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Now she did speak her mind. “You come to my party, drink my champagne, eat my hors d’oeuvres and now you threaten me? Why, that’s just…tacky.”
“You think I’m joking?”
“My father and half of Texas society are just a scream away.”
Menace twisted his mouth. “Like they’d hear you through closed doors.”
“Oh…” Arden smiled, deliberately showing dimples as she bared her perfect teeth at him. “They’ll hear me.”
He stepped even nearer, so close that she could smell his aftershave—Armani Black—and count the teeth on his knife’s serrated blade. Now would be an excellent time to scream, but he said, “Your research and prying have caused enough trouble already.”
Which distracted her. Her research? That could mean only one thing, and Arden’s lips parted in amazement. Suddenly this strange intercession made weird sense. “You mean, it’s true? There really is a secret society of powerful—”
The knife, cold against her throat, confirmed her guess.
Yay?
“If you’re smart, you will never refer to such a thing again,” Boston warned, making sure Arden could feel the toothy knife above her triple strand of evening diamonds. She tried very hard not to swallow. She could barely breathe. “You will go on behaving yourself, and hosting your little parties, and doing your little charity works. And if you’re a good girl, and stay out of matters that don’t involve you, perhaps—”
Then he dropped.
That would be from the arc of an unexpected tree branch, ending in a sick crack against his head.
The knife landed beside Arden’s perfectly pedicured foot. A brown-haired man sank to one knee, strangely like a courtier about to propose, to check Boston’s pulse with one hand. Unconscious like that, Arden’s attacker looked increasingly young.
Her rescuer kept the tree branch. He looked up, met her gaze—and recognition stabbed through her. Arden knew that angle of brows over mischievous brown eyes, and the sullen-cowboy set to his jaw. She knew the toffee-brown hair by touch, as well as sight. She knew that easy, athletic body, although he’d once dressed far better than his current jeans and dark, long-sleeved tee—a suspicious fashion choice for August in Texas.
But it wasn’t just recognition that made her feel even more unsteady than she had with a knife to her throat.
“Smith.” The name of the man who’d broken her heart by dumping her without explanation. The man who’d simply vanished from her world.
The man she’d once thought she would marry.
No, what cut the deepest was her recognition, from how her pulse sped up and her breath caught—that she wasn’t nearly as over the bastard as she’d hoped.
Oh…sugar.
Smith Donnell grinned as he rose to stand taller than her despite her heels, branch in one hand and Boston’s knife safe in the other. “Hey, Arden,” he greeted cheerfully, as if they’d just run into each other at the club. As if a stranger hadn’t just threatened her. As if he had any right to be cordial! “How’ve you been?”
For a minute, Smith feared that Arden might faint. Or maybe she would attack him with balled fists and harder words. She’d always been a lot more of a firecracker than her poised, beauty-queen looks let on—and she was gorgeous, especially in a green gown that matched her wide eyes, with that thick, Irish-black hair drawn off her slender neck, showing all that peaches-and-cream skin….
Smith forced himself to keep breathing. If he were a lesser man, he might have gone a little wobbly himself. And he’d known there was a possibility of seeing her tonight, although he hadn’t intended to be seen.
She’d had no idea.
Instead of fainting or fists, Arden smiled that adorable, dimpled smile that had always put him on guard. She extended both hands, saw that his hands were busy with weaponry, and made do with an air kiss. “Smith Donnell, as I live and breathe! How long has it been, three years?”
Smith felt his own grin waver at her overestimation, as well as the hauntingly familiar magnolia scent of her. “Barely a year, to tell the truth.”
She waved the idea away. “Time flies, doesn’t it? I’ve been right as rain, thank you for asking. Likely you heard that my stepmother passed. That’s been even harder on Daddy and Jeff—you remember my little brother?—than on me. But what about you? You’re looking…”
Smith waited for her to put a polite-yet-pointed spin on that one. His life since the big defection at Mount Vernon had been embarrassingly hand-to-mouth. Not every powerful businessman in the world belonged to the Comitatus, of course. Just enough of them to keep the occasional “traitors” from getting references, credit or clean background checks.
Go figure. Secret societies sucked when it came to severance packages.
“Fit,” she decided brightly, a euphemism if ever he’d heard one. “So whatever brought you into my daddy’s backyard, where you ought not to be, just in time to play knight in shining armor against…?”
As if in an afterthought, she nudged the suited shoulder of her attacker with her strappy dress shoe. Her full lips pulled into an adorable pout of annoyance. He could spend all night just watching her pout. He used to deliberately provoke it.
“I believe his name’s Lowell,” Smith admitted. No wonder the Comitatus had wanted Donnell Security for their special crusade a year ago, with incompetents like this running around. Lowell had been just plain stupid, going straight for the threats…but then again, the threatening and the posturing illustrated Smith’s problem with the whole organization. “Though we haven’t been formally introduced.”
“And yet here you are. Maybe chivalry isn’t dead.” Her eyes danced at him. “Other than the you-hitting-him-from-behind part.”
He shouldn’t feel deflated at that. Their split should’ve cleared up any delusions she had about his never-steadfast honor. But Arden’s easy poise still brought out his contrary side. “I would’ve challenged him to a duel, but I left my fencing foil with my tuxedo.”
“Ah, but you still have that sharp wit of yours, don’t you?” Her composure was starting to worry him, and he’d already been worried. Worried enough to come out of hiding when he saw her threatened. Worried enough to risk his entire erased existence and everything he was accomplishing with that invisibility.
“So, uh…what did Lowell here mean about you doing research into secret societies?” He prayed his betrayal hadn’t somehow involved her in this.
Rather than reassure him, she wrinkled her pixie nose in that teasing way that used to make his stomach flip. Still did. “Now if I told, it wouldn’t be secret, would it? But look at me, chatting away. I really should call security and get back to my invited guests.” Still, she couldn’t be quite that rude; it all but went against her religion. “Why don’t you come inside and have something to eat? Jeff’s away at camp, but Daddy will be just thrilled to see you again.”
Her ability to spout social lies the size of the Watergate cover-up still amazed him. “Haven’t you got a hot date to get back to?”
“Three,” she assured him, not missing a beat. He half believed her. “But you won’t be in our way.”
“Actually, sweetness,” he said, satisfied at her almost-wince over the endearment, “you’d be doing me a favor if you didn’t mention me being here at all.” He pressed the branch into her hands. “Or, at least, don’t tell anyone my name. I can’t say why, just now, but…”
She arched a perfect brow. “But I owe you?” They both knew that, with the way he’d dumped her, he would have to save her life several times before they were even. Still, she had the grace to pretend. “I never could say no to you, could I?”
“Actually, you could.” He’d never worked so hard to catch a woman in his life—and then he’d had to go and throw her back, right before he’d meant to seal the deal. Her perfection had been her only flaw. Of all the things he’d lost that night at Mount Vernon…“You really do look fine, Arden Leigh. Always did.”
For a moment, her facade faltered. Could that be lingering pain in her big, lash-shadowed eyes? Did she want to kiss him as badly as he did her? Could she be human for him, just once more? But the moment passed, and he suspected it was mere wishful thinking on his part.
Not to mention…secrecy and all. Big society plans. Vengeance to be wrought and inner-circle VIPs to betray.
“Give me a count of twenty-five?” he asked, backing away a step. On what should not have been an afterthought, he wiped his prints off the ceremonial knife and flipped it sharply into the manicured lawn, well away from Lowell. When Arden hesitated, eyebrows lifted in challenge, he added, “Please?”
“One,” Arden drawled obligingly. “Two…”
Hell. Before he lost his nerve, he surged forward again.
Slid urgent fingers into her thick black hair.
Bent to her for a too-necessary kiss.
Arden…
With a little sigh, she parted her glossy lips to him, warm and receptive and increasingly, gloriously, less poised. She was everything female, milk and magnolias and softness and beauty, and she’d once been his. For a long, blissful moment, life felt like it had before. Back when he’d had a prosperous future to offer, and a heritage to be proud of, and what he’d foolishly thought was honor.
Back when, amazingly enough, he’d had her. After a year without her, to have her so close, so his, felt—
Oof! With a sharp jab of the branch into his ribs, Arden put an end to the kiss. Smith felt both relieved and shattered. She stared dazedly up at him, her gaze as raw and resentful as his felt, and he feared the coming accusations, didn’t know how he could ever explain himself.
Instead, after regaining her composure with a single, shaky breath despite her hair now falling in messy loops to her bare shoulders, Arden said, “Eleven. Twelve.”
Smith ran. It was a big yard. He’d barely vaulted the stone wall before he heard Arden’s voice split the night. “Daddy!”
In the excitement that followed, Smith had no trouble meeting with Mitch and Trace, whom he’d been signaling with his penlight before Arden’s attacker distracted him. As the local Comitatus leadership poured into the garden to Arden’s cries, Smith and Mitch stole into the office they’d vacated.
“Niiice.” Trace grinned from his position as guard outside. “She’s still hot.”
“Shut up.” Smith punched a code into the security pad with the end of his penlight. The society’s new security was top notch, but Smith was better. Mitch was already moving around Donaldson Leigh’s dark, heavily furnished den, collecting the surveillance equipment that they’d hidden that afternoon under the cover of all the florists and caterers who’d swarmed the property in preparation for Arden’s big night.
“Weird though these words feel leaving my mouth, Trace is right,” Mitch admitted, even as he unscrewed a nearly invisible, key logger from Leigh’s keyboard cable. “The whole thing had a kind of old-romance, Robin-Hood-and-Maid-Marian look to it.”
“Except that this isn’t a movie,” Smith reminded him, still mulling over the guard’s accusation. Your research and prying have caused enough trouble already. Arden should have been safe. What had he gotten her into? “Are you done?”
“Almost.” Humming a happy little ditty, Mitch stretched to retrieve another tiny, voice-activated microrecorder from a hanging planter. “We’re in luck! Nobody watered.”
“They won’t leave this place empty for—”
“Got it!” Mitch pocketed the recorder and made for the door. “Here’s hoping they got to the best plotting and self-implication before Arden interrupted things. Good job stalling her, by the way.”
Yeah. That’s what Smith had been doing. Stalling her.
“Shut up.” But instead of running, Smith paused beside what looked like an antique gun safe just inside the door. It wouldn’t hold guns. Inside would be at least five long, toothy, ceremonial knives—and suddenly he wanted them.
Rather, he didn’t want Donaldson Leigh and the others to have them. The knives represented the society. He itched to challenge that.
Especially when his own father stood with them.
“What happened to low profile?” demanded Mitch, hovering at the closed door. “What happened to nobody knowing we were ever here? Or is Arden going to talk anyway?”
If Arden talked, they might as well add insult to injury and take the knives. It’s not like she owed Smith that kind of trust. And yet…
Trace drummed his fingers on the doorjamb. “Guys! Some suits are headed back this way. As long as we’re hitting people with sticks tonight…?”
“She won’t talk,” Smith decided. Hoped. “Not right off, anyway. Let’s go before Trace starts a brawl.”
Mitch opened the door and Smith tapped in the code to again disable the alarm, careful to leave no fingerprints. The knives, though…Those, he left.
It wasn’t like they were swords. It wasn’t like they held real value.
Then the three exiles from the most powerful secret society in the world escaped from Donaldson Leigh’s property—with what might be the Comitatus’s plans to secretly destroy the female gubernatorial candidate inside.
Donaldson Leigh hungered to crack his fist across young Prescott Lowell’s jaw. But, no. The Comitatus could not claim to be the apex of civilization while behaving like the unwashed masses.
Instead, he pointed at the boy with his ceremonial knife. “Down.”
“But I had to threaten her. I was guarding—”
“DOWN!” Civilization also depended on knowing one’s place.
The boy—he couldn’t be more than twenty-three—dropped to his knees, defeated. At Leigh’s glare, he laid his ceremonial knife on the marble floor in front of him. Whether or not he got it back…
“You were to guard us against our enemies, you fool. Not against wandering family members!”
“But…she knows about us!” Apparently not content to spout these lies, Lowell actually dared to glare up at his elder.
Leigh used a knee to push the youth onto all fours, then facedown onto the floor. At least the boy knew better than to protest that!
“Leigh.” Will Donnell drew his friend back with a restraining hand on his shoulder. “I think he understands that he made a mistake.”
“But I didn’t blow it!” protested Lowell. “I intercepted her—”
“With a knife!” At least some of the other elders, behind Leigh, were murmuring agreement at Leigh’s complaint.
“She’s of the blood. Should I have used a gun?”
Only Donnell’s hand on Leigh’s shoulder kept him from reacting to such blasphemy as the boy babbled on: “I had to stop her, didn’t I? So I did. I told her to go back to her party, mind her own business, and she said that there really was a secret society!”
Leigh’s restraint on his Irish temper cracked. The hell with civilization!
Donnell held him back from kicking the boy’s teeth in. “Do you think our families have never had suspicions?” Leigh’s friend asked, more calmly. “We have ways to divert them. By confirming them for her, you’ve caused far more trouble than you prevented.”
That, brooded Donaldson Leigh, was an understatement. Certainly more trouble for young Lowell.
And, worse—more undeserved trouble for his beloved daughter, Arden.
Chapter 2
“So he kissed me, and then he just…left.”
“And you didn’t call the police,” noted Arden’s friend Valeria Diaz as the women walked through midday heat from a sleekly modern light-rail station into a questionable, once-glamorous Victorian neighborhood. Tall and dusky skinned, her coils of brown hair drawn into a practical ponytail, Val didn’t stand out in South Dallas’s run-down Oak Cliff neighborhood nearly as much as Arden did.
“The kiss wasn’t that bad,” joked Arden, before giving in and answering what her friend really meant. “There was no need for the authorities. Daddy said—” She deliberately ignored her friend’s roll of the eyes. Especially here in the South, “Daddy” was a perfectly respectable title for one’s father…just like it was acceptable to give a boy his mother’s maiden name for his first name, as with Smith. “Apparently, Lowell is an intern of my father’s. I assumed they would handle the incident internally.”
Val’s dusky face had all the expression of a stone idol—an idol with intense, topaz eyes. “Someone puts a knife to your throat, he deserves jail time, not a demotion.”
Arden’s friend and partner never had excelled at girl talk. Val had once, briefly, been a cop. She’d surely been a tomboy. “Daddy has it under control. He’s a good man.”
“Unlike his daughter, the slut.” Val’s eyes sparkled with sudden teasing, despite her mask of solemnity. “So you kissed this knight in shining timeliness?”
“Smith kissed me,” Arden clarified with assumed dignity. Then she admitted, “But I didn’t exactly bite his tongue.” No, instead she’d opened herself to him. His warm touch. His scent of heat and earth. When she should have been skewering his foot with one of her dress heels, she’d instead closed her eyes and pretended—just for a minute—that they’d never broken up. All her foolish, inappropriate longing had gone into that one stolen kiss.
Smith…
Like some desperate fool, she’d started to lift her arms around him, to draw him to her for the first time in too long….
