“Working. And don’t you dare say that all work and no play makes Jordan a dull girl,” Jordan added. “I hate that saying. Mostly people use it because they want me doing things for them, not for myself.”

“Besides which, they’re wrong. Work doesn’t make you a dull girl. Work makes you an absolutely fascinating girl.” He lifted her hand from the camera and kissed the pad of her index finger, the one that spent most of its time lying against the Leica’s button.

Click, went something in Jordan’s middle.

“Swan boats?” he said eventually. “Or is paddling around on a pond too boring for you, Jordan McBride? I could be persuaded to waive my fee.”

You just broke off a long engagement, a voice inside Jordan chided. You shouldn’t move too fast! But she told that voice to hush, hooking her finger at the neck of Tony’s shirt and tugging him toward her. “Maybe an alternative form of payment?”

A long, lazy, open kiss under the beating sun, Jordan’s fingertips resting against his warm throat, his thumb stroking along the line of her cheekbone. He kissed with slow, shattering thoroughness, like he could do this all day and not get tired of it, like it could take him a year if that was what she wanted. Right now, she wanted.

“Is there anywhere you have to be?” Tony said eventually, kissing along the line of her jaw toward her ear. “Or can we do this all day?”

Oh, yes, please. Jordan cleared her throat, looking down at her watch to give her breath a chance to slow. Dammit, Anneliese would be packing by now for Concord and New York, rushed off her feet. “I promised I’d help at home. Then it’s the darkroom for me—work.”

Tony dropped a last kiss below her ear, then pulled back. “All right.” No arguing that work could wait. Just assent, and that unwavering dark gaze. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ruth’s lesson. Maybe we could go to the movies after.”

“Yes,” Jordan said without hesitation. How pleasant it was just to enjoy a man’s company, his attention, his kisses without feeling the weight of expectation from parents and neighbors. When are you going to settle down, Jordan? When will you two make it official, Jordan?

How pleasant to enjoy a man who was not official, not in the slightest.

Chapter 40

Ian

July 1950

Boston

Ian was surprised how much he enjoyed showing Ruth how to handle her half-size instrument. Perhaps because she was so voracious, so desperate for everything he could show her. Weren’t most children her age playing with dolls rather than begging to play scales? She hung rapt as he took her through positioning and stance, the basics. “Always tune to an A,” Ian said, and Ruth sang a perfect A unprompted. “Very good. Remember that Saint-Sa?ns I was playing, how that began?” She hummed the opening in G major. Ian glanced at Jordan McBride, sitting behind the shop counter with a cup of tea. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she has perfect pitch, Miss McBride.”

Ruth’s sister beamed. She’d brought the little girl into the shop just as Ian was hanging up his battered fedora on an antique umbrella stand and Tony was flipping the sign around to read Closed. Ian had been feeling a touch impatient with himself for making this offer when there was already so much to do, but Ruth’s face had turned on the violin so eagerly and Jordan McBride’s gaze followed her with such happiness, his misgivings faded into a wry smile. “Take your instrument, and dear God, do not drop it. To destroy a Mayr, even a replica, would be a crime against art.” Jordan puttered about preparing tea in Minton cups, and Tony leaned on the counter watching her do it.

“Enough for now,” Ian said at last, after his pupil had wobbled through her first one-octave scales. Ruth begged “More, please!” but Jordan reached over the counter to take the violin.

“You’d keep us here all night, cricket, and Mr. Graham has other obligations. I’ll bring you back tomorrow to practice.”

Ruth sighed, watching the instrument go back behind glass. When her sister prompted, “What do you say to Mr. Graham now?,” she fixed Ian with a direct stare and said, “When can you teach me more?”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” Jordan protested.

“When can you teach me more, sir?” Ruth amended.

Ian laughed out loud.

“You don’t have to do this again,” Jordan told him. “I don’t wish to impose.”

Ian opened his mouth to take the way out she’d given him. “I don’t mind,” he heard himself saying instead, and looked at Ruth. “Will Thursday do, cricket?”

Both McBride sisters burst into smiles like small suns. Goddammit, Ian thought. He liked them, and it made him wish he hadn’t met them under slightly false pretenses.

“I hope I’m not too forward in asking.” It burst out of Jordan like a dam breaking. “You were in Spain with Gerda Taro, Mr. Graham—she’s such a hero of mine, you can’t imagine. What was she like?”

“Gerda?” Ian recalled. “They used to call her la paquena rubena—the little red fox. She had a good deal of swagger as well as nerve.” Jordan had stars in her eyes, and behind her Tony smiled. He’d warned Ian in advance that she’d recognized his name, and that surprised Ian as much as Ruth’s passion for scales. Didn’t young women gush over film stars, not journalists?

“You were at the liberation of Paris,” Jordan was saying now. “I remember one of your columns—”

“Yes, I got my first draft down in the bar of the H?tel Scribe, jammed in between a woman writing a piece for the New Yorker—Janet Flanner, I think it was—and John, who looked like he had the worst hangover in France.”

“John who?” Jordan asked.

“Steinbeck.” Ian saw Jordan’s impressed expression, and hastened to add, “It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. A roomful of exhausted press corps nursing blisters and griping about their deadlines.”

She didn’t look like she believed that. “And afterward?”

Ian leaned on the counter, drawn into the past despite himself. “There was a poker game played in the bed of a truck as we headed out of Paris . . .” He ended up telling one story and then another, through a second cup of tea as Jordan pressed him with questions.

“You tell these stories, and I can see everything unfold like I was there,” she exclaimed. “But Tony says you’ve given up writing.”

Ian shrugged. “See enough horrors, the words run out.”

Jordan looked like she wanted to push a pen into his hands anyway, but Tony interjected. “Princess Ruth is getting restless.” He nodded at Ruth, who sat drumming her heels. “And we’ve got a date, McBride.”

That surprised Ian. “I thought you said she didn’t know anything else useful about Kolb,” he said when Jordan disappeared into the back room to put the teacups away.

“This isn’t for work.” Tony shrugged. “Nina has Kolb’s tail until dawn, and it’s too late to make more telephone calls. There’s absolutely nothing else chase related I can turn my hand to, so I’m going to take a pretty girl to the movies.”

“If you want a pretty girl to take out, wouldn’t it be less complicated to pick one who isn’t wrapped up in our chase?” Ian said mildly. “One you don’t have to keep fibbing to?”

“I like her, that’s all.” Tony hesitated, looking unusually thoughtful. “She wants things, big things. I like that. She makes me think about wanting bigger things too. Not just coasting along on your train.”

Ian tried to resist the gibe, but failed. “Has it entirely escaped you that you’re falling for a witness?” he said straight-faced.

Tony shot him a dirty look. “This is not like you getting moony over our resident Soviet assassin—”

“Which is an absurd idea, and you can drop it—”

“—Jordan makes me laugh, that’s all. I make her laugh. It’s a bit of fun on both sides. What’s the harm?”

“Is she going to laugh when she learns you had ulterior motives for asking her on a date to begin with?” Ian lifted an eyebrow. “I may not know everything there is to know about women, but I know they don’t like to be deceived.”

Jordan swept out of the back room. “I hope you don’t mind Ruth coming to the movies, Tony? My stepmother’s out of town.”

“I can cover three tickets.” Tony smiled at the tall blond girl in her yellow summer dress, she smiled at him, and Ian could see the heat there, plain as day.

Something about this chase, he thought. It’s throwing us all off-balance. He went back disquieted, to take over the dawn watch on Kolb from Nina, then attack their list of telephone calls. But by the following afternoon when Tony came home from his shift at the antiques shop, disquiet was forgotten.

“CHEERS,” IAN SAID to his team. “We’ve unraveled our first thread.”

The three of them stood around the table, looking down at the list.

“Seven of these addresses are fakes,” Ian said. “No pattern to it, they’re mixed in with the real ones. But Riley Antiques in Pittsburgh, Huth & Sons in Woonsocket, Rhode Island . . .” He rattled off the rest. “Not one of them is real.”