The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine Page B

mezzanine, where a stray kick could knock a glass off the table and into someone’s waiting arms. That was another good sign; you had to trust your clientele to arrange things this way. There would be some decent dancing here.
    There were already two hundred people milling around, maybe more. Jo wondered how they ever heard of a place like this when there wasn’t even a street number to mark it, when you had to count stoops and knock on a plain red door and say “Curtain up” to the man who answered before you could go through the second door and down the stairs into the dance hall. It felt like a place she would have liked to know about a long time ago.
    From beside her, Tom said, “Penny for your thoughts.”
    She thought Tom had a bad habit of standing too close to her; she had a bad habit of letting him.
    â€œIt’s lovely,” she said instead. “How long have you had it, did you say?”
    It was strange, thinking that he’d been so close to her for so long.
    He shrugged. “I’ve had it almost two years, but it hasn’t been open long. I had the deed, but I had to shake a lot of hands before I had the safety to open up shop, and then I had to get up the nerve to open it and declare myself a businessman.”
    Jo remembered one or two nights when Tom had shown up with his hands shaking and his face drawn, and had pulled her onto the dance floor without a word, as if he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he’d tell her what had happened and frighten them both.
    Whatever it was he’d been hiding, Jo suspected he had been paying for it for the last eight years.
    A waltz was playing, and most of the girls were out on the floor with blissful-looking men who held them as if they were porcelain.
    Sophie and Lily were dancing together, and Doris was waiting it out at the bar, laughing with the bartender and casually spinning a highball glass that had appeared in front of her.
    When Jo looked at Tom, he was watching the flow of the room, quietly satisfied, a smile flickering over his face.
    She knew that expression. It worried her.
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    The night she met him, he’d been unloading barrels into the Kingfisher’s cellar under Jake’s orders.
    He wasn’t much older than Jo, and he wasn’t carrying a gun or making a nuisance of himself to Jake, but still, Jo kept an eye on him all night. (There was something about him she didn’t understand; she couldn’t help looking over.)
    When there were no more barrels, he’d come back inside, looked around for a girl to dance with, and immediately seen Ella at the bar.
    Jo moved closer—Ella could handle herself, but you never knew when there could be trouble.
    He came up to Ella smiling, gestured at the dance floor as he spoke. Ella ran her finger around the rim of her glass, which meant she wasn’t interested.
    Jo decided to cut in before this went farther. Some men had a bad habit of staying interested in Ella long after Ella was tired of them.
    â€œI promise not to step on you—I only look like a clodhopper,” he was saying when Jo reached them. He winked at Ella, who glanced away and blinked, as if surprised that he’d come so close to guessing what she thought.
    Jo slid up to the bar behind her sister, planted a stiff arm on the ledge, and raised an eyebrow at him.
    He glanced up and saw her.
    She expected him to blanch, or bristle, or pretend he’d just forgotten someplace else he had to be. A lot of men did that, when they realized that the girl they thought was alone had brought friends to look out for her.
    But instead he only said, “Oh,” softly, his smile so wide and earnest that crows’-feet appeared at the edges of his eyes; he smiled as though she was an old friend, as though he had been waiting for Jo a long time and was delighted to see her at last.
    â€œOr I can dance with you,” he said to Jo, “if you’d