Britt jerked her hand away from his, her bottom lip trembling.
“I’m sorry. I’m a jerk.” That same guilt he’d felt before lanced his belly, and he wanted to press his thumb against her mouth to stop the quivering.
“You’re just telling it like it is, and you’re not wrong about Leanna.” Britt sniffed and dabbed her nose with a napkin. Then she dragged her purse into her lap and pawed at the contents inside. “There is something else. Can you read Russian?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you can at least help me with this.” She waved a Tattle-Tale cocktail napkin at him. “I found it with my sister’s bills. I’m pretty sure she didn’t learn Russian while working at the club.”
He held out his hand, and she dropped the napkin. It fluttered and landed in his palm. He flattened the napkin on the table. “It’s written in Cyrillic.”
“Yeah, I have no clue.”
Alexei ran his finger beneath the symbols, and when he reached the end of the note, he curled his fist around the napkin, crushing it.
“What’s wrong? What does it say?”
“You were right, Britt. Your sister is in very big trouble...if she’s even alive.”
A chill raced through her body, leaving a pebbling of goose bumps across her flesh. She swallowed hard and met the unflinching gaze across from her, as Alexei’s blue eyes darkened to midnight.
She started to speak, her voice raspy. She cleared her throat and tried again. “What does the note say? Who wrote it?”
“A woman named Tatyana. She’s a victim of...rape, of slavery.”
“Slavery?” Britt wrapped her hands around her coffee cup, trying to warm them, but little heat remained in the lukewarm liquid. “Who? Does she name her rapist?”
Alexei released the crumpled napkin, and it fell to the table in a ball. “She doesn’t name names, but I think it’s clear who’s behind the human trafficking.”
Britt smoothed out the napkin on the table and read the black-and-red lettering of the club’s logo in the corner. “The Tattle-Tale Club? Sergei?”
“A good assumption.”
“Why would my sister be in danger?” She flattened her hands against her belly to soothe the butterflies swirling inside. “D-do you think they tried something on her?”
“I think they’re too smart to try to enslave an American with a family, but your sister must’ve known Tatyana. Maybe Tatyana was reaching out to her for help. If Sergei knew about the note, that would be enough to put Leanna in danger.”
Britt chewed on her bottom lip. She and Leanna didn’t have much family to speak of—just each other, and they’d done a poor job of having each other’s backs up to now. She’d done a poor job.
“I don’t understand.” The strange characters of the note blurred before Britt’s eyes, which were puddling with tears. “I work at the club of my own free will. I witnessed a bunch of women coming into work—some waitresses, some dancers—nobody forcing them.”
Alexei drove his finger into the napkin on the table. “Maybe this Tatyana worked at a different place. They have more than one.”
“They?”
“Sergei’s family. They own a restaurant and banquet hall in Van Nuys. There could be other activity going on there.”
“One of the other waitresses mentioned a banquet hall tonight.”
Alexei’s lean jaw tightened, and Britt could almost imagine smoke coming out of his ears from the anger that kindled in his eyes. He’d done his research. He knew these people. Maybe he could help her find Leanna.
“Is that why you were in the club? You’re investigating human trafficking?”
He blinked once, his heavy lids shuttering the blue depths of his eyes. “No.”
“But now that you know about this—” she poked at the napkin on the table between them “—you can bring charges against them. You can tell the police about my sister.”
“Now that I know about this aspect of their operation, I can use it to further my own investigation. It’s not a good idea to involve the police at this stage. That will just alert Sergei and his family and drive them further underground. We don’t even know who or where Tatyana is.”
Since she’d hit her own brick wall with the police, she wasn’t anxious to return to them for help. She’d rather put her money on this blue-eyed stranger who seemed to understand the seriousness of her sister’s predicament.
Drawing in a breath, she folded her hands on the table in front of her. “If you help me find my sister, because I refuse to believe she’s dead, I’ll help you.”
He raised one eyebrow. “You’ll help me?”
Her gaze dropped to his mouth—no twitching or smirking. At least he hadn’t laughed at her. As she took in the soft sensuousness of his lips, at odds with the intensity of his face, she had a hard time dragging her gaze away from them.
“That’s right.” She blinked and swept her hair back from her face. “I’m inside the club, and I plan to stay there. I can find out who Tatyana is and how my sister knew her. I’ll give you everything I have...and you’ll return the favor by using your resources to look for Leanna.”
Steepling his long fingers, he said, “You’re putting yourself in danger by working at the Tattle-Tale. How do you know Sergei and Irina haven’t already discovered your identity?”
“You have done your research. You know about Irina, too?”
He waved one hand. “Answer my question, Britt.”
Alexei didn’t have a detectable accent—after all, he was a born-and-bred American—but he pronounced her name with a long e sound, like Breet. She liked it. She liked everything about him.
“For one thing, Irina doesn’t know me as Britt Jansen. Like I told you before, I’m Barbie Jones from New York, nice and anonymous.”
“And if they do a search for Leanna Jansen, are they going to find her sister, Britt, who looks a lot like their new waitress Barbie?”
“Leanna went by Lee, and we have different last names. She’s Leanna Low.”
“She’s Chinese?”
“Half. After my mother split from my father, she...ah...played the field. Let’s just say that the only reason she knew Leanna’s father was Mr. Low was because of Leanna’s features.” Britt flicked her fingers in the air. “But that’s another story.”
“So the two of you don’t look much alike?”
“Not to the casual observer. Believe me, Irina has made no connection between me and Lee-Low.”
This time Alexei’s lips did twitch. “Is that why your sister uses the nickname of Lee?”
“Yes.” She tapped her phone and skimmed through several pictures with the tip of her finger. “Leanna has a quirky sense of humor and lives kind of a Bohemian lifestyle.”
She spun her phone around on the table to face Alexei. “That’s my sister. That’s Lee-Low.”
“They’ll never guess you two are sisters, not by appearance, anyway.” He studied Leanna’s picture for a few seconds, running his finger down her sister’s tattooed arm. Then he smacked the table next to the phone. “Delete this photo from your phone and any others you have of your sister.”