Callie (Keepers of the Flame: Origins #2)

Chapter Two

Callie awakened on her stomach, bare skin pressed against cool satin sheets and her cheek pillowed in the nest made of her folded arms. Her head pounded dully from too much champagne the night before, and her body ached from too many late nights out. Too much dancing, and, later, loving. Johnny’s energy in both courts was prodigious.

She knew keeping up with her new lifestyle would soon prove impossible, but she found it equally difficult to deny Johnny anything. Quite frankly, she didn’t want to. And he insisted he enjoyed spoiling her, so she let him. What could be the harm?

Exhaustion, for one. After nursing all day Johnny sent a car round to collect her for the evening and take her home to change. She would bathe and dress for the evening, and the car would then take her to whatever swanky restaurant Johnny was dining at that particular evening, and then they would hit the speakeasies and jazz clubs until the wee hours. And then Johnny would take her his opulent rooms in the Stevens Hotel, and in the morning the whirlwind would begin again.

She wondered at the intense attention he paid her. He wanted to know everything about her: where she had been born and grown up (Chicago, of course), who her parents were (Tom and Maggie Trevelyan, both dead in the Great War), why she had turned to nursing (her mother had been one, and her mother before her). She found it a little off-putting—if flattering—to be the target of such questioning. He even asked her—as he plied her with mimosas during their first Sunday brunch in his hotel suite—what she thought of Prohibition.

“I think,” she said, raising her glass with a smile, “it’s a law of unintended consequences.” And returned to her perusal of Lipstick’s column in The New Yorker. Johnny got copies from yet another associate, and she’d taken to it.

He was so tickled by her response he toasted her with her own words at a dinner party that very night.

In comparison she knew little about him. He touted himself a businessman, but Callie strongly suspected he made a significant portion of his seemingly endless income from bootlegging. Of course, in the height of Prohibition, who wasn’t? There were a reputed five thousand speakeasies in Chicago alone, many of them private residences.

This seemed to amuse Johnny endlessly. “Nothing pays the way to Hell,” he said once, when Al Capone had made the papers yet again, “quite like good intentions.”

“Paves,” Callie corrected, lighting a cigarette. “Paves the way the Hell.”

“That, too.”

A tumult sounded outside the bedroom door. Callie rubbed the grit from her eyes and sat up, drawing the sheet over her naked breasts, and waited.

Johnny entered the bedroom. His stunning blue eyes that seemed to see straight into her deepest desires slid from her bed-mussed hair to the string of pearls he’d gifted her with the previous night, still roped around her neck, and he smiled. “Dinner may be delayed this evening.”

Callie reached for her cigarette case—silver, and from Tiffany’s. “Oh? What’s the problem?”

“There’s been a shooting.”

Callie stilled, ice water trickling through her veins instead of blood. She shut the case and whipped the sheets away so she could slide from the bed. “Who’s hurt?”

“Two men employed by a business associate. He couldn’t call anyone else. No police, no hospitals.”

In other words, a bootlegger. Or, it occurred to her, something far worse. Chills pervaded her once more, and she forcibly shook them off. Criminal or not, she was a healer—and someone needed her help.

She threw on a thin robe and knotted her matted hair into a makeshift bun anchored by its own weight. “Take me there.”

Her first impression when she entered the sitting room was one of noise. Second, was of blood mixed with gunpowder.