Читать книгу Colton's Secret Service - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 8

Chapter 3

Nick bristled at the insult. “My state of mind isn’t in question here.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that he was crazy if he thought she would have anything to do with another Colton after her mother’s experience. But that would lead to questions she didn’t want to answer. “And mine is?”

His eyes met hers. “You’re the one sending the threatening e-mails.”

If she weren’t holding Emmie, she would have thrown up her hands. “What threatening e-mails? I’ve been too damn busy working to pick up a phone, much less waste my time on the computer.”

When she came right down to it, Georgie didn’t care for the Internet. To her, it was just another way for people to lose the human touch and slip into a vague pea soup of anonymity. The only reason she kept a computer and maintained an Internet account was because she didn’t want to fall behind the rest of the world. Once Emmie started going to school, she knew that a computer would be a necessity. In no time at all, she was certain computers would take the place of loose-leaf binders, notebooks and textbooks. She wanted to be able to help her daughter, not have Emmie ashamed of her because she was electronically challenged.

But that didn’t mean she had to like the damn thing.

Her protests fell on deaf ears. The venom he’d seen spewed in those latest e-mails wouldn’t have taken much time to fire off. She hadn’t even bothered with spell-check, as he recalled. And the grammar in some of the messages had been pretty bad.

“My tech expert tracked it to your ranch house, your IP account.”

She had no idea what an IP account was, but wasn’t about to display her ignorance, especially not in front of her daughter. But she did know one thing. “Your tech expert is wrong.”

“He’s never wrong.” It was both the best and the worst thing about Steve because his results could never be challenged.

Georgie was unmoved and unintimidated. With her mother the butt of narrow-minded people’s jokes because all three of her children had been fathered by a man who was married to someone else, she’d had to stand up for herself at a very early age. That tended to either make or break a person. She’d always refused to be broken.

“Well, he just broke his streak because he is wrong and if the messages were traced to my ranch house, he’s doubly wrong because I haven’t been in my ranch house for the last five months.”

Something told him that he should have investigated Georgie Grady a little before catching the red-eye to San Antonio, but time had been at a premium last night and he’d wanted to wrap this up fast.

His eyes swept over her. “Is that so?”

She rocked forward on the balls of her boot-shod feet. “Yes, that’s ‘so,’ and I resent your attitude, you manner and your manhandling me.”

“Lady, you got in a right cross and your daughter almost cracked open my skull with that tire iron of hers. If anyone was manhandled, it was me.”

He saw a grin spread over otherwise pretty appealing lips. “Is that why you’re so angry? Because you were bested by a woman a foot shorter than you and her four-year-old daughter?”

Not only was she cocky, but she wasn’t observant either.

“You’re not a foot shorter than me, more like eight inches,” he estimated. “And I’m angry because I’m here in this one-horse town, wasting my time arguing with a pig-headed woman after waiting for the last eight hours for her to show up when I should be back in California, with the Senator.”

“Well, go.” Tucking Emmie against her hip, she waved him on his way with her temporarily free hand. “Nobody told you to come to Esperanza and harass innocent people.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”

“Finally, we agree on something.” She blew out a breath. One of them would have to be the voice of reason and because he didn’t know the meaning of the word, it would have to be her. “You really a Secret Service Agent?”

“Yes.”

“Can I see that ID again?”

Reaching into his pocket, he took out his wallet. “Not very trusting, are you?” He’d always thought that people in a small town were supposed to be incredibly trusting, to the point of almost being simple-minded. Him, he trusted no one. When you grow up, not being able to trust your own parents, it set a precedent.

She raised her eyes to his. “Should I be?” He was a stranger, for all she knew, he could be some serial killer, making the rounds.

His eyes slid over her. Someone as attractive as this woman needed to be on her guard more than most. That body of hers could get her in a great deal of trouble.

“No, I guess not.” Opening his wallet to his badge and photo ID, he held it up for her to look over again.

Still keeping Emmie on her hip, Georgie leaned slightly in to peruse at length the ID he showed her.

As did Emmie. She stared at it so intently that Nick caught himself wondering if the annoying child could read. Wasn’t she too young for that?

Georgie stepped back and looked at him with an air of resignation. The ID appeared to be authentic after all.

“I guess you are what you say you are.” He felt her eyes slide over him. “You’ve got the black suit and those shades hanging out of your top pocket and all.” There was that smirk again, he thought. The way she described him made him feel like a caricature. “And your hair’s kind of slicked back, the part that’s not messed up,” she added.

Without realizing what he was doing, Nick ran his hand through his hair, smoothing down the section where the kid had hit him.

He saw the woman shake her head. “You’d look better with it all messed up. The other way looks like it’s been glued down.”

He knew what she was doing. She was trying to undermine him any way she could. Well, it wasn’t going to work.

“We’ll trade hairstyling tips some other time,” he told her sarcastically.

Rather than put her in her place, his response seemed to amuse her.

“Touchy son of a gun, aren’t you? Don’t take criticism well, I see,” she noted, as if to herself. She cocked her head, as if taking measure of him and trying to decide some things about him. You’d think he was the one in trouble, he thought, annoyed.

“You the one they used to make fun of when you were a kid?” she asked.

The exact opposite was true. He’d been more than half on his way to becoming a bully, threatening other kids at school. Smaller, bigger, it didn’t matter, he took them all on because he could. In school and on the streets, at least some things were in his control. Not like at home where an abusive father made his life, and his alcohol-anesthetized mother’s life, a living hell.

But then, one day, for reasons he had yet to completely understand, he suddenly saw himself through his victim’s eyes. Saw his father as Drake Sheffield must have been at his age. Sickened, Nick released the kid who’d come within a hair’s breadth of being pummeled to the ground because he’d mouthed off at him and just walked away. After that, his life had turned around and he put himself on the path of protecting the underdog rather than trying to humiliate and take advantage of him.

“Well, were you?” Georgie queried, although, she couldn’t quite see him as a classic ninety-eight-pound weakling.

“No” was all Nick said.

Her arms began to ache, reminding her that until this man had jumped out of the shadows, tackling her and causing her adrenaline to register off the charts, she’d been dead tired. It was getting really late.

Georgie decided to appeal to his sense of decency—if he had any. “Look, would you mind if I put my daughter to bed? It’s been one back-breaking long day.”

“I’m not tired,” Emmie protested.

It was obvious that she didn’t want to miss a second of what was going on. Because of the life she led, a child thrust into a world populated predominately by adults, Emmie thought like a miniature adult. Georgie was positive that if she’d elected to remain on the rodeo circuit, Emmie would have been thrilled to death. The little girl would have loved nothing better than to live in the run-down trailer amid her beloved cowboys forever. Especially because so many of them doted on her.

“That’s okay,” Georgie told her, “I am, pumpkin.”

Emmie pulled her small features into a solemn expression. “Then you go to bed,” the little girl advised her.

Georgie glanced at the dark-haired stranger. Yes, she was exhausted, but she was also agitated. There was no way she could have closed her eyes with this man around.

“Not hardly.” She raised her eyebrows, silently indicating that she was still waiting for him to respond to her question. She didn’t expect him to say no.

Nick gestured toward the door. “Go ahead.”

Setting Emmie down, Georgie fished her house key out of her front pocket.

As she raised it to the keyhole, he said, “It’s not locked.”

She looked at him accusingly. Secret Service Agent or not, the man had some nerve. “You broke in?”

“No,” Nick corrected patiently, “I found it unlocked.”

The hell he did, she thought. “I locked up before I left,” she informed him. In her absence, no one would have broken in. Everyone around here knew she had nothing worth stealing. He had to have been the one jimmying open her lock. How dumb did he think she was?

Pushing the door open, Georgie took Emmie’s hand in hers and walked inside.

Nick followed in her wake. “Aren’t you going to turn on the light?” he asked when she walked right by the switch at the front door.

“No light to turn on,” she answered. The shadows in the room began to lengthen, swallowing up the pools of moonlight on the floor. She turned to see he was automatically closing the front door. “Keep the door open until I get the fire going,” she instructed. Georgie quickly crossed to the fireplace.

Obliging her, Nick pushed the door opened again. He saw her squatting down in front of the fireplace, bunching up newspapers and sticking them strategically between the logs.

“In case you haven’t noticed, it’s June,” he protested. A damn sticky June at that. “Isn’t it too hot for a fire?”

“Not if you want coffee.”

Finished, she glanced over her shoulder at him. The Secret Service agent was still standing in the doorway. The moonlight outlined his frame, making him seem a little surreal. He was a powerful-looking man, even in that suit. She supposed she should have counted herself lucky that he hadn’t broken any of her bones when he tackled her in the yard.

“Don’t you law enforcement types always want coffee?” she asked, trying her best to maintain a friendly atmosphere. Her mother always said that honey worked better than vinegar. “Or is that against some Secret Service agent code?”

Another dig. Still, after standing there for eight hours, he was hungry enough to eat a post. Coffee would help fill the hole in his stomach for the time being. “Coffee’ll be fine” Nick heard himself saying.

With the fire illuminating the living room, he shut the door behind him. As he did so, he flipped the light switch.

Nothing happened.

Rising to her feet, Georgie paused, one hand fisted at her hip. Rather than be angry, she found herself mildly amused at this overdressed, albeit fine specimen of manhood.

“You want to play with the other switches, too?” she asked. She pointed to the kitchen and then down the hall. “There’re about six more. None of them will turn on the lights either.”

This was just getting weirder and weirder. “Why isn’t there any electricity?”

“Because I don’t have money to throw around,” she suggested “helpfully.” “There’s no phone service either, so don’t bother picking up the receiver.” She nodded toward the phone on the kitchen wall. “If it makes you feel any better, they’ll both be on in the morning. I got home ahead of schedule.”

Ahead of schedule. That meant that he would have gone on waiting for her to arrive all night until the next morning.

The very thought of that intensified the ache in his shoulder muscles.

Of course, she could just be making the whole thing up and she and the pint-sized terror could have been coming back from visiting someone. “So you’re sticking to your story about being out of town?”

“It’s not a story, it’s the truth,” Emmie insisted angrily, stomping over to him, her hands on her hips, her head tilted back like a miniature Fury. “Mama doesn’t lie. She says only bad people lie.”

Georgie had her back to him. He watched the way her long braid moved as she arranged something in the hearth.

“No,” he told the child while watching the mother, “sometimes good people lie, too.”

Georgie straightened to go get the coffee pot from the cabinet in the kitchen. He was trying to trip her up, and he was just wasting his time. Because he had the wrong person. The sooner she convinced him of that, the sooner she could get down to the business of settling in.

“Ask anyone in town,” Georgie urged him. The warm glow from the fireplace cast itself over her, coloring her cheeks, lightly glancing along her frame. “They’ll all tell you the same thing. That I was out on the rodeo circuit. Around here, everybody knows everybody else’s business.” That used to annoy her. It didn’t anymore. Now it just gave her a feeling of belonging.

“And what is it you do on the rodeo circuit?” Nick asked, not that he really believed her. Men who wore oversized hats and walked as if born on a horse hit the rodeo circuit, not a little bit of a woman with a big mouth and a child in tow.

“Win,” Georgie answered tersely. “You’d better like your coffee black,” she informed him, raising her voice as she walked into the small, functional kitchen and poured water into the battered coffee pot. “Because I don’t have any milk handy. The last of it was used to drown a few chocolate chip cookies who were minding their own business about five hours ago.”

Georgie looked at her daughter and grinned, remembering the snack they’d shared during the impromptu picnic she’d arranged for the little girl. She’d done it to lift Emmie’s spirits because her daughter had been so sad about leaving the rodeo circuit. Georgie had talked at length about the ranch in glowing terms, reminding her daughter about all the people who loved her and were looking forward to celebrating her fifth birthday next week right here in Esperanza. By the time the cookies were gone, Emmie couldn’t wait to get home.

“Black’ll do fine,” he told her.

As he watched, he saw Georgie stretch up on her toes, trying to reach the two white mugs on the top shelf. Crossing over to her, he took the mugs down and placed them on the counter. Georgie scooped them up and made her way back to the hearth.

He found himself following her.

Nick could feel Emmie’s eyes boring into him, suspiciously watching his every move like some stunted hawk.

“This doesn’t change anything,” he warned Georgie, referring to her effort at hospitality by making him something to drink.

“It’s coffee, not a magic elixir,” she responded. “I didn’t think it was going to turn you into a prince. I’m just being neighborly.”

“I’m not your neighbor.”

“And for that, I am eternally grateful,” Georgie told him. With the coffee brewing, she turned her attention to the center of her universe, her daughter. “Okay, Miss Emmie,” she took Emmie’s hand, “time to get you ready for bed.”

But Emmie wiggled her hand out of her mother’s grasp. Her large green eyes darted toward the stranger in their house, then back at her mother. “Mama, please?” Emmie pleaded.

In tune with her daughter, Georgie didn’t need Emmie to spell it out for her. She could all but read her mind. Tired or not, there was no way the little girl was going to fall asleep a full three rooms away from here. Emmie was far too agitated about what was going on. She stood a better chance of having her daughter nodding off here, safely in her company.

Georgie surrendered without firing a shot. “Okay, pumpkin, take the sofa.”

Relief highlighted the thousand-watt smile. Emmie wiggled onto the leather couch. “Thank you, Mama,” she said happily.

Other than his own horrific childhood, Nick hadn’t been around kids for more than a minute here or there. He had absolutely no experience when it came to dealing with them. Nor did he really want any. Kids had their own kind of logic and he had no time to unscramble that.

But his gut told him that what had just transpired was wrong from a discipline point of view. “You always let her win?” he asked Georgie.

Georgie watched him for a long moment, debating whether to tell him to butt out. But saying so wouldn’t be setting a good example for her daughter. “I pick my battles,” she told him. And, to be honest, she felt better being able to watch over Emmie right now. She didn’t fully trust this character, Secret Service agent or not. “Arguing over everything never gets you anywhere.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“I have no desire to fool you, Mr. Secret Service agent—”

“My name’s Nick Sheffield.” He knew he was telling her needlessly. After all, she’d read as much on his ID—if she bothered reading it.

Georgie started again from the top. “I have no desire to fool you, Nick Sheffield,” she told him. “I just want you to go away.”

That made two of them, but under a different set of circumstances. “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen right now,” he informed her tersely.

Georgie sighed. “So much for my lucky streak continuing.”

Behind her, the coffee pot had stopped percolating. She turned toward it, and, taking the two mugs she’d brought with her from the kitchen, she poured thick, black liquid into both. She set the pot back on its perch and brought the mugs over to him. Georgie offered him one.

He took it from her a bit leerily and she laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to pour it onto your lap.” She couldn’t resist a quick glance in that area. “Although the thought did cross my mind.”

Thank God for small favors, he thought. But she’d stirred his curiosity. “Why not?”

“Because if I did that,” she said only after she’d paused to swallow a mouthful, “then you’d think I was guilty. And I’m not,” she pointed out.

“What if I think it anyway?”

“Then you’re dumb,” she told him simply. “Because that means that you’re either not looking at the evidence—or ignoring it.”

No, he thought, wrapping his hands around the mug, he had to admit that he wasn’t looking at the evidence at the moment. He was looking at her. And God help him, he did like what he saw.