Kentucky Confidential Read Online Free

had a rebellious side. Despite her flirtations with the VIPs earlier, Yasmin now noticed a pinched look around the girl’s eyes and mouth that suggested she had found her role vexing.
    Not worth the tips they would leave when they departed?
    “I think that handsome customer you served earlier liked you,” Darya added, her voice back to its normal, teasing tone. “The one with the leather jacket? Very manly.”
    “I am pregnant and hardly looking my best,” she countered, trying to forget the look of betrayal in Connor’s eyes. A pain began to throb behind her forehead. “You were right. I am not feeling well.”
    She had to get out of here. Go somewhere to think. Figure out what to do next. Try to reach Dal again.
    “Go. Your shift is nearly over. I will tell Farid you became ill and left.”
    Yasmin glanced at her watch. It was eight forty-five. The restaurant closed at nine. “I’ll tell him,” she said, already heading toward the kitchen. Farid would probably dock her the final hour of her pay, but money was the least of her problems at the moment.
    How had Connor located her? What kind of game was he playing?
    She found Farid in his cluttered office behind the kitchen and told him she was feeling unwell.
    “You’ll get an hour less in your paycheck this week,” he warned her. “Unless you can pick up an hour later this week.”
    “I will do that,” she said, not at all certain she’d be back to the restaurant at all.
    Instead of going out the back door into the darkened alley behind the restaurant, she chose the relative safety of the well-lit front exit. As she left, she spared another glance at the two men sitting at the VIP table. They leaned toward each other over the table, deep in conversation. The older man’s demeanor seemed angry, while the younger man looked tense and worried. From her vantage point, she couldn’t see the older man’s face, but there was something vaguely familiar about the way he held himself erect, about the shape of his head and his slim but masculine build.
    Flicking her gaze toward the front exit, she realized she could see the older man’s reflection quite clearly in the window. Clearly enough that she was now certain she’d seen him before. But not in person.
    Where had she seen him?
    It might have been on Dalrymple’s office wall, she realized a few moments later. There had been several surveillance shots tacked up on a corkboard behind Dal’s desk in his Washington office. She’d asked about the photos once, but Dal had brushed her questions aside. “They’re wins,” he’d said with grim satisfaction. She’d assumed that Dal meant they were bad actors who’d been killed or captured by the agency.
    One of the photos on the wall had looked a little bit like one of the two men Darya had been serving earlier, hadn’t it?
    But those men on Dal’s wall of wins were dead or locked up somewhere they’d never escape.
    So how could one of them be sitting at table six in The Jewel of Tablis?
    And was it a coincidence that Connor had shown up at this restaurant at the same time as the mystery man? Maybe he hadn’t come to Cincinnati looking for her at all.
    Maybe he was here looking for the mystery man.
    She exited the warmth of the restaurant, the shock of frigid air sucking the breath from her lungs. Pulling her coat more tightly around her, she started walking down the street toward the bus stop on the corner. The restaurant was close enough to her apartment to walk there most days, but she was cold, tired and feeling hunted. She could splurge on the bus fare after the evening she’d just had.
    Light from the storefronts across the street illuminated her way between the circles of light sporadically shed by streetlamps. On a Wednesday night, the crowd of pedestrians was lighter than it would be on the weekends, but there were enough people to make her feel safer as she walked to the corner. A few of them gave her curious glances, their gazes directed either