Raven on the Wing Read Online Free PDF Page A

mirrored sunglasses, slung an expensive leather handbag into the Mercedes, and got in herself.
    She drove uptown to a towering apartmentbuilding and pulled up in front, smiling politely at the doorman, who rushed to open her door. “Thank you, Evan,” she said, her tone low and cultured.
    “My pleasure, Miss Anderson.” The doorman escorted her up the tiled steps while a valet appeared from thin air and hurried to tenderly drive the Mercedes to its secluded parking place. A uniformed guard at the front desk rose respectfully to his feet as Raven entered, murmuring a greeting as he handed her a sheaf of messages.
    “Mr. Travers is waiting for you, Miss Anderson.”
    The sunglasses hid Raven’s expressive eyes, which might have revealed how entirely unwelcome this information was. “Oh? Thank you,” she commented. Gracefully, she moved to the elevator, where another uniformed man punched the buttons so that she wouldn’t strain herself.
    The door opened onto the top floor, and Raven stepped out of the elevator with the gliding, feline movements she’d perfected. The grace was wasted, however, since she was forced almost immediately to jump to one side to avoidbeing run over by an untidy stack of papers and files with legs.
    “Oh!” A harried, timid voice came from behind the obstruction, and a pale, thin face peered around at Raven. “Miss—Miss Anderson. I’m so sorry—”
    “No harm done,” she murmured, tempted, as always, to abandon her role, but resisting because experience had taught her caution. It certainly was difficult, though, to maintain her cool detachment in the presence of Leon Travers’s assistant-or-whatever; she’d never been clear on the relationship.
    Theodore Thorpe Thayer III was the optimistically grand name bestowed, possibly by a lisping mother, some thirty-odd years ago on the child who could never hope to equal it. Theodore—
never
Ted, Raven had decided—was about five foot four and might have weighed a hundred pounds on one of his hearty-eating days. He was pale, and his thin face invariably wore the expression of a hunted rabbit. And behind the cruelly distorting lenses of his glasses,spaniel-brown eyes pleaded with the whole world.
    How on earth the amazingly inept man had secured a job with Leon Travers had been a total mystery to Raven until Leon had explained in a long-suffering tone that Theodore was related to him and, as he pointed out, who else would hire him?
    Bringing her mind back to specifics, Raven asked coolly, “What are you doing here, Theodore?” The question was mild enough, but Theodore looked crushed.
    “I’m—I’m sorry, Miss Anderson, but I thought Leon—I mean, Mr. Travers wanted to work here. I could have
sworn
he told me, but I was wrong.” The spaniel eyes blinked rapidly behind thick lenses.
    Raven glanced back over her shoulder, where the elevator operator, expressionless, was still waiting. She looked at Theodore. “Did you really think you could accomplish all that anyway?” she asked dryly, gesturing to the stack of work he clutched to his chest.
    Theodore promptly lost himself in a morassof unfinished sentences and stuttered explanations, none of which made the least bit of sense.
    Raven waved it away. “Never mind. The elevator’s waiting, Theodore.”
    He nodded miserably and scurried into it.
    When she stepped into her penthouse apartment a few moments later, Raven smiled far more welcomingly than she had at the doorman, but there was an almost-imperceptible chill in the curve of her lips, stamped there, it seemed, as a glacier permanently stamped its mark on the soft earth beneath it.
    “Hello, Leon.”
    “I used my key,” he said.
    The phone rang endlessly in the empty apartment.
    Josh counted the rings, hanging up when he reached twenty. She wasn’t there. He had called from ten P.M . last night until two this morning, then had given up. Waking after a restless night, he had begun calling at eight this morning; it was