Colton's Secret Service

by Marie Ferrarella

  She’d heard that if someone was really determined to get into your computer, they’d find a way. “But you would.”

  Nick couldn’t help the tinge of satisfaction he felt from surfacing. He’d come a hell of a long way from that bully in the school yard.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “I would.”

  She crossed her arms before her, watching his fingers fly across the keyboard. Something was not right about a man being able to type that fast. Hands like that should be roping in a steer, not typing.

  “So the people I should be protecting myself against with that password thing could still—what’s the word? Hack?—into my computer.”

  “That’s the word,” he confirmed. “Hack.” Nick laughed under his breath, although there was no humor to the sound. She played the innocent well, he’d give her that. “Guess you’re right. Having a password wouldn’t help. It would be pointless.”

  An uneasiness descended over her as she listened to the keys clicking on the keyboard. “So is your nosing around on my computer,” she insisted.

  Bingo, he thought. He’d gotten into her online account and accessed her recent activities. It was right there in living color.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.” Rising from the chair, he started to turn the monitor toward her so that she could see what he knew she was already familiar with. He felt the card table begin to wobble.

  Quickly bracing it, Nick muttered a few choice, ripe words under his breath. They mingled with his suppressed sigh.

  Well, that hadn’t taken very long, he thought sarcastically. And he had just begun entertaining the idea that maybe, just maybe, she was telling him the truth about not having sent those e-mails. Just went to show that con artists came in all sizes and shapes. Even pleasing ones.

  Especially pleasing ones, he reminded himself. People like the Grady woman capitalized on their looks.

  So much for believing in fairy tales, he thought. He raised his eyes to hers. Tapping the screen, he asked, “Do you know what this is?”

  Georgie narrowed her eyes into angry green slits. “A frame-up.”

  Not by a long shot, he thought. “It’s the Senator’s Web site. And these,” he pointed to communication at the bottom of the screen, “are the e-mails you sent to him just in the last couple of days.”

  Georgie forced herself to look at the screen. The e-mail Sheffield was pointing to was particularly venomous and it was signed “Lone Star Girl.” But that was no proof that it was her.

  This was surreal, she thought, fighting off a feeling of desperation. This wasn’t happening. She was asleep, that was it. She’d fallen asleep behind the wheel of the truck and maybe even crashed into a ditch. She was having hallucinations.

  This had to be a hallucination.

  This was real. He was real. And he was lying. She didn’t know how he’d managed to do it while she was watching him, but somehow, he’d gotten that e-mail onto the computer.

  Her jaw hardened. “No, I didn’t.” And there was no way he was going to get her to say that she did.

  No more games, Nick thought. It was time to wrap this up. He pointed to the screen again. “Proof’s right here. This is your computer, your account.”

  “I don’t care if that damn message is painted across the Grand Canyon,” she informed him hotly, tired of being intimidated. “I didn’t write to your precious Senator. I don’t even have an e-mail account.”

  “Then what’s this?” he asked.

  She threw up her hands. How the hell did she know how it got there? “A mistake. A glitch. I don’t know. Machines are prone to errors.” Her eyes blazed as she glared at him. “Nothing is foolproof and this proves it.”

  She’d emphasized the word “fool.” Another dry laugh escaped his lips as he shook his head. “Calling me names isn’t going to help you.”

  But strangling him might, she thought angrily. Georgie struggled to draw her patience to her and sound calm. “Look, I’m only going to say this one more time. I haven’t been home in the last five months. The computer has. Somebody—”

  Georgie clamped her mouth shut as her own words and the thought behind them resonated in her head. Sheffield hadn’t planted this. Somebody had broken in. That had to be it. And if they broke in, there had to be evidence that they’d been here, right? Things would have been moved around, maybe the drawers had been ransacked. Something, anything, to show that someone had trespassed on her property, maybe even stolen her identity.

  The idea took root, shaking her down to her very toes. Her throat tightened. Maybe she was overreacting. Oh, God, she hoped so.

  Without another word, Georgie spun on the worn heel of her boot and hurried from the bedroom. The second she was out in the hall, she made a beeline for the kitchen.

  Catching him off guard, it took Nick a second to realize that she’d bolted. He immediately hurried after her. Unable to refute him, she was making a break for it, he thought. Not on his watch. Not after he’d stood all those hours in this god-forsaken place, waiting for her.

  “You can’t run!” he called after her.

  The woman didn’t bother to answer him.

  Expecting her to dart into the living room to grab her daughter, Nick was more than a little stunned to see Georgie run into the kitchen instead.

  Was there a back door? Was she abandoning her daughter and making a run for it?

  Nick strode into the kitchen after her and grabbed her by the wrist just as she’d reached the counter, spinning her around.

  “Let me go!” she cried in outraged frustration. She struggled to yank her wrist out of his grasp.

  For a little thing, she was pretty strong, he thought. Had to be all that rodeoing stuff she claimed to be doing. Well, it wasn’t going to do her any good. As a girl, she was strong, but she was no match for him.

  “It’ll go a lot easier on you if you surrender,” he counseled.

  “The hell it will.”

  Ever since she was a little girl, she’d hated the word “surrender.” It meant weakness to her and she would rather die than admit to that.

  Still trying to pull out of his grasp, Georgie raised her knee the way instinct and her older brother Clay had taught her, determined to award Sheffield the kind of pain that would make him set her free.

  But Nick anticipated her move. “Oh, no, you don’t,” he cried.

  Twisting, he jerked out of the way, throwing her off balance, then bodily pushed her against the wall. Pressed up against her, with his adrenaline running high and her breath hot against his chin, it took Nick a second to catch himself because his body was reacting to hers, taking him to places that his training did not allow for.

  For two cents, he’d kiss that mouth of hers into silence.

  It would have been the costliest two cents he would have ever had to pay and he knew it.

  “You can’t run,” he told her, his breath coming in short spurts.

  “I’m not running, I just want to get a damn flashlight,” she cried.

  Everything inside of her was scrambling madly—and anger had very little to do with it.

  Chapter 5

  Georgie’s words burrowed through the wall of preconceived notions in his head. This matched none of them.

  “A flashlight?” he asked.

  Georgie glared up at him, doing her best not to think about the havoc his closeness caused within her. How could she be so angry and react to him on a far different level at the same time?

  “Yes,” Georgie hissed. “A flashlight.”

  Nick released her and took a step back—as much for her sake as his own. He wasn’t the kind who usually entertained temptation, much less succumbed to it, but right now, he had to admit temptation was an irritating and unwanted guest.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” he fairly growled at Georgie.

  She tossed her head, trying to ward off the effects of being so close to him. “I didn’t realize I had to ask for permission to get something in my own house.”

 
“We Secret Service agents are a jumpy lot,” he told her drily. “Sudden moves make us nervous.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, unable to gauge whether he was serious. “I guess that means you don’t attend many rodeos,” she finally said.

  “Never felt the urge.” Although he found himself oddly curious about the events that would entice the likes of someone who looked like her to participate—if she was telling the truth and that was a big “if.” He asked a question that was more to the point. “What do you need the flashlight for?”

  Turning around, Georgie opened one of the drawers beneath the counter and took out the flashlight she kept there. She flipped it to the On position and it cast a waning beam.

  The batteries were running down, she thought. Something else she needed to see to. The mental list was growing.

  “So I can tell ghost stories.” For a second, she put the flashlight beneath her chin so that it cast an eerie illumination on her face. And then she lowered it, as well as her sarcastic tone, again. “What do you think I need it for?”

  He laughed drily. The woman was one for the books. “With you, my first guess probably wouldn’t be the right one.”

  She had no patience with playing games, not with him, not now. She pointed the flashlight away from him. “I want to look around to see if anything’s been taken or misplaced.”

  Again, she couldn’t begin to imagine why anyone would want to break into her ranch house, other than for shelter during a storm. She had no hidden money stashed away in a wall safe, no valuable pieces of jewelry stuffed beneath her mattress or even any high-tech electronic equipment lying around. Everything she had—except for Emmie—she had either bought secondhand or had been given as a hand-me-down.

  “Because you think someone broke in.”

  From his tone, she surmised that he still didn’t believe her. “Yes, I think that someone broke in. That generator isn’t mine.”

  “Someone broke in and brought you something rather than stealing something.”

  He was mocking her. She knew it sounded pretty stupid, but she didn’t appreciate his pointing it out or using that tone with her. Her hand tightened around the neck of the flashlight. For a split second, she wished she was Emmie’s age and had an excuse to act on her impulses. She would have loved to have hit this man and his mocking tone into the latter half of next week.

  But she reined in herself and fell back on using logic and reason—even if he didn’t have any. “You said you found the door unlocked.”

  “I did.”

  Well, that cinched it for her, if not for him.

  “I always lock the door when I leave the house.” She saw him look at her with doubt. She just knew he was going to say something again about people in rural areas being trusting. So she headed him off. “Times aren’t what they used to be,” she explained. “I trust my neighbors, but as you’ve just proven, people other than neighbors can come by. Those are the ones I lock my door against.” And then she sighed, shaking her head as she began to scan the area with her flashlight. “Without much success, apparently,” Georgie added under her breath, but audibly enough for Nick to overhear.

  He was about to make a comment on what she’d just said when he saw her freeze. He saw nothing that would cause her to stop talking.

  “What?”

  She aimed her flashlight directly at what had caught her attention. She wasn’t the world’s best housekeeper, but she kept things neat, especially when she was going away.

  “There’s a newspaper by the window seat.” Still aiming the flashlight on the paper, Georgie quickly crossed to the window seat.

  Nick fell into step behind her. “So?”

  She picked up the newspaper and, with the flashlight in one hand, looked at the date on the front page. “So, it’s from last week.” She dropped the newspaper back on the window seat.

  He still didn’t see what she was getting at. “Again, so?”

  Did she have to hit him over the head with it? “I wasn’t here last week.”

  That again. Nick shook his head, his skepticism all but shining like a beacon. “So you say.”

  She was tired of his not-so-veiled accusations. Tired of protesting and saying the same thing, over and over again.

  “I can give you a list of the towns I’ve been in. I pretty much shadowed the circuit. I entered one if not more events in each town. People saw me. My daughter thinks I’m special, but even so, I haven’t found a way to be in two places at the same time.” And if that didn’t make him shut up and finally go away, she didn’t know what would.

  The faintest hint of amusement lifted the corners of his mouth. “Would you want to be?”

  What kind of a question was that? Was he deliberately trying to hassle her? Of course he was. Well, then, she just wouldn’t let him, that’s all.

  Raising her chin, she gave him an answer she was fairly certain he couldn’t argue with.

  “Every mother wants to be in two places at once, if she’s worth anything. She wants to be with her child and she wants to be doing whatever it is she needs to do to earn a living for that child.” At least, that was the way she’d felt since the day Emmie was born and she’d fallen instantly and madly in love with the tiny baby. Taking her along with her on the rodeo circuit was the closest she could come to being with Emmie and still earn a living for them at the same time.

  She had passion, he’d give her that. Passion that unfortunately drew him in. It took effort for him to mentally pull back. “Is that supposed to convince me that you’re innocent?”

  Maybe she would give in to her impulse and just smack him. It wasn’t as if Sheffield didn’t deserve it. “No, my innocence is supposed to convince you that I’m innocent.”

  Instead of commenting on her claim, Nick looked at her thoughtfully. She looked damn sincere. “How long do the events that you participate in last? Your portion of them,” he elaborated.

  She shrugged, thinking. “I don’t know. Five, six minutes maybe.” Although there were times, like when her horse had stumbled last year, when it had felt like an eternity—going by in slow motion. “Why?”

  “Five, six minutes,” he repeated. “So you wouldn’t have to hang around all day if you didn’t want to, would you? Just show up for your part of the contest and then you could leave.”

  She knew what he was getting at. Obviously he thought the events were all close by. Either that, or the man thought she had some kind of magical horse that flew her home and back. If she had a magical horse that could fly, she wouldn’t have to be competing on the rodeo circuit in the first place.

  But instead of telling him that, or what kind of an asinine blockhead she thought he was, she said something she knew he could understand. “I’ve got people to vouch for me.”

  She saw Sheffield raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Friends?”

  “Yes, friends.” Something she doubted that Sheffield had.

  His expression didn’t change. “Friends lie for friends.”

  There was no winning with this man. Or reasoning for that matter. Her frustration rose another notch. She struggled to keep her voice down in order not to wake Emmie.

  “Are you determined to arrest me?”

  He tried to sound impartial, even though right now, everything did point to her.

  “I’m determined to make the threatening e-mails stop and have whoever has been sending them up on charges because, in case you didn’t know, it’s against the law to threaten a candidate for the presidency of the United States.”

  She resented his implication. That she was some hick who had no knowledge of the law. They weren’t that far from San Antonio and even if she hadn’t been to college, she’d been to the school of hard knocks and she’d graduated at the top of her class.

  “Yes, I know that,” she said between gritted teeth, “And again, no I didn’t do it. Now someone, as you so cleverly pointed out by pulling up the Web thingy on my computer—”

  “Web site,” he supplied,
interrupting her.

  “Whatever,” she said, struggling to rein in her temper. “Someone did and according to you, they did it from here. I know it wasn’t me, so by process of elimination, it had to have been someone else. Someone who broke in,” she emphasized. “I don’t know who or why, but it wasn’t me. I don’t know how else to say it.” She’d pretty much reached the end of her rope here. “IT WASN’T ME,” she enunciated the words close to his ear so that not even a single syllable was lost on him.

  “There’s a newspaper I didn’t bring in on the window seat and a dinky generator I never saw before stashed under my card table. Someone’s been here.” Her eyes blazed as she looked up at him. “Now you can believe me or not, I really don’t care. But I do intend to get to the bottom of this because my house has just been violated and I don’t like it.”

  Marching away from him, she returned to the kitchen and reached for the wall phone.

  Nick snapped to attention and quickly cut the distance between them until he was right next to her. “Who are you going to call?”

  It had been over four years since she’d found herself answering to anyone. She’d been more or less on her own since then and it grated on her nerves to be bombarded with questions like this—and expected to answer them.

  “Somebody who knows I don’t lie,” she bit off. Lifting the receiver, she began pressing the buttons before she even had the phone to her ear. “The sheriff. Hey, what are you doing?” she cried. The agent’s hand had covered hers and he pushed the receiver back down on the hook.

  “I can’t let you do that,” Nick told her simply.

  “Why?” she demanded. In the front yard, when she’d threatened to call the sheriff on him, he’d told her to go right ahead. Why was he changing his mind now? “You said I could.”

  “There’s a little matter of jurisdiction.”

  “This is outside of Esperanza. That puts it into the sheriff’s jurisdiction,” she retorted. “He’s the sheriff for the entire county.”

  “The e-mails are threats against a United States Senator,” he reminded her. “That makes it a federal case.”