Jennifer Greene - Secretive Stranger

“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.