“Set it so I can find you.” At her blank look, he gave her a head shake of exasperation. “Where is it? I’ll show you.”
A few minutes later she stood in her empty suite wondering how she’d gone from crying in the shower to having a date, one that made her feel more awake and alive than—this was dangerous—any other time in her life.
Oh, Tiffany, be careful. You could still fall for the wrong man.
No, she wasn’t that pathetic and vulnerable, she assured herself. Nor was she strong enough to stay in her room and risk his coming for her. Besides, she had enjoyed feeling normal. There was no crime in that, was there?
She liked even more the idea of making him see her as beautiful. Turning, she went to see what treasures the designers might have left her.
CHAPTER FIVE
RYZARD MOVED THROUGH the three-dimensional images of a carnivale parade. He had to be careful. There were real people, Q Virtus members and petite q’s, dressed as colorfully as the fake partiers, but for the most part he walked right through projections of extravagant floats and scantily clad women wearing beaded bikinis and feather headdresses. He stopped for a troupe of men in checkered pants and neon elephant masks when they began a tumbling routine in front of him, nearly convinced they were real.
His watch hummed, indicating Tiffany was close by, but where?
His need to see her again, to know she’d come down here for him, was out of proportion to any normal sort of anticipation. He brushed it aside, thinking if he could have her just once more, he’d be able to forget about her. It didn’t matter that she’d revealed more about herself than he’d ever heard from all other Q Virtus members combined. Like most of the happenings here, their private conversation would stay locked in his own personal vault, not even to be revisited by him.
He especially refused to dwell on their comforting embrace when her mixture of grief and anger and self-blame had struck a chord in him. Even though, for the better part of a minute while he held her, he’d been at peace for the first time in a long time.
He stepped on a man’s hands and looked through the feet that would have struck him in the nose if the vision was real. Music blared, voices cheered, and the holographic players were so dense he might as well have been in a crowd on the street.
There. All the hairs stood up on his body as he took her in.
She had her head bent to study her watch and pivoted as though trying to orient herself with a compass. The movement allowed him to take her in from all sides.
She really was strikingly beautiful. Tall and slender, but generously curved in the right places. He swallowed. She wore some kind of jumpsuit that clung from knees to elbows, then flared into ruffles down her forearms and over her shins. It had a subtle sparkle in its midnight blue color and clung to her ass so lovingly, his knees weakened.
He mentally recited the populations of Bregnovia’s cities, trying to keep hold of his control as he approached her. Sidling up behind her, almost touching, he inhaled where she’d left the right side of her neck bare, gathering her hair to the left so it covered the scars.
“What the hell are you wearing?”
Her head came up. “You don’t like it?” She jiggled the watch in her hand. “This thing was buzzing at me, but I couldn’t figure out if you were over there or over there.”
“I’m here,” he growled, wanting so badly to palm the firm globe near his crotch his hand burned.
“So you are.” She turned to study his mask from behind her own. “Hello again, Mystery Man. Buy me a drink? I’ve had a terrible day with the most arrogant, self-aggrandizing jerk you can imagine.”
Few people could get away with insulting him so openly, but he found her brashness refreshing. Maybe even reassuring. She wasn’t as vulnerable as she’d seemed in her suite. Good.
Testing the waters, he said, “I’m looking forward to one myself. I was stuck all evening with the most infuriating female, smart as a whip, but blonde. No offense.” He tugged one of her ringlets.
For a moment her mouth stayed flat and humorless, just long enough for doubt to creep over his conscience. Then her lips twitched and a pretty, feminine chuckle erupted, sounding a shade rusty, as if she hadn’t laughed unreservedly in a long time, but it engaged him in a way he hadn’t expected. He instantly wanted to hear it again.
“None taken,” she assured him breezily, turning to grasp his arm above his elbow, demonstrating how much self-assurance she possessed when she wasn’t paralyzed by self-consciousness. “Can you believe this parade? I thought it was real.”
Despite wanting to remark on the sudden change in her, he decided to go with it.
“The first time I saw this technology, it was a rain forest. It wasn’t as robust as this, but the rain effect was quite something.”
“You’ve been coming to these shindigs for a while?”
“This is my twenty-fifth. I earned a pin.” He lifted his lapel to draw her eye to the small gold button.
“Nice. What does it do? Beam you up? Shoot lasers?”
“It tells people I belong.”
* * *
Ryzard’s mouth tightened after he spoke, as if he hadn’t meant to reveal that, which piqued her curiosity all the more. “What do you mean?”
He shook his head, trying to dismiss her curiosity. “They have a live performance on the beach tonight. Shall we check it out?”
“Are you sensitive to not belonging because of the UN thing? You must know how slowly the wheels of political progress can turn. If the old boys’ network is refusing to pick you for their team, tell them to stuff it.”
His mask annoyed her. He was already pretty stoic, and now she had to try reading his emotions from the way the corner of his supersexy mouth flattened with disgust.
“I’ve learned to do exactly that, Tiffany. And it really doesn’t matter to me if I’m rejected or found wanting, but I can’t bear for my country to be discriminated against.”
Discriminated. There was a big word. As a woman she’d been on the short end of that nastiness even in her own home in favor of her brother, but she couldn’t imagine it happening to a man who showed so few weaknesses. He wasn’t a typical representative of the people she understood to suffer the worst end of biases.
“When were you picked on? Why?” she asked, allowing him to steer her through the shower of candies that should have landed with a sting or crunched under her platform shoes.
He shrugged as if the details were inconsequential. “Different times. When I was a child and didn’t yet speak German. I was late to sprout and quick to fight, angry that I couldn’t see my parents. My temper was a problem. Getting a legitimate passport was a nightmare, so I was forever in a country illegally. That’s one of the reasons I picked grapes. Things like visas can be overlooked when the fruit is ripe and a transient offers to help. But when I tried to go to America, they wanted nothing to do with me.”
“So you went to Russia.”
“There are parts as wild as your early frontier. Misfits are the rule.”
“Which country’s passport do you travel on now?”
“Bregnovian,” he asserted, as if that should be obvious.
“But it’s not recognized? That still keeps you from entering America?”
“I wouldn’t be allowed into Venezuela.”
“But you’re welcome here.” She pointed at the floor of the club.
He nodded once, still seeming bristly.
She considered how that might feel, always being separated and left out. Being who she was had always ensured her entrée into virtually any situation. For all her father’s faults and detractors, he was still welcome everywhere. Even with her scars, she wasn’t locked out. It was her choice to stay home.
She looked up at Ryzard, wanting to ask how he’d come to finally go home and fund a war, but they had arrived on the beach. Bending, she removed her shoes and allowed him to take them so she could walk barefoot in the cool, powdery sand.
“That’s an excellent cover band,” she said as they moved toward the music.
“It’s the real band,” he told her, making her chuckle.
He looked at her and the corners of his mouth curled again, but his mask and the strobing lights made it hard to tell if he was smiling because he was in a good mood, or if he was laughing at her.
“I can’t get used to this,” she excused. “It’s a lot to pay just for an exclusive concert, isn’t it? The membership fee, I mean.”
“If you hadn’t been sulking in your room, you could have attended some of the lectures. There was an excellent one on the situation in Africa. Last quarter, I brokered a free trade agreement that will ease a lot of strain on our wheat and dairy production.”
She weighed that, seeing new value in these meetings and wondering if she would come to another. Maybe see him again.