need to go back inside the house now,” ordered the young man. He wore a small goatee and a had Yankee accent. Massachusetts, she recognized with an even greater flare of surprise. Unless she was mistaken, and roving bands of Bostonians had migrated down to the Lone Star State for a surprisingly well-dressed crime spree, this was one of her guests! But how had she not caught his name?
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,
