Marie Ferrarella - The Coltons - Nick, Clay & Jericho

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?”