4
Smith tried not to flinch from Arden’s casual dismissal. “Hey now, sweetness—you aren’t ashamed of me, are you?”
She arched an accusing eyebrow.
“Oh,” he said, not quite as cocky. “You are, huh?”
“As delightful as this has been, what with the history lesson and the stalking, I really do have to go,” Arden insisted. Then she actually smiled.
A warm, real smile.
Smith’s traitorous heart leaped.
“Jeffie’s coming home from camp today,” she explained. So the smile was for her half brother, not for Smith. “I’m picking him up at the airpo—”
“Too much information,” Smith interrupted. How many times had he warned her that the fastest way to be victimized was to let down one’s guard? In light of that, it was probably just as well she didn’t trust him. Dammit.
Arden waved him away like an annoying bug as, with a quick hug for Greta and pat for Dido, she headed out.
“Too much information?” he heard Val demand as the younger women left, the dog whining from her exile at the door. “It’s not like you said you’d been on the toilet all morning or anything.”
He had to imagine the expression on Arden’s face.
Smith’s expression might have rivaled it as he watched the women reach the sidewalk. Greta Kaiser said, “You love her.”
It wasn’t a question.
Spinning to face the old woman, Smith pretended it had been. “Me? No. Sure, we were dating when…” When I lost everything she might have wanted from me. He grinned to reinforce his position. “No love. Maybe some like, if you squint at it and turn your head just right.”
Oh, great job. Make sight jokes to a near-blind woman.
“I’ll just call a friend of mine to bring over the supplies we need for that security system,” he said.
“Help me with these dishes when you’ve a moment, please?” asked Greta mildly, and vanished into the kitchen.
No, Arden was definitely not the only too-trusting woman involved in this latest problem.
As he sat in his car, waiting for Arden and her “friend” to leave the run-down old house they’d come to visit, Prescott Lowell used his laptop to pull up the area tax records.
The house was owned by someone named Greta Lorelai Kaiser.
It didn’t sound familiar, but he made note of it all the same. No surprise that she was a single woman home owner. From what he knew of Donaldson Leigh’s stuck-up bitch of a daughter—opening a recreational center especially for girls, supporting a woman for governor—Lowell figured them for feminazis. Throw in the Mexican woman, who’d almost spotted him as he tailed them from the train station, and there was probably enough estrogen in that house to lower a guy’s IQ by fifty points.
Not that Lowell didn’t like women! But they had their place.
He loved that about the Comitatus. Everyone had their place. And the place of Comitatus members was on top of everyone else.
That was the only reason he’d kept himself from fighting back when Leigh had humiliated him last night, when he’d really wanted to knock the old geezer’s teeth in. There was an order to things—at least within the social sanctuary that was the Comitatus. The younger members of the outer circles respected the older members of the inner circles, because someday they would be part of those inner circles themselves. They would run things the right way.
With strength.
Leigh and his cronies seemed annoyingly tolerant of the threat posed by Arden’s interference. What the hell had Will Donnell meant about womenfolk having suspicions, and “ways to divert them,” anyway? If women stuck their noses into men’s business, as far as Lowell was concerned, you smacked them back so they wouldn’t do it again. That was how to divert them.
But there was no reasoning with Leigh about his precious little girl. So it was up to Lowell to uncover the truth for those inner-circle powermongers, and…
Ah. Here came Arden and her brown-skinned friend now. The friend, clearly low-class, scanned the area around them. For a moment, her eyes paused on Lowell’s car, well down the street. Seeing nothing more suspicious than a luxury vehicle in a cesspool of a neighborhood, she scowled but moved on. Arden, in contrast, looked deceptively refined in a full-skirted sundress and a large, shady hat. She acted as if she had no need of monitoring her surroundings, she was that confident in her place of the world.
Idiot.
Certain he knew where they were going—public transit, again—Lowell waited until the women had almost reached the end of the block before turning the key in the ignition. It wasn’t like they would hear the purr of his finely tuned engine. Shifting into gear, he eased forward….
Tried to ease forward.
A thumping lurch dragged his attention from his quarry to his car. He pressed harder on the gas, forcing the sedan to move, and the thumps sped up.
Braking, Lowell cut the engine and climbed out into the heat to face a flat tire on the driver’s side front.
And the driver’s side back.
Circling the car, he found the other two tires equally flat. A piece of toothpick, still extending from the valve of one tire, explained how someone had sabotaged the car without him hearing it, or even noticing the slow sinking of the vehicle. Instead of puncturing the tires, someone had arranged for a slow leak in all four.
But—the girls had been in the house the whole time!
Lowell glanced quickly around him, his eyes narrowing at some teenaged boys of mixed ethnicities playing basketball not far down the street. They had worse ways, he supposed, of trapping a fine automobile in this slum, maybe to steal its hubcaps, maybe to do worse.
Narrowing his eyes in warning, Lowell slipped quickly back into the car to phone for auto-club service. But first he pressed the button to lock all his doors and made sure he knew where his gun was, as opposed to his knife.
None of the bloodlines around here deserved an honorable fight!
Grinning from one of Greta’s windows at his automotive handiwork, Smith quickly finished dictating which security system to pick up. “No, let’s not go with the base level—and yes, I’ll pay you back. Let’s go for deluxe. If certain parties figure out who she is—”
“Who is she?” demanded Trace over the prepaid cell phone.
“I’ll explain later. ’Bye.” Then, pocketing the phone, Smith carried the last of the dishes into the kitchen after his elderly hostess, careful not to trip on the dog. Living hand-to-mouth as he now did, he’d gotten pretty skilled at bussing tables.
Descended from heroes of history and legend, huh?
Even
