Colton's Secret Service

by Marie Ferrarella

  In the overall scheme of things, eight hours was nothing, but when those hours peeled away, second by second, moment by moment, it felt as if the time was endless.

  He wanted to get back to the action, not feel as if his limbs were slowly slipping into paralysis. But he didn’t even dare get back to the car he’d hidden behind the barn. He might miss his quarry coming home. The man had to come home sometime. The e-mails had been coming fairly regularly, one or more almost every day now. Because there hadn’t been anything yesterday, the man was overdue.

  Nick took out a candy bar he’d absently shoved into his pocket last night. It was just before leaving Prosperino, California, the Senator’s home base, to catch the red-eye flight to San Antonio. After checking in with his team to see if there were any further developments—there hadn’t been—he’d rented a car and then driven to this god-forsaken piece of property.

  He’d found the front door unlocked and had let himself in, but while there were some signs here and there that the ranch house was lived in, the place had been empty.

  So he’d set up surveillance. And here he’d been for the last interminable eight hours, fifteen minutes and God only knew how many seconds, waiting.

  It would be nice, he thought irritably, if this character actually showed up soon so he could wrap this all up and go back to civilization before he started growing roots where he stood.

  How the hell did people live in places like this? he wondered. If the moon hadn’t been full tonight, he wouldn’t even be able to see the house from here, much less the front door. Most likely, he’d probably have to crouch somewhere around the perimeter of the building as he laid in wait.

  He supposed that things could always be worse.

  Stripping the wrapper off a large-sized concoction of chocolate, peanuts and caramel, Nick had just taken his first bite of the candy bar when he heard it. A rumbling engine noise.

  Nick froze, listening.

  It was definitely a car. From the sound of it, not a small one. Or a particularly new one for that matter.

  Damn, but it was noisy enough to wake the dead, he thought. Whoever it was certainly wasn’t trying for stealth, but then, the driver had no reason to expect anyone to be around for his entrance.

  Because he was pretty close to starving before he remembered the candy bar, Nick took one more large bite, then shoved the remainder into his pocket.

  All his senses were instantly on high alert.

  He strained his eyes, trying to make out the approaching vehicle from his very limited vantage point. He didn’t dare open the door any wider, at least, not at this point. He couldn’t take a chance on the driver seeing the movement.

  It suddenly occurred to him that if the driver decided to park his truck behind the barn, he was going to be out of luck. That was where he’d left his sedan.

  Nick mentally crossed his fingers as he held his breath.

  The next moment, he exhaled. Well, at least one thing was going right, he silently congratulated himself. The vehicle, an old, battered truck, came into view and was apparently going to park in front of the ranch house.

  A minute later, he saw why the truck’s progress was so slow. The truck was towing an equally ancient trailer.

  As he squinted for a better view, Nick tried to make out the driver, but there was no way he could see into the cab. He couldn’t tell if the man was young or old. The vague shadow he saw told him that the driver appeared to be slight and even that might have just been a trick of the moonlight.

  Nick straightened his back, his ache miraculously gone. At least the ordeal was almost over, he told himself.

  The truck finally came to a creaking stop before the ranch house, but not before emitting a cacophony. It almost sounded as if it exhaled. Straining his eyes, Nick still heard rather than saw the driver getting out of the truck’s cab.

  Now or never, Nick thought.

  “Stop right there,” he shouted, bursting out of the barn. He held up his wallet, opened to his ID. As if anyone could make out what was there, he thought ironically. To cover all bases, he identified himself loudly. “I’m with the Secret Service.”

  In response, the driver turned and bolted back toward the truck.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Nick shouted.

  A star on his high school track team, Nick took off, cutting the distance between them down to nothing in less than a heartbeat. The next moment, he tackled the driver, bringing him down.

  “Get the hell off me!” the driver shouted.

  Nick remembered thinking that the truck driver had a hell of a feminine voice just before he felt the back of his head explode, ushering in a curtain of darkness.

  Chapter 2

  It was only through sheer grit that Nick managed to hang on to the fringes of consciousness, gripping the sliver of light with his fingertips and holding on for all he was worth. He knew that if he surrendered to the darkness, there would be no telling what could happen. In his experience these last ten years, death could be hiding behind every conceivable corner. Even in tiny, off-the-beaten-path burgs that made no one’s top-ten list of places to visit.

  Falling backward, Nick teetered, then managed to spring up, somehow still miraculously holding on to his wallet and displaying both his badge and ID.

  Not that anyone was looking at it.

  “Striking a Secret Service agent is a punishable offense that’ll land you in prison,” he barked at his assailant.

  Swinging around to face the person who’d almost bashed in his head, Nick struggled to focus. Everything appeared blurred, with images multiplying themselves. This intense ringing in his ears jarred him down to the very bone. But even though it was wavy, the image of his assailant was legions away from what he had expected.

  Was he hallucinating?

  There, standing with her legs spread apart and firmly planted on the ground, clutching a tire iron that was close to being half as big as she was, was—

  “A kid?” Nick demanded incredulously when he could finally find his voice. “I was almost brained by a little kid?”

  “I’m not little! And you stay off my mama!” the tiny terror shouted. She held on to the tire iron so hard, her knuckles were white and she’d lifted her chin like a pint-sized, old-fashioned prize fighter, daring him to try to touch her.

  His head throbbed and the headache mushrooming over his skull threatened to obliterate everything else.

  Focus, Nick, focus!

  “Your mama?” Nick echoed. Well, that explained it all right. His ears hadn’t been playing tricks on him. The driver he’d tackled had sounded like a woman for a very good reason. “He” was a “she.”

  Even as he fought to clear his brain and try to keep the headache at bay, he saw the woman—and now that he looked, he could see that she was a petite, curvaceous woman whose body could not be mistaken for boyish—move swiftly to stand beside her daughter. She rested her hand on one of the little girl’s shoulders. The woman had lost the ridiculous, oversized cowboy hat she’d had on. Without it, he saw that she had red hair. It was pulled back and tucked into a long, thick braid that ran down to the small of her back.

  The fiery-looking, petite hellcat didn’t look as if she could weigh a hundred pounds even with her daughter perched on her shoulders. He should have easily subdued both of them with no trouble, not find himself at their mercy.

  This wasn’t going to look good in the report.

  The woman took the tire iron from her daughter. But rather than drop it, the way he expected her to, she grasped it like a weapon while gently attempting to push the little hellion behind her. The girl didn’t stay put long. It reminded Nick of a painting he’d once seen in a Washington museum, something that had to do with the spirit of the pioneer women who helped settle the West.

  For one unguarded moment, between the monumental headache, the intermittent confusion and the anger he felt at being caught off guard like this, the word magnificent came to mind.

  The next moment, he
realized this was no time for that kind of personal assessment.

  He found himself under fire from that rather pert set of lips.

  “Who the hell are you?” she demanded hotly, moving the tire iron as she shot off the words. “And what are you doing, sneaking around on my land, attacking defenseless women?”

  “I already told you who I was,” he reminded her tersely, “and I’d hardly call you defenseless.”

  As he said that, he rubbed his chin and realized belatedly that the woman he’d inadvertently tackled had actually landed a rather stinging right cross to his chin.

  Maybe he was damn lucky to be alive, although he probably wouldn’t feel quite that way if word of this incident ever really got out: Nick Sheffield, aspiring Secret Service agent to the President, taken down by two females who collectively weighed less than a well-fed male German shepherd.

  He eyed the tire iron in her hand. “I feel sorry for your husband.”

  “Don’t be,” Georgie snapped. “There isn’t one.”

  Once upon a time, during the summer that she’d been seventeen and full of wonderful, naive dreams, she’d wanted a home, a husband, a family, the whole nine yards. And, equally naively, she’d thought that Jason Prentiss was the answer to all her prayers. Tall, intelligent and handsome, the Dartmouth College junior was spending the summer on his uncle’s farm. She’d lost her heart the first moment she’d seen him. He had eyes the color of heaven and a tongue that was dipped in honey.

  Unfortunately, he also possessed a heart that was chiseled out of old bedrock. Once summer was over, he went back to college, back, she discovered, to his girlfriend. Finding out that their summer romance had created a third party only made Jason pack his bags that much faster. He left with a vague promise to write and quickly vanished from her life. In the months that followed, there wasn’t a single attempt to contact her. The two letters she wrote were returned, unopened.

  Georgie had grown up in a hurry that summer, in more ways than one. Eighteen was a hell of an age to become an adult, but she had and in her opinion, she and Emmie were just fine—barring the occasional bump in the road.

  Like the one standing in front of her now.

  Sucking in his breath against the pain, Nick rubbed the back of his head where Emmie had made more than gentle contact.

  It was a wonder she hadn’t fractured his skull, he thought. As it was, there would be one hell of a lump there. Probing, he could feel it starting to form.

  No husband, huh? “Killed him, did you?” he asked sarcastically.

  He saw the woman’s eyes flash like green lightning. Obviously, he’d struck a nerve. Had she really killed her husband?

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I want you to turn around and get the hell off my property or I’m going to call the sheriff,” she warned.

  Nick held his ground even as he eyed the little devil the woman was vainly trying to keep behind her. He was more leery of the kid than the woman. The little girl looked as if she would bite.

  “Call away,” he told the woman, unfazed. He saw that his answer annoyed her and he felt as if he’d scored a point for his side. “It’ll save me the trouble of looking up his number.”

  “Right.” She drew the word out, indicating that she didn’t come close to believing him. Inclining her head slightly toward her daughter, she nonetheless kept her eyes trained on him. “Emmie, get my cell phone out of the truck.” Her eyes hardened as she turned her full attention back to him. “We don’t like people who trespass around here.”

  Okay, he’d had just about enough of this grade B western clone.

  “Look, I already told you that I’m a Secret Service agent—” Nick got no farther.

  Georgie snorted contemptuously at what she perceived to be a whopper. Anyone could get a badge off the Internet and fake an ID these days. “And I’m Annie Oakley.”

  “Well, Ms. Oakley,” Nick retorted sarcastically, “right now, you’re interfering with a federal matter.”

  When it came to sarcasm, she could hold her own with the best of them. Growing up with no father and her lineage in question, the butt of more than one joke, she’d learned quickly to use the tools she had to deflect the hurtful words.

  “And just what matter would that be?” she asked.

  Although he rarely justified himself, he decided to give this woman the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she wasn’t playing dumb, maybe the more-than-mildly attractive hellcat really was dumb.

  So he spelled it out for her. “Obstruction of justice, harboring a criminal—”

  She stopped him cold. “What criminal?” Georgie demanded angrily.

  This man was really getting under her skin. God, but she wished she had her shotgun with her instead of this hunk of metal. Wielding a tire iron didn’t make her feel very safe.

  “Georgie Grady,” he answered. He had his doubts that she was innocent of the man’s activities. Not if she lived here as she claimed. Even so, Nick decided to cover his bases and give reasoning a try. “Look, your boyfriend or whoever Georgie Grady is to you is in a lot of trouble and if you try to hide him, it’ll only go hard on you as well.” Needing some kind of leverage, he hit her where he assumed it would hurt the most. “Do you want Social Services to take away your daughter?” He nodded at the returning child holding on to the cell phone she’d been sent to get. “I can make that happen.”

  “Can you, now?” He was bluffing, Georgie thought. The man didn’t know his ass from his elbow, he’d just proven it. “Somehow, that doesn’t fill me full of fear,” she informed him coldly.

  “Mama?”

  There was fear in Emmie’s voice. Georgie’s protective mother instincts immediately stood at attention. She slipped one arm around her daughter’s small shoulders to give her a quick, comforting squeeze.

  “But someone upsetting my daughter does fill me full of anger and I promise you, mister, when I’m angry, it’s not a pretty sight.” Her eyes became glinting, green slits as she narrowed them. “You’d do well to avoid it if you can.”

  What the hell was he doing, standing in the middle of nowhere, going one-on-one with some misguided red-headed harpy? He’d had enough of this. “Just tell me where I can find this Georgie Grady and I’ll forget this whole incident.”

  Emmie tugged on the bottom of her mother’s shirt to get her attention. “Is he simple, Mama?” she asked in what amounted to a stage whisper.

  Georgie stifled a laugh. “It would appear so, honey.”

  He was not here to entertain them, nor did he appreciate being the butt of someone’s joke, especially when he wasn’t in on it. “Look, call the damn sheriff so we can get this over with.”

  To his surprise, she took a step toward him, lifting her chin exactly the way he’d seen her daughter do. “I will thank you not to use profanity in front of my daughter.”

  Of all the hypocritical—“But you just cursed,” he pointed out.

  Georgie allowed a careless shrug to roll off her shoulders. “That’s different.”

  Of course it was. “God, but I hate small towns.”

  “And using the Lord’s name in vain’s pretty much frowned on around here as well,” Georgie told him, not bothering to hide her disdain.

  Well, it was obvious that no matter what she said, she wasn’t calling the sheriff and he wanted this thing brought to a conclusion. “Fine, tell me the sheriff’s number.” He began to reach into his suit jacket pocket. “I’ll call him and we can get this over with.”

  Alarmed that he might be reaching for a concealed weapon, Georgie raised the tire iron threateningly. “Put your hands up!” she ordered.

  Abandoning his cell phone, Nick did as she said. “I can’t dial and put my hands up,” he protested. He was miles beyond annoyed now.

  The woman seemed to relax, lowering the tire iron again. She raised her eyes to his and he could have sworn he saw a smirk. Her next words did nothing to dispel that impression.

  “Don’t do your research very we
ll, do you, Mr. Secret Service agent?”

  No matter how he focused, he hadn’t a clue what she was driving at and he was very tired of these mind games. She was undoubtedly stalling for time. If he didn’t know better, he would have said she was trying to give her boyfriend time to escape—except that he already knew the man wasn’t in the ranch house.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  She debated stringing him along for a bit, then decided that more than wanting to get to him, she wanted him gone. There was only one way that was going to happen. “Well, for one thing, Mr. phony Secret Service agent—” she’d seen more convincing IDs in Howard Beasley’s Toy Emporium “—I’m Georgie Grady.”

  “No, you’re not.” If ever he’d seen someone who didn’t look like a “Georgie” it was this woman in the tight, faded jeans and the checkered work shirt that seemed to be sticking to every inch of her upper torso like a second skin, thanks to the humidity.

  Georgie shook her head. Talk about a blockhead. Too bad he was so damn annoying, because, all things considered, he was kind of cute—as long as he lost the black suit and stopped using so much of that styling goop on his hair.

  “Then the people who put that name on the trophy I just won at the last rodeo competition are going to feel pretty stupid,” she told him.

  Nick had to consciously keep his jaw from dropping. He eyed her incredulously. This was just outlandish enough to be true. “You’re Georgie Grady.”

  “I’m Georgie Grady. I guess you’ve got a hearing problem as well as lacking any manners,” she surmised. She looked down at her daughter. “Gotta feel sorry for a man like that, Emmie. He doesn’t know any better.”

  He was hot, he was tired and his head was splitting. He was in no mood to be talked about as if he wasn’t standing right there. Especially by his quarry if this woman really was Georgie Grady.

  “Look,” he said waspishly, “this is all very entertaining, but I don’t have time for an episode of The Waltons—”

  The woman watched him blankly. It was obvious that the title of the popular classic TV show meant nothing to her. “Must’ve been before my time,” she commented. She nodded over his shoulder. “The road’s that way. I suggest you take it.”