Secretive Stranger

by Jennifer Greene

  Penelope sighed with disappointment and stood up. “Darn it. I was hoping you’d picked up more. You’d tell me if you found out anything, wouldn’t you? You know…Jan always bragged about sleeping with Jon. But I’d feel bad if she somehow got hurt because of it. If you found out something, we could try to protect her.”

  “I’d hate to think of her getting hurt, too.”

  Penelope pulled on her coat. “I’ve made this sound like a selfish visit. You know I love scandal. But I was honestly worried about Jan. And much more, about you. That break-in was no small thing. Anytime you want me to stay with you, just give me a call. You still must be petrified.”

  Sophie didn’t think she was suffering leftover symptoms from the break-in-until she almost jumped out of her skin when she heard the next rap on the door.

  Penelope had been gone for more than a half hour by then, and Sophie had installed herself in front of her computer, saving-and double saving-the interview work she’d done that day. She was afraid to trust her hard drive or her backup. Afraid every time she heard a creak in the walls or a whistle of wind.

  When she heard the second rap on the door, she thought: It has to be Cord. So it’s okay.

  Only, her heart was still thundering like a wild drum. Apparently, nothing was going to be “okay.” Any sense of safety in her life, in her heart, had been frayed at the edges.

  There was no “safe” anymore. She’d learned that at five years old. How could she have forgotten that?

  When Cord charged up the stairs and thumped on Sophie’s door, he was wound tighter than a violin string. The meeting with Ferrell and Bassett had been unsettling and tricky.

  The problems with his brother kept becoming more complex, more ugly, more dangerous. Cord was a problem solver. Give him an avalanche or a fire or an accident, and he dove right in-no fear, no hesitation. It wasn’t as if he liked trouble, but he thrived when he had something to do. This business of waiting and waiting and waiting for another axe to fall, another piece to fit in the blackmail puzzle, was grating on his nerves.

  When Sophie didn’t respond, he knuckled her door again, this time harder. He shifted his feet. Rolled his shoulders. His nerves sharpened another notch.

  All day, he’d wanted to see her.

  All day, he’d worried about seeing her. He had no idea-none-how she’d greet him. If she’d regret last night or be happy about it. If she’d want to talk about what it meant, or want to pretend it never happened. If she’d shy from him like a wary colt, or assume last night meant…what?

  Hell, he didn’t know what last night meant himself. He knew he was wary of trusting another woman since Zoe…but he’d sure as hell trusted Sophie last night, in every way a man can trust a woman. Whatever name you wanted to call it, Cord wanted her with him every night, all night, for as long as she was willing.

  Still…that didn’t absolve him of responsibility for what his brother had gotten Sophie embroiled in. Cord had only put her in a more dangerous position since Jon’s murder. Bottom line was that, if he were Sophie-he’d kick him out of her life so fast, it’d make his head spin.

  When she didn’t respond to the second knock, he frowned and rapped one more time-about to start getting damn worried-when Sophie suddenly yanked open the door.

  Whatever he’d expected or been braced for, it wasn’t a flying blonde.

  She almost knocked him over. Damn woman leaped, slapped her arms around his neck and then just hung there, holding tight. Not breathing. Not speaking. Not moving. Just holding.

  He closed his eyes, inhaled her scent, the tickle of her hair, the warmth of her body. Crazy as it sounded, that’s all he needed or wanted to do for those moments. Hold her. Just like this. Eventually, though, his vocal cords functioned enough to say, “Not having the best day, huh?”

  “Awful.” Finally, she lifted her head, released him from that gluelike clutch hold. “I wasn’t going to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Say hi this way. I don’t want you to think I’m a clinger. Or a chaser. But the thing is…you’ve probably had an awful day, too.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  “And it’s because of Jon. Or connected to Jon.”

  “Right again.”

  “So, who else can we possibly hug about this except each other?”

  “This is about hugs, is it?”

  Her cheeks flushed like a child’s. So it wasn’t about hugs. For her or him. And maybe she wasn’t all that easy with last night, but her eyes still met his squarely, flush or no flush. She wasn’t denying what happened between them. Or trying to.

  She wasn’t denying wanting him, either.

  Although she did suddenly ease away. “Hey. No diversions until we get some work done. We need answers. We need information. This limbo land of waiting for the next crisis to get heaped on our heads is hugely not fun.”

  “We also need food.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  He had Thai delivered, her choice. It was clearly a favorite of both hers and Caviar’s, since the cat hung over the edge of the computer desk, occasionally trying to bat the chopsticks from her hand. Worse yet, Sophie shared. With the cat.

  How could he possibly be involved with a woman who shared Thai with a cat?

  Out of the complete blue, words came out of his mouth that he never planned. “I was involved before.”

  “Yeah?” She lifted her eyes to his immediately, which gave the cat the opportunity for an extra steal.

  He stood up, bunched up the napkins and boxes and debris. His voice came out light, easy, like he was telling her about the weather. “Yeah. Zoe. That was her name. Closest I came to marriage. In fact, we’d have been married if both of us hadn’t had a lot of travel with our work, so we hadn’t yet pinned down a date. Anyway. It was when my mother got sick. I quit the job and moved back here. She didn’t like that, and that was that.”

  Soph rose, too, and dove into the cleanup with him. “If she hurt you, she’s dead to me.”

  Of all the crazy things to say, he mused. But he didn’t go on. He hadn’t known he was going to even mention Zoe. And after that, they both dove into their attack plan for the evening.

  The plan, simply, was to follow the money. Couldn’t have been more trite or stereotypical, but hell, that was because it generally worked. The police believed they’d been through Jon’s records from every possible angle already-but Sophie figured she’d look at the numbers from a female perspective, and immersed herself in front of Jon’s computers.

  Cord parked himself on the floor with boxes of old records. The cat, for no known reason, chose to sidle next to him. At least a half hour passed before either of them spoke.

  “Cord?”

  “Hmm.” God. What his brother had spent on himself and pleasure boggled the mind. And where and how Jon could afford it all made Cord even more uneasy.

  “Did you check Jon’s mailbox today?”

  “No. But I will right now.” He jumped up immediately. Sitting still that long was straight torture. And since he had that outstanding excuse to move, he stalked behind her and dropped a kiss on the back of her neck-that spot with the down-soft hair and the silky white skin.

  “Do not seduce me now,” she complained.

  He hadn’t been. At least not exactly. He just couldn’t get that “if she hurt you, she’s dead to me” out of his head. It was so like Sophie to spill out her heart in a single, bold stroke.

  He hustled downstairs and scooped the junk from the mailbox, started sifting through it all on the climb back up. Catalogs. Bills. More bills. Junk mail. And then…an envelope with a Cayman Islands address. A bank. It stopped him dead.

  When he came back into the apartment, the darn cat-of course-tried to trip him. He was batting around a rolled-up piece of paper as if it were the best toy a human had ever given him. “Sophie?” How long had he been gone? Three minutes, four? She was no longer sitting in the computer room, although the printer was spewing out a long se
quence of sheets.

  He found her in the kitchen, crawled up on the counter, looking in the back of the top cupboard-heaven knew why.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.

  “I found something. Something not good.”

  One short glance, and he could see her complexion had gone from healthy pink to chalk. “What?”

  “I’ll tell you. Right away. But sit down. I’m looking for whiskey or scotch or something.”

  “Another drinking night?” he murmured.

  “For you, not me. I just made myself tea.”

  As if to illustrate the point, the microwave pinged. He plucked out her mug. For him, she pulled out a bottle of Talisker from the top shelf, opened it, reared her head away, as if the smell alone could give her sunburn, and scrambled in the cupboards for a glass. By then, she’d leaped back down to the floor and served him the drink-raw, no ice, no water.

  “That might be a little strong,” he mentioned.

  “Trust me. You’ll need it all.”

  “I found something, too. Something not so good, either.”

  “Wait!” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “I need my bracer of tea first. How bad’s your news?”

  “Bad.”

  “Well, mine’s worse. Mine is so bad that, if I were next door, I’d be cracking open the whole box of Oreos.”

  Damn, but she was forcing him to smile. He didn’t doubt she’d found something troubling. He knew he had. But being with her could probably make hell almost better.

  “Okay,” she said and gulped a sip of tea. “I’m ready.”

  So he spilled his first. “My brother received an accounting from an offshore bank. It doesn’t mention the account amount. It wouldn’t. It just reports what he earned in interest for the last three months.”

  “This is scary?”

  “I’d say ten thousand bucks-over that short period of time, for one account-is on the road to damn scary.”

  She took another gulp. “You don’t suppose he just had a really high-yielding CD?”

  Double damn, but he had to laugh. And she knew he couldn’t help it, because she smiled right back at him. “So,” she said cheerfully, “it looks as if Jon had been thriving in his blackmail career for quite a while. It’s not everyone who has that kind of job skill, Cord.”

  “Trust you to see the positive.”

  “Hey, at least he was good at it. Money seems to be showing up all over the place around here.” She braced, then clunked down her tea. “Okay. My turn. I was following the money, as we talked about. Going through the list of accounts in Jon’s Quicken. I can’t imagine he’d use an open program like that if he was trying to hide anything, so it was just as unlikely the police thought anything looked suspicious. And maybe they were right. But I found a payment of fifteen hundred dollars a month for the last eighteen or nineteen months to the same place.”

  “What was the name?”

  “JONA.”

  Cord shook his head, mystified. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “I’m not through.” Her tone softened, the humor gone. “Once I pinned that down, I went back to when this all started. Around eighteen months ago, Jon paid a ton of credit card bills to various stores.”

  “Nothing odd about that.”

  “These stores were, like Toys ’R Us. A furniture store specializing in baby furniture. Several hundred dollars spent at another place, called Babies and Blankets.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” Cord frowned.

  Since he wasn’t drinking it, Sophie reached over, took his shooter of Talisker and threw back a slug. After another minute or two of violent coughing, she croaked, “I’m afraid it will. Wait a minute.”

  She charged back into the computer room and came back with her booty from the printer. The four pictures were grainy, poor-quality prints, but they illustrated the same thing-a baby. The first was a newborn shot, followed by a baby who was obviously a little older, and finally, a shot of a toothless, hairless, chubby-cheeked baby in a red-and-white Valentine dress.

  “A baby,” Cord said blankly. And without pause, swallowed three solid gulps of the Talisker-a drink that deserved being savored with respect. “This can’t be what it looks like. You’re telling me my brother had a baby? On top of all the crap he pulled on people.”

  “I keep thinking that maybe there’s some other explanation. But I can’t think of one. He’s been paying regular support, paid for a bunch when the baby was born. The pattern’s pretty inescapable.” Sophie studied the last photo, then said, “Looks as if you have a niece, judging from the dress.”

  Cord pushed away from the kitchen counter, the way a boxer might shoot off the ropes. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “We are?”

  “I’ve had enough. So have you. Enough of bad news and sad news. Enough of sleazy behavior and roads that lead to more sleazy behavior. Enough focusing on my brother.”

  “But, Cord, we’ve finally broken through, really started making some major discoveries. For the first time, I think we have a shot at figuring out the player, or players, in this whole mess. But maybe we should even be calling the police, telling them what we found out-”

  “A lot of shoulds and coulds in that scenario. And I agree with you, Soph. But not right this second. Right this second, we’re dumping this pop stand.”

  “Where to?” she asked bewilderedly.

  Chapter 8

  Sophie was still trying to fathom it. How they’d ended up here.

  She’d never been to Silver’s before-never heard of it, and probably never would have, if Cord hadn’t dragged her here. The place was stuffed with young professional people, even this late on a Thursday night. Most looked as if they’d come directly from their jobs, judging from the business suits on the men and the heels on the women, and typical of Washington, the buzz was all about the day’s political events.

  For an after-work hangout, the place struck Sophie as unusually appealing. The long bar gleamed under firelight and antique brass lanterns. Round ma hog any tables were packed in tight, but a few revelers had left their seats, pushed off suit coats and kicked off heels, abandoned their drinks and hit the corner dance floor. The music emanated from a new-fashioned jukebox-not the 50s era, art-deco type of box, but a brass-and-glass player with high-end speakers. Instead of quarters, the machine demanded bucks, and someone had emptied their pockets of singles to play a run of slow, bluesey love songs.

  Those on the dance floor had abandoned politics, power and DC gossip. Tummies rubbed tummies. Arms hooked around necks. Cheeks rested against shoulders. Everybody wasn’t addicted to stress, Sophie mused. Every once in a while, people actually remembered what life was really about.

  Like falling in love.

  Her mind wasn’t remotely on the rest of the crowd, yet somehow she’d helplessly, hopelessly picked up the prevailing mood. Her arms, for instance, were roped under Cord’s neck. Her cheek was definitely snuggled in the crook of his shoulder. Her tummy didn’t happen to be rubbing against his tummy, because of the difference in their heights, but her tummy was unquestionably rubbing against his pelvis. Her breasts hummed awareness at the evocative contact; her pulse thrummed to the evocative beat of the song. If her eyes weren’t smoky with shock, she thought they should be.

  The shock wasn’t finding herself in a place like this. The shock was that Cord had taken her here-apparently to dance. When he couldn’t dance. At all.

  He could make a girl fall in love, though.

  Since Sophie didn’t do reckless, didn’t want to do reckless, had never remotely even felt reckless since she was five, she figured this had to be Cord’s fault. She didn’t rub her tummy against a guy’s you-know-what. She didn’t look up at him, nakedly communicating longing and desire. She didn’t tease, with the graze of a breast, the tickle of a fingertip, the promise conveyed in the snuggle of body parts. She sure as Sam Hill didn’t put up with a guy stepping all over her feet.

  So
there was only one conclusion she could possibly reach-that Cord had forced her, completely against her will, to feel this way.

  “Are you thirsty?” she murmured. “We ordered drinks and then never even waited until they got to the table.”

  “Very thirsty. But not for drinks.” He looked at her…as if he were a starving lion, and she was the only thing he hungered for. As if she were standing naked and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. As if there wasn’t a thought in his head but wanting her.

  See, she told herself. It wasn’t her fault little shivers kept chasing up her spine. It was all his.

  “You don’t think,” she asked carefully, “that we should head home?”

  “Hell, no. There’s nothing waiting for us back there but more serious problems. More grenades without pins. We’re not going home. Maybe ever.”

  “Um, Cord.” She rubbed a finger on the nape of his neck. With her arms swooped protectively around him, she’d created a private cocoon between her face and his. Her eyes and his. She wasn’t sure which one of them needed more protecting, but for darn sure, the expression on his face was stark with stubbornness. “They’re going to close the place pretty soon.”

  “But not yet. It’s not closing yet.”

  “Don’t you have classes tomorrow?”

  “Yup. An eight o’clock class, in fact. Don’t care,” he said; and then, as if all this talking had exhausted him, ducked down just those few more inches so his mouth could touch hers. Claim hers. Woo hers.

  Her eyes closed. Plain old lust, she was positive she could have fought-or at least kept her head. But this cherishing, this tenderness, this wooing, was almost more than she could bear.

  “I’m wondering,” he murmured against her temple, “why I didn’t realize how beautiful you were when I first met you.”

  “Because you were sober then?”

  “I’m sober now. Which is why I have to be honest, and admit that at first I was fooled-by the bulky clothes and clumsy act and the glasses.”

  “I am clumsy. And I wear glasses.”