LENA

Booker and I slowly cruise along yet another buttoned up downtown street. I’m not normally a pouter, but my lower lip might be sticking out a little as I peer at the dimly lighted storefronts and eateries. I dislike admitting this, but I was looking forward to sharing a meal with Booker again. Now, that might simply be the drinks I consumed talking. I thought I had danced most of those out of my system, but I could be wrong.

Doesn’t matter, anyway, because there isn’t a blessed thing open at this hour of the morning.

As if reading my thoughts, Booker suddenly shoots a glance my way, then pulls over to the curb. He looks rumpled and frustrated, worlds removed from the smooth, unflappable sophistication he usually wears like one of his dapper suits. His hat is pushed back on his head, reminding me of a bookie Will once pointed out at a horse race at the Valley Fair. Booker has long since tossed his coat on the back seat, unbuttoned the top two buttons on his shirt and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Then there’s his suspenders and the dark stubble on his chin and jaw. I swear I can darn near see it growing denser by the second.

“Sorry, Lena,” he says, sounding as every bit as tired as I feel. “I was sure there was an all-night café around here somewhere, but clearly I had it wrong. Let me get you home. I’ll take you out for a nice dinner before work tomorrow and we can hash things out then.”

I have the oddest urge to argue against giving up on our original plan. But the sheer size of my yawn threatens to crack my jaw in two, and I nod sleepily. “Sounds good. I’m worn to a nub.”

A short while later, Booker pulls up in front of the Women’s Residence and shuts down his Packard. Before I can tell him he doesn’t need to see me to the front stoop, he’s already climbed out of the car and come around to open my door and usher me out. As we reach the small landing, the front door to the Women’s Residence whips open.

My heart drops when I see Mrs. Rodale standing in the opening, her hands on her hips and one foot impatiently tapping a ratty slipper against the worn thin carpet. Her expression is nowhere in the neighborhood of friendly.

Next to her are two suitcases I recognize as my own, and beside them a cardboard box, which I fear contains whatever leftover odds and ends didn’t fit into my luggage. I’m glad I left my new gowns in my dressing room at The Twilight Room, because I don’t even like to think about those beautiful fabrics being crammed willy-nilly in with the rest of my clothing.

Or, worse, pinched. Heaven knows theft can be a problem at women’s residences.

“What is this?” Booker demands authoritatively, jabbing his forefinger at my suitcases.

Mrs. Rodale ignores him to look directly to me. “I made an allowance for you with the house curfew, missy,” she says briskly, “in deference to your work hours. “But I will not turn a blind eye to you rolling in with the dawn after you have been out doing God knows what with your Drugstore Cowboy!”

My...what? I darn near choke on the startled laugh fighting to blow a hole in my throat. Under any other circumstance, I would no doubt howl at the idea of my landlady mistaking Booker for one of the shiftless fellas who hang around street corners trying to pick up girls. But the not-so-minor detail of Mrs. Rodale throwing me out on the street in the dead of the night sorta puts a damper on my sense of humor.

I draw myself up and pin the older woman with the best I am not amused expression I can muster. “I beg your pardon?” I demand in a tone coated with ice. “Far from being a good-for-nothing lounge-about, Mrs. Rodale, this is my employer, Mr. Booker Jameson.”

“And I don’t much care for your slur on either of our reputations,” Booker snaps with a steeliness a hundred times more effective than anything I can drum up. “Miss Bjornstad and I have put in long hours working overtime on the new music we’re adding to her sets.”

Mrs. Rodale is not impressed. “Working overtime.” She snorts. “Is that what you call it these days?” She uses her foot to push my belongings out onto the stoop. Then she gives me a slow up and down once-over, filled with so much contempt it threatens to shrivel me on the spot. “I run a respectable establishment,” she says snippily. “And you are no longer welcome here.”

With a final, withering stare, she steps back and slams the door in my face.

“Oh, my God!” I swing around to gape in shock at Booker. “What am I going to do?” I keep my gaze locked on his face, hoping he has an idea. I wrack my brain, then say tentatively, “Can you take me to Dot and Clara’s place? I’m sure they’ll take me in for tonight—and maybe even until I can find a new place.”

“No doubt, but not tonight,” he says. Booker hands me the box, then tucks one of my suitcases beneath his upper arm, hugging it to his side as he squats to pick up the other. After rising to his full height, he rests his free hand on my lower back and escorts me back to the car. I can feel his heat clear through my coat.

“Wait here just a sec,” he says and leaves me next to the passenger door while he opens the trunk to store my luggage and the box he’d removed from my death grip. He’s back in literally seconds to help me into the front seat with all the care he might show something precious. Or an invalid. Then he rounds the hood to climb in the driver’s side. He starts up the automobile but turns to me instead of putting it gear. “The Brasher girls are bound to be sound asleep by now. I’m taking you to my place.”

“Oh, but—” I am amazed he can’t hear the hard thud of my heart battering the wall of my chest.

“No buts, Lena. You intend to be in any kind of shape to get things straightened out tomorrow, you need a good night’s sleep.” Reaching over, he sweeps a tender thumb across my cheekbone. “If you can’t trust me on anything else, trust this. Things will feel clearer and not so unsettling once you’ve had some shut-eye.”

“I suppose.” I rest my head against the seat back. Then jerk upright once again as a thought suddenly occurs to me. “That witch! Just yesterday I paid her a week’s rent!”

“Don’t worry about that, either.” Booker’s expression, when he glances over at me, is all grim determination. “You don’t have to deal with her again. I’ll take care of getting your unused rent back.”

“Yeah? You may have noticed she wasn’t any more impressed with you than she was with me. So how do you plan to manage that?”

“The next time I land on her doorstep, I’ll be accompanied by the local bull.”

That has me sitting up. “A policeman?” I stare at him, my mouth dropping open, and I snap my teeth together. “Are you crazy, Booker? You do remember you run a speakeasy, right? I’m frankly surprised we haven’t been raided during the five weeks I’ve been with the club. Yet you plan to waltz up to a policeman and demand he go along with you to confront Mrs. Rodale?” Is this what comes of growing up the only son of the richest man in town?

Maybe Booker is rethinking his no harm can come his way delusion, though, for he doesn’t respond until he stops for a red light. Then he slowly turns his head to look at me. His face is all hard planes and angles in the red glow from the traffic light and the paler illumination off the nearest street light. It’s flat-out all business, and I marvel Mrs. Rodale could have mistaken him for anything other than the highly successful man he is, let alone treated him like some down-on-his-luck ruffian. Even Booker’s informal clothing is constructed of quality fabric and he commands an unmistakable air of authority only a fool would overlook.

“I haven’t been raided, doll,” he informs me drily, “because I pay the cops good money to keep the Dry Squad off my back. And I’m fairly friendly with a couple patrolmen.” He shrugs. “It won’t be difficult to talk one into accompanying me to get your refund.”

“Wow,” I breathe. Okay, so I was the naïve one here, not Booker. Still, how could I have known? I have worked a couple places that were raided. I was never arrested, of course, since it’s not illegal to drink or sing in a gin joint, just to sell booze. But I can see now that some of the places I worked, which weren’t raided, must have had similar arrangements as Booker’s. Even then, the transactions had to have taken place behind closed doors. Because it certainly wasn’t anything the employees ever talked about.

I rest my weary head back once more, then another stray thought breaks free and I tighten up all over again . “Remind me to check to make sure nothing was “misplaced” between the wardrobe and dresser in my room and my suitcases.”

Booker’s hot, rough-tipped fingers gently and much too swiftly caress the back of my hand fisted on my thigh. “Yet something else you can put off worrying about until tomorrow.”

“Easy for you to say, Mr. Big Shot,” I mutter. All the same, I must have dozed off, because those are the last words I remember from either of us. Not to mention I have no idea how we got from the red light to where I blink awake when Booker gently shakes my shoulder. Yawning, I straighten in my seat to see him squatting on a curb outside my open car door. I rub my eyes. “Where are we?”

“Home, sweet home.” He surges to his full height and steps back, offering a hand to help me out of the car.

“Which is where?” I yawn again. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Yeah, that’s always harder to do with your eyes closed.”

I give him a look and he shrugs. “West Boston Street on Magnolia Bluff.”

“Magnolia.” I look around as Booker walks back to pull my luggage from the trunk. The gaps between houses are large in this neighborhood, as if plots are still in the process of being parceled up. Evergreen trees dot the undeveloped land in small stands here and there and two maples display their red leaves beneath the glow of a streetlight. “I’ve never been over here. It’s very peaceful.” I inhale deeply through my nose. “And it smells divine.”

“Yeah, those are a couple of the things I like about the area as well. It’s close to downtown, yet it feels a lot more like living in the country.” He hands me the box holding my odds and ends again, then scoops up my suitcases as though they weigh nothing at all. “It probably has to do with the fact the neighborhood is on a peninsula with limited access.”

Shutting the trunk, he gives a jerk of his chin and says, “Follow me.” Then without so much as a glance back to determine if I’m following, he sets off along a narrow, paved path.

I shrug and follow as, with long-legged strides, Booker makes short work of the distance to a long set of stairs. Where else am I gonna go?

Reaching the steps, he stands aside for me to go first, and both of us are quiet as we climb it. At the top is a pretty yard hosting an even prettier house with a covered front porch. It, too, has stairs at one end, although not nearly as many as the ones we just hiked up from the street.

Booker unlocks the front door moments later and opens it. Reaching inside, he flips a switch, illuminating a small foyer. He opens the door wider with one hand and, with a tip of his head, gestures for me to precede him. “Come on in.” Following me with the luggage, he tosses his keys into a decorative bowl on the small Mission style entry table against the wall.

After Booker sets my luggage out of the way against another wall, he takes the box from me to add to the pile. “Wait here a second and I’ll turn on some lights.” He disappears into the room off the entry and light begins spreading a glow in his wake.

I follow him into what turns out to be the living room, where I stop in my tracks. “Oh,” I breathe, looking around. “This is really nice.”

“Thanks.” He shoots me a pleased smile. “I wanted something comfortably sized, but not a damn mansion like I grew up in.”

“Well, you certainly got it, because this is just perfect. It has such warmth, sort of like a hug.” I promptly squirm. Honestly, Lena? A hug?

But the way Booker’s face lights up, you’d think I had just uttered the most brilliant words in the English language. “That is exactly what I thought when the realtor first showed it to me. I took one look and it just felt like a home.”

It does feel homey. The ceiling is high, giving the room an open, spacious feel. The room is long and painted a cool-tone grayish green, the color warmed by all the wood trim in the windows and doorways, the baseboards and crown moldings, the mantel and surround over a tiled fireplace in the middle of the room, and in the beautiful built-in bookshelves on either side of the hearth.

“Oh, and look at this!” I walk up to the big front window. The top foot across its width is a beautifully worked leaded glass panel with an occasional pop of green, orange and gold stained glass highlighting its pattern. I turn in a circle, trying to take in everything at once. “You’re right. It does feel like a home.” Not that that is anything I’ve ever had a up-close relationship with. But, boy, do I envy Booker this place. And I wonder for a moment what it would be like to live here with him.

Oh, no, you don’t. I ruthlessly squash the thought. No, no, no, no, no! The idea of living happily ever after with Booker would have been realistic once.

But it has no relation to reality in whatever we can call this thing between us now. I turn back to him, but avoid meeting his eyes by gazing over his right shoulder. “Where do you want me to sleep?”