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
