Three Fates

cheap and boasted its own bath. Such as it was.
    While the room wasn’t to her taste—and she was neither really young nor in any way optimistic—she could cover the weekly rent with one night’s tips.
    She’d installed the dead bolt lock herself after one of her neighbors had tried to muscle his way into her room for a free show. It gave her a considerable sense of security.
    She switched on the light, tossed her purse aside. She went to the dresser, pawing her way through the top drawer. She’d had a considerable wardrobe when she’d landed in Prague, and a great deal of it had been new lingerie.
    Bought, she thought viciously as she shoved through silk and lace, to delight one Sidney Walter. The prick. Then again, when a woman let herself spend a couple grand on undies because she was hot for a man, she deserved getting screwed. In every possible sense.
    Sidney had certainly obliged her, Cleo thought now. Heating up the sheets in the presidential suite of the priciest hotel in Prague, then strolling away with all her cash and her jewelry and leaving her with a hefty hotel bill.
    Leaving her, she added, flat broke and mortified.
    Still, Sidney wasn’t the only one who could cash in on an opportunity when it slapped him in the face. She smiled to herself as she yanked out a pair of athletic socks, unrolled them.
    The little silver statue she uncovered was badly tarnished, but she remembered what it looked like when it was shiny and clean. Smiling to herself, Cleo rubbed a thumb over the face with absent affection.
    “You don’t much look like my ticket out of here,” she murmured. “But we’ll see.”
     
     
    SHE DIDN’T SHOW until nearly two the following afternoon. Gideon had just about given up on her. As it was, he nearly didn’t recognize her when she finally came out into the broiling sunlight.
    She wore jeans, a low-cut black top that offered peeks of her midriff. So it was her body he made out first. She’d pulled her hair back in a thick braid, shielded her eyes with dark, wraparound glasses and, walking briskly in some sort of thick-soled black boots, melded with pedestrian traffic.
    About damn time, he thought as he followed her. He’d been stuck kicking his heels for hours waiting for her. Here he was in one of the most beautiful, most cultured cities in Eastern Europe, and he couldn’t risk the time to see anything.
    He wanted to drop in on the Mucha exhibit, to study the Art Nouveau foyer of the Main Station, to wander among the artists on the Charles bridge. Because the woman apparently slept half the day, he’d had to make do with reading a guidebook.
    She didn’t window-shop, never paused at the displays of crystal or garnets that flashed in the brilliant sunlight. She walked steadily, down sidewalks, over the cobbled bricks of squares and gave her shadow little time to admire the domes, the baroque architecture or the Gothic towers.
    She stopped once at a sidewalk kiosk and bought a large bottle of water, which she stuffed in the oversized purse on her shoulder.
    Gideon regretted, when she kept up the clipped pace and the sweat began to run down his back, that he hadn’t followed her lead.
    He cheered a bit when he realized she was heading toward the river. Maybe he’d get a look at the Charles after all.
    They passed pretty, painted shops thronged with tourists, restaurants where people sat under umbrella tables and cooled off with chilled drinks or ice cream, and still those long legs of hers climbed steadily up the steep slope to the bridge.
    The breeze off the water did little to bring relief, and the view, while spectacular, didn’t explain what the hell she was doing. She didn’t so much as glance at the grandeur of Prague Castle or the cathedral, never paused to lean on the rail and contemplate the water and the boats that plied it. She certainly didn’t stop to haggle with the artists.
    She crossed the bridge and kept going.
    He was trying to decide if she was heading to the castle, and if so why the hell she hadn’t taken a bloody bus, when she veered off and walked breezily downhill to the street of tiny cottages where the king’s goldsmiths and alchemists had once lived.
    They were shops now, naturally, but that didn’t detract from the charm of low doorways, narrow windows and faded colors. She cut through the tourists and tour groups as the uneven stone street climbed again.
    She turned again, walked onto the patio of a little restaurant and plopped down at