Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

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.

Sophie switched off her recorder and stood up. “You’ve been wonderful, Mrs. Hoffman.” It had been a productive Monday afternoon, but she could see her eighty-one-year-old interviewee was wilted now.

“You’ve brought my memories to life again, child,” Mrs. Hoffman answered in German. She, too, stood up, with the help of a cane. “No one ever listened to my side before.”

“They should have.” Maybe it was a job, but Sophie still leaned over to kiss Mrs. Hoffman’s cheek. Before gathering up her work and jacket, she carted the German porcelain cup to the miniature kitchen in the back. Mrs. Hoffman always served some kind of fancy tea, but Sophie didn’t want the elderly woman cleaning up after her.

Her mind was still spinning from the stories Greta Hoffman had shared. She’d been just a girl when Hitler had invaded “her” Austria. She remembered a boisterously noisy city turning suddenly silent.

“People who talked suddenly disappeared-or were just plain shot down on the street, as if they were rabid dogs,” Mrs. Hoffman recounted. “Men used to go to the beer gardens to talk politics-that stopped. Women used to chatter with neighbors at the grocer’s-that all stopped. After the war, when people kept saying, how could you have let this happen, how could you not have known? About the gas chambers. The Jews.”

Sophie had heard this before, all through these hours of interviews, but Greta’s eyes were lonely and sad, lost in her old memories.

“What people didn’t understand is that we were all afraid. To speak against Hitler meant death. Day by day, month by month, more and more people disappeared. We knew they were dead. In our hearts, we knew. But we were all frightened of dying, too. So we walked with our heads down and we hid in our houses. My father…I still remembered his slapping my face. I’d laughed at something. On the street. Laughed out loud, drawing attention to myself. My father had never hit me before…”

It was another half hour before Sophie could make it to the door and really mean her “goodbye” this time.

“It was the whispers that were dangerous,” Mrs. Hoffman echoed again. “Any whisper of a transgression could bring on certain death. You didn’t have to do anything wrong. You were judged by those rumors alone. You think whispers have no power…but they do, child, they do.”

Night had fallen hard and cold by the time Sophie climbed onto the metro. From there she walked the few blocks home, carrying the usual ten tons of equipment and satchels, on crackling leaves, through wisps of fog.

She’d thought of Cord all day-and all last night-yet now Mrs. Hoffman’s words made her think of him in a different context. Greta’s comments about whispers and rumors nailed the whole atmosphere around D.C. Some said the city thrived on the power of whispers.

Cord’s brother had sure seemed to thrive on whispers and intrigue.

Sophie crossed the road, heard a horn blare at her lack of attention, and then hustled the last half block toward home. She wished she knew whether Cord thrived on intrigue the way his brother had.

The kisses from the day before had haunted her sleep, her daydreams…like a whisper that only her heart could hear. There was no shutting it off.