Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,54

small smile on his lips. Maybe the walls he’d built around himself were starting to show cracks. Tiny ones, to be sure, but I was going to do my damnedest to widen them.

We were to meet Dr. Prakash at one of the side entrances to the museum. Jamaal and I arrived there a little before seven. Standing outside waiting in the rain wasn’t my idea of a good time, especially not with the damp chill in the air.

Jamaal, of course, had no umbrella. If we’d just been walking straight from the parking lot and into the building, I’m sure he would have refused to share mine, but even he wasn’t macho enough to stand around waiting in the rain as the temperature dipped toward its predicted nighttime low of thirty-five.

Sharing the umbrella meant Jamaal had to stand closer to me than he would have liked. I think he was trying not to show his discomfort, but I couldn’t help noticing the stiffness of his posture, or the way the fingers on the hand that wasn’t holding the umbrella were dancing nervously at his side.

“Do you need a cigarette while we wait?” I asked.

My question must have cued him in to his unconscious hand movements, and his fingers came to a stop. “I’m fine,” he said.

I was debating whether to try to push him into telling me what was wrong when the door to the museum swung open.

I hadn’t realized I’d built an image of a curator of Indian art in my head until I set eyes on a woman who looked absolutely nothing like that image. I’d pictured a petite Indian woman of mature years wearing a sari and sporting a red dot on her forehead. The woman who beckoned us into the museum was indeed of Indian descent, but that was about all I’d gotten right.

Dr. Kassandra Prakash was plump without being fat, and if she was over thirty, she was some kind of cosmetics genius. She wore a thoroughly Western wrap dress with ugly sensible shoes, and she had a smile that made her face look pretty despite an oversized nose and black eyebrows that were just short of being a unibrow.

I darted inside, leaving Jamaal to wrestle the umbrella into submission.

“I’m so sorry to leave you waiting in the rain!” Dr. Prakash said earnestly. “I’ve been indoors all day and never realized it was raining.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said as Jamaal won his battle with the umbrella and joined me inside. “We just got here. And we can’t thank you enough for taking the time—”

“Nonsense,” Dr. Prakash interrupted with a cheery smile. “I’m like a proud mama showing off her baby.” She held out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Kassandra Prakash, but you can just call me Kassie.”

“Nikki Glass,” I answered as I shook her hand. I could tell the moment she got her first good look at Jamaal, because her generically friendly smile turned into something with a hint of hubba-hubba behind it.

“And you must be Mr. Jones,” she said.

I highly doubted Jamaal had been born with either his current first or last names, and I sometimes wondered why he’d chosen something as dull as “Jones” for his surname. It didn’t fit his exotic good looks, but then I don’t think Jamaal realizes just how attractive he is.

“Nice to meet you,” Jamaal said dutifully as he shook Kassie’s hand. There was a hint of strain behind his smile, and I wondered how long it had been since he’d had a normal, social interaction with someone other than Anderson’s Liberi. He certainly wasn’t used to smiling at people, and I was glad he’d made the effort, even if it did come off a little forced.

If Kassie noticed Jamaal’s awkwardness, she didn’t acknowledge it, instead leading us through the empty halls of the museum toward the exhibition. She chattered almost nonstop, and I decided Jamaal’s lack of social graces probably wasn’t going to be much of a handicap tonight. I didn’t get the feeling that she was overly enamored of hearing herself talk, just that she was so excited about the exhibit that she couldn’t contain herself. I wondered if she was always like this, or if she’d been overdosing on energy drinks to get her through her long and busy day.

I’d imagined this evening’s outing as a chance for Jamaal and me to spend some time together and maybe try to ease ourselves back into something resembling a normal relationship. I thought maybe we’d