Rory shifted to her friend at the next station. “Would you mind helping this gentleman? I have an emergency.”
“Oh, sure.” Curiosity flickered in Christine’s eyes. The boy shuffled over to her station, and Rory hurried away to the library director’s office.
After arranging for an emergency leave, she collected her tapestry tote bag from the break room and left. As she wound her way through the stop-and-go traffic of Maplewood, she dialed the number she’d hoped she’d never have to use.
“Seekers, Inc., Liv Falconer speaking.”
“Is Sebastian in? This is Aurora Cates.”
“Rory! Nice to hear your voice again. He’s right here. Hang on.”
Liv Falconer had sustained a brain injury over a year ago. Her recovery since then was extraordinary. She couldn’t remember anything from her life before her accident, but she’d created an exciting new life for herself as she’d helped her husband start Seekers, Inc. They specialized in finding people. Sebastian had once been the best manhunter in the U.S. Marshals Service. Rory hoped he hadn’t lost any of his edge.
“Rory, how are you?” Sebastian’s voice sounded more relaxed than she’d ever heard it when he worked for the USMS. Being in charge of his own fate agreed with him.
“I need a favor.” She winced.
“I owe you one.”
She’d helped Sebastian find the information he needed to help Liv after her accident, but this would take a whole lot more than perusing a few databases for articles dealing with coma, brain injuries and amnesia.
“It’s my sister. Felicia’s missing.” Rory changed lanes to give herself time to make sense of the mess Felicia had dumped in her lap. “Ordinarily I wouldn’t worry.”
Sebastian laughed.
“Okay, I’d worry, but I wouldn’t call you. Since the baby she’d settled down, you know. She loves Hannah. She would never just leave her like that. She told me she was on her way here. And now she’s gone.”
“Okay, Rory, take a breath and start at the beginning.”
A red light registered on her unfocused mind and she pressed the brake. She gave Sebastian all the information she had. “I’m heading to Summersfield as soon as I can pack a bag. Can you check on the situation for me?”
“No problem.”
A horn honked and she realized the light had turned green. She shifted gears and turned left.
Her fault. She shouldn’t have given Felicia a chance to say no. Not after their parents had died and Rory had escaped to a job in Washington, D.C. Not when Felicia had called to tell Rory she was pregnant. Not last month when fear had crept into her voice. But handling Felicia had always made Rory feel incompetent. Even though she could locate the epitaph on Max Planck’s gravestone or the fashion fads of the 1950s or the rules of Bunko without breaking a sweat, she could never find the right book or article or piece of information that would let her understand her sister. Giving Felicia a loose rein was easier than fighting against the sheer muscle of so much unbridled anger.
“I have a man in Summersfield,” Sebastian said. “I’ll have him ask around.”
Rory groaned as traffic seemed to grind to a halt for no reason. In her low-slung Beetle, she couldn’t see past the UPS truck in front of her and was boxed in on three sides by SUVs. It was only three o’clock, for heaven’s sake. Didn’t these people have jobs? “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Take it easy. You go home and pack, and I’ll arrange for a car to pick you up and a plane to fly you here.”
She wanted to balk at the generosity, but she couldn’t. She’d let her wild-child sister down too many times. She had to hope that this time she hadn’t waited too long to rein her in.
IF THERE WAS ONE THING Adriano Constantin Esteleone knew, it was how to survive. You weren’t raised by a woman like Carlotta Esteleone on the mean streets of the Bronx without learning how to think on your feet. To survive, you had to trust and act on your gut instinct before you could analyze the facts of a situation. Stopping to think could get you dead.
He didn’t care what Sebastian Falconer said. Every fiber of his body told him a woman who looked like TNT was bound to detonate, and he couldn’t chance her blowing his cover.
“No.” Ace left no room for disagreement. The conference room in the basement offices of Seekers, Inc., also known as the Aerie, was boardroom-comfortable with its cream walls, soft lighting, leather chairs and oval cherrywood table. It still smelled of new carpet and fresh paint. But stuck in this leather chair, Ace felt as trapped as if he’d walked down the wrong alley in the middle of the night with a posse of thugs hard on his heels. He gripped the arms of the chair and scowled at Falconer, sitting at the head of the table. “I can’t have my attention divided like that.”
How could Falconer do this to him? He worked alone. Always had. It was part of the deal. As Ace Lyon, working as a grease monkey at Fletcher Automotive, he’d spent the last six months winning the Fletcher brothers’ confidence. And now Falconer wanted him to blow it all to bits for this woman just when the case was coming together? He couldn’t. This case was too important. It was scum like Fletcher who’d killed his mother and poisoned his sister. There was no way he was walking away. Not when he was this close to shutting down their corridor and getting his sister back on the right track.
“He’s right,” the woman who was causing all this upheaval said.
At least she was smart enough to know she didn’t belong in a place like Summersfield. She sat calmly across the table from him in her prim and proper green tweed suit. But all that wild red hair and those fire-gold eyes made her look as unstable as a homemade pipe bomb. That couldn’t be good.
“I want to know what happened to Felicia. That’s all. I’m not an agent or an operative or whatever it is you call the people who work for you.”
She was working as hard at ignoring him as Ace was at ignoring her. But it wasn’t happening. He was as aware of her as if she were a lit fuse and he was gunpowder. “Felicia’s hiding from Fletcher.”
“Felicia wouldn’t have left Hannah behind.” Rory almost knocked over the mug of coffee in front of her with her long fingers. “Something’s happened to her.”
“She’d leave Hannah behind if she thought it was the best thing for the kid.”
“She was leaving Summersfield,” Rory insisted, cupping curled fingers into curled fingers like two nested Cs.
“It’s all tied together, Rory.” Falconer tented his hands in front of him on the table. A deep V creased between his eyebrows as he laid out the facts for the woman. His dark gaze tracked from Ace to Rory. “Felicia was involved in the situation in Summersfield. There’s multi-agency task force involved in breaking this case.”
“Exactly,” she and Ace said at the same time. Finally Falconer was seeing the light.
Rory’s spine lost some of its starch. “That’s why she was coming to live with me.”
“Felicia
