Secretive Stranger

Chapter 3

Cord stomped up the stairs behind that tight little butt, well aware he’d completely failed to charm Ms. Sophie Campbell, but hell, he was expecting a looker. A brunette, buxom looker, definitely not a blond, much less a flyaway blond with stick-up cowlicks, an oversize jacket and fresh pink cheeks like a country girl.

Cord kept wanting to shake his head. Obviously, a player came in all sizes and shapes. Honest eyes and baby-soft skin were no measure of character.

It was just really, really challenging to imagine his brother with Sophie-not just as a blackmailing cohort, but as a sexual interest. Particularly when the whole neighborhood seemed crammed with exceptionally attractive brunettes who were everything Jon ever panted after.

“Mr. Pruitt…Cord…you might have heard me say I loved Caviar.”

Yeah, he’d heard a bunch of the women’s chitchat. Initially he hadn’t even seen Sophie, because she was hidden on the stair steps. But he’d heard the other woman identify her, and directly heard that butter-soft voice talking about loving caviar and tomcats and how she preferred her bodies “rich and soft.”

Cord wasn’t passing judgments. He was just hearing exactly what he expected from one of his brother’s sex partners-a shallow, all-about-me personality, with liquid morals. It wasn’t just his opinion, for Pete’s sake. Those were the same personality flaws that made the cops, private and public, believe Sophie was part of his brother’s blackmail schemes…and was likely directly involved in Jon’s murder.

Only, now that he’d seen her, he couldn’t believe it. The soft blue eyes showed no sign of guile. The outfit was as attractive as a potato sack. She dropped one of her multicolored mittens on the fifth step-they looked like something a kid would wear.

He picked it up. The second mitten slipped out of her jacket pocket somewhere around the tenth step. He picked that up, too.

Then she dropped a book.

Then her scarf pooled on the floor when she rummaged at the top of the stairs for her apartment key.

Cord thought her performance was Academy Award winning. Who would ever guess that she was a mercenary, manipulative bitch? Anyone would be fooled into thinking she was an absentminded, sweet soul without a greedy bone in her entire body.

“Cord.” She repeated his name again, and then took a big, brave breath-as if he were falling for this act.

“I realize you have a right to your brother’s things. Totally. But I honestly don’t think it’s a fair thing to do, to take Caviar. It’s not about ownership. It’s about love. I spent more time with him than Jon ever did. So I’m just asking if you’d consider letting me keep him. Or at least, if you’d give me a chance to show how happy he is with me.”

“Huh?”

She opened her door about the same time Cord unlocked his brother’s. Light flowed from windows in both flats. His brother’s place-Cord only glanced for a millisecond-looked like a gadget-lover’s techno paradise.

Hers looked like a fire sale for ruffles.

She peered up at him, waving a hand. “Are you awake?”

He didn’t bat her hand away, but he was as annoyed as…well, as if she were a pesky little sister. “Of course I’m awake. I just didn’t understand your question.”

“The cat…This cat…is Caviar.”

“Caviar,” he echoed, as the lightbulb finally dawned. She’d been referring not to the expensive salty stuff you put on crackers, but to a cat.

And not just any cat. The scrawny, skinny, ugly, huge-boned feline hurled toward Sophie the instant she unlocked the door. It was a motley blend of black and white and orange, all run together like spilled paint. It wound around Sophie’s legs like a fuzzy snake, purring louder than thunder.

Sophie crouched down to pet it, dropping everything in her wake-purse, mittens, hat, book and all. Even the first stroke made the cat’s purr rise another decibel level.

“Your brother, as I’m sure you know, was no animal lover. Caviar just showed up one day and refused to leave. Jon opened the door and the cat just shot in and hid, couldn’t be found. Jon fed it, but every time he tried to put the cat outside, Caviar would find another hiding place, until Jon finally gave up. Anyway, whenever Jon was going to be gone overnight-which was a lot of nights-he’d put a note on my door so I’d feed Caviar. Or take him in with me.”

This thrilling story almost put Cord to sleep. He had stuff to do. All of it unsettling, none of it pleasant. And yeah, he hadn’t forgotten the cops wanted him to grill Sophie. In his life, he’d done plenty of tough things, but so far, that never included kicking a puppy.

She seemed to think he was hesitating because he wanted the cat himself. “Look,” she said. “Just come in for a minute. Have a cup of coffee or tea. You’ll see what Caviar is like, how he is with me. And maybe I can help you with some of your brother’s things. I don’t know what you might need, but…”

Hell. Maybe he’d misjudged the puppy thing. The cops had sure led him to expect she’d offer some way to get into Jon’s stuff. And like it or not, Cord couldn’t see how he could turn down the chance to find out more information.

He took a step inside her place, wary as a fox in coyote territory.

Besides the ruffles all over the curtains and pillows and all, she seemed to decorate in old furniture and messes. A hanging birdcage held a giant fern. Open magazines and books blanketed a coffee table, and the floor, and a chair or two. A window seat had been covered with somewhere around thirty pillows. The couch looked saggy, the kind of couch that swallowed up a body and never let it out again. The wallpaper was flowers, the couch cover was flowers and the jammed bookcases, spilling over with books, had vases of flowers on top of them.

Cord felt momentarily light-headed. It was close to a toxic dose of estrogen. Two martinis on an empty stomach didn’t pack this much of a wallop.

“Cream or sugar in your coffee?” She showed up in the far doorway.

“Just black. But you don’t have to…”

She disappeared before he’d finished refusing the coffee. Cord reminded himself that he was a proven tough guy, a Marine with honors, an athlete who’d come damn close to an Olympic win, a man who’d survived some impossible challenges in his overseas project years. But he was afraid to take off his coat.

She was one scary cookie.

He wound his way around the clutter slowly, and then parked in the kitchen doorway. It wasn’t much of a kitchen. Typical of an old house, the woodwork had been painted a hundred times. The walls were sun-yellow, plants stealing what little counter space she had, and the appliances dated back to the dark ages. A computer and books and heaps of paper covered the entire surface of the kitchen table, so it was a cinch she didn’t try eating there.

“I take it this is your desk.”

“Yeah, no choice, there is no other place. Now, I know this looks bad. It’s not like I want cat hair near the food.” She motioned with her head toward the cat, who was perched on the counter like a god overlooking his realm. Sophie handed Cord a mug, took one for herself. “Caviar was always a little like your brother. He’s so good, if you just let him do what he wants. And it’s not as if there’s a point in arguing with him, because he’s not going to listen to you anyway.”

“You knew my brother pretty well.”

“In certain ways, yes.” There was something in her voice. A message, but he couldn’t read it.

She led him back to the living room, shunted papers and magazines aside to give him a seat. The cat followed them in, perched on the high edge of the sofa, clearly determined to chaperone the pair.

Although, how the word chaperone popped into Cord’s mind, he had no idea.

“You work at home?” he asked her.

“I’ve worked in Italy, Peacock, Georgia, the Isle of Man, Luray, Virginia…and I’d probably work in a ditch, if that’s where Open World sent me-that’s the name of the company I work for. Right now, I’m doing a long-term translating project, and I should be in Foggy Bottom for over a year. Although I hope they find more projects here after that, because I’d like to settle down. The traveling’s fun, seeing new places, experiencing new cultures, but I’m just really sick of renting. I’d like to have a home base.”

She’d spilled more information than he’d asked-times ten. A chatterbox would hardly seem a common character trait in a woman who had a ton to hide. Cord found himself intrigued. Not that he was about to tell her about his State Department or service background, but he was definitely startled to hear more about her background. Who’d guess they had any similarities? “So, what’s the long-term translating project you’re working on?”

“It’s really pretty fascinating. I’m interviewing women who survived WWII. European women who lived in countries directly affected by Hitler’s domination back then. Eventually, all the stories will come together into an intensive research project. Anyway, ‘my’ ladies are a Russian, a German woman, and my first was a Danish lady. I just finished her story. It was fascinating. She was only nine when the U.S. joined the war. She remembers her dad, a sailor, fishing our American pilots out of the sea, night after night. Everyone hid the American soldiers-in fruit cellars, under beds, wherever they could. She remembers…” Sophie suddenly laughed. “I know, I know, I can go on all night. I can’t help it. I love my job. But you don’t want to hear all this.”

Confounding him completely was that he did. Want to hear more. Maybe her ditsiness was contagious. “It sounds interesting,” he said stiffly, “but actually, right now-”

She finished his sentence for him. “You have much more serious things on your mind.” She’d just perched on a chair arm and now bounced up again. “I almost forgot. I’ve got piles of your brother’s mail for you. I don’t know what the authorities did with Jon’s mail when they were investigating. But once they stopped coming…well, the box got overstuffed almost right away, and I had the key to Jon’s box, so I just started bringing it in. I’d done it for him before. I knew someone would come sooner or later about the apartment, all his things.” She hesitated. “You’re going to need some help.”

“You sound sure of that.”

Whatever she answered, Cord missed. He wasn’t used to feeling thrown off balance, but she was sure as hell doing it to him. Nothing about her was what he’d been led to expect-particularly once he saw her moving around with her jacket off.

She was still wearing clothes that would work on a nun’s runway. Baggy blue sweater, hanging way past her hips. Skinny jeans. Sloppy socks. Her blond hair was clipped out of the way, wisping all over the place. But…when she walked, when she moved, he could see there were no extra pounds under the sweater.

She had a slim waist. Serious breasts-not huge, not blatant, but she couldn’t totally conceal a downright arresting figure, even under those clothes. The legs weren’t long-she was shorter than a shrimp-but the proportions were right. And maybe she wasn’t into face paint and all, but her skin was irresistibly soft, her mouth as kissable as any he’d ever seen, her eyes expressive and gorgeous-at least until she smashed a pair of black-rimmed glasses on her nose.

She wasn’t Jon’s type of woman, for damn sure. There was no shine, no dazzle, no trimmings on the surface. She clearly wasn’t remotely embarrassed about her cluttered place, nor was she running around to fix her hair or smack on lipstick.

She just seemed…real.

Cord wished he could shake off the foggy confusion in his head. He hadn’t thought of Zoe in over a year, but now he did-because she was such an elegant example of his poor judgment of women. He’d thought she was the real thing once upon a time, too.

He knew better than to trust anyone too fast-much less to trust his own instincts.

“Cord?” Sophie had clearly been trying to snare his attention for a good minute or two.

“I’m sorry. I was thinking about my brother.”

“Of course you were.” Her eyes softened in sympathy. “I’ll quit babbling, just give you the box of mail. And you can tell me what you decide about Caviar, whenever you get around to it. Right now I assume you’re going across the hall to Jon’s-”

“Yes.”

“So bang on the door if you need anything.”

Sophie started humming the minute she closed the door. That had gone well, she thought.

For a few moments there, Cord had made her feel uneasy. He just seemed to, well, look at her. Really look. As if he were interested. As if he saw something beyond the black-framed glasses and sisterly smiles and ordinary person.

She retrieved her coffee and plunked herself down at the kitchen table, determined to get an hour or two of translating work done. Naturally, Caviar immediately leaped onto the tabletop and sank, purring, on top of the files she was trying to read. She stroked him absently, musing that probably her restlessness around Cord had an entirely different reason.

Cord was a hunk. Naturally, he’d made her blood spin a little. He had that all-guy walk, the biceps, the crooked smile. He was way beyond adorable. He was sharp, smart, dangerous-looking.

As worrisome as that observation should have been, she yawned as she batted Caviar’s paw from the computer screen. Her avatar shot up with the familiar adage: “There’s no such thing as being too safe.”

Her sisters claimed it was her mantra, which was true. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men. One of the reasons the traveling in her job had started to nag was that she really wanted a chance to find a guy, settle down, have some kids. But she wanted a man like…well, like her dad. Too many men out there today were all about themselves, treating sex with the casualness of an after-dinner brandy.

She grabbed a pen, scooched Caviar another inch off the papers and heard the phone ring. She picked it up.

No one there, just a hangup.

She settled back down for a solid twenty minutes, when the landline rang again. Again she picked it up.

Again, there was no one on the other side.

Abruptly she stood up, rubbed her hands down her thighs. Not that she spooked easily…but she spooked easily. She had from the time of her parents’ death, but her next-door neighbor’s death had certainly brought her nerves out of storage. No matter how certain the police were that Jon’s death was an accident, Sophie still felt something more had happened.

As if to punctuate her edginess, she jumped when she heard the sudden rap on her front door.

Cord stood on the other side. “I’m sorry to bother you, but…” Caviar shot between her legs, through his and into the open door of Jon’s apartment. Cord stared after the loose feline, then back at her, frowning at her expression. “What’s wrong? I mean, besides the cat.”

“Nothing.”

“You’re white as a sheet.”

“Too much rain. Not enough sun.” It was a dumb thing to say, but abruptly she realized her heart had picked up a new, exuberant pounding-not from fear this time. It was from being inches too close to Cord. That problem, thankfully, was readily fixable. “I’ll chase after Caviar. The thing is, he’s used to being able to shoot back and forth between the two apartments-Oh.” Midflight, she stopped abruptly. “I forgot to ask why you knocked on the door. What do you need?”

“Do you know anything about the fancy technology my brother set up in his place?”

“Like what?” She forgot being spooked. The groan in his voice was just funny. Pretty clearly, Cord wasn’t the kind of man who tolerated frustration well-or enjoyed asking anyone for help.

She identified the crisis two seconds after entering Jon’s apartment.

She’d encountered precisely the same problem the first time she babysat for Caviar. The light switch on the living room east wall didn’t turn on lights. It had been rewired to turn on Ravel’s “Bolero,” close the living room drapes, and start the gas-lit fireplace.

She hiked across the room to the light switch by the drapes, hit it.

The seductive music quit. The gas-lit fire fizzled out. Only the drapes stayed closed.

“What the hell was that?” Cord murmured.

“You don’t recognize a staged seduction scene when you see it?”

He scraped a hand through his hair. “Um…to tell you the truth, no.”

The thought seeped into her mind that Cord really wouldn’t stage anything artificial or contrived with a woman. He wouldn’t need to. But she shifted her attention back on track. “You had to know your brother loved gadgets. I always wondered why he didn’t make his living as an inventor. Good grief, what’s that smell?”

Normally, she’d have waited for an answer before charging into someone else’s space, but it was fairly obvious that Cord-no matter how smart-was way, way over his head. No one had been inside the place since the police investigation, and naturally their prime concern hadn’t been housekeeping. She had a key, but since Caviar was already safe at her place, she figured she didn’t have a reason-or right-to use it.

The bottom line, though, was a symphony of ghastly smells emanating from the kitchen. The sources were easy enough to identify-an uncleaned litter box, some garbage rotting in the disposal and trash, and then there was the opened refrigerator door, which Cord had obviously been trying to clean out.

“That was where I was working,” he said. “Obviously, I couldn’t do anything else until I cleaned out the rotten fruit and meat, and it was pretty disgusting, so I threw open the window and then walked into the other room for some fresh air. Only, I turned on the living room light-”

“And immediately got stripper music,” she said wryly.

He washed a hand over his face. “Look. The smells have to go. And then the place has to be completely aired out before I can pretend to tackle anything else. I don’t suppose you’d be up for a walk somewhere? Lunch?”

“I don’t think…” But she hesitated. “You want to talk about your brother,” she murmured compassionately.

It was his turn to hesitate. “Yeah. Of course I do.”

“Okay then. We’ll just take a quick break, all right?”

“Right.”

Cord hadn’t been lying. He needed fresh air, thinking time away from his brother’s place would help to clear out the cobwebs in his head.

More by instinct than intention, he steered Sophie at a brisk pace toward Georgetown. The hike down Pennsylvania Avenue was as peaceful as a tornado drill, between nonstop sirens and barking horns and the occasional thrown-up barrier when a fancy limo or security entourage took over the streets. Oddly, all that craziness struck Cord as comforting. It was just a status quo day around D.C.

What distinctly wasn’t status quo was the woman striding next to him.

Looking at the surface facts, Sophie was everything the cops had led him to expect.

She knew his brother’s apartment, knew all the details of Jon’s corny seduction setup. Very well.

She was jumpy around him, the way a guilty person was jumpy.

And she was so damned easy to be with that he had to believe she could con anyone. God knew, she’d gotten him to readily talk, when Cord had never been a chatterer with anyone.

Of course, he did have stuff he could naturally ask her. “I hate to admit it,” he muttered, “but I’m downright confused by my brother’s place. I’m not a techno-innocent.” An understatement, not that he was going to get into security programs and codes with her. “I can usually get around any computer system. But I don’t know what Jon’s interest was in all that…gadgetry.”

Her chuckle was warmer than sunlight. “I take it you’d never been in your brother’s apartment before?”

“No.”

“But surely you knew he was a hard-core tinkerer. He seemed to spend his insomnia time inventing stuff that had no use to anyone-except him.”

Damn, but she forced him to chuckle now. “Yeah, in a way. I mean, as a kid, no clock or watch was safe around Jon. He loved inventing things, putting spare parts together and coming up with god-knows-what. But I’m finding switches and locks that seem to go nowhere in that apartment.”

“Even worse, because he was renting. I’m afraid you’ll never get your damage deposit back,” she murmured.

By then they’d reached the Potomac. The river was the color of pewter, the skies a matching moody gray. Yet, in spite of the gloom, in spite of the stress surrounding Jon’s death, Cord found his spirits lifting from just being around her. Since they’d walked this far, he chose a restaurant he was familiar with-a second-story bar, with a view over the river. She wanted a hot mug of tea; he ordered a tall-necked amber.

“I’m not worried about the damage deposit. I’m just…trying to understand what was going on in his life.”

“It doesn’t sound as if you and Jon were very close.”

“Sure we were. As a close as a cougar and a fox raised in the same den.”

“Uh-oh,” she murmured, and had him smiling again.

He was honest. No reason not to be. “I keep trying to think back to something Jon and I saw eye to eye on. Maybe we could agree the sky was blue on some summer days, but that’s about the end of it.”

She cocked her head, her gaze compassionate. “So you really must feel stuck, having to deal with all his business and stuff.”

“I do. But there’s no one else to do it, so that’s that.” He took a long pull from the bottle. “Are you from a big family?”

“Yes and no. Originally there were five of us-my mom and dad, and three girls. I was the baby.” She dropped her eyes from his. “Unfortunately, there was a fire when I was around five. We not only lost our parents in one fell swoop, but for a long time we lost each other. No one could foster the three of us together, so we were separated.”

“That’s not just rough. That’s god-awful,” he said quietly.

“I have to say…it was. But I was fostered out to a really terrific couple-older-both professors at Georgetown. It was a quiet, safe home in every way. Couldn’t have been a more calming situation for a terrorized little kid. They were wonderful to me.”

“Are they still around?”

“I only wish. But cancer took Mary a few years ago, and William had a stroke the next year. They were both past sixty when they took me. Anyway, my oldest sister-Cate-never stopped looking for the two of us. She found me first, then Lily. We may not all live in the same city, but we’re close enough, phone talk or e-mail talk all the time.” She lifted her eyes, “Which is partly why I’m sorry you weren’t close with your brother. Family’s everything when the road gets rough. As a little girl, I used to have nightmares about being abandoned, lost without anyone. Finding my sisters again has been so great…”

Cord fell silent, trying to imagine a sedate, older couple taking in a rambunctious five-year-old…and what that must have been like for Sophie, to not only lose her parents, but then her sisters. Yet again, he couldn’t fathom that anyone with that background could turn into a money-grubbing, ruthless woman who’d pair with his brother. No matter how he turned those cards around, they just didn’t play. If she was a hussy who blackmailed people for sport, he’d eat snails.

More complicated yet, the more he spent time with her, the more he felt an electric, emphatic pull toward her. He wanted to hear more. To look more. To touch.

His grip tightened around the long-necked bottle of beer. “Sophie, you were around Jon enough. Can you tell me what his job was, how he made a living?”

“His job-no. I mean, he used to laugh and say he was a bureaucrat, then just drop it. It’s not as if I was in Jon’s confidence. The only reason I knew some things was because…well, because he was gone so much. He needed someone around for Caviar, to be there to pick up packages, his mail, that kind of thing. It wasn’t one-sided. Whenever I’d leave for the weekend to see my sisters or something like that, he offered to watch over my place the same way.”

Cord figured he was going to have to get blunter, or they’d never get down to any brass tacks. “The picture I’ve gotten…Jon had a lot of women friends.”

Color climbed her cheeks. “Yes. I’d say more than ‘a lot.’”

“Yet you were always the one he asked to watch the place when he was gone?”

She nodded. “I guess that does seem weird, doesn’t it? But actually, he really didn’t have women at the apartment all that often. Or if he did, they didn’t tend to stay the night.” She suddenly tensed up. “Not that I was watching his every move-”

“I didn’t mean to suggest you were. I’m just trying to understand anything I can, about his life, about what happened to him. Anything you could tell me would help.”

She relaxed again. “Well, as odd as this sounds…I don’t think your brother particularly trusted the women he got involved with. I mean, he never seemed to turn down a party. Always seemed to have a good time. But almost no one came back to the apartment more than once. He was kind of like Caviar. Go out and howl in the night, but come back to nest someplace alone when he was tired.”

“But he trusted you,” Cord pressed.

“I believe he did…but I think for obvious reasons. He looked at me and just didn’t see anyone particularly…interesting. Not for him. So we made good neighbors. Seriously good neighbors, actually.”

Cord stared at her. She didn’t see herself as interesting or sexually appealing to Jon? Or interesting to a man in general, her tone had implied. With that skin, those eyes, that soft red mouth?

For Pete’s sake, was she a fabulous fake or the real thing? An award-winning actress or just what she seemed like-the genuine article?

A complex, interesting, and damn beautiful woman.

He spun that word beautiful in his mind for a moment. God knew, it wasn’t his first impression of her. At first sight, he’d summed her up as frumpy. Lumpy. Dorky.

“What?” she asked warily, when she realized he was staring at her.

“You took off your glasses,” he said.

“Oh. I just forget sometimes.” Immediately, she popped them back on her nose.

But now he peered closer. They sure as hell looked like clear lenses to him. A disguise. To hide those damn incredible eyes.

Cord resisted the urge to pull out his hair. Whether or not he could trust Sophie should have been clear by now. In the ultraquiet work he’d done for the government, no one had ever doubted his judgment. But then came Zoe, of course. Life-and-death decisions seemed a whole lot easier than any conclusions he could draw about women.

And in the meantime, she’d finished her tea; he’d sure as hell finished his beer, and he had no more answers now than when he’d taken this break.

When he reached for the bill, Sophie leaped to her feet as fast as he did. “I need to get back, too,” she said swiftly.

“I never meant to steal this much of your Sunday afternoon.”

“I offered to help,” she reminded him.

“I know you did. And to tell the truth…” He hesitated. “When we get back, could I ask for a couple more minutes of your time? Not a ton. I’d just appreciate your running through the place, see if you’re familiar with any more of my brother’s fancy gadgets. I’d just as soon not set off any unintentional alarms.”

She smiled. “Sure. In fact…if no one showed you Jon’s security setup already, I can do that, too.”

A frisky breeze nipped at their cheeks on the walk back. Sophie kept up with his brisk stride, as if she liked a fast pace as much as he did, but Cord noted that she stayed a few inches apart, her hands tucked in her pockets, as if making a point not to encourage any physical contact. Still, she kept shooting him quiet glances.

Both of them were probably doing the same thing. Cord suspected she had her own reasons for sizing him up, measuring who he was-especially because she obviously didn’t have too high an opinion of his brother.

Once back at the Foggy Bottom brownstone, she came in, as asked, but she made a point of not shedding her jacket-just started a free-flow information spill. It wasn’t babbling. She really knew a lot about Jon’s apartment.

“The thing is, Cord, a hundred years ago, this building was a single-family residence-so my half of the upstairs isn’t a mimic of your brother’s. Jon’s side is bigger. But it’s more than that. The odd shape of Jon’s kitchen is probably because it was once a bedroom…”

He’d been through the place before, obviously, but Sophie made him see the layout with new eyes. Jon may have picked an old place because architecturally, there were more ways to hide things. The kitchen may have once been a bedroom, but it was predictably stuffed with new appliances and gadgets. The red-and-black bathroom had been outfitted with a towel warmer, a disappearing steam machine, a cupboard that revealed a chilled square-for drinks? Food? God knew.

Still, past the living room and kitchen and bedroom was the only beyond-weird room in the flat. Cord stood in the doorway, hands on hips, feeling as if he’d just stepped into a sci-fi setting. Sophie ambled right in. “I never saw Jon’s bedroom, so I don’t know what’s in there. But this was your brother’s…sandbox, so to speak. The room where he played. And it’s the room he told me most about, because when he was gone for a night or two, he worried about the security in here.”

Cord knew computers and security setups, but nothing remotely like this. Not for a private citizen, anyway. A square platform desk took up the room’s center, covered with four functioning computers and symbiotic hardware. Writhing snakes of electric cords tangled every which way. Beneath the single window was a long bench table, obviously a worktable of some kind.

“No,” Sophie said suddenly.

“What?”

“You don’t want to touch that picture,” she warned him.

“Why?” For some insane reason, Jon had hung an incongruous and tasteless picture of a naked Mona Lisa on the inside wall. Sophie suddenly showed up beside him, touched “the smile”-and all the computers abruptly when blank.

She touched the eyes in the painting, and throughout the room, locks turned on all the desk and file drawers.

And then she chuckled at Cord’s expression. “I know. I can’t imagine why Jon did it, either. He just seemed to have fun with this kind of thing. He was always afraid I’d come in to feed Caviar when he was gone and I’d touch something by mistake.”

She motioned to a specific tile in the checkerboard floor. “If you step on that square, you’ll set off an alarm in the kitchen. Caviar’s done it a few times, although I think Cav’s figured out most of Jon’s booby traps by now. You see that weird little square quilt on the wall? It really is a quilt, but if you poke it, it opens up to a mini bar, with drinks and glasses. It shares the same wall as the kitchen, and he put this in so he didn’t have to walk all the way around the hall to get a drink and put in his dirty dishes. Jon was on the lazy side. And then…”

She shifted past him, leading him back toward the kitchen. “I know you’ve already seen this room, but this drawer here-” She pulled at the latch, revealing the usual catchall utensil drawer everybody had, the one that held a hammer and screwdriver and flashlight and all the junk that refused to belong anywhere else. “The drawer doesn’t have a false bottom, but see? There’s a row of three buttons here. The first shoots the dead bolts on the front and back doors. The middle one shuts off all the lights in the house. Pretty silly, if you ask me. Why would you want to be standing in the kitchen in a dark house? Anyway. The third one…um, shoot. Your brother only told me about this stuff once, and I never thought about it again. I forgot what Jon told me the third button was for.”

She glanced up with an impish smile, clearly wanting to share humor at his brother’s idiosyncratic ideas.

Cord was inches away from her at that second. Inches away from that smile, those silly glasses. Inches away from the woman who’d been confounding him from the minute he met her. From the very beginning, he was uncertain whether she was saint or sinner…angel or thief…a truly fascinating woman or a manipulative sociopath.

But it was about time he found out.

So maybe a kiss wasn’t alchemy. Maybe there was no miracle test to definitively separate the truth from the lies. But he knew something definitive the instant his mouth dropped on hers.

He lifted his head with a frown. She lifted her head with the same perplexed frown.

Some instinct made him pluck the glasses from her nose, set them on the counter, then go back for another kiss. This one involved tongues and teeth and pressure. This one involved framing her head in his hands and closing his eyes.

Her mouth was softer than butter. The way she stilled reminded him of a doe in a buck’s sights. She went soft-still, worried-still…yet she didn’t bolt. Cautiously, carefully, her lips returned the pressure, as if she were sampling him no differently than he, as he was getting a serious, deep taste of her.

And then her arms reached out, reached up, the bulk of her jacket making a whiskery sound when her hands locked behind his neck. A groan, helpless and vulnerable, shuddered from the very back of her throat. Suddenly she was up on tiptoe, kissing him back, offering her mouth, her tongue. She was like…a firecracker. It was as if a fuse suddenly lit, a spark that suddenly flared into a female combustible firestorm in three seconds flat.

Or maybe that was ten seconds.

And maybe six or seven kisses had passed by then, because he seemed to have hooked his arms around her waist and lifted her up to the counter. She was too damn short to bend down to kiss-at least to kiss the right way-for very long.

He told himself he had outstanding reasons to be suspicious. She was trouble. To the bone.

And God knew, he had a hard one by then.

Only, she kissed with the wild winsomeness of an untried virgin. Expressing yearning. Need. And hunger-the shaking-out-of-control kind, the vulnerable kind, the kind you never unlocked your doors for unless you were damned sure what kind of partner you were dealing with.

Finally he tore his mouth free from hers. Needing oxygen. Needing sanity. Frowning at her with even deeper, darker frustration than when they’d first started this. “What the hell was that?” he muttered.

She was breathing hard, too, her face flushed and her mouth wet-and she glowered at him with the same impatience. “Don’t you mess with me, Cord.”

“Me?”

“I’m not a player. If you’re like your brother, just move on. There are many super women out there. Lots of women looking for fun. Or just a good game. That’s not me. Leave me alone if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“I wasn’t looking for anything.”

“Well, I wasn’t, either,” she said grumpily, and slid off the counter. She moved past him, called out, “Caviar!”

The mangy thing appeared instantly, shot Cord a look and an annoyed flick of his tail, then took off with Sophie. He heard the door slam. Then they were both gone.

Okay, he thought. Okay…that had really proved something.

What, he had no idea.

Except that he needed to sit down before he fell down. For days, there’d been nothing on his mind but his brother’s killer. Now, all he could think about was a far more enticing danger.

Damn, but that woman could kiss.