Gone With the Witch (20 page)

BOTH women stepped forward.
Both with colored hair, dark lips and nails, and heavy eye makeup.

"Do I know you?" they asked at the same time.
"No," they answered together.

A bouncer-type thug came around the corner, and the hostess winced. "Gotta get back to work
. '
I have a supper break in fifteen minutes," she told Storm. "Meet me in the Malachite Lounge upstairs." The woman left without waiting for an answer and began to distribute drinks to high-
roller slot machine players as if Aiden and Storm didn't
exist.

"That was weird," Storm said. "She looked a little like me"

A
little?
Aiden thought.

"Did you read her name tag by any chance?" Storm
asked.

"Sorry," he said. "We'll take a look at it when we meet her in the lounge."

Fifteen minutes later, the hostess no longer wore a
name tag, though Aiden saw signs of the missing pin. Why would she remove it, unless her name proved as spooky as her resemblance to Storm?

"This is my supper break," she said. "You don't mind if I order?"

"I'm hungry, too." Storm picked up her menu. "Mind if we join you? I'm Storm, by the way." She reached across the table and offered her hand.

The woman hesitated but shook it, barely.
"Marvel
anne."

"Marvelanne," Aiden said. "That's an unusual name.”

“It is," Marvelanne said, blowing a gum bubble and sucking it in with her pierced tongue. "My mama was into the Marvelettes, and she was playin' `Please Mr. Postman' on the record player when she and my daddy did the deed and conceived me."

Aiden firmed his mouth so his jaw wouldn't drop.
"Aiden McCloud," he said, introducing himself with his
last name, hoping that Marvelanne—the Southern casino hostess, or so her accent indicated—would add her last name, but she didn't.

Her first name wasn't even one you could shorten. No
one would call the nicotine-stained, smoke-scented woman
a marvel.

The waitress came to take their orders,
an
d
Marvelanne
shut her menu. "I'll have a bacon cheeseburger, blue
cheese instead of cheddar, sweet potato fries, and a side of
mayo "

Storm slowly lowered her menu, revealing a look both amazed and wary. "I'll have the same."

Aiden ordered a scotch.

"Are you a goth, like Storm?" Aiden asked Marvelanne.
"You're wearing the casino's uniform, I know, but your hair
and makeup are similar, though your hair's purple and hers
is blue, then there's the
tattoo ..

Storm focused on the woman's wrist. "The symbol of three in a heart,
a Celtic
triquetra," Storm said, pulling her top aside a bit to reveal the edge of the triquetra on her breast. "Mine's blue,
an
d
yours is red."

Aiden's scotch appeared before him. "Do you have
triplets, too?" the waitress asked. "That's why Marvelanne has
a triquetra
."

Marvelanne slapped the table.

"Too much information, 'I guess, huh?" The waitress looked from Storm to Marvelanne, and back. "Cripes, you two could be sisters."

"Sylvia!"

"Sorry. Food'll be out in a minute." Sylvia popped her gum and left.

Storm looked uneasy. She shook her head and crossed
her arms in a protective gesture. "How old are your triplets?"
she asked. "I'll bet they're teenagers.
Must be a handful.
Boys?
Girls?
Or a mix?"

Marvelanne shrugged. "I didn't keep 'em."

"But the tattoo?"

"A
form of birth control."

"Has it worked?" Storm asked, and Aiden choked on his
scotch.

"Are you all right?" Storm leaned over to slap his back.

Aiden nodded and took a sip of Storm's water. "You'd think there wouldn't be anything else you could do or say that would shock me"

"You should talk," Storm said, turning back to
Marvelanne. "How old were you when they were bo
rn
?"

Marvelanne took the gum out of her mouth and stuck it to her wrist triquetra. “Anybody ever tell you that you're nosy?"

"I mean, did your parents force you to give them up for adoption?"

"Nah, my old man never knew. I ran the minute the
brats were born. Daddy would have killed me"

"Did the number of babies you had matter?" Storm
asked, sitting forward.

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Would you have kept one baby?
Or two, maybe?
But three were just too many? 'I mean
,
was the third baby the straw that broke the camel's back?"

Marvelanne mocked her with a laugh. "I wouldn't have kept
any,
honey. One baby would have been every bit as much trouble as three."

The waitress brought their food, and when she left,
Aiden was still comparing the two women with his gaze, still shocked by the resemblance. "I'm sorry," he said to
Marvelanne, "but aren't you the least bit curious about
what happened to your children?"

Marvelanne raised a brow. "You want to know if 'I feel
guilty, don't you?" She took a bite of her hamburger, chewed
thoughtfully, took a d
ri
nk, and then another bite, before she
set her burger down. She checked her watch. "On the clock,"
she told him.
"Gotta get back to my shift on
time."

"Of course," Aiden replied.

"I never look back," Marvelanne said. "Guilt is a wasted
effort."
She emptied the container of sugar packets into her purse and added a honking big wad of napkins.

Aiden wondered if she'd take the catsup bottle, too.

"I did the right thing," Marvelanne said, closing her
purse. "You don't miss what you never had"

"That's not true," Storm said. "Don't you even want to know who adopted them, where they are?"

Marvelanne examined Storm with dead eyes. "I left my babies in their daddy's care."

Storm sat forward, the light in her eyes fading. "Maybe their daddy
didn't
care"

"His mother would have. She was a pushover."

"Maybe his mother would have killed him, like your
parents would have killed you, so he didn't tell her until the
triplets were too old to need her."

"He wasn't afraid of his mother. He was older than me. He'd been married before."

Storm pushed her plate aside, but when Aiden coaxed her lips open with one of her fries, she ate it and gave him a wan smile.

"What about later, when you left your parents' house, Marvelanne?" Aiden asked. "Did you try to look for your triplets, then?"

Marvelanne shrugged. "I had enough trouble support
ing myself. Kids drag you down no matter how old you
are" She raised a hand to wave at their waitress. "Sylvia, bring me a piece of strawberry cheesecake. Do you two want any dessert?"

Aiden put a fifty on the table, certain that Marvelanne would make a tidy profit.

"Dessert?" she asked them again.

"No thanks," Storm said, standing. "I don't feel very well."

Chapter Twenty-seven

AID
EN
took Storm's arm. "Come on, I'll get us a room for the night."

At the last minute, he turned to Marvelanne. "Nice meeting you," he told the cocktail hostess with no heart.

"I sure hope you were lying," Storm said as they walked
away.

"About the room?"

"No, about it being nice to meet her. It was awful." Storm's fingers and legs tingled, while a suffocating heat closed around her and threatened to smother her. She was
that scared she might have met her mother, the woman who
gave her away without a second thought.

In sensing the present, she'd been almost sure, except
that she'd spent her life wanting to find her mother so
badly, she was afraid that her need was playing tricks on
her psychic good sense. But who wanted a mother like
that?

Talk about a dream crashing and burning.

Aiden sat her on a cushy sofa in the lobby as if she was made of spun sugar, and went to register.

When he came back for her, Storm tried to smile for
him. "Nice to know I'm not the straw that broke the
camel's back"

He held up a credit-card-size passkey. "Nice to see you got your equilibrium back."

"I'm not in denial, if that's what you mean. There are
some pretty strong arguments for that ... loser ... being
my mother, though 'I can't believe Marvelanne has enough generosity and sensitivity to have allowed anyone the use of her uterus for nine months."

"Why didn't you just ask her the name of her triplets' father?"

"I didn't wanna know. This way, I'll always have hope.
Can we go play hide-and-seek with the dragon?”

“
Is this
you
running away now?"

They stepped into the elevator, and the doors closed
them inside, alone.

"Share your turtle shell for a while?"

"Ouch."

"Kiss me, Dragon Boy."

They kissed, and kissed, and Aiden had her up against the wall kissing her senseless when a cough interrupted
them. When they broke the lip-lock, the elevator door
stood open, and an impatient, mature, and expensively dressed couple stood waiting to get on.

"Oops," Storm said. "Did we forget to choose a floor?"

"Oh, right," Aiden said.
"Penthouse.
Gotta use the
passkey in the elevator to getup that far."
Which he promptly
did.

"Are you coming?" Storm asked, biting her lip at the couple's appalled expressions.

The two disapproving up-tights got on the elevator, and
though they pressed the third floor, Aiden had used his passkey first, so the two couples rode up twenty floors together in silence.

Storm and Aiden got off at the penthouse floor, and the minute the elevator doors shut behind them, they laughed, but somewhere between amusement and hilarity, Storm's
crumbling defenses collapsed, and she found herself
sobbing in Aiden's comforting arms.

He lifted her off her feet, carried her like a b
ri
de to their
door, and, after only two
tr
ies, he aced using the passkey with his arms full.

Entering the penthouse was a little like entering her sister's castle, though the furniture, art, and chandeliers were newer and more traditional, though no less pricey or
elegant.

Poor Aiden had to car
ry
her through a foyer, living
room, dining room, and past a small bedroom before finding the master suite.

Entranced by the lush and brilliant palette of earth tones accented by brick red, Storm was surprised to feel the most
amazing mattress at her back and then nothing but the warm
comfort of Aiden's weight protecting and encircling her.

His arms became her
haven,
his words soothed her
like a balm, washing over her with gentle care. "Storm Cartwright, don't you dare let what you came from get you down. You've risen above your beginnings in so many wondrous ways. You're beautiful, generous, determined,
hardheaded, tenacious, stubborn, a little bit crazy, and
very, very addictive."

As he brought out her smile, he raised her self-esteem, and that made her fall a little bit in love with him.

She didn't know how long she wallowed in tears, so rare
her sisters wouldn't believe they existed. She knew only that
the sun went down and the room went dark, then Aiden's lips were on her everywhere, her hands on him, as a slow
and sensuous pressure built inside her, a need to be taken to
the gratifying world of mating dragons where neither reality nor broken dreams could intrude.