Three Fates

narrow in speculation. “I think this should buy an hour’s conversation.”
    “It might.” She’d reserve judgment on whether or not he was a moron, but at least he wasn’t cheap. She reached for the bill, annoyed when he moved it just out of reach.
    “What time do you finish here?”
    “Two. Look, why don’t you just tell me what you want, and I’ll tell you if I’m interested.”
    “Conversation,” he said again and tore the bill in half. He handed her one part, pocketed the other. “If you want the rest of it, meet me after closing. The coffee shop in the Wenceslas Hotel. I’ll wait till two-thirty. If you don’t show, we’re both out fifty pounds.”
    He finished his beer, set down the glass. “It was an entertaining performance, Miss Toliver, and lucrative from the looks of it. But it’s not every day you can make fifty pounds by sitting down and having a cup of coffee.”
    She frowned when he turned to walk away. “You got a name, Slick?”
    “Sullivan. Gideon Sullivan. You’ve got till two-thirty.”

Four
     
     
     
     
    C LEO never missed a cue. But neither did she believe in giving her audience the appearance she’d rushed to hit one. Theater was rooted in illusions. And life, like the big guy had said, was just a bigger stage.
    She strolled toward the coffee shop at two minutes to deadline.
    If some jerk with a pretty face and a sexy voice wanted to pay her for some conversation, that was fine by her. She’d already determined the exchange rate from Irish pounds to Czech koruna, using the little calculator she carried in her bag to figure it to the last haleru. In her current position, the money would go a very long way.
    She didn’t intend to make her living stripping off her clothes for a bunch of suckers for long. The fact was, she’d never intended to make her living, however temporary, dancing naked in a Prague strip club.
    But she’d been stupid, Cleo could admit. She’d walked straight into a con, blinded by good looks and a clever line. And when a girl was flat-ass busted in Eastern Europe, in a city where she could barely manage the simplest phrase in the guidebook, she did what she could to make ends meet.
    She had one thing on her side, she thought now. She never made the same mistake twice.
    In that regard, at least, she was not her mother’s daughter.
    The little restaurant was brightly lit, and there were a few patrons scattered around the tables having coffee or a late meal. The company, such as it was, was a plus. Not that she was particularly worried about the Irish guy making a move on her. She could handle herself.
    She spotted him at a corner booth, drinking coffee and reading a book, with a cigarette smoking away in a black plastic ashtray. With those dark, romantic looks, she thought, he’d pass for some kind of artist, a writer maybe. No, she decided, a poet. Some struggling poet who wrote dark, esoteric free verse and had come to the great city for inspiration as others had before him.
    Looks, she thought with a smirk, were always deceiving.
    He glanced up as she slid into the booth across from him. His eyes, a deep and crystal blue in the poetic face, were the type that shot straight to a woman’s glands.
    Good thing, Cleo acknowledged, she was immune.
    “You cut it close,” he commented and continued to read.
    She merely shrugged, then turned to the waitress who stepped up to the booth. “Coffee. Three eggs, scrambled. Bacon. Toast. Thanks.” Cleo smiled when she saw Gideon studying her over the top of his book. “I’m hungry.”
    “I suppose what you do works up an appetite.”
    He marked his place, set the book aside. Yeats, Cleo noted. It figured.
    “That’s the point, isn’t it? Working up appetites.” She stretched out her legs as the waitress poured her coffee. “How did you like my act?”
    “It’s better than most.” She hadn’t removed her stage makeup. In the bright lights she looked both hard and sexy. He imagined she knew it. Had planned it. “Why do you do it?”
    “Unless you’re a Broadway scout, Slick, that’s my business.” Watching him, she lifted a hand, rubbed her thumb and two fingers together.
    Gideon took the half bill out of his pocket, then slid it under his book. “Talk first.” He’d already outlined how he wanted to approach the matter with her and had decided the direct—well, fairly direct—route would work best.
    “You have an ancestor on your mother’s side. A Simon White-Smythe.”
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