Marie Ferrarella - Colton's Secret Service

Nick took out a candy bar he’d absently shoved into his pocket last night. It was just before leaving Prosperino, California, the Senator’s home base, to catch the red-eye flight to San Antonio. After checking in with his team to see if there were any further developments—there hadn’t been—he’d rented a car and then driven to this god-forsaken piece of property.

He’d found the front door unlocked and had let himself in, but while there were some signs here and there that the ranch house was lived in, the place had been empty.

So he’d set up surveillance. And here he’d been for the last interminable eight hours, fifteen minutes and God only knew how many seconds, waiting.

It would be nice, he thought irritably, if this character actually showed up soon so he could wrap this all up and go back to civilization before he started growing roots where he stood.

How the hell did people live in places like this? he wondered. If the moon hadn’t been full tonight, he wouldn’t even be able to see the house from here, much less the front door. Most likely, he’d probably have to crouch somewhere around the perimeter of the building as he laid in wait.

He supposed that things could always be worse.

Stripping the wrapper off a large-sized concoction of chocolate, peanuts and caramel, Nick had just taken his first bite of the candy bar when he heard it. A rumbling engine noise.

Nick froze, listening.

It was definitely a car. From the sound of it, not a small one. Or a particularly new one for that matter.

Damn, but it was noisy enough to wake the dead, he thought. Whoever it was certainly wasn’t trying for stealth, but then, the driver had no reason to expect anyone to be around for his entrance.

Because he was pretty close to starving before he remembered the candy bar, Nick took one more large bite, then shoved the remainder into his pocket.

All his senses were instantly on high alert.

He strained his eyes, trying to make out the approaching vehicle from his very limited vantage point. He didn’t dare open the door any wider, at least, not at this point. He couldn’t take a chance on the driver seeing the movement.

It suddenly occurred to him that if the driver decided to park his truck behind the barn, he was going to be out of luck. That was where he’d left his sedan.

Nick mentally crossed his fingers as he held his breath.

The next moment, he exhaled. Well, at least one thing was going right, he silently congratulated himself. The vehicle, an old, battered truck, came into view and was apparently going to park in front of the ranch house.

A minute later, he saw why the truck’s progress was so slow. The truck was towing an equally ancient trailer.

As he squinted for a better view, Nick tried to make out the driver, but there was no way he could see into the cab. He couldn’t tell if the man was young or old. The vague shadow he saw told him that the driver appeared to be slight and even that might have just been a trick of the moonlight.

Nick straightened his back, his ache miraculously gone. At least the ordeal was almost over, he told himself.

The truck finally came to a creaking stop before the ranch house, but not before emitting a cacophony. It almost sounded as if it exhaled. Straining his eyes, Nick still heard rather than saw the driver getting out of the truck’s cab.

Now or never, Nick thought.

“Stop right there,” he shouted, bursting out of the barn. He held up his wallet, opened to his ID. As if anyone could make out what was there, he thought ironically. To cover all bases, he identified himself loudly. “I’m with the Secret Service.”

In response, the driver turned and bolted back toward the truck.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Nick shouted.

A star on his high school track team, Nick took off, cutting the distance between them down to nothing in less than a heartbeat. The next moment, he tackled the driver, bringing him down.

“Get the hell off me!” the driver shouted.

Nick remembered thinking that the truck driver had a hell of a feminine voice just before he felt the back of his head explode, ushering in a curtain of darkness.

Chapter 2

It was only through sheer grit that Nick managed to hang on to the fringes of consciousness, gripping the sliver of light with his fingertips and holding on for all he was worth. He knew that if he surrendered to the darkness, there would be no telling what could happen. In his experience these last ten years, death could be hiding behind every conceivable corner. Even in tiny, off-the-beaten-path burgs that made no one’s top-ten list of places to visit.

Falling backward, Nick teetered, then managed to spring up, somehow still miraculously holding on to his wallet and displaying both his badge and ID.

Not that anyone was looking at it.

“Striking a Secret Service agent is a punishable offense that’ll land you in prison,” he barked at his assailant.

Swinging around to face the person who’d almost bashed in his head, Nick struggled to focus. Everything appeared blurred, with images multiplying themselves. This intense ringing in his ears jarred him down to the very bone. But even though it was wavy, the image of his assailant was legions away from what he had expected.

Was he hallucinating?

There, standing with her legs spread apart and firmly planted on the ground, clutching a tire iron that was close to being half as big as she was, was—

“A kid?” Nick demanded incredulously when he could finally find his voice. “I was almost brained by a little kid?”

“I’m not little! And you stay off my mama!” the tiny terror shouted. She held on to the tire iron so hard, her knuckles were white and she’d lifted her chin like a pint-sized, old-fashioned prize fighter, daring him to try to touch her.

His head throbbed and the headache mushrooming over his skull threatened to obliterate everything else.

Focus, Nick, focus!

“Your mama?” Nick echoed. Well, that explained it all right. His ears hadn’t been playing tricks on him. The driver he’d tackled had sounded like a woman for a very good reason. “He” was a “she.”

Even as he fought to clear his brain and try to keep the headache at bay, he saw the woman—and now that he looked, he could see that she was a petite, curvaceous woman whose body could not be mistaken for boyish—move swiftly to stand beside her daughter. She rested her hand on one of the little girl’s shoulders. The woman had lost the ridiculous, oversized cowboy hat she’d had on. Without it, he saw that she had red hair. It was pulled back and tucked into a long, thick braid that ran down to the small of her back.

The fiery-looking, petite hellcat didn’t look as if she could weigh a hundred pounds even with her daughter perched on her shoulders. He should have easily subdued both of them with no trouble, not find himself at their mercy.

This wasn’t going to look good in the report.

The woman took the tire iron from her daughter. But rather than drop it, the way he expected her to, she grasped it like a weapon while gently attempting to push the little hellion behind her. The girl didn’t stay put long. It reminded Nick of a painting he’d once seen in a Washington museum, something that had to do with the spirit of the pioneer women who helped settle the West.

For one unguarded moment, between the monumental headache, the intermittent confusion and the anger he felt at being caught off guard like this, the word magnificent came to mind.

The next moment, he realized this was no time for that kind of personal assessment.

He found himself under fire from that rather pert set of lips.

“Who the hell are you?” she demanded hotly, moving the tire iron as she shot off the words. “And what are you doing, sneaking around on my land, attacking defenseless women?”