Marie Ferrarella - The Coltons - Nick, Clay & Jericho

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.