Protecting the Boss

by Beverly Long

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  Colton Cowboy Standoff

  by Marie Ferrarella

  Chapter 1

  “Hello, Wyatt. How are you?”

  The woman’s low, melodic voice hypnotically wove its way into his bloodstream.

  Wyatt Colton stood in the doorway of the Crooked C ranch house, completely speechless and trying to remember if he’d somehow gotten drunk last night without having any memory of it.

  But he knew he hadn’t.

  He’d cleaned up his act several years back, substituting work to numb himself instead and to blanket the hurt he’d felt when she’d left him. Last night, like so many other nights, he’d been dead tired and had just fallen into bed, still dressed with his boots on.

  The same way he’d woken up this morning.

  But a hallucination was the only way he could explain why he was suddenly seeing Bailey, tall, golden-brown-haired and beautiful, standing on his porch, talking to him as if it was just any other day.

  As if nothing had ever happened.

  As if she hadn’t ripped his heart out of his chest, breaking it into a million pieces when she’d suddenly walked out on him and on their marriage without giving him even a single warning regarding her intentions.

  He felt as if he’d been torpedoed when the divorce papers had arrived in the mail.

  “Stunned,” Wyatt finally said, answering his ex-wife’s question when he was finally able to find his tongue and get it to work.

  His tongue might be working but his brain was another story.

  The first year after Bailey had left, he’d kept fantasizing about situations like this one. Scenarios in which he would open his front door—the door of the ranch house they had begun to build together—and find Bailey standing there. Sometimes repentant and contrite, other times smiling through tears, but always telling him that she’d been wrong to leave him. The scenarios would always end with Bailey throwing her arms around his neck and him forgiving her as he lost himself in the sweet taste of her lips.

  As time went on, the fantasies occurred less and less frequently until he was finally able to make it through a whole month without aching for her.

  Well, almost.

  However, the pain did ease up and he felt he was almost human again...

  And now here she was, standing in front of him, in the flesh, and Wyatt found himself suddenly catapulted back to the shaken shell of the man he’d been right after Bailey had left him.

  Staring at her now, he couldn’t help thinking she looked almost shy standing there. As if she didn’t know what seeing her like this was doing to him.

  “May I come in?” Bailey asked in a quiet voice, shifting and feeling somewhat awkward standing there on the front porch.

  Her fingertips were cold, colder than even the Colorado January air warranted. Wyatt looked almost like a stranger, not at all like the man she had loved and lived with six years ago. His shaggy, dark brown hair, bits of gray just coming in at the temples, framed dark blue eyes and a left cheek with a slight hint of a dimple.

  Had she made a mistake, coming back? Was he going to turn her away after all?

  For a moment it seemed as if Wyatt wasn’t going to answer her question. And then, when he opened his mouth, she could feel her heart squeeze in fear, afraid that he would say no and then close the door on her.

  So when Wyatt finally said, “Sure,” and stepped back to allow her access into the house, Bailey felt the corners of her eyes growing moist.

  Willing her tears not to fall, she walked into the wide, warm, inviting living room.

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” she told him after a beat. She slowly looked around and took in the room in its entirety.

  Initially they had worked on this room together but hadn’t gotten nearly finished when she’d suddenly taken off.

  It all came flooding back to him, every detail, every feeling, as if it had been just yesterday.

  “It needed furniture,” he told Bailey with a careless shrug.

  Bailey looked around again, taking more in. They had only finished building half the ranch house before she’d made her mind up to leave.

  “Well, you did a nice job, Wyatt,” she murmured and then added, “Really,” in case he thought she was just mouthing empty words.

  Wyatt frowned. His guard was up, but even so he could feel her getting to him.

  She always could.

  His resolve kicked in. He wasn’t going to allow himself to be set up for another bout of mind-numbing disappointment, he thought fiercely. He’d barely survived the last time and had just gotten to the point where he was breathing regularly.

  He couldn’t go through all that again.

  He wouldn’t be able to survive it.

  His dark blue eyes narrowed as he looked at the woman he had believed would be by his side forever. The joke was on him, he thought bitterly.

  In the beginning it seemed as if Fate had purposely thrown them together when he’d left home and embarked on making a name for himself outside the oppressive Colton sphere of interest.

  All of his life he’d been overshadowed by his family and his last name. When his father, Russ, wouldn’t allow him to do what he’d wanted to do—insisting instead that his oldest son get a business degree so he could take over the family business—Wyatt had abruptly dropped out of college, left his family and taken to the road.

  His father had all but gone into a rage when he’d learned that his firstborn was following the rodeo circuit.

  It was on that same circuit that Wyatt had met Bailey-Ann Norton.

  A rodeo brat whose father took her with him as he went from town to town, following the circuit, Bailey had never known another life. Eventually she’d become a barrel racer.

  Their attraction was immediate and strong, but she hadn’t thought there was any serious commitment on his part. That hadn’t happened until Wyatt had learned his beloved grandmother had died, leaving him a sizable amount of land right outside of Roaring Springs, Colorado.

  It seemed like an omen, the next step in his desire to make something of himself apart from his father’s almighty influence. Tired of the aches and pains he’d accumulated as a bull rider, Wyatt decided to change his plans—again. He’d asked Bailey to marry him and help him create a home and a ranch.

  He remembered that Bailey had never looked more beautiful than when she had smiled up at him and cried, “Yes!”

  They’d returned to Roaring Springs and started building their home and the ranch he envisioned.

  He’d thought things were going well. Obviously he’d thought wrong. A few years into their marriage, Bailey had suddenly left him.

  Wyatt f
elt as if he’d been gut-shot.

  It had taken him all this time to get over her, to get on with his life and finally become whole again.

  And now she was back!

  Why was she here?

  It made no sense to him.

  He wanted to know. “Did you come back here just to give the place a once-over?” he snapped, a cold edge in his voice.

  Bailey’s courage almost failed her then. But she had come this far—she couldn’t just back out now. She had to tell him why she’d sought him out after all this time.

  “No,” she answered Wyatt quietly, “that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Then why are you here, Bailey?” he demanded.

  Bailey took a deep breath, hoping her voice wouldn’t crack. She raised her head slightly, doing her best to look and sound as if she was in command of herself, in command of the moment. She knew that her ex-husband didn’t like displays of weakness. He valued bravery, even in an enemy, which she knew was the way he probably thought of her. At least to start with.

  Her dark eyes met his.

  You’ve got this, Bailey, she told herself. Her voice sounded as if it was echoing in her head as she answered his question.

  “I’m here because I want to have a baby and I want you to be the father.”

  Copyright © 2018 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  Geek girl Lexi Carmichael thought getting engaged would mean calmer days ahead. But when her fiancé’s past brings up more questions than answers, she’s not going to let anything—or anyone—drive them apart.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek at No Stone Unturned by Julie Moffett.

  No Stone Unturned

  by Julie Moffett

  If my mom texted me a picture of my own engagement ring one more time, I was going to lose it.

  Apparently she was trying to send them to her best friend, Candi Schmidt, but Mom and her new phone were still coming to an understanding, so she’d texted me the same picture seven times in the last five minutes. It was my picture to start with, and I’d only sent it to her after she bugged me for a week, threatening that if she didn’t get a photo, she’d post an engagement announcement on my behalf in the Washington Post. That horrified me enough to snap a photo of my ring and send it to her. Unfortunately she now wanted to share it with all her friends, which essentially meant the entire greater DC area. I had seriously been considering hacking her phone so it went exactly nowhere, but it seemed that wasn’t necessary. For now, I gritted my teeth and tried to be happy that the photo was coming back to me, over and over, instead of to her ginormous circle of friends.

  My phone dinged again, but I ignored it. Mom was just excited for me, but she was telling everyone about my engagement, while I’ve struggled with telling anyone, even close friends and family. Her enthusiasm was starting to make me feel weird about the mixed-up feelings I was having about getting engaged. I’m a geek girl who loathes attention, and telling people that Slash and I are engaged inevitably leads to screams, hugs, and a thousand questions about a wedding I haven’t even thought about yet. The stress was getting so acute that not even reciting Frederich Karl Gauss’s Theory of Reciprocity could take the edge off my social anxiety.

  My name is Lexi Carmichael and my life was a bit weird even before I got engaged. My fiancé and I are both uberhackers—me for a private cyber intelligence company called X-Corp and Slash for the NSA. His nickname is short for backslash in hacker lingo, and only a few people know his real name because of the covert nature of his intelligence work. He’s recently taken a much more visible position, and is now the youngest director of the Information Assurance Directorate in NSA history, followed around the clock by his own special Secret Service detail.

  My own job isn’t exactly lacking in excitement either. X-Corp is based in DC, but despite the virtual nature of my job, I travel a lot to secure my clients’ assets. I used to think that being an expert in cybersecurity meant a safe, quiet job behind a desk. I’ve discovered that couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a new world out there, and security is more often than not managed by strokes on a keyboard. Since humans are often the weak link in cybersecurity, I’ve had to do considerable work with people to keep data safe and secure. All that means both Slash and I are at the forefront of protecting national security, as well as business interests. It sometimes puts a strain on our relationship, but we decided to take it to the next level and commit ourselves to each other anyway.

  At this particular moment, national security wasn’t even on my radar. Instead I was focused on the engagement party Slash had informed me was inevitable. As the news of our engagement filtered out, our friends and family wanted to see us in person to congratulate us and see the new house we’d recently moved into together. Although we’d planned the party for this Friday, I was obsessing and stressing because this would be the first one I’d ever thrown in my own house. Slash was helping, which meant we were muddling along, trying not to kill each other in the process.

  “Do we really have to allow people to bring a guest?” I asked him for the third time, studying the spreadsheet while chewing on the eraser at the top of my pencil. We were sitting at the counter with mugs of coffee and a printed spreadsheet of all the things we had to do for the party. I’d carefully divided the spreadsheet into three parts—my responsibilities, Slash’s jobs and our joint tasks. Inviting people was part of our joint-task column, so here we were, hammering it out.

  He glanced up from the spreadsheet and my breath caught in my throat. He was unquestionably the best-looking guy I’d ever dated. Okay, he was pretty much the only guy I’d ever dated seriously. Still, when he spoke with his sexy Italian accent and gazed at me with his deep brown eyes, all logic left my brain. I knew that sometimes he used that to his advantage.

  His mouth quirked slightly at the corner, probably because he could see the glazed look coming into my eyes. Yep, Seduction 101, that’s exactly what he was doing. Even though I was fully aware of it, it was still working.

  “Your brothers have girlfriends, right?” he replied. “Guest plus one is standard.”

  “Who cares about plus one?” I groused. “I don’t even know who their girlfriends are this week.”

  He didn’t respond, so I let out a loud huff of annoyance before reluctantly adding two extra people as the unknown guests of my brothers. “We’ve already got sixteen people, including my parents. “It’s too many guests. We’ll never fit them all.”

  “We have a big house, cara. We’ll fit and have room to spare. Besides, it’s possible some people won’t come. You can stop worrying.”

  I’d never stop worrying, because I’d rather endure a dozen Microsoft patches than attend a party. But here we were—party planning central.

  Forcing myself to keep my mind on the task at hand, I resumed studying the spreadsheets. “Do I have to iron napkins?” I asked.

  Slash looked up from the spreadsheet. “What?”

  “The napkins. The book said formal events required ironed napkins. But now that I think about it, we don’t have napkins to be ironed.”

  Slash started to say something and then shut his mouth. After another beat, he asked, “What book?”

  “Party Planning for Dummies. They have separate chapters for formal and informal events. Formal events require cloth napkins. Do I need to buy some? More importantly, I’ve never ironed a napkin before and the book isn’t terribly clear on how to do it properly.

  Slash put his hand over mine, stopping me before I could write it down. “We are not buying or ironing cloth napkins. This is not a formal gathering. This is a casual party with close friends and family. It’s being catered, so we need to do little more than show up.”

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t mind the showing up part.”

  “I like it better than the party planning part, I admit.” He put a hand on my back and made circles with his fingers.
“We’ve got this. We’ll email the invites, pay the caterer, keep the house clean, and we’re done. People will come, congratulate us, look at the house, eat, drink and make small talk. One evening—over and out.”

  He made it sound easy. I only hoped he was right. In hindsight, I should have known better.

  Don’t miss No Stone Unturned by Julie Moffett, available now wherever Carina Press ebooks are sold.

  Copyright © 2019 by Julie Moffett

  www.CarinaPress.com

  ISBN-13: 9781488041143

  Protecting the Boss

  Copyright © 2018 by Beverly R. Long

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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