever.

“We should call the cops,” he said.

Her face contracted. “Oh, God.”

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not like we have a better plan.”

“Let’s get up to my apartment,” she said, sounding exhausted. “I need to sit down. And my purse and cell are somewhere on the steps.”

They gathered up her stuff and his instruments as they climbed the stairs. A peek inside the fiddle case showed that the tough fiberglass had done its work well, cracking heads on the outside, protecting the instrument on the inside.

The door didn’t look forced, but he took the key from Nancy’s stiff, trembling fingers and opened the door himself, hesitating.

“Light’s over the stove,” Nancy forced out, through chattering teeth. “Yank the string.”

Shock, he thought. She was acting shocky, and she, by God, had the right to. He peered inside suspiciously.

There wasn’t much to the place. He could take it in in a single glance. A long narrow room with a barred, grilled window at both ends, a tiny water closet in the back behind the tiny kitchen. No place for an attacker to hide. He pulled her inside, grabbed an afghan off the couch, and wrapped it around her. She landed with a
whump
, on the couch, legs giving out. He turned on the light that dangled over the kitchen corner.

“You swing a mean violin,” he said.

He got a wavering smile and a peek through those long, dark, curling lashes. “I did what I could,” she said. “But you…My God, Liam, where did you learn to fight like that?”

“My stepdad was a cop and a Vietnam vet,” he said. “A Marine. He taught me the basics. I did some training on my own, too, later.”

“You were amazing,” she said.

“I let him get away,” he said sourly. “Amazing would have been knocking the dickhead out and tying him up, so we could give him to the police. After we pounded some answers out of him.”

“So you think this is connected to…” Her voice trailed off as the expression on his face answered her. She shrank into the couch. “Oh, God. My sisters. I have to warn them. Where is my phone?”

He helped her find it, and handed it to her. “Here. Breathe deep,” he advised. “Calm down.”

Liam put on a saucepan of water and rummaged for tea bags while she talked to her sisters. Some excavating had uncovered a cheap brand of stale tea, but he was more concerned with getting sugar and caffeine into her than in the subtleties of flavor. When she hung up, he held out a sweet, milky cup to her and took the phone. “Let’s trade.”

She sipped it slowly while he called 911. His whole body ached and hurt, but he had no one but himself to blame. This was what happened when a guy poked his nose into a woman’s big, hairy problems. He’d done it voluntarily. In fact, he’d insisted.

When she’d drunk her tea, he took the cup away and sank down in front of her. Her hands were cold, in spite of having clutched the hot cup. So smooth and slender. He rubbed them and contemplated a uniquely scary thought. This woman’s life was a fucked-up, deadly mess.

And there was no place on earth that he would rather be than right in the middle of it.

Liam kept Nancy’s teacup loaded with sugary tea during the whole police routine. He did most of the talking, for which she was grateful.

And that was the least of what she had to be grateful for. If not for him, she would be dead. Or something else that was very bad. Something she didn’t even want to contemplate. It kept backhanding her afresh when she tried to think about something else, or better yet, not to think of anything. Those guys had not been trying to rob or kill her.

Those guys had been trying to abduct her.

Shudders of retroactive horror kept rippling through her, at how close she’d come to an unspeakable fate. But why her, for God’s sake? Why on earth? She had two hundred and seventy eight bucks in her checking account, after paying her rent.

After a while, she drifted loose. She was floating in a faraway bubble, and the two policemen talking to Liam in her apartment were in another one. Their voices were tinny, a radio chattering in another room.

Only Liam held the cord. He could reel her back in to himself if he wanted to. Otherwise, she’d stay in her bubble, thanks very much.

The police finally left. She and Liam had declined to go in for medical observation, in the face of strong disapproval from the female officer, but enough was enough. She wanted peace and quiet.

Liam sat down next to her, touched her cheek.

“Nancy,” he said.

That “don’t freak out on me” tone made her brace herself. “Yes?”

“Those guys who attacked us. They were trying to—”

“Kidnap me, yes. I figured out that fun factoid all on my own.”

“No need to snap,” he replied. “Just factor that fun factoid into your future plans.”

“Plans?” Her voice rose to a squeak. “What plans? You think I’m capable of planning? Someone killed my mother and tried to abduct me. And murder you while they were at it. I noticed that, too.”

“Calm down,” he soothed.

She hissed out a long sigh. “I’m sorry. I’m scolding you, and you don’t deserve it. You saved my ass tonight. Don’t think I’ve forgotten it.”

“Anytime.” He fished a cat toy out from under his leg, a jointed wooden snake. “How can you keep a cat in a place this cramped?”

The disapproval in his voice stung. “It’s better than the life she had on the street! She was half dead when I found her, and I spent fifteen hundred dollars getting her sewed back together, plus getting her spayed, and shots. And I spend a fortune in kitty litter and niblets.”

The silence that followed stretched out too long to bear. When she looked up, Liam had a gleam in his eye. He was trying not to smile.

“What?” she asked crossly. “You’re giving me that look again.”

“Bet getting the cat fixed up was a hard-assed, self-interested business decision, right?”

Nancy gave him a cool stare. “You’re bugging me, Liam.”

He gazed back, unrepentant. “Get used to it.”

He picked up Lucia’s bronze Cellini satyr, turning it carefully in his hands. “You think this thing is safe here?”

She bristled. “Probably not, considering what just happened, but is anything safe anywhere?”

“A good point.” He set the thing carefully down. “Probably not.”

“I guess I should put it in a safe-deposit box,” she said. “It got all the way through the Nazi occupation without getting appropriated. The Conte wrapped it in burlap and buried it in the kitchen fireplace ashes. It would be ironic if it got stolen now and traded for crack.”

“The Conte?” Liam’s sharp gaze bored suddenly into her eyes. “Lucia’s father hid art from the Nazis?”

“Everything he could. I think they got most of it, but—Oh, hey! You don’t know about the letter, do you?”

He frowned. “What letter?”

“We found an old letter last night, and a photo, in the Fabergé picture frame at Nell’s apartment.” Nancy quickly outlined the contents of the letter to him.

Liam listened, his face impassive. When she finished, he turned again to stare at the Cellini bronze. “Maybe there’s something else that was hidden from the Nazis, like the satyr,” he said. “Except that it’s still hidden. And the old count died before he told anyone where it is.”

Nancy chewed her lip. “But then why are they attacking me?” Her voice quivered again. “I don’t know anything.”

“They don’t know that.”

Dark spots started swimming before her eyes. “Oh, God. That would suck. The worst of all possible worlds. If it’s true, they’ll never stop. And I’ll never, ever be able to give them what they want.”

“Put your head down.” Liam pushed her head between her knees.

Nancy did so and concentrated on breathing. When she dared to sit up again, he had a small, thoughtful frown in his eyes. “Don’t think about it anymore,” he said gently. “Please. Don’t faint on me.”

So give me something else to think about, you doofus
, she wanted to yell. She contented herself with a slightly hysterical crack of laughter.

He looked around her apartment. The cramped room was crammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves, cassettes, CD racks. A desk dominated the room, with a computer, a fax, a scanner. A file cabinet, copy machine, and water cooler were crowded around it. Liam patted the back of the couch where they sat. “Does this thing open up into a bed?”

Her hackles were on the rise, as she sensed a criticism in formation. “Yes, it does,” she said. “Anything else? More pronouncements about my apartment, my life, my choices? By all means, Liam. Express yourself.”

“So this place is an office. With a couch for those occasional moments when you want to assume a horizontal position,” he said.

Yeah. Like, right now. With you.
She groped for a smart-ass retort, but an unexpected insight took form in her mind as she looked into his eyes.

“You’re pissing me off on purpose,” she said slowly.

His face was impassive. “A couple of zingers to get you going. It kicks up your blood pressure. I like to see some color in your face.”

She covered her face with her hands. “I must look like death warmed over. Or not even. Death served right out of the fridge.”

“No.” He reached out, pulled her hands gently off her face. “You’re beautiful, Nancy. You shine. Like a jewel.”

She was moved, embarrassed, mortified. Charmed beyond belief.