Knight in Blue Jeans (8 page)

“What would invalidate our reason for being here,” Smith said, once he’d finished chewing and swallowing, “would be letting someone hurt you in an attempt to shut you up. And if you came alone, that might just happen.”

“Well, thank heavens I have a big, strong man to protect me,” she drawled, only the simmer in her eyes giving away her sarcasm.

“More than one,” Smith assured her.

Arden twisted in her seat again, scanning the small crowd waiting under the arched shade canopies that marked a stop along the overhead electric lines and near-invisible, street-level tracks. “What? Where?”

“Don’t
look
for them.” Smith took some pride in the fact that even he had to work to notice Trace and Mitch, despite Trace’s size and Mitch’s gold hair. “This Vox guy might let you get by with one guard, but not three.”

“Which is why I wouldn’t have brought them in the first place!”

“Considering that someone held a knife to your throat not three days ago, you’d be stupid not to.”

Arden lifted her iced-tea glass to her lips but paused before taking a sip, her gaze dry. The expression made a delightful contrast against her sleeveless pink sundress. “However did I survive an entire year without your charming advice?”

“Hah! So you
do
know it wasn’t three years.” But before he could pursue that delightful discovery further—or, worse, flirt more obviously—Smith turned toward the faint wail of an approaching light-rail train. “It’s showtime, folks.”

The plan, as outlined by Vox07, was for Arden to wait here at the restaurant, in the open, for the 2:18 p.m. southbound, red-line train. Once Vox saw that she was alone—more or less—he would join her on the patio, where they could trade what information they’d gathered about the Comitatus.

“I’ll be just inside this doorway, listening,” Smith assured her, clearing his dishes as he stood. Since his impoverishment, he’d taken more than one job doing just that. “If you’re at all uncomfortable, twirl your hair around your finger, got it?”

Arden smiled pure honey up at him through the afternoon sunshine—and Smith just about dropped the dishes he was holding. Damn, she really was the most beautiful woman in the world. And he had to be the most stupid man, to have let her go. He barely heard her tease, “Are you certain you don’t want me to tap out a message in Morse code with my dinner knife?”

“No.” His own voice sounded faint in his ears. “The pre-arranged signal’s fine.”

Arden blinked, seeming confused—but by then the train was in sight, so Smith ducked into the restaurant and took over a booth by the window, so that he could watch the confrontation. The sleek white and yellow train slid into the station,
sounding its horn to counter the near silence of its electric cars and warn unwary pedestrians away from the tracks.

A handful of passengers disembarked. Several, carrying backpacks or books, immediately headed toward El Centro Community College. Three, still wearing name tags from some conference or another, headed toward the West End’s pedestrian-only brick streets. Two were tourists, from their digital cameras to their matching
Everything is Bigger in Texas
T-shirts. One swarthy young man looked fairly suspicious as he headed their way, until Smith recognized the apron sticking out of his pocket and realized that he probably bussed tables. And…

And that was it. With more bells and a strained whistle, the train slid back into silent motion in the direction of the Grassy Knoll, Union Station and parts south.

Arden sat alone at her outdoor table, as if jilted.

Again.

She wore it well, arching an eyebrow at her iced tea without commenting, but still…

Hell.

Some instinct in Smith had him wait—you never could tell if this Vox guy wasn’t careful enough to come on the next train, or by bus, or from one of the other restaurants or shops. Which meant Smith had been an idiot to spend any time near Arden at all…but damn. Could he have given up even a minute more of it?

Time stretched. In the far distance, a northbound train sounded its whistle to warn of its approach.

Arden succeeded in not glancing toward the window where Smith waited, watching. She did glance at the reading teenager, probably wondering about her opinion on all-girl youth centers, until her subject scowled, turned down the page on her book, shouldered her backpack and got up to go.

The girl stumbled beside Arden—

And dropped something in her purse.

Smith almost didn’t see her clever sleight of hand. As it was, he barely moved fast enough to block the doorway back into the restaurant.

The teenager, deerlike in her thinness and the skittish way she leaped back, had long, chocolate-colored hair that all but hid her expression. Still, Smith could read body language.

He could read her fear.

“Hiya, Vox,” he said, saving the cursing of himself for his assumptions about Vox07’s gender and age for later.

Still seated at her table, Arden parted her perfect lips in surprise.

Vox ran.

Just like that, before Smith could toss out a single quip, the teenager darted across the patio and vaulted the iron fencing that encircled it, despite the short, flowy skirt she wore—or the cowboy boots. She raced toward the light-rail stop. Smith took off after her, swinging over the fence with somewhat less agility than Little Deer-Girl, but damn, she was fast.

She probably would have shot across the tracks and lost herself in the El Centro crowd if it hadn’t been for the Comitatus. One minute, the girl was in full flight. The next, she’d stumbled to a stop—face-to-face with Prescott Lowell, who’d appeared from behind the handicap-access ramp beside the tracks.

Now Smith
really
cursed himself. Obviously, despite whatever knowledge she claimed to have about the Comitatus, Vox07 wasn’t part of a secret society of all-powerful males. Somehow, he and Arden must have led the Comitatus here.

Lowell wore a suit—Hugo Boss. In August. Even without brandishing a knife, he might as well have worn a pin reading
Hi, I’m Prescott. Ask Me About My Secret Society.

Vox07 took one look at him and whirled around to backtrack.

Then she saw Smith—and froze.

“It’s all right, honey!” Arden’s voice surprised Smith, not the least because she swept past him in a pink blur, heading toward the girl. She must have run, too. How could Arden look so good after running in this heat? “You can trust us. Come—”

But a whistle, overloud and startling in its nearness, drowned out her voice.

Seeing what was about to happen, Smith lunged forward.

The girl, as if in shock, took one step backward—more firmly onto the light-rail tracks that bisected the brick street, just as the northbound train bore down on her.

Arden surged forward, blind to the risk to herself—and Smith, seeing everything unfold too fast to stop it, too fast to get there, did the only thing he could. He ran. He couldn’t reach the teenager. God help him, he couldn’t. But he might reach Arden before she ended up on the tracks, as well.

Brakes shrieked. Someone yelled. The train’s whistle howled into one long, panicked scream.

Smith reached—and caught Arden. He dragged her forcefully into his arms, spinning to put himself between her and the blur of white and yellow that barreled by them where the teenaged girl had been standing.

The girl they’d chased onto the tracks.

He muffled Arden’s cry against his chest, muffled his own silent scream somewhere far deeper, far more dangerous.

The breeze off the train blew his hair. He could feel its heat, far worse than that of August, push against his back. With his head ducked, he could see a white stripe under his old shoes and Arden’s strappy sandals, her neatly painted toes.

The safety line of demarcation separating the public from the train.

Smith closed his eyes for a moment, inhaling the magnolia scent of Arden’s thick black hair, selfishly glad for her safety even as the train’s horn fell silent and the crowd’s shouts took over.

He held on to her. She clutched him. And God help him, he was glad that she’d survived, no matter what had happened to the teenaged informant he and the Comitatus may have just helped kill. Maybe his so-called
noble
bloodline was corrupt down to the cells, at that.

So much for being a hero.

A
rden, tucked forcibly into Smith’s chest, could barely breathe. She’d never felt so terrible. Not when she’d seen such horrific poverty, on a good-will tour as a pageant finalist, that she’d had to save little girls and thus discovered her mission in life. Not when Smith, whom she’d thought she loved, dumped her with no explanation. Not even when her stepmother died.

None of those had been her fault.

But this…!

Someone began to shout at them—a Dallas Area Rapid Transit cop. Arden couldn’t make out the angry words through her shock, though clearly the stocky woman was scolding them for what had happened. As if they’d meant for it to happen? As if they didn’t know…?

Maybe Smith did understand. He drew her gently back from beside,
right
beside, the northbound train. For the first time, Arden saw how he’d stepped between her and danger, how close he’d come to being hit himself.

Nausea tightened her throat. She held on to his hard arms for balance now—and more.

Then, strangely, with another shriek of its whistle—the train pulled forward.

To reach the poor girl? Surely not just to…leave? Unwilling to see, but less willing to avoid what they’d done, Arden twisted far enough from Smith’s arms to see the tracks as the light-rail train picked up speed and slid away in a yellow and white sequence.

She saw nothing but brick and rails.

“Smith,” she gasped, noting a definite paleness to his usually tanned face. He hadn’t wanted to see the carnage, either. Somehow, that realization softened something inside her, something hard that over the weekend had seemed to melt a little more, the more time she spent time with him. “Where is she?”

The DART cop continued to shout at them—and at someone else.

Belatedly, Smith loosened his grip on Arden and moved his gaze past the empty bricks to the sight of a big, swarthy man their age. She recognized Smith’s friend, Trace Beaudry, climbing up from the bricks and dragging the teenager by one slim hand.

“—
doing
?” Trace demanded, bent over the stunned girl as if to deliberately intimidate her. “When a train’s about to hit you, you
move,
you don’t just
stand
there!”

“Oh, thank God!” Arden pulled from Smith’s dumbfounded stillness to hurry across the tracks and gather the girl away from her oversized rescuer. But the girl flinched away from Arden’s touch, back against Trace. “We didn’t mean to frighten you,” Arden insisted.

“Sorry, Arden,” quipped another familiar voice—Smith’s old friend Mitch Talbott. All they needed now was the nebbish Quinn to round out the quartet. But Quinn didn’t seem to be nearby. That, or the light-haired Mitch just grabbed more at
tention. “I guess you don’t have the way with women that Trace does.”

Trace seemed to like the teasing even less than Arden. “Yeah, well, my way kept her from being run over by Smith’s damned legacy.”

Smith’s…?

“My family was in railroads, not rapid transit,” Smith defended himself. Ah. The
Donnell
legacy. Arden watched him draw every bit of it around himself, despite his old T-shirt and jeans, as he spun on the transit cop. “Yes, we get it, no playing chase across the train tracks, won’t happen again, are you happy?”

Since the woman drew her ticket book from her back pocket, Arden presumed she was not. Speaking of certain individuals’ way with women…“Let me handle this,” she suggested to the men. “Just get her…Vox…” What was the girl’s name? “Take her somewhere that she can catch her breath, all right?”

“No!” So the girl could speak after all. She glanced frantically around them before turning her imploring gaze back to Trace. “Not with them, not….”

Then the girl’s eyes widened, rolled upward, and she sank toward the ground.

Trace caught her before she made it all the way. After a moment of apparent confusion, he lifted her with disturbing ease. “Crap.”

But at least it distracted the DART officer from ticketing them.

They got Vox07 back to the barbecue restaurant—in the air-conditioned shade, not the patio. Trace reluctantly held her in his lap until Arden’s attentions, dabbing the girl’s temples with a napkin dipped in ice water and fanning her with a menu, revived her. The girl’s eyes fluttered, and she stiffened. Then, when Trace unceremoniously slid her onto the bench
seat between him and Arden, she caught sight of him and seemed to relax—marginally—even as she stared.

Arden couldn’t imagine anyone ever having that reaction to a man she’d always thought of as thuggish, but if Trace kept Vox07—or whatever her name was—calm, more power to him.

“Here’s some sweet tea,” she murmured, moving the straw to the girl’s lips until Vox took both cup and straw from her and obediently drank. Their waitress had been wonderfully solicitous when they’d lied and blamed the heat—not an uncommon cause of fainting spells around here. “Don’t try to talk right away. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

The girl drank—but her narrow-eyed gaze, from behind her veil of long hair, radiated distrust of all of them, Arden included.

That unnerved Arden. Not almost-killed-by-a-train unnerved, but still. She was a Leigh, of the Highland Park Leighs. She had a way with people. She was charming—except sometimes with Smith, who brought out the worst in her, but that was hardly her fault. Excluding him, being good with people was her
thing.

Now Smith, who sat directly across the plank table from Arden, made a huffing noise. He slumped back on the bench seat he shared with Mitch, and his feet tangled with hers. Deliberately? “So if she’s not going to talk, what are we supposed to do?”

“Eat?” Trace rudely helped himself to one of the complimentary corn chips the waitress had brought for them.

“Anyone bring a deck of cards?” suggested Mitch in that joking way of his. “Nothing tops off a near-death experience like a good game of Go Fish.”

“Patience is a sign of maturity,” Arden reminded them sweetly, through gritted teeth. “Trace, perhaps you should leave some chips for her. Salt helps counteract the heat.”

“She didn’t faint from the heat,” Smith reminded her right back. “She fainted from fear. C’mon, Ard. You saw Prescott
Lowell, didn’t you? How do you suppose he got here, unless he followed you?”

Did he always get this annoying after close calls? “Hmm. Let me use my psychic skills.” Arden dropped the dampened napkin to turn on him. “
I don’t know.
We already established that he’s Comitatus.”

The girl made a snorting sound, like,
duh.

Smith leaned across the table in his apparent need to push his point home. “The longer you and Vox here are out in the open like this, the more vulnerable you are.”

“Vox is a stupid name,” noted Trace, between chips.

Finally the girl spoke. Her voice was faint—but she spoke. With sarcasm. “Not my real name.”

“So tell us your real name,” insisted Smith, with his usual lack of tact.

The girl shook her head, her eyes only touching on him before wandering across the table to touch on—and veer from—Mitch. Then Trace. “Lowell is Comitatus. Not the only one. You led him here. Lied to me.”

She said that last with her gaze planted firmly on Arden.

Arden felt her heart sink at the truth of the accusation. “I’m sorry, honey. I know you said to come alone—”

“Don’t apologize!” Smith interrupted, as if she needed defending against even a teenager. “You’d rather you both were here alone with Lowell?”

“Perhaps we could have handled him,” noted Arden.

“Maybe you couldn’t have,” insisted Smith.

“Maybe you two—” this last came from Mitch “—could take this to your own table? This was supposed to be the quiet, calming-down-after-the-excitement table. Not to mention, you’re attracting attention. Jenny’s been so nice. Don’t make her tell us all to leave.”

Jenny was their waitress.

Flushing at the idea of having lost her poise so seriously,
much less in public, Arden drew in a breath to protest that she could control herself—but Smith had already stood and circled to the table immediately behind her. All she had to do was turn on her bench seat, sweeping her gored skirt with her, and she was facing him.

“What’s your problem?” he demanded, voice lowered.

“I don’t have a problem.”
Except you.
For some reason, she wasn’t as anxious to add the usual dig.

He widened his brown eyes, impatient. “Then why are you acting like this?”

“Because you could have been killed!”
The accusation slipped from her lips before Arden even recognized the truth of it. But, hearing it, she accepted it.
That
was her problem, all right. She could only take comfort in the fact that her voice didn’t shake. It came out a little strident, perhaps. But no shaking. “You put yourself between me and the train,” she clarified, even more calmly. “You could have been killed.”

Trace, behind them, snorted. “No kidding.”

Smith glared at his friend’s broad back before returning his gaze to Arden. His eyes softened, just to touch on her. “Well, I wasn’t.”

“But you could have been.”

“And Vox over there could have been run over,” Smith reminded her.

“Or me,” Trace reminded both of them over his shoulder. “I could’ve been run over.”

“Or Trace,” Smith conceded with a shrug. “But nobody was.”

“
This
time!” That definitely sounded strident.

Smith squinted across the table at her. “Are you mad at me again? Because this time, I had nothing to do with…Well, barely anything…Just stop being mad, already!”

“I’m not.”
Dogs get mad, people get angry.
“I’m…worried.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you, so—Ouch!” That last
came when she reached across the table and smacked him in the upper arm with a menu. “That felt mad.”

“I’m worried about
you,
you idiot!” Saying it forced her to face reality. Whether she should care about this handsome, foolish, gallant,
stupid
idiot was immaterial. Even if he didn’t deserve her sympathy, she did care.

She cared a great deal. Again. Still.

Sugar.

“I don’t want to see you hurt,” she continued, less certain of herself.

“I don’t want to see you hurt, either,” Smith insisted. “So we’re even. So what’s the problem?”

I’d only just begun to get over you, and now…

But she most certainly would not discuss that in front of his friends, her young conspiracy contact
or
Jenny the waitress. “Can we just call it nerves?” she suggested.

For once, Smith had nothing snarky to say. Instead, he just studied her, then shrugged, as if shaking off her insanity.

To end the uncomfortable conversation, Arden simply turned back to the original table, leaving him to circle to his original seat. Mitch grinned at all of them, far too cheerfully.

Vox07 said, “None of you sound Comitatus. Too disorganized. Too emotional.”

Arden stared at her.
What?

And the entire energy at the table changed.

“
We
don’t sound Comitatus?” asked Smith, even as he thought,
How did she guess?
And then doubling back to the previous few minutes of encouragement,
Arden didn’t want to see me hurt.
But mostly, sticking with the present,
How did she guess?

When she’d said Lowell wasn’t the only one, Vox07 had
known.

Still, Smith winced a little when Trace snorted his inno
cence and protested, “Who’s Comitatus?” Great. Invite the conspiracy expert to start naming names.

“You think these three are part of an all-powerful secret society?” Arden’s dimpled smile reassured Smith, but she didn’t have to sound quite
that
amused. “
Them?
No wonder you were frightened, poor thing.”

She reached for the teenager’s hand, but the girl pulled away, fixing her eyes, still half-hidden behind her straight, unstyled hair, on Smith. “Who are you?”

They hadn’t done introductions yet, what with her having been unconscious. “Smith Donnell.”

“Donnell.”
She nodded, but didn’t look at all satisfied as she turned toward Mitch, collected his surname of Talbott, and continued on to Trace. For the first time since he’d yanked her from death on the tracks, she looked frightened of him.

“Trace Beaudry,” he said firmly, as if speaking to an idiot. “And I’m not Comitatus.”

I’m
not. Now Smith understood the hair Trace was splitting. Trace had come late into the privileged lifestyle. After his birth father disowned him for betraying the Comitatus, Trace had disowned his father right back—and gone back to his original name. Apparently, he thought you could divorce vows, too.

“Beaudry,” the girl repeated—but without the dour weight she’d given Arden, Smith and Mitch’s last names. This was amazing. She must have an entire roll sheet of Comitatus memorized. Even Smith couldn’t have recognized fellow members just by their names. “Beaudry?”

Trace’s look dared her to contradict him. “Beaudry.”

“Why are you with them?”
Them
included Arden. Arden obviously didn’t understand why. And Smith wanted to get a handle on this day of revelations before their little conspiracy theorist outed everyone—up to and including Arden’s father—to a woman not yet ready to know the truth. It was
one thing for Leigh to be a self-righteous jerk. It was another to force Arden to see it if she didn’t have to.

“It’s a long story, conspiracy girl, and not one we need to be discussing in a public restaurant with Prescott Lowell and who knows who else lurking outside. We’ve got to get to some kind of safe zone before we go any further.”

“Greta’s house,” suggested Trace, then shrugged when the others looked at him. “Hey, she said she’d be frying chicken.”

“Greta’s house,” repeated the teenager softly, as if to herself. “The woman Arden Leigh asked about. Kaiser. Comitatus name. Might as well be Stuart.”

“We could go somewhere else,” Arden reassured her. “Perhaps—”