Relieved, she dropped the pipe onto the battered old desk and managed to light the oil lamp. Neither the sudden glow nor any of the sounds she made were enough to rouse Tony.
Coming round the desk, Rory stared down at her friend, wondering what he was doing here asleep on the office floor. How long had he been there? Had he waited up for her all night and through the day too?
She was stricken with remorse. During the past hours, she had hardly scarce given her old friend a single thought. She had wondered why he hadn’t come to the flat earlier looking for her, but she had been too grateful to be left in peace to give the matter much consideration.
Bending down, she brushed aside his dark tumble of curls, her fingers skimming over a cheek roughened with a morning’s growth of beard. It still seemed odd to note signs of manhood on one who in her mind would forever be the boy who used totie her braids together, swing off her fire escape and share his peppermint sticks.
At her touch, Tony stirred. He rolled onto his back, his eyes fluttering open. Their brown depths clouded with confusion and then cleared as he focused on her.
“Rory!” He jerked upward. Too close to the desk, he banged his head on the corner and swore. As Rory straightened, he struggled to his feet, rubbing his crown.
“What time is it? When did you get here? Where the devil have you been?”
“Which question do you want me to answer first?” She stretched, flexing her back muscles like a lazy cat. She tried to keep her voice light, sensing a quarrel coming and wanting to avoid it.
When he glared at her, she settled on the most harmless question and replied, “I think it must be close on five o’clock.”
“Five o’clock! And you’re just now getting back here?”
“No, I’ve been at the apartment all day.”
“No, you haven’t. I sent Angelo round to look for you early this morning.”
“He must have just missed me. Look, Tony, I am sorry I wasn’t here to help with the balloon last night. I hope you managed all right.”
“Oh, I managed all right—to go half out of my mind worrying about you.”
Sinking into the chair behind her desk, Rory used the scarred surface as a barrier between them. “You needn’t have fretted so much about me. I can take care of myself. I hope you haven’t been waiting here all day.”
“All night and all day, until I fell asleep! I didn’t know what you were up to, where to find you, but I was sure this would be the first place you would come.”
His words only added to her discomfort, for he was right. Ordinarily that would have been her one thought, to get back to the warehouse, to examine the damage to the Katie Moira. It was the first time in her life, anything or anyone had ever managed to distract her from her work with the balloons.
“I had something more important to attend to,” she said.
“You mean this?” He drew a crumpled paper from his pocket and tossed it on her desk. She recognized the remains of the note she had left for Tony at Morrison’s house.
“I spend all day tracking you from those stupid fairgrounds, thinking this time that you must have broken your fool neck for sure. I finally located where the balloon went down, only to be told you have gone flitting off with some strange feller.”
“I wasn’t flitting”Rory snapped, then checked herself. She hated it when Tony assumed this badgering, dictatorial tone. But she also hated the deep shadows beneath his eyes, the look of hurt lurking beneath the anger. She resumed in gentler accents, “I had a business meeting with Mr. Morrison. He took me to supper at Delmonico’s.”
“It took you all night to eat?”
“No, afterward, we went dancing,” Rory admitted reluctantly.
“Dancing! That sounds like a funny kind of business meeting to me.”
“I was spending as much time with Mr. Morrison as I could, trying to persuade him to invest in the balloon company.”
“And did you?”
“No. After all, it seems he was not interested.”
“Damn right. I could have told you what he was after. I thought you had better sense than to set yourself up as a mash date for some rich swell.”
“It wasn’t like that at all.”
“No, I suppose he was a perfect gentleman,” Tony sneered. “He didn’t even try to get fresh.”
