“How did you find me?” Autumn sat, stiff and unnatural, in a corner of the sofa.
“Luke is a friend of mine.” With her gaze steady on her sister, hands clasped tightly in her lap, Francesca tilted her head toward the man perched next to her. “He works for the company that owns this building.”
“Works for?” The look Autumn shot between Luke and Francesca appeared almost…hunted. “Where do you work?” She frowned, her expression confused. “Obviously not in maintenance or anything.”
“I’m director of security at the Bonaparte.”
“Oh.” Autumn clearly didn’t know what to make of that. “The casino? I didn’t realize they had anything to do with…this place.” The lines of strain on Autumn’s pretty face as she glanced toward the front door aged her.
Was it possible that the manager of the property didn’t know Autumn was staying there?
“Luke’s employer doesn’t have any part in finding you,” Francesca added. “He just used his contacts to help me.”
“O-ohh.” Autumn drew the word out.
“Do you live here alone?”
“Yes.”
She scanned the apartment—sparse furnishings, clean walls, newish-looking carpet. The fully furnished kitchenette. “It’s nice.”
And how did Autumn afford it?
“Thanks.”
Francesca reached over, grabbed Autumn’s fingers to keep her from picking at the nails of her opposite hand. “I can’t stand this!” She squeezed. “I’ve missed you so much! Talk to me, tell me what’s going on. How you’ve been. What you’re doing here.”
Close enough to catch the fruity scent of Autumn’s shampoo, a familiar scent, Francesca just wanted to close her eyes and go back. Two years. Three. Fifteen. No matter how bad it had been—it’d been better than what ultimately came after.
“Talk to you?” Autumn jerked her hand away, clenched it in her lap. “Why would I talk to you now? I tried to talk to you.”
Trying not to reel from the rejection, Francesca stared at her. “You did?” She was cold, filled with fear. “When?”
How had she missed something this critical?
“All the time,” Autumn said. “I’d tell you I couldn’t stand Mom and Dad. I couldn’t stand being at home. I told you how much of a prisoner they were making me.”
Yes, she had. And the complaints had sounded so normal compared to the abuse Francesca had suffered, unbeknown to Autumn, at her stepfather’s hands, that she’d been too relieved to hear anything else. Certainly not anything that would’ve led her to suspect Autumn was being driven to the point of running away. The real abuse in their home had been because of her. Her stepfather had made that abundantly clear on so many occasions. She was her father’s child. A constant reminder to him that he was second best in his wife’s heart.
“I just thought it was normal teenage stuff….” She’d left to take the abuse out of Autumn’s home, out of her life. Jack Stevens had adored his own daughter. Every single time Francesca had seen them together, she’d seen the love and gentleness in his eyes, his touch….
“It doesn’t matter.” Autumn jumped up, took a step back. “I just don’t think you have any right to come here,” she cried. “Asking questions that are none of your business.” With each staccato sentence she took another step farther away. “Acting like you’re going to be around. That you care at all.”
“Autumn!” Francesca was having a hard time breathing. “Of course I care. I’ve always cared.”
“Mmm-hmm. Have you?” The girl looked toward the door. It was the third time she’d done that.
“Of course I have! Every second since the moment you were born.”
Her expression hard, empty, Autumn ignored her, glancing out the window in the front of the apartment.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“What if I am?”
“Nothing. Except if it’s a friend of yours, I’d like to meet her. Or him.”
“Well, you can’t.”
Autumn’s eyes, narrowed and bitter, met Francesca’s—almost as if by accident—and the girl’s shoulders dropped. “At least not today,” she finished.
“Okay. Another day, then?”
Autumn shrugged, her slim body bowed in a gesture of defeat as she stood there defending her turf—or her right to have it; Francesca couldn’t be sure. One thing was certain. This reunion was not happening the way she’d hoped it would.
“I guess you’ve called Mom, told her where I am?” The tone was belligerent.
“No.”
“Why not? Or are you lying so I won’t take off again?”
“Are you going to take off again?”
“Maybe.”
Francesca hadn’t even thought of that. Not that morning. Not since finding out her sister was alive. And close. She’d been so grateful. So overwhelmed by the idea of actually seeing her.
With a glance at Luke, who was still sitting quietly on the edge of the couch, Francesca understood what he’d been trying to tell her earlier.
She hadn’t been prepared at all.
And she hurt. The inside of her chest tightened, emotion squeezing the back of her throat. The pain reached an intensity that she couldn’t sustain. Not on top of everything else. Not sustain it and continue to stand there.
Instinctively, she stepped outside herself. It was either that or collapse. As if from a distance, she saw the morning play back from another point of view. Saw it as Luke must have done. The detachment that followed was the blessing that saved her.
She recognized it. Welcomed it. Clung to it.
And she knew she had a job to do. The most important job of her life.
“Okay,” she said, suddenly calm as rational thought took over where emotion had been. “Let’s make a deal. I don’t call Mom and you don’t run.”
Glaring through angry eyes, Autumn said, “How do you know I won’t run, anyway?”
“Because I know you.” She was taking a chance, but she had to believe in something. “You’ve never lied to me. If you give me your word, you’ll keep it.”
Autumn stared at her another full minute. And then she nodded.
“You need us to go right now because you have someone coming over.”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll go. But only if you’ll tell me when I can see you again.” She didn’t move closer or try to reconnect in any way.
“This afternoon?”
From her distant vantage point, Francesca noted the almost eager response. Filed it away as a good sign. “You got it. Can I pick you up?”
“No. I’ll meet you outside the Riviera.”
A hotel-casino on the less-refurbished end of the Strip.
Without so much as a touch to her sister’s shoulder, Francesca nodded and followed Luke out the door.
Not much more came of the second meeting with Autumn. There were so many things they had to talk about, so many things Francesca wanted to know—and had to say. Not the least of which was telling the girl that while she’d been gone, her father had died….
She’d never had the chance. While Autumn wasn’t as openly tense and defensive, she’d had to run inside the casino and throw up before Francesca had even gotten around to suggesting that they take a drive out in the desert and find some nice out-of-the-way place for dinner.
Autumn had had some bad pork for lunch. A fast-food variety that hadn’t sat well, she’d explained. And because she so adamantly refused to let Francesca take her home, because Francesca didn’t want to push the girl into running again, she had to stand there on the walk and watch her sick little sister walk away alone.
And on Friday night, Francesca became a Guido dropout—just another in the crowd of girls who disappeared with no warning. Carl called her cell phone but she didn’t hear it ring in the casino at the Bonaparte. She got the message he left later that night but didn’t return his call. Instead she made her way back to the Lucky Seven. Sober. Alone. Fifty dollars richer. Less frantic than she’d been in months. And sad beyond compare.
There were two things Autumn Stevens loved about Las Vegas. The sunshine that touched her skin with such intensity it warmed her all the way inside. And Matteo. Italian like Beniamino Witting—Francesca’s father, the father she would’ve had if he hadn’t gone and died before their mother got pregnant with Autumn. Matteo was not only the best-looking guy she’d ever known, he also had such a strong sense of honor that a girl knew she could trust him to love her and keep her safe. Unlike her own jerk of a father.
“What’s up, Golden Girl?” he asked when they met for their usual Sunday-morning date. Matteo’s mother didn’t work on Sundays and could be home with the little kids. He worked at the garage, like he did every other day of the week, but not until the afternoon.
Scuffing her feet on the sidewalk as they headed toward a park by his house, she wished she dared reach over and take his hand. “Nothing.”
He wouldn’t mind if she held his hand. She knew that. It was just that if she did, she might not be able to let go.
Grabbing her arm, he pulled her to a stop, gazing deeply into her eyes in that way he had that made her stomach go all soft and gooey, right there on the street. “We’ve been together ten minutes and other than a quick kiss hello you haven’t touched me. Or looked at me. Or laughed at any of my jokes.”
His grin was kind. So full of love she thought she might die. “You haven’t told any jokes.”
He grabbed both of her hands in his. “But if I had, you wouldn’t have laughed.”
Probably not. She didn’t feel much like laughing. Maybe not ever again. “Can we just walk for a bit?”
He glanced up as a car drove past. “Only until I can get you someplace more private. Unfortunately my place is filled with kids. Anyone home at yours?”
“You know we can’t go there.”
“Yeah.” He dropped her hands, sliding his own into the pockets of his jeans—ones that fit, not the stupid kind that guys her age wore, so big they hung down off their butts—and started walking again. “But I don’t happen to think you’re right about that,” he said. “I’m in college, I work hard, I have one small tattoo, no piercings and a mother who’ll vouch for me,” he said, enumerating some of the things that made her love him so much. “I think if you just give us a chance, your guardians will accept me.”
“No, they won’t.” That wasn’t negotiable.
“How do you know if you won’t at least try?”
It was the third time he’d brought up the subject. Each time he got more and more frustrated with her.
His insistence was one of the reasons she had to talk to him today, although she hadn’t decided what she was going to say. What she should say. What she could say.
She had no idea how she was going to look into those gorgeous brown eyes and say anything at all.
“Tell me what’s wrong.” They were at the University of Las Vegas—where he was studying business—in the almost deserted Moyer student union. An hour later and he still hadn’t given up.
He’d taken her to a corner of the reception area where there was an arrangement of modern red sectional couches. So far, in the ten minutes they’d been there, only one other person had walked through.
With an arm on the back of the couch, he was turned toward her. Any closer, and he’d have that arm around her shoulders.
Right where she wanted it.
“I can’t see you anymore.” There. She’d said it. She was safe. Her insides tightened into knots.
“What?” He hadn’t moved. She didn’t know what kind of expression he wore. She couldn’t look.
Gaze focused on the grain in the rough-feeling fabric, Autumn picked at the cuticle on her right index finger. “You heard me,” she mumbled. She couldn’t say it again; she wasn’t that strong.
“I heard you, I just don’t understand.” She wished he’d move. Get angry. Stand up. Stomp off. Leave her there to fall apart in peace.
Was a little peace too much for a girl to ask?
“Joy…” He sighed, a short, impatient sigh, like he was getting mad. Or giving up. “Joy—what’s going on?”
My name isn’t Joy.
“I can’t see you anymore, that’s all.”
She finally heard him move, and out of the corner of her eye saw his forearms come down on his thighs.
“Because of your guardian?”
It would be easiest to say yes. Unless he followed her home in an attempt to take matters into his own hands where her “guardian” was concerned—and then found out she didn’t have one.
She shook her head.
“Is it me? Something I’ve done?”
She had to say yes. It was the only way. There was a small dark stain on the sofa, and she centered it evenly between her knees. “I…I’m leaving.”
She wished. Leaving wasn’t an option. Not yet, anyway.
“Leaving?” He sounded so shocked. “Where are you going?”
Nowhere. “Home.”
“To Sacramento?”
She nodded.
“Are your guardians moving?”
God, why did life have to be so complicated?
Still not daring to look into his sweet face, Autumn stared at the tile floor, back at the couch, at the bruise just above her right knee where she’d walked into the edge of a chair in the doctor’s waiting room the day before. She’d just had some upsetting news and hadn’t seen the damn thing.
“My sister came.” Her life was so much about keeping secrets, she hadn’t even thought of the excuse before.
“Here, to Las Vegas?”
“Yeah.”
“And talked you into going home to the bastard who beat you?”
The words were harsh, horrible, bringing vividly to mind a life she couldn’t bear.
“No,” she told him, wondering where the closest bathroom was. “He’s dead, anyway. She’s taking me to live with her.”
As if. Francesca couldn’t be hauling her sister along on her travels all over the world. First, she’d insist Autumn stay home and finish school.
But it was easier to tell Matteo about her sister’s exciting job, about how Cesca had been gone for a long time—out of the country—and then she invented the part where her older sister had missed her so much she’d given it all up to come back and make a home for the two of them.
In truth, her sister had told her when they’d met for a fast-food dinner—at Autumn’s insistence—the night before, that it was Autumn’s phone call home that had brought her to Vegas. She’d heard all about Guido’s. And the phone booth. That had been hard to take. Knowing that her sister had been posing as some homeless deadbeat all these weeks, in the middle of the summer’s worst heat, just to find her.
She couldn’t hate her after that. And then Cesca had told her, very gently, that her father had died of a heart attack a year and a half ago. Cesca had been all set to be sympathetic, and there was no way Autumn could handle that. She was through with keeping up appearances about that twisted jerk. She’d faked an appointment and left the burger joint instead. Another reprieve.
Something told her she wasn’t going to be so lucky when she and Cesca met again later that afternoon.
“I’m finished school at the end of this year,” Matteo said. “I don’t mind relocating to Sacramento.”
She raised her head then. She couldn’t help it. “But your family,” she reminded him. “All those kids. Your mother needs you.” Matteo’s father, a policeman, had been shot to death during a routine traffic stop a few years before.
“You need me.” His look was earnest. And open. Far more open than she’d ever been with him. Except when she’d told him how much she loved him. “And I need you just as much.” He stayed there, looking at her with those compelling brown eyes that were glistening with the intensity of what he was telling her.
How the hell could she ever be expected to walk away from that? Hands on her stomach, Autumn wished the ground would just open up and suck her in.
“One of the hardest things to do in life is to put yourself in someone else’s shoes because then you risk having your mind changed.”
Luke stopped mid-chew, staring at his mother. Where had that comment come from? Her hand drumming a rhythm with a knife turned sideways, she hadn’t eaten more than two bites of the eggs Benedict and fruit she’d prepared for Sunday brunch.
Francesca’s fork hung suspended above her half-empty plate. In her tight black lace, short-sleeved shirt and jeans, she was breathtakingly beautiful—in a sassy sort of way. “I hadn’t thought of it like that,” she said.
Carol’s nod might have been a normal part of the conversation if not for the nervous jerks that accompanied the movement. “It’s why so many people resist, even when they think they’re being open-minded,” she said. “Giving up control of anything is frightening, but that kind of empathy is like handing over control of your mind, which is more than a lot of people can accept.”
“So you’re saying I need to trust Autumn enough to become her.” Francesca, the most independent and private woman Luke had ever met, had told his mother about finding her runaway sister. And the painful reunion that followed.
“If you want to reach her, I think so.”
Luke took a long sip of the mimosa his mother had poured from the iced pitcher in the middle of the table. He could do with a little more champagne and a little less orange juice.
His mother was giving advice. Sound advice. He’d forgotten how often he’d heard her doing that with his father while he was growing up. Probably because those conversations were overshadowed by her frequent loss of emotional control.
“I can do that.” Francesca pierced a chunk of melon. “It’s sort of what I do when I work. You have to become people, in a sense—feel their emotions and experiences accurately, in order to portray them truthfully.”
Francesca didn’t seem to remember Luke was there, so focused was she on her conversation with his mother.
He wished he could be as unselfconscious. She fit into his home so naturally. God knew, it was a pleasant novelty having a beautiful woman sitting there, charming the air around her. He rubbed the ache at the back of his neck, pulling at the collar of his short-sleeved white cotton shirt. There just wasn’t a wardrobe suitable for the Las Vegas summer heat.
He’d gone out alone for the jump he’d scheduled with Jackson the day before. Floating in the sky, in control, yet not in control, he’d reveled in a few brief moments of peace.
Thank God for those.
“You don’t become her to the point of losing yourself,” his mother was saying. Luke had to restrain the impulse to reach over and take the drumming knife out of her hand before she put a dent in the table. “Just long enough to go where she is so you can try to bring her to where you are.”
Was she talking to him? Looking up, Luke saw that her focus was on Francesca.
He poured another mimosa. Had he ever done that—attempted to really put himself in his mother’s shoes, to live, even for the space of one minute, in the hell she had to cope with every day of her life?
Would he even want to?
He understood her plight. He always had. It was why he was still there.
“And what if she doesn’t want to come to where I am?” Francesca put down her fork, her dark eyes shadowed. The room buzzed with the energy that seemed to surround her.
And to draw him in.
Soon, the claustrophobia would follow.
“In that case, you have to meet her halfway,” Carol said.
And then, for no apparent reason, she started to cry.
The pill he’d given her an hour before had obviously not worked.
Luke was in for a long afternoon.