Marie Ferrarella - The Coltons - Nick, Clay & Jericho

Emmie only stopped to draw breath when he chose to answer a question. She distracted him to the point that he eventually placed what he was doing on hold. He’d found what he was looking for, at least to some extent. Unearthing user history, he found a score of places that had been hit, all online stores. Unlike Georgie, whoever had used this computer had a logon user name and password for each site. He was going to have to get Steve hooked up to the computer in order to ascertain them. He had a feeling that if he found the names, he’d find the person sending the threatening e-mails as well.

God, he hoped he wasn’t being taken for a ride—by two redheads.

“Lunch is ready, you two.” Standing in the doorway to her bedroom, Georgie repeated what she’d first called out from the kitchen, getting no response. It seemed that her daughter and her uninvited “guest” hadn’t heard her so rather than call again, she decided to just fetch them and be done with it.

She hadn’t expected to find them kneeling on the floor on opposite sides of her bed. Especially not Sheffield.

Georgie looked from her daughter to the man who had summarily invaded her life and turned everything within it upside down. She decided that she’d get a better answer from Emmie than from Sheffield.

“Just what in the name of all that’s sacred are you doing, Emmie?” she asked, addressing the top of the little girl’s head—it was all that was peeking out from the far side of her bed.

Emmie popped up, grinning and looking very pleased with herself. “Playing cops and robbers, Mama. I’m the cop.”

Georgie turned to see the Secret Service agent on his knees, handcuffs securely on his wrists and an exceedingly sheepish look on his face. “I guess that must make you the robber.” She didn’t bother struggling to keep the amused expression from her face.

Silently declaring the game to be over, he rose to his feet. “Yeah.” He thrust his bound hands before him and at Georgie. “Get these off me.” The widening grin on her face did not fill him full of confidence.

“Not so fast,” Georgie drawled. “I think I like having you handcuffed.”

But Emmie was already making her way to her new playmate. “But he can’t eat if he’s handcuffed, Mama,” she said, the soul of logic. Taking the key she’d placed in her pocket, Emmie inserted it into the lock and turned it.

Handcuffs unlocked, Nick quickly removed them from his wrists, still not entirely sure how he’d allowed himself to get “captured” in the first place.

“I know,” Georgie agreed, “But he’d be a lot less trouble that way.”

Rubbing his wrists, Nick temporarily deposited the handcuffs into his pocket. “You know the penalty for falsely imprisoning a Secret Service Agent?” he asked Georgie.

Georgie turned her face up to his innocently. “Peace and quiet?” she ventured.

He had no idea why, but he had this overwhelming urge to kiss the grin off her lips. Had to be all this fresh air, he theorized. It was obviously doing strange things to his head.

“Get a move on,” Georgie ordered. He wasn’t sure if it was aimed at him, or her daughter, or both. “The food’s getting cold.” She led the way back. Nick did his best to keep his eyes fixed on the back of Georgie’s head rather than on the way her hips swayed in her tight jeans as she walked.

The rest of the day was spent less pleasantly, spinning his wheels, making very little headway, although Steve told him that he would do his best to hack into Georgie’s computer and get past the encrypted passwords. Nightfall came before he knew it.

Emmie seemed to finally run out of energy and had to be carried off to bed, sound asleep. Something stirred within him as he watched Georgie carry her daughter to her room. For some reason, the extremely domestic scene got to him and started him thinking. Wondering about the road not taken.

And then he shook off those thoughts. He wasn’t interested in that road, he reminded himself. He would have been bored within the first day.

But watching Georgie Grady/Colton now, he had to admit that there was something going on. It was the “what” that remained unidentified to him.

Careful, Nicky , he warned himself. You don’t want to be making any mistakes now .

He was human and he’d been conned before. But never by anyone nearly so attractive. Never by anyone he’d felt so attracted to.

In her defense, Nick supposed that Georgie could actually be telling him the truth. That she was a victim in all this. He had Steve checking all that out for him, checking her out, to make sure she was who she said she was and had, as she claimed, not even been near a computer these last few months.

In the meantime, he thought cryptically, he was doing his own checking out. Up close and exceedingly personal. So personal, he could feel his blood stirring.

It had been a long time since he’d thought of himself as anything other than a law enforcement agent of one type or other. But Georgeann Grady made him remember that beneath the oaths he had taken and the extreme devotion to duty he felt, there beat the heart of a man.

A man who’d been far too long without the touch of a woman.

The power was on, but she seemed to prefer having the fire in the fireplace lit. He watched now as the light from the fireplace caressed the outline of Georgie’s small, trim, jean-clad body. She moved about the rustic living room that could have easily come off the set of a Hollywood western. Except that it was genuine.

As genuine as she claimed to be?

Something inside him hoped so.

Not very professional of you, Nicky .

He wasn’t supposed to be taking sides. His only interest in being here was to guarantee Senator Joe Colton’s safety as the latter continued to make his bid for the presidency. Everything else was supposed to be secondary.

But, Nick had to silently admit, that was just a wee bit hard to remember right now.

Earlier, before she’d put her precocious handful of a daughter to bed, Georgie had fed his appetite by whipping up some kind of a delicious concoction out of the vegetables she’d pulled from her garden. Vegetables that, by all rights, should have been withered and dried. She’d mentioned that a friend came by on occasion to weed and tend the garden. Still, it surprised him that somehow she’d managed to make something mouth-watering out of very little.

Almost as mouth-watering as she looked to him right then.

Again, he was reminded of the appetite that hadn’t been fed, hadn’t been satisfied.

And wasn’t going to be, Nick sternly told himself. At least, not now. Maybe when things took on a more definite shape and all the questions in his head were, once and for all, answered to his satisfaction, there would be time to explore this feeling. To explore this woman. But not now.

Damn it.

“I can turn the lights back up,” Georgie said, breaking into his train of thought as she turned around to face him. If she noticed the way he was looking at her, she gave no indication. “But Emmie wanted to pretend that we were still roughing it. This way, she could pretend we were camping out. Emmie really likes to camp out.”

“And you?” Nick asked, moving closer. “What do you like?”

The very breath stopped in Georgie’s throat as she looked up at him.

And then, all sorts of things ricocheted in her head.

Things that didn’t make sense.

Things that had to do with needs rather than the logical behavior she had been trying so hard to embrace for the last few hours.

“I think you’ve got a fair shot of guessing that one,” she told him softly.

Chapter 10

Nick was acutely aware that he was crossing a line. A line he had never ventured over before in his adult life.