He was enjoying holding her hand, though he did wonder about the gloves; some sort of affectation he guessed, or perhaps it was just that her nails were the wrong color for her dress, or any one of a number of feminine reasons. Women were a mystery in themselves, and now this one was insisting her friend had disappeared. The Colonel had been to many a grand party; he knew that drink—or too much of it anyhow—could loosen morals just a little bit; that a young woman might find herself in an inappropriate situation, sometimes even dangerous. He hoped this was not the case with Verity, though he doubted that at such an elegant event anything like that could have taken place. The Boss had his own security, his men were everywhere, or had been earlier, though he saw none of them around right this minute. Still, they were under the Boss’s orders and would do as he asked. “I’m so worried about her,” Mirabella was saying as they walked through the party crowd to the strip of darkness around the edge, where all light ended.
