W
ell.
This wasn’t how Smith would’ve preferred to kick off his next meeting with Arden. Not that he’d actually meant her to see him again. Despite following her here. But…still.
He kept her Latina friend in his sights—mainly because she still had him in hers—but said, “Arden Leigh, as I live and breathe. Seems like forever, huh?” What with them replaying last night and all. Since he didn’t want to take his gaze off the lady looking to shoot him, he didn’t put a hand to Arden’s pretty cheek. Instead, he made do with an air smooch. “Kiss, kiss.”
“And here I thought you didn’t like guns.” How could she put such thick disapproval into such a sweetly phrased statement? She was right, of course. He didn’t. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t hit what he aimed at, or that—after seeing a Comitatus flunky holding her at knifepoint the previous night, and after listening to Mitch’s partial recording of the Comitatus agenda—he wouldn’t carry one until he knew she was safe.
Which she wasn’t, here.
The old lady in the hallway said, “Blades are more honorable than guns, don’t you think?”
That surprised the hell out of him, so much that he glanced away from the muzzle of the Latina’s Saturday Night Special to the older woman’s pale gaze, which seemed to look not just at him but through him.
More honorable.
Those were almost the exact words the Comitatus leaders used when giving a teenaged boy his ceremonial knife upon entry into the society. Blades were personal. Blades were honorable. Guns might be more practical, but if ever someone of Comitatus blood outright betrayed his brethren, he would be shown the honor of dying by blade.
How could she know?
Only when she smiled down at the dog, wizened and wise, did Smith grasp his rookie mistake. The old woman
hadn’t
known—not about his own involvement with the Comitatus, anyway—until he’d reacted.
Blades.
“Honor’s a luxury some of us can’t afford,” he said carefully.
“Obviously.” Arden glanced pointedly between the two guns. “Will you two please put those nasty things away?”
“Her first,” said Smith at the same time Arden’s friend said, “Him first.”
“At the count of three.” Arden made it a velvet-gloved order. “One.”
The tall, dark woman narrowed her eyes in challenge.
“Two.”
Smith wished he was staring at Arden instead of a gunwoman. The blue-jeaned Amazon was handsome, in her way. But Arden was pure beauty, and not just because she wore such a pretty sundress, her black hair in a curly ponytail.
Or because her toenails were painted the exact same color as her fingernails and her lips.
Or…
“Three,” finished Arden—but the weapons didn’t move. She put her hands on her hips, as if she meant business. “Oh, for mercy’s sake!”
Smith almost hoped to see her lose her temper—he’d loved catching sight of the real Arden behind the composure since long before they’d started dating.
He
wasn’t
ready for her to step right into the line of fire.
Where the slip of a finger could kill her!
“Hey!” Immediately he turned his weapon to the ceiling and thumbed on the safety. His voice cracked.
“Arden!”
“Are you
insane?
” demanded the other woman, doing the same thing.
“Did I teach you nothing about personal safety?” demanded Smith, struggling to catch his breath. “Never,
never
—”
“NEVER!”
insisted her friend.
“I,” noted Arden icily to Smith, dismissing the deadly weapons with a roll of her eyes, “am not the one breaking into houses—”
“The door was unlocked, no breaking required.”
“—and pointing guns at people. Shame on you!”
The strange thing was, instead of laughing at her, he did feel a touch shamed…which made him petulant. “I was just making sure you weren’t into something over your head.” Justified, he jabbed a finger in her direction. “Which apparently you
are.
Secret societies and all that…that crazy talk….”
The old lady was staring through him again and smirking. Somehow she
knew
he knew better. He didn’t like her seeming omniscience one bit.
Rejecting Comitatus leadership, as he and his friends had done, meant exile. Breaking one’s vow of secrecy, on top of the whole dishonor thing, could be one of those nasty, dying-by-blade offenses, depending on the circumstances.
Yet another reason Smith carried a gun today.
All the old lady said was, “Is nobody going to introduce us?”
“How ill-mannered of me.” Only Arden could fit so much sarcasm into such proper words or so bright a smile. “Miz Greta, Val, please let me introduce the wholly untrustworthy Smith Donnell. Smith and I have known each other’s families since childhood. Once, during a period of temporary insanity on my part, we dated. Smith, these are Miss Greta Kaiser and Ms. Valeria Diaz. Greta teaches piano at my teen recreation center, and Valeria could kill you for fun where you stand.”
“Gladly,” clarified Val.
“How do you do?” Smith tried his most charming smile. He even bowed a little before seating his revolver back into its SOB holster.
Generally, that was meant as a rhetorical question, but Valeria Diaz said, “Personally, I’m pissed that nobody’s dialing nine-one-one yet. And you?”
Torn about what I heard from that Comitatus meeting. Too happy to be in Arden’s presence again. Worried about the dark sedan that followed you here from the rail station.
“I’m feeling more than a little silly that I chose to hide in a pantry instead of taking a stairway to the whole of upstairs,” he admitted, and offered his hand in truce.
Val deliberately ignored it.
“Much as I’m sure you would have enjoyed rifling through Miz Greta’s private things.” Arden pushed his hand back down to his side, her own hands soft, her scent sweetly familiar.
Thanks for the brush-off, Val.
“I’d rather know why it’s your business whether I’m over my head, off my game or out of my mind. There’s a great deal I wouldn’t put past you, Smith. A
great
deal…” She widened her eyes to think of the enormity of things that included.
“Nice vote of confidence,” Smith muttered, to drag her back on track.
It worked. “But
stalking?
Why
shouldn’t
we call the authorities?”
None of them expected Greta to step in. “Because if we call the police, Mr. Donnell will miss the story he risked so much to hear. Let’s all return to the parlor to deal with the larger issue at hand. Mr. Donnell, would you like some iced tea?”
Val’s mouth dropped open in blatant amazement. Arden, being Arden, revealed her surprise with the barest of blinks—but Smith was pretty adept at reading the annoyance of those blinks, and he grinned in pure triumph. Maybe the old lady was crazy, maybe not. But he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth…especially when he’d seen so few gift horses lately.
“Why,
thank you,
Miz Greta. I would love some tea…and maybe a slice of that delicious strudel?” As he accompanied his new favorite person and her gamboling, happy dog toward the front of the house, making the most of his status as a welcome guest, Smith caught Arden’s soothing murmur to Val.
“Just take deep breaths, and it will pass. He inspires almost everyone to kill him, sooner or later.”
She had no idea how right she was.
The question was, how could someone as perfect as Arden have inspired similar—and all-too-real—threats?
And why was someone with tinted windows parked just down the street, keeping watch on her?
Greta Kaiser was not crazy. Nor was she completely blind, physically
or
emotionally. The macular degeneration gave her
central
blindness. That meant if she looked directly at Smith Donnell, she saw no face at all, barely a head. But she could glimpse, with her remaining peripheral vision, how Arden Leigh snuck peeks at him when she thought nobody was looking. When Greta turned her old eyes on Arden, the beautiful socialite all but vanished—but Greta
got a clearer impression of Smith Donnell beside her, a hint of strong profile and brown hair and blatant interest in—almost longing for—someone he had supposedly dumped. He’d managed to sink onto the love seat next to Arden before Val could.
Arden made an amusing show of ignoring his nearness completely.
Greta also noted Smith’s worn jeans and T-shirt, his cheap shoes. Put that together with the unlikelihood of Arden having dated someone from a significantly lower social caste—
have known each other’s families since childhood
—and Greta found far more truth on the couple’s periphery than anyone might by looking at their relationship straight on.
This man may have lost his chance to be Arden Leigh’s hero…but he might yet prove to be Greta’s.
“My family name,” she said, when everyone had finished their bickering and settled back in the parlor, Dido flopped happily between them, “is Kaiser. Does anyone know what that name implies?”
“It’s German,” offered Arden.
Greta turned expectantly to Smith, even if that meant losing sight of his expression.
“It means ‘emperor,’ right?” he asked. When Arden and Val stared at him, he seemed to square his shoulders. “What, you think I
bought
my way through college?”
“Yes, ‘emperor’.” Greta settled back in her favorite chair, comforted by Dido’s chin on her foot. “The name derives from the word
‘Caesar,’
because the Hapsburg dynasty professed direct lineage to the Roman emperors, themselves descendents of the epic hero Aeneas. Hence our claim to the Holy Roman Empire.”
“And you’re a Hapsburg?” Arden sat up. “Of the
Austrian
Hapsburgs?”
In periphery, Greta caught the suspicion that began to
darken Smith Donnell’s strong profile. He was starting to figure this out already.
Clever.
Arden had exceptionally good taste.
“Let us say we are a significant branch off that family tree. As you might guess, my father was a powerful man, descended from a seemingly unending line of powerful men. I was born in this house, back when Oak Cliff was the garden spot of Dallas society. I fully expected a life of private schools, debutante balls and eventual marriage into wealth. But instead…” She took a deep breath, bracing herself against the memories. “Even before my coming out, shortly after World War II, my father lost everything. Our fortune. Our standing. The house—I did not inherit it, only bought it back decades later, after the falling property values made it available for a fraction of its original cost.
“We were wholly ruined, and I never knew why.”
Arden leaned forward to take Greta’s hand, offering sweet comfort. Greta smiled directly at the black-haired beauty, effectively erasing Arden from her vision but allowing her to glimpse Smith’s sudden, wary stillness.
“Well…” He paused, then continued, not quite hiding the sympathy in his tone. “That
would
be terrible.”
He, she felt increasingly convinced, should know. If he didn’t, she was endangering herself and perhaps Arden and Val—even Dido—by continuing. But life was risk.
“Astute as ever.” Arden’s poise had degenerated into dry sarcasm. Interesting.
“College,” Smith reminded her amiably. But, observing the contrast between his current apparel and the upper-class confidence of his posture, Greta felt sure he’d spoken from firsthand experience.
“Our family never wholly recovered.” She could not admit her childish resentment, nor how long into adulthood it had followed her. A foolish marriage, for all the wrong reasons.
A bitter divorce, for the right ones. So many lost years. Instead, she cut to the significant part of the story. “But when Papa developed Alzheimer’s, someone had to care for him. My mother was gone by then, and my brother, and I’d bought back the house, so I took him in. And that’s when Papa began to explain.
“At first, I thought him delusional.” Greta’s laugh came out harsh, startling her spaniel. “He
was
delusional, or he never would have spoken of such things. When I asked him, during sentient periods, he denied everything with such vehemence that I stopped asking. But when he confused me with others, with
men
from his past, I became curious and encouraged his stories.
“He admitted to having joined an ancient secret society of powerful men.
“And he admitted to ruining us by crossing them during the War.”
Arden had heard much of this story once already. So, while Greta told how her father had challenged the Comitatus and their precious status quo, Arden found herself watching Smith.
Carefully, though, so nobody would notice.
She’d generally avoided him during their youth, despite their fathers’ friendship. Smith had been too full of himself, too loud and
boy
like—trouble on two feet. Only when they began moving in the same post-college circles did she really start watching him, still more annoyed than intrigued. His cocky immunity to her charms—and she wasn’t foolish enough to deny them—had bothered her. The more caustic the run-ins they had, the more she assumed their dislike to be mutual. They couldn’t seem to spend ten minutes in each other’s company without finding something to disagree about…which eventually proved downright fascinating. By the time he’d bitten out a sudden invitation to a party, like a
dare in the middle of a fight over nothing, she’d been so surprised that she’d stuttered out agreement. And then…
Then the attraction that flared up between them, no longer held back by their pretense of mutual enmity, had almost consumed her.
How long had she already been in love by then?
It wasn’t just that he was handsome, though he was. She noted the long line of his back now, the pull of his shoulders under his faded brown T-shirt, worn to a softness she could only imagine under her fingers. She noted the defined muscles of his tanned, bare arms, his elbows on his jeaned knees as he leaned nearer Greta to hear the story. The brush of his too-long brown hair across his neck. That action-hero profile. The stubborn, uncompromising jaw—far more recalcitrant than his daring grins let on—which she could remember kissing the tension out of one night, while his hands had done sinful things across her…