Читать книгу The Coltons: Nick, Clay & Jericho - Marie Ferrarella, Beth Cornelison - Страница 12

Chapter 5

Georgie’s words burrowed through the wall of preconceived notions in his head. This matched none of them.

“A flashlight?” he asked.

Georgie glared up at him, doing her best not to think about the havoc his closeness caused within her. How could she be so angry and react to him on a far different level at the same time?

“Yes,” Georgie hissed. “A flashlight.”

Nick released her and took a step back—as much for her sake as his own. He wasn’t the kind who usually entertained temptation, much less succumbed to it, but right now, he had to admit temptation was an irritating and unwanted guest.

“Why didn’t you say so?” he fairly growled at Georgie.

She tossed her head, trying to ward off the effects of being so close to him. “I didn’t realize I had to ask for permission to get something in my own house.”

“We Secret Service agents are a jumpy lot,” he told her drily. “Sudden moves make us nervous.”

She looked at him for a long moment, unable to gauge whether he was serious. “I guess that means you don’t attend many rodeos,” she finally said.

“Never felt the urge.” Although he found himself oddly curious about the events that would entice the likes of someone who looked like her to participate—if she was telling the truth and that was a big “if.” He asked a question that was more to the point. “What do you need the flashlight for?”

Turning around, Georgie opened one of the drawers beneath the counter and took out the flashlight she kept there. She flipped it to the On position and it cast a waning beam.

The batteries were running down, she thought. Something else she needed to see to. The mental list was growing.

“So I can tell ghost stories.” For a second, she put the flashlight beneath her chin so that it cast an eerie illumination on her face. And then she lowered it, as well as her sarcastic tone, again. “What do you think I need it for?”

He laughed drily. The woman was one for the books. “With you, my first guess probably wouldn’t be the right one.”

She had no patience with playing games, not with him, not now. She pointed the flashlight away from him. “I want to look around to see if anything’s been taken or misplaced.”

Again, she couldn’t begin to imagine why anyone would want to break into her ranch house, other than for shelter during a storm. She had no hidden money stashed away in a wall safe, no valuable pieces of jewelry stuffed beneath her mattress or even any high-tech electronic equipment lying around. Everything she had—except for Emmie—she had either bought secondhand or had been given as a hand-me-down.

“Because you think someone broke in.”

From his tone, she surmised that he still didn’t believe her. “Yes, I think that someone broke in. That generator isn’t mine.”

“Someone broke in and brought you something rather than stealing something.”

He was mocking her. She knew it sounded pretty stupid, but she didn’t appreciate his pointing it out or using that tone with her. Her hand tightened around the neck of the flashlight. For a split second, she wished she was Emmie’s age and had an excuse to act on her impulses. She would have loved to have hit this man and his mocking tone into the latter half of next week.

But she reined in herself and fell back on using logic and reason—even if he didn’t have any. “You said you found the door unlocked.”

“I did.”

Well, that cinched it for her, if not for him.

“I always lock the door when I leave the house.” She saw him look at her with doubt. She just knew he was going to say something again about people in rural areas being trusting. So she headed him off. “Times aren’t what they used to be,” she explained. “I trust my neighbors, but as you’ve just proven, people other than neighbors can come by. Those are the ones I lock my door against.” And then she sighed, shaking her head as she began to scan the area with her flashlight. “Without much success, apparently,” Georgie added under her breath, but audibly enough for Nick to overhear.

He was about to make a comment on what she’d just said when he saw her freeze. He saw nothing that would cause her to stop talking.

“What?”

She aimed her flashlight directly at what had caught her attention. She wasn’t the world’s best housekeeper, but she kept things neat, especially when she was going away.

“There’s a newspaper by the window seat.” Still aiming the flashlight on the paper, Georgie quickly crossed to the window seat.

Nick fell into step behind her. “So?”

She picked up the newspaper and, with the flashlight in one hand, looked at the date on the front page. “So, it’s from last week.” She dropped the newspaper back on the window seat.

He still didn’t see what she was getting at. “Again, so?”

Did she have to hit him over the head with it? “I wasn’t here last week.”

That again. Nick shook his head, his skepticism all but shining like a beacon. “So you say.”

She was tired of his not-so-veiled accusations. Tired of protesting and saying the same thing, over and over again.

“I can give you a list of the towns I’ve been in. I pretty much shadowed the circuit. I entered one if not more events in each town. People saw me. My daughter thinks I’m special, but even so, I haven’t found a way to be in two places at the same time.” And if that didn’t make him shut up and finally go away, she didn’t know what would.

The faintest hint of amusement lifted the corners of his mouth. “Would you want to be?”

What kind of a question was that? Was he deliberately trying to hassle her? Of course he was. Well, then, she just wouldn’t let him, that’s all.

Raising her chin, she gave him an answer she was fairly certain he couldn’t argue with.

“Every mother wants to be in two places at once, if she’s worth anything. She wants to be with her child and she wants to be doing whatever it is she needs to do to earn a living for that child.” At least, that was the way she’d felt since the day Emmie was born and she’d fallen instantly and madly in love with the tiny baby. Taking her along with her on the rodeo circuit was the closest she could come to being with Emmie and still earn a living for them at the same time.

She had passion, he’d give her that. Passion that unfortunately drew him in. It took effort for him to mentally pull back. “Is that supposed to convince me that you’re innocent?”

Maybe she would give in to her impulse and just smack him. It wasn’t as if Sheffield didn’t deserve it. “No, my innocence is supposed to convince you that I’m innocent.”

Instead of commenting on her claim, Nick looked at her thoughtfully. She looked damn sincere. “How long do the events that you participate in last? Your portion of them,” he elaborated.

She shrugged, thinking. “I don’t know. Five, six minutes maybe.” Although there were times, like when her horse had stumbled last year, when it had felt like an eternity—going by in slow motion. “Why?”

“Five, six minutes,” he repeated. “So you wouldn’t have to hang around all day if you didn’t want to, would you? Just show up for your part of the contest and then you could leave.”

She knew what he was getting at. Obviously he thought the events were all close by. Either that, or the man thought she had some kind of magical horse that flew her home and back. If she had a magical horse that could fly, she wouldn’t have to be competing on the rodeo circuit in the first place.

But instead of telling him that, or what kind of an asinine blockhead she thought he was, she said something she knew he could understand. “I’ve got people to vouch for me.”

She saw Sheffield raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Friends?”

“Yes, friends.” Something she doubted that Sheffield had.

His expression didn’t change. “Friends lie for friends.”

There was no winning with this man. Or reasoning for that matter. Her frustration rose another notch. She struggled to keep her voice down in order not to wake Emmie.

“Are you determined to arrest me?”

He tried to sound impartial, even though right now, everything did point to her.

“I’m determined to make the threatening e-mails stop and have whoever has been sending them up on charges because, in case you didn’t know, it’s against the law to threaten a candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

She resented his implication. That she was some hick who had no knowledge of the law. They weren’t that far from San Antonio and even if she hadn’t been to college, she’d been to the school of hard knocks and she’d graduated at the top of her class.

“Yes, I know that,” she said between gritted teeth, “And again, no I didn’t do it. Now someone, as you so cleverly pointed out by pulling up the Web thingy on my computer—”

“Web site,” he supplied, interrupting her.

“Whatever,” she said, struggling to rein in her temper. “Someone did and according to you, they did it from here. I know it wasn’t me, so by process of elimination, it had to have been someone else. Someone who broke in,” she emphasized. “I don’t know who or why, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know how else to say it.” She’d pretty much reached the end of her rope here. “IT WASN’T ME,” she enunciated the words close to his ear so that not even a single syllable was lost on him.

“There’s a newspaper I didn’t bring in on the window seat and a dinky generator I never saw before stashed under my card table. Someone’s been here.” Her eyes blazed as she looked up at him. “Now you can believe me or not, I really don’t care. But I do intend to get to the bottom of this because my house has just been violated and I don’t like it.”

Marching away from him, she returned to the kitchen and reached for the wall phone.

Nick snapped to attention and quickly cut the distance between them until he was right next to her. “Who are you going to call?”

It had been over four years since she’d found herself answering to anyone. She’d been more or less on her own since then and it grated on her nerves to be bombarded with questions like this—and expected to answer them.

“Somebody who knows I don’t lie,” she bit off. Lifting the receiver, she began pressing the buttons before she even had the phone to her ear. “The sheriff. Hey, what are you doing?” she cried. The agent’s hand had covered hers and he pushed the receiver back down on the hook.

“I can’t let you do that,” Nick told her simply.

“Why?” she demanded. In the front yard, when she’d threatened to call the sheriff on him, he’d told her to go right ahead. Why was he changing his mind now? “You said I could.”

“There’s a little matter of jurisdiction.”

“This is outside of Esperanza. That puts it into the sheriff’s jurisdiction,” she retorted. “He’s the sheriff for the entire county.”

“The e-mails are threats against a United States Senator,” he reminded her. “That makes it a federal case.”

Incredibly frustrated and stymied, Georgie wanted to scream. “I bet you like making a federal case out of everything.”

Nick didn’t rise to the bait she’d dangled in front of him and made no comment.

Desperate, not sure what the man was going to do next but fairly certain she wouldn’t like it, Georgie tried to appeal to his better nature—if he had one.

“Look, Sheffield, I need someone who knows me. Someone who can make you believe that I’m not lying. Someone who can make you understand that I never sent any of those e-mails.” Because I sure can’t.

He supposed there was no harm in throwing her a bone. And there could be a very slim chance that she was telling the truth.

“Okay, let’s just say for the sake of argument, you’re right,” he told her. “You’re innocent. You’re not the one sending those e-mails.” Nick paused, the import of his own words replaying themselves in his head. If what she was suggesting was true, then that shifted the focus. This could be about her, not the Senator.

Or, that could be what she wanted him to think.

Nick explored the first question. “Why would someone set this up to make it look as if you were threatening the Senator’s life?”

How many times did she have to say it? “I don’t know.” She uttered each word carefully so that maybe this time, it sank in. “If I did, believe me I would tell you.”

His mind whirling, he hardly heard her. “Do you have enemies?”

She shrugged. She didn’t like to think so. “I don’t know. Everyone’s got enemies, I suppose. But nobody I know wants to see me in prison. Not even Kathy Jenkins.”

Nick’s interest was immediately aroused. They had a name. “Kathy Jenkins?” he repeated, his manner coaxing her to continue.

“I beat her in the barrel racing events in the last three towns.”

The surge of adrenaline subsided as suddenly as it had begun. Nick sincerely doubted that all this was about barrel racing.

He tried again. “Nobody has it in for you? Your ex-husband? A jilted boyfriend? Some girl whose boyfriend you stole?” With each question, he watched her face for a reaction. Instead, he saw a wall going up.

“You always think the worst of people?” she asked.

“It’s my job.”

“If my daughter wasn’t sleeping in the other room, I’d tell you what you could do with your job.” Blowing out a breath, she went down the list he’d just raised. “There’s no ex-husband,” she deliberately avoided his gaze, wanting to see neither pity nor judgment in his eyes, “there’s no jilted boyfriend and the only thing I ever ‘stole’ wasn’t a boyfriend. It was a twenty-five cent candy bar when I was six. My mother made me give it back and apologize. I worked off my ‘offense’ by straightening bottom shelves in the grocery store for Mr. Harris for a month.”

He could almost see that. She probably looked a lot like her daughter at that age. “Sounds like a strict mother,” he commented.

Georgie instantly went on the defensive. “She was a good mother.”

Well, there was a sore point, he thought. He wondered why.

“Didn’t mean to imply otherwise,” he told her. Nick looked at her for a long moment, common sense wrestling with a budding gut feeling—or was that just temptation in another guise? “I’ll look into it,” he finally said.

It had been so long between comments, she wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “Excuse me?”

“Your alibi.”

She hated the way that sounded, as if a lie was immediately implied. She didn’t have an “alibi,” she had a life. But in this case, she supposed having an alibi was a good thing.

“Then you believe me?”

He’d always played things very close to the vest. It was better that way—for everyone. “Let’s just say I’m trying to keep an open mind.”

He didn’t strike her as someone who normally kept an open mind. “I guess maybe Emmie’s hitting you with the tire iron did some good.”

“Don’t push it,” he advised. “I just don’t want to be wrong.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be wrong either,” she told him pointedly. The subject of logistics occurred to her. “Does this mean you’re going to be staying here?”

He nodded slowly. It wasn’t something he was happy about, but this was going to take at least a day, if not more.

“For now.”

“I’ve got a guest room in the back.” She jerked her thumb toward the rear of the house.

He knew that. He’d done a very thorough surveillance of the house when he’d first gotten here, thinking he’d find the perpetrator at home.

The room in question was full of boxes filled with all kinds of things, none of them new. “You’re using it for storage.”

“There’s a bed in there,” she volunteered. The boxes were piled on top and all around it. “You’re welcomed to it.”

He could just see her trying to wall him in. “Here’s just fine.”

Here? Did he mean to stretch out on the sofa? She supposed she could move Emmie and hope the little girl went on sleeping. Unlike her brother Ryder, who could sleep while being tossed around in the funnel of a twister, Emmie was easily roused.

Moving over to the sofa, she began to pick up her daughter.

As with the flashlight, Nick caught her wrist and stopped her. “What are you doing?”

She wished he would stop touching her. “Moving Emmie so that you can have the sofa.”

“Leave her where she is,” he instructed, releasing her wrist. “I don’t want the sofa. I’ll take the chair.” He nodded toward it.

Toward the left of the sofa, the item under discussion was an overstuffed chair that had once belonged to her grandfather, the famous rodeo star she’d been named after and whose last name she’d taken when she began riding herself. George “Rattlesnake” Grady. He’d favored that chair for some fifteen years and it still retained his shape. She loved it dearly, but it was hardly comfortable enough for Sheffield to spend the night in.

Georgie eyed him dubiously. “You won’t get much sleep in it.”

“I don’t intend to sleep.”

Which meant that he intended to watch her, she thought, immediately suspicious. And that in turn put them back in two separate camps.

Still, he wasn’t slapping handcuffs on her and shouting that she was under arrest. She supposed that she could deal with anything short of that.

And come the morning, she promised herself, after she deposited her winnings into the bank, she’d find a way to set Mr. Secret Service agent straight.

Once that happened, her life as Georgie Grady, rancher, could finally begin.