Knight In Blue Jeans

“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….

Just as well she’d forgotten the big stick in her hand.

“There was tongue?” Val glanced over her shoulder as they walked.

“Smith always did have a peculiar kind of charm.” That roguish grin. That cocky indifference. Even during those years when they’d known and disliked each other—or thought they had—she’d sometimes wanted to kiss him just to shut him up.

“Charming as pie, ’til he dumped you.”

“Exactly.” They turned down a cracked, uneven sidewalk onto a street boasting large trees and more Victorian homes. Several had been renovated to their original elegance, but most sat in graffitied disrepair, with abandoned cars in the front yards and rusting burglar bars on the windows. Historic Oak Cliff, once a jewel among Dallas society neighborhoods, had fallen victim to postwar white flight and urban decay generations before.

Arden liked to think the recreation center for girls she and Val had started nearby could reverse some of that.

“Dumped you over the phone.” Again, Val glanced behind them. Satisfied, she turned her stern stare back to Arden. “With no warning.”

“Yes, he did.”

“Drunk off his butt.”

“I was there, Val. I’m the one who told you.”

“Boy deserved biting.” Val slid her topaz gaze disapprovingly toward Arden. “And not in any good way.”

“Well…I did hit him with a branch.”

“Good.” But Val knew her too well. “Accident, was it?”

“And I doubt I’ll see him again.” Which was a good thing, of course.

“Make sure of it, girlfriend.”

“Why, look,” said Arden brightly, to change the subject. “We’re at Miz Greta’s.”

Miss Greta Kaiser taught piano at the rec center. Her tall stone home, like the neighborhood, had forgotten its elegance beneath decades of neglect. It boasted a mansard roof with uneven iron cresting, dormer windows along the top story, and a high bay window of Second Empire style. Roman arches over its windows and doorway added an Italianate touch. But several of the cracked panes in its higher windows had been patched with cardboard or taped plastic, despite Arden’s repeated offers to help with repairs. Lost roof tiles gave the appearance of missing teeth. What must once have been a glorious garden had withered to a brown, dirt-spotted lawn, deprived of sunlight by a single, glorious oak tree and of water by the Texas heat.

It broke Arden’s heart to see it. And yet, had the home joined the ranks of the restored historic houses brightening the area here and there, Miz Greta couldn’t possibly have managed its upkeep. The divorcee had macular degeneration, a central blindness that limited her ability to manage certain tasks…which was why she’d asked for Arden’s help looking into a suspected secret society. Greta could play piano with her eyes closed. But she could no longer read without a huge magnifying glass.

Today, Arden had brought a new audio book, wrapped in crinkly tissue, for their visit. “It’s a hostess gift,” she explained to a curious Val after knocking on Miz Greta’s recessed door. The expected barking erupted from the other side. Both women took off their sunglasses, and Arden her wide sun hat.

“And I don’t get a bodyguard gift because…?”

“Sweetie, you’re not my—” But the opening door cut off the rest of her answer. Both women stood a little straighter for their elder. Despite their significantly different backgrounds, both Arden and Val had been raised with Southern manners.

“Please do come in,” insisted the small, white-haired woman, braids wrapped around the crown of her head, giving her barely enough height to reach five feet. She peered down at the barking dog through Coke-bottle lenses. “Hush, Dido!” Then—presumably to the women and not Dido—“I’ve made strudel.”

On mere hours’ notice? The delicious smell filled the warm house, a testament to Greta’s cooking abilities despite her failing eyesight.

“You shouldn’t have,” demurred Arden as they made their way through the crowded vestibule and into the parlor, because that’s what one said. Once she’d presented the gift, she crouched to let the cocker spaniel lick her hand and remember her. Dido wiggled harder at the sheer joy of having company.

“Sure she should,” insisted Val, of the strudel.

“I love cooking for guests,” agreed the older woman.

In minutes, her visitors had china plates of strudel and tall glasses of sweetened iced tea. Because Greta’s old house had no central air—only cheap window units and an assortment of fans that had been running since June—the iced tea was especially welcome, despite Arden’s awkwardness at being waited on by someone she’d rather be serving.

Arden felt even worse recounting her adventure of the previous night—but it had to be said, no matter how much it troubled her old friend.

“My God.” Miz Greta shook her head, paling at even Arden’s most gentle version. “I never dreamed that you…You could have been killed!”

“I’m sure I was in no danger.” Arden gently squeezed Greta’s thin hand. “The Lowell boy was just posturing.”

“And apparently Arden’s loser ex-boyfriend has miraculous timing,” added Val darkly. When the dog barked in the kitchen, she stood.

“Heavens, child! You’ll have me jumping at shadows. Dido?” The dog trotted back in and sat, nose pointed at the strudel. “She barks at squirrels.”

Val sank back into her chair, but now Arden felt alert, as well. Being recently held at knifepoint had that effect, but it was no excuse for frightening old ladies.

“Dido certainly enjoys company,” she noted, a deliberate feint.

“She’s very affectionate.” The older woman relaxed as she petted her dog. “Hence the name. I’ve always been partial to Virgil’s Aeneid. In Roman literature, Dido is the heroine who falls completely in love, then kills herself after her lover deserts her to pursue his destiny.”

“Imagine that,” murmured Val, no big fan of classic literature—but in the meantime, Miz Greta’s cheeks had regained some color from the distraction.

“I wouldn’t have mentioned last night,” noted Arden carefully, “except that Lowell validated your suspicions. Why would anybody care about our research otherwise? I believe there really may be some kind of secret society out there!”

“A dangerous society.” Greta shook her head. “Of course you must do as he said and leave the matter be—no need to pursue this further.”

“And let them think they’ve frightened me away?”

“Wait a minute,” protested Val. “I came into this late. What kind of secret society are we talking about, and just what kind of research did you do?”

“Not very much,” Arden said. “Miz Greta had a…a personal curiosity and asked for my help with some reading. I found a few books about secret societies in general, but this one—they’re called the Comi…?”

“Comitatus,” provided Greta softly.

“The Comitatus were hardly ever mentioned. I went online to some conspiracy Web sites and posted questions, but almost everyone denied ever hearing of them. Except of course for the teenagers who pretend to know everything but can’t tell you anything. Then I found a conspiracy buff who seems to be local—he calls himself Vox07. He offered to meet me with the names of some area members of the society if I would trade information, who knows what kind…That’s as far as I got before last night. Why do you keep looking out the window?”

“Never hurts to be careful,” said Val. “Especially when—assuming there really is a Comitatus—anyone from a bookstore clerk to this Vox person could have let on that you were asking questions. Way to be stealthy there, Leigh.”

Arden resisted the urge to make a face. Val wasn’t usually paranoid. She was just…careful.

Arden hated thinking she might have cause.

And why was the dog spending so much time in the kitchen, with company here? Smith had once told her something about dogs and security…. “Where’s Dido?”

Neither Greta nor Val understood her non sequitur at first, but Miz Greta called, “Dido! Come!”

The cocker spaniel scrambled happily into the parlor, wiggling her pleasure at being called…But she also cocked her head back toward the kitchen, as if torn. Why?

Dido loved company!

“Check her breath,” suggested Arden, standing suddenly.

Val was on her feet even before Greta—barely able to hold her exited dog still long enough to open her mouth—exclaimed, “Strudel? Bad dog! How did you get into the—?”

By then, Arden and Val were heading down the narrow, wood-floored hallway past the staircase and library, toward the kitchen—aiming for stealth, which is why Arden had left her pumps back in the parlor. She dropped back a pace only when she saw Val draw a gun from a small-of-the-back holster. Texas had a carry law—and Southern girls were well versed in gun safety, too.

Val practically rolled around the kitchen doorway, weapon first, like the cop she’d once been. She scanned, then crossed the large room with Arden following, past its yawning fireplace and shelves, toward one of three doors. She pushed open one, revealing a second set of stairs blocked with boxes and storage, and shook her head before closing the door to glance back at Arden. “Stairs?” she mouthed in surprise.

“Servants’ stairway,” Arden whispered back, moving to the 1950s stove to check the pan of strudel. Too much pastry was gone, and it looked like someone had been serving with their fingers.

Dogs make the best security systems. That’s what Smith had once told her. Except for the bribing-with-food part. He might have driven her crazy sometimes—more often than not, truth be told—but he’d always made her feel safe.

“Someone was here,” she said softly.

“What’s wrong?” called Miz Greta from the hallway, her voice quavering in a way that hurt Arden’s heart. “Did you find someone?”

“Not that we can see,” Arden reassured her brightly. “You just keep hold of Dido and let us make sure, all right?” Careful not to cross Val’s line of fire, she stepped to the middle door, this one obviously leading onto the covered porch. Its hook-and-eye latch hung open…Was Greta that lax about security? Around here?

Crouching, Arden pushed the door open. Gun first, Val swept the porch.

Again—nobody.

The friends exchanged pregnant glances, torn between amusement at their Charlie’s Angels routine and the fact that there was one…last…hiding place.

In her stockinged feet, breath shallow from the risk, Arden crossed to the third doorway. Probably the pantry or the larder.

Val held up one finger, to create a count. Then two.

At three, Arden pulled the door open. From behind the shelter it made, she saw Val feint back and shout, “Freeze!”

Dido began to bark wildly—

And a second gun poked past the door as a too-familiar voice, both pleasant and deadly, said, “It’s August. This place isn’t air-conditioned. I couldn’t freeze if I wanted to.”

Smith? Arden leaned past the door to peek at the man she’d immediately recognized, both from his voice and from his truly inappropriate sense of humor. His eyes didn’t look that mischievous just now, but his jaw was set even more stubbornly than usual—and his aim on her best friend didn’t waver.

Val aimed right back.

Over a year with no word, and now Smith had shown up twice in less than twenty-four hours? As ever, Arden took refuge in hard-won composure.

“Hey, Smith,” she drawled coolly at the gunman, deliberately imitating his cocky greeting of the night before. “How’ve you been?”

Chapter 3

Well.

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.