course. Life-and-death decisions seemed a whole lot easier than any conclusions he could draw about women.
And in the meantime, she’d finished her tea; he’d sure as hell finished his beer, and he had no more answers now than when he’d taken this break.
When he reached for the bill, Sophie leaped to her feet as fast as he did. “I need to get back, too,” she said swiftly.
“I never meant to steal this much of your Sunday afternoon.”
“I offered to help,” she reminded him.
“I know you did. And to tell the truth…” He hesitated. “When we get back, could I ask for a couple more minutes of your time? Not a ton. I’d just appreciate your running through the place, see if you’re familiar with any more of my brother’s fancy gadgets. I’d just as soon not set off any unintentional alarms.”
She smiled. “Sure. In fact…if no one showed you Jon’s security setup already, I can do that, too.”
A frisky breeze nipped at their cheeks on the walk back. Sophie kept up with his brisk stride, as if she liked a fast pace as much as he did, but Cord noted that she stayed a few inches apart, her hands tucked in her pockets, as if making a point not to encourage any physical contact. Still, she kept shooting him quiet glances.
Both of them were probably doing the same thing. Cord suspected she had her own reasons for sizing him up, measuring who he was-especially because she obviously didn’t have too high an opinion of his brother.
Once back at the Foggy Bottom brownstone, she came in, as asked, but she made a point of not shedding her jacket-just started a free-flow information spill. It wasn’t babbling. She really knew a lot about Jon’s apartment.
“The thing is, Cord, a hundred years ago, this building was a single-family residence-so my half of the upstairs isn’t a mimic of your brother’s. Jon’s side is bigger. But it’s more than that. The odd shape of Jon’s kitchen is probably because it was once a bedroom…”
He’d been through the place before, obviously, but Sophie made him see the layout with new eyes. Jon may have picked an old place because architecturally, there were more ways to hide things. The kitchen may have once been a bedroom, but it was predictably stuffed with new appliances and gadgets. The red-and-black bathroom had been outfitted with a towel warmer, a disappearing steam machine, a cupboard that revealed a chilled square-for drinks? Food? God knew.
Still, past the living room and kitchen and bedroom was the only beyond-weird room in the flat. Cord stood in the doorway, hands on hips, feeling as if he’d just stepped into a sci-fi setting. Sophie ambled right in. “I never saw Jon’s bedroom, so I don’t know what’s in there. But this was your brother’s…sandbox, so to speak. The room where he played. And it’s the room he told me most about, because when he was gone for a night or two, he worried about the security in here.”
Cord knew computers and security setups, but nothing remotely like this. Not for a private citizen, anyway. A square platform desk took up the room’s center, covered with four functioning computers and symbiotic hardware. Writhing snakes of electric cords tangled every which way. Beneath the single window was a long bench table, obviously a worktable of some kind.
“No,” Sophie said suddenly.
“What?”
“You don’t want to touch that picture,” she warned him.
“Why?” For some insane reason, Jon had hung an incongruous and tasteless picture of a naked Mona Lisa on the inside wall. Sophie suddenly showed up beside him, touched “the smile”-and all the computers abruptly when blank.
She touched the eyes in the painting, and throughout the room, locks turned on all the desk and file drawers.
And then she chuckled at Cord’s expression. “I know. I can’t imagine why Jon did it, either. He just seemed to have fun with this kind of thing. He was always afraid I’d come in to feed Caviar when he was gone and I’d touch something by mistake.”
She motioned to a specific tile in the checkerboard floor. “If you step on that square, you’ll set off an alarm in the kitchen. Caviar’s done it a few times, although I think Cav’s figured out most of Jon’s booby traps by now. You see that weird little square quilt on the wall? It really is a quilt, but if you poke it, it opens up to a mini bar, with drinks and glasses. It shares the same wall as the kitchen, and he put this in so he didn’t have to walk all the way around the hall to get a drink and put in his dirty dishes. Jon was on the lazy side. And then…”
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
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.”
“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.
