Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

Nothing was settled, as far as Sophie was concerned. The search continued. Her hands got shakier and her stomach queasier. The thief had pilfered through her freezer. What on earth had he expected to find there? And in her bedroom, drawers were yanked open, her lingerie and jewelry strewn all over the place, her mom’s pearls abandoned on the floor. The state of the pearls made her eyes sting more than anything else. She ran to pick them up-or tried to.

“No, Ms. Campbell,” Ian Ferrell said gently, “The best chance for us to find prints is to work with the items we know the perpetrator touched.”

Sophie hadn’t had a temper tantrum since she was five. She never lost it. Ever. But tarnation, she was coming darn close. “Those are my mother’s pearls. No one is taking my mother’s pearls or touching my mother’s pearls. That’s it, guys. That’s the line. I mean it-”

“Listen, Ms. Campbell,” Ferrell said patiently, “our guys will probably be here for just a couple of hours. Do you have somewhere you could go? There isn’t anything else you can help us with, so you could get some fresh air.”

“I don’t want fresh air, and I’m not leaving the cat.”

“Now just think,” Bassett said flatly, “you’re not going to feel safe staying here alone tonight anyway, are you? I’m sure the cat will be fine. And tomorrow morning, if you wouldn’t mind coming down to the station to make a statement-”

“Are you guys crazy or am I? I’ve already made a statement. I’ve told you everything I know. I’m the one who’s the victim here, remember?”

At the precise moment she was about to wring George Bassett’s jowly neck-or let a bunch of frustrated tears spring loose-she saw Cord striding in her front door.

Maybe she wasn’t the kind of woman to depend on a hero-and she hadn’t lived a life where she could possibly need one-but when he met her eyes, she flew toward him faster than a thief for a bank vault. He had her tucked under his shoulder in two seconds flat.

Every sensory nerve in her body took him in. His face was windburned, his pulse fast, as if he’d been running. He was wearing old corduroys and his battered sheepskin jacket, and he hadn’t shaved. The feel of his scratchy chin on her forehead, the heat and strength of his long, tall body-she couldn’t remember such a sense of belonging with someone else. Maybe she was just traumatized, but who cared? Damn but he felt good.

“You needed more hell, did you?” he murmured.

Naturally, she was curious how he’d showed up right then, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t care. “This has been a nightmare,” she said helplessly. “I can’t imagine why anyone would have done this to me. Why, how, who-anything. So much wealth around here, why would anyone pick on me?”

He didn’t answer, just took charge-not in a big, noisy way. He just stepped in, intervened. The next few minutes passed in such a blur that they barely registered. She noticed something in the way Bassett and Ferrell responded to his showing up, the way they talked to him-they knew Cord.

If that should have alerted something on her internal wary scale, it didn’t. Nothing did.

“I’m taking her out of here for a while,” Cord told the cops. “Get her something to eat, a drink.”

She said, “Caviar’s traumatized. I really don’t want to leave him alone.”

Cord noted the cat cuddled under her coat, gently hooked the mangy feline under an arm and escorted him to her bed in the other room. “He’s a tomcat,” he reminded her. “I do believe he’s had a few terrorizing experiences in the past and survived them.”

“But he’s a tomcat who came in from the cold. He wants shelter now. I don’t want to let him down.”

“Sophie.”

“What?”

“You’re not letting him down,” he said patiently. “We’re just getting out of here for a few minutes. Grab some food. Find a quiet place to just chill for a while. Then we’ll come back here. I’ll sleep next door. You won’t be alone. The cat won’t be alone. How’s that for a plan?”

It was a good plan. It was the best plan she’d ever heard. She wanted to be with Cord and away from here, more than anything she could imagine wanting.

But the complete trust she wanted to feel with him wasn’t quite there. She wanted it to be. Sophie knew perfectly well she was a sissy in the guy department, too damned afraid of being abandoned to give trust unless she had every lock latched, every T crossed, every possible question out on the table. But still…she couldn’t just make those worry buzzers in her heart totally shut off.

“I should call my sisters. And Jan and Hillary and Penelope-the neighborhood women. They’ll have seen the cop cars. They’ll be concerned.”

“So bring your cell,” Cord said.

Well, sheesh. After that, she couldn’t think of any more objections.

Bassett and Ferrell undoubtedly thought he was going along with their plans by getting Sophie out of the way, but Cord’s motivation came from an entirely different source.

Outside, his car was double-parked-not an uncommon occurrence around D.C.-but at the cost of tickets, a lot easier to pull off when you had the authorities’ permission. Sophie didn’t seem to notice where he was parked. When he helped her into the passenger seat of his Bronc, she flinched at the passing lights of a cop car. By the time he’d started the engine, his jaw felt glued together.

She looked more fragile than a rose petal. Fragile, crushable and damned scared. She got out her cell phone, obviously intending to call her sisters and friends, but for a few moments she just sat silently, locked in her seat belt and folded up inside her jacket as if hoping she could disappear.

Cord weaved in and out of traffic, turning right on Pennsylvania, his veins pumping adrenaline. He wished she could do exactly that-disappear. The woman was in danger. And because the cops thought Sophie was guilty of something, they weren’t going to protect her. They wanted to use her.

It was Ferrell who’d called him, and that message was still ringing in his mind. Ferrell told him about the break-in, told him if there was ever a good shot at getting information out of Sophie Campbell, it was now. She could have staged the break-in herself, to divert suspicion. If she hadn’t, then whoever Cord’s brother had been blackmailing believed that Sophie either had the evidence-or knew where it was.

Jon’s autopsy had come back. There’d been two critical blows-one to the back of the head, one to the forehead. The latter had propelled him down the stairs, and was how he’d ended up lying on his back, but it had been the first blow that had really been the killer. There was no hard evidence to pin down the culprit, but according to Bassett, it was either a woman or a short man.

The cops had figured the killer as a woman from the start. More than ever, they wanted Cord to grill Sophie. Or as Ferrell put it, grill her or seduce her. Whatever worked to get information from her.

Cord’s grip tightened on the wheel while he listened to her calling friends on her cell phone. She left messages for her sisters, didn’t reach Hillary, but connected to Jan Howell…who questioned her on every detail, what happened, what the cops said, what she’d said, making promises to tell everyone else so she didn’t have to repeat the call, offering to immediately come over-on and on. When Sophie hung up, she leaned back against the seat as if too wiped out to hold her head up.

“Hillary…she’s the one with the extraordinary, um…?” Cord had a hard time keeping the brunettes straight.

“Boobs. Yes.” Sophie didn’t open her eyes. “That figure of hers is so ironic. She’s soft-spoken, very shy, and a doctor-smarter than any ten people I know. Yet all people notice are her looks.”