Rachel Lee - Guardian in Disguise

He tossed his helmet on the desk and brought his computer up. He had some idea how to teach the course he was about to begin. It hadn’t been that long since he’d taken such a course himself, and he knew that part of what students would want to hear were actual on-the-job experiences. He’d heard enough stories to tell them as if they were his own.

He’d even managed to rustle up his own course outline and enough handouts to get him rolling. He figured he could pull this off as well as any role he’d ever had to play. And unlike Liza Enders, his students weren’t going to be suspicious.

Nope, the teaching part would be a walk in the park compared to some of the stuff he’d had to do—like lie.

There were some folks who deserved to be lied to. And then there were the rest, who didn’t deserve it at all.

What was that old joke? The drug dealer is more honest than the average narc, because the narc lies about what he is.

The thought made him shift uncomfortably in his seat.

Keep your eye on the ball, he reminded himself. It was a familiar refrain in his life. He had to keep his eye on the ball here, an important ball. And that was definitely going to mean keeping an eye on Liza Enders.

There were worse jobs, he decided. But nothing that began with a lie could end well. In fact, lies usually just blew up on you.

And right now, he wondered if Liza Enders was going to wind up being a grenade.

Two days later, Liza sat in the back of her own classroom, listening as Sheriff Gage Dalton explained why cops used Public Information Officers to speak with the press. But her mind was elsewhere.

She’d learned that Max did indeed have an active law license in Michigan, but no address for a practice. Private addresses were confidential. Okay, he was licensed. That part of his CV was real. But she had learned absolutely not one more thing, and that bothered her.

Gage, a former DEA agent, a man with a limp and a face badly scarred from burns received from a car bomb that had killed his first family, looked comfortable in front of the class explaining matters.

“You’ve got to understand why we need to control information flow,” he said. “First off, ongoing investigations need to be protected. We can’t share information that might tip off a criminal to how much we know. We can’t share information that might implicate someone who is innocent. We can’t share anything we’re not a hundred percent certain of. So we have a spokesperson who knows exactly what we can and cannot say.”

She nodded to herself, understanding it only too well, although it had caused her a lot of frustration during her years on the crime beat.

He went into some detail about the Atlanta Olympics bombing and how he felt that had been mishandled. Pencils and pens were scrabbling quickly across notepaper, fingers were typing rapidly on laptops as the students listened, enthralled.

Finally Gage looked at her. “Do you have anything to add, Ms. Enders?”

She smiled and stood up. “Of course I do. It’s still my job as a reporter to get everything out of you and any other source I can find and report it. So, class, you could say we have an adversarial relationship here. There’s a fine line between respecting an investigation and buying public statements hook, line and sinker.”

Gage nodded agreement. “Sometimes the press can be really helpful to us. Other times they can cause problems.”

The two of them batted stories back and forth and answered students’ questions until the class ended. Gage remained until the last student left, then he turned to Liza.

“I haven’t told you yet, but it’s good to have you back in town.”

“I haven’t been back that long and you hardly knew me before I left.”

He winked. “But I’m sure you knew me.”

“Oh, everyone knew who you were.”

“Hell’s own archangel,” he said.

She almost gasped. “You heard that?”

“Everything gets around this town sooner or later. I can’t say I blame anyone for calling me that. I came out of nowhere with death in my eye, I suppose.”

“But no one thinks of you that way anymore,” she assured him.

“No, probably not anymore.”

She hesitated. “Say, Gage?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know Max McKenny?”

Cops were good, especially cops like Gage, who’d worked undercover, but she caught an instant of stillness before he responded. “Only that he asked me to talk to one of his classes, too.”

“Yeah? About what?”

“My undercover days and how you have to work to stay inside the law when you’re trying to get in with people who are constantly breaking it.”

“That’s a good topic,” she admitted. “You were DEA, right?”

He nodded. “And I had to get through it without ever doing drugs myself. It’s not easy, and it can cause a lot of suspicion. Why do you want to know about McKenny?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about him,” she said frankly. “Something doesn’t add up.”

“Such as?”

“I can’t exactly put my finger on it. He wants to take me up into the mountains on a ride sometime.”

Gage shook his head. “You reporters. I did his background check for the college, Liza. Is that good enough?”

She felt like squirming, wondering yet again if she was being unreasonable about all this. Maybe this was nothing but a major fail for her instincts. Or maybe her whole problem with Max was that she was nervous about the attraction she felt for him. Attraction had given her nothing but grief in her past.

“I guess it’s good enough,” she said finally to Gage.

“He’s clean?”

“They hired him, didn’t they?” Gage smiled that crooked smile of his and headed for the door. “Let me know if he does anything to justify your suspicion.”

Ouch, she said to herself as Gage disappeared.

She thought again about the complaint her ex-boyfriend had made. Was she really too inquisitive? Too suspicious? Maybe so, she admitted as she returned to her office. Max McKenny had passed a background check performed by the sheriff’s office. That should be enough for her. Absolutely enough.

His reasons for coming here to teach were purely personal and none of her business unless he made it hers. God, she needed to rein this in. Even Gage thought she was being a bit ridiculous, although he hadn’t come right out and said so.

She was walking head down, waging an internal war with herself as she crossed the quadrangle. A few dead leaves rustled as they blew by her, an early announcement of autumn, but she barely noticed them.

Okay, she was trained to want to know everything, but she wasn’t trained to question everyone who crossed her path. What had Max done to arouse her suspicion except seem out of place? And who was she to decide he was out of place?

Heck, she was out of place herself.

So a good-looking guy with a law enforcement background came all the way from Michigan to teach at an out-of-the-way junior college. Maybe it was the only job he could find, given that jobs were harder to find than ladybugs without spots. She ought to know that, since she’d spent months searching after she got her pink slip.

Maybe he really did just want a break from chasing speeders. He wouldn’t be the first cop who found the job not to his taste after a while.

And look at her. If her life had followed her plan, she’d be working at an even bigger daily paper now instead of teaching.

She sighed.

Okay, maybe all this was happening simply because she was frightened of being so attracted to him. Maybe she was doing the deflecting, finding reasons to try to stomp down that attraction. Any other woman with these feelings would be trying to draw Max’s attention, not trying to find something unsavory in his past.