Knight in Blue Jeans Read Free Page B

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. “Doyou 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
    “S o 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