LITMIR.BIZ

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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 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—”

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