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he said, not quite as cocky. “You are, huh?”
    “As delightful as this has been, what with the history lesson and the stalking, I really do have to go,” Arden insisted. Then she actually smiled.
    A warm, real smile.
    Smith’s traitorous heart leaped.
    “Jeffie’s coming home from camp today,” she explained. So the smile was for her half brother, not for Smith. “I’m picking him up at the airpo—”
    “Too much information,” Smith interrupted. How many times had he warned her that the fastest way to be victimized was to let down one’s guard? In light of that, it was probably just as well she didn’t trust him. Dammit.
    Arden waved him away like an annoying bug as, with a quick hug for Greta and pat for Dido, she headed out.
    “Too much information?” he heard Val demand as the younger women left, the dog whining from her exile at the door. “It’s not like you said you’d been on the toilet all morning or anything.”
    He had to imagine the expression on Arden’s face.
    Smith’s expression might have rivaled it as he watched the women reach the sidewalk. Greta Kaiser said, “You love her.”
    It wasn’t a question.
    Spinning to face the old woman, Smith pretended it had been. “Me? No. Sure, we were dating when…” When I lost everything she might have wanted from me. He grinned to reinforce his position. “No love. Maybe some like, if you squint at it and turn your head just right.”
    Oh, great job. Make sight jokes to a near-blind woman.
    “I’ll just call a friend of mine to bring over the supplies we need for that security system,” he said.
    “Help me with these dishes when you’ve a moment, please?” asked Greta mildly, and vanished into the kitchen.
    No, Arden was definitely not the only too-trusting woman involved in this latest problem.
     
    As he sat in his car, waiting for Arden and her “friend” to leave the run-down old house they’d come to visit, Prescott Lowell used his laptop to pull up the area tax records.
    The house was owned by someone named Greta Lorelai Kaiser.
    It didn’t sound familiar, but he made note of it all the same. No surprise that she was a single woman home owner. From what he knew of Donaldson Leigh’s stuck-up bitch of a daughter—opening a recreational center especially for girls, supporting a woman for governor—Lowell figured them for feminazis. Throw in the Mexican woman, who’d almostspotted him as he tailed them from the train station, and there was probably enough estrogen in that house to lower a guy’s IQ by fifty points.
    Not that Lowell didn’t like women! But they had their place.
    He loved that about the Comitatus. Everyone had their place. And the place of Comitatus members was on top of everyone else.
    That was the only reason he’d kept himself from fighting back when Leigh had humiliated him last night, when he’d really wanted to knock the old geezer’s teeth in. There was an order to things—at least within the social sanctuary that was the Comitatus. The younger members of the outer circles respected the older members of the inner circles, because someday they would be part of those inner circles themselves. They would run things the right way.
    With strength.
    Leigh and his cronies seemed annoyingly tolerant of the threat posed by Arden’s interference. What the hell had Will Donnell meant about womenfolk having suspicions, and “ways to divert them,” anyway? If women stuck their noses into men’s business, as far as Lowell was concerned, you smacked them back so they wouldn’t do it again. That was how to divert them.
    But there was no reasoning with Leigh about his precious little girl. So it was up to Lowell to uncover the truth for those inner-circle powermongers, and…
    Ah. Here came Arden and her brown-skinned friend now. The friend, clearly low-class, scanned the area around them. For a moment, her eyes paused on Lowell’s car, well down the street. Seeing nothing more suspicious than a luxury vehicle