“What do you hope to find?” she asked. She couldn’t begin to fathom using the machine as a tracking device, but then, she’d be the first to admit that she was naive in the ways of computers.
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted.
“Well, that’s not very encouraging.”
“Most clues turn up by accident,” he told her, leaving the room.
“Definitely not encouraging,” she murmured under her breath. Pushing everything else out of her mind, she turned her attention to making lunch. Specifically, to making burritos. Mexican food always made her feel better and she really needed something to make her feel better.
Left to her own devices, Emmie decided that now would be as good a time as any for “Mr. Sheffield” to answer those questions buzzing in her head. Slipping out of the kitchen, she came bounding into her mother’s bedroom.
“Hi,” she declared cheerfully. Not standing on ceremony, or hanging back, she planted herself beside him at the card table.
Nick looked up. Lost in thought for a moment, he’d forgotten about the little girl.
“Hi,” he murmured and, inadvertently, opened the door for her. The questions came, fast and furious, as to how his handcuffs worked. Why did he need them? Did he see many bad people? What did he do when he saw them? And on and on. There seemed to be no end in sight, her fertile mind coming up with question after question.
Emmie only stopped to draw breath when he chose to answer a question. She distracted him to the point that he eventually placed what he was doing on hold. He’d found what he was looking for, at least to some extent. Unearthing user history, he found a score of places that had been hit, all online stores. Unlike Georgie, whoever had used this computer had a logon user name and password for each site. He was going to have to get Steve hooked up to the computer in order to ascertain them. He had a feeling that if he found the names, he’d find the person sending the threatening e-mails as well.
God, he hoped he wasn’t being taken for a ride—by two redheads.
“Lunch is ready, you two.” Standing in the doorway to her bedroom, Georgie repeated what she’d first called out from the kitchen, getting no response. It seemed that her daughter and her uninvited “guest” hadn’t heard her so rather than call again, she decided to just fetch them and be done with it.
She hadn’t expected to find them kneeling on the floor on opposite sides of her bed. Especially not Sheffield.
Georgie looked from her daughter to the man who had summarily invaded her life and turned everything within it upside down. She decided that she’d get a better answer from Emmie than from Sheffield.
“Just what in the name of all that’s sacred are you doing, Emmie?” she asked, addressing the top of the little girl’s head—it was all that was peeking out from the far side of her bed.
Emmie popped up, grinning and looking very pleased with herself. “Playing cops and robbers, Mama. I’m the cop.”
Georgie turned to see the Secret Service agent on his knees, handcuffs securely on his wrists and an exceedingly sheepish look on his face. “I guess that must make you the robber.” She didn’t bother struggling to keep the amused expression from her face.
Silently declaring the game to be over, he rose to his feet. “Yeah.” He thrust his bound hands before him and at Georgie. “Get these off me.” The widening grin on her face did not fill him full of confidence.
“Not so fast,” Georgie drawled. “I think I like having you handcuffed.”
But Emmie was already making her way to her new playmate. “But he can’t eat if he’s handcuffed, Mama,” she said, the soul of logic. Taking the key she’d placed in her pocket, Emmie inserted it into the lock and turned it.
Handcuffs unlocked, Nick quickly removed them from his wrists, still not entirely sure how he’d allowed himself to get “captured” in the first place.
“I know,” Georgie agreed, “But he’d be a lot less trouble that way.”
Rubbing his wrists, Nick temporarily deposited the handcuffs into his pocket. “You know the penalty for falsely imprisoning a Secret Service Agent?” he asked Georgie.
Georgie turned her face up to his innocently. “Peace and quiet?” she ventured.
He had no idea why, but he had this overwhelming urge to kiss the grin off her lips. Had to be all this fresh air, he theorized. It was obviously doing strange things to his head.
“Get a move on,” Georgie ordered. He wasn’t sure if it was aimed at him, or her daughter, or both. “The food’s getting cold.” She led the way back. Nick did his best to keep his eyes fixed on the back of Georgie’s head rather than on the way her hips swayed in her tight jeans as she walked.
The rest of the day was spent less pleasantly, spinning his wheels, making very little headway, although Steve told him that he would do his best to hack into Georgie’s computer and get past the encrypted passwords. Nightfall came before he knew it.
Emmie seemed to finally run out of energy and had to be carried off to bed, sound asleep. Something stirred within him as he watched Georgie carry her daughter to her room. For some reason, the extremely domestic scene got to him and started him thinking. Wondering about the road not taken.
And then he shook off those thoughts. He wasn’t interested in that road, he reminded himself. He would have been bored within the first day.
But watching Georgie Grady/Colton now, he had to admit that there was something going on. It was the “what” that remained unidentified to him.
Careful, Nicky, he warned himself. You don’t want to be making any mistakes now.
He was human and he’d been conned before. But never by anyone nearly so attractive. Never by anyone he’d felt so attracted to.
In her defense, Nick supposed that Georgie could actually be telling him the truth. That she was a victim in all this. He had Steve checking all that out for him, checking her out, to make sure she was who she said she was and had, as she claimed, not even been near a computer these last few months.
In the meantime, he thought cryptically, he was doing his own checking out. Up close and exceedingly personal. So personal, he could feel his blood stirring.
It had been a long time since he’d thought of himself as anything other than a law enforcement agent of one type or other. But Georgeann Grady made him remember that beneath the oaths he had taken and the extreme devotion to duty he felt, there beat the heart of a man.
A man who’d been far too long without the touch of a woman.
The power was on, but she seemed to prefer having the fire in the fireplace lit. He watched now as the light from the fireplace caressed the outline of Georgie’s small, trim, jean-clad body. She moved about the rustic living room that could have easily come off the set of a Hollywood western. Except that it was genuine.
As genuine as she claimed to be?
Something inside him hoped so.
Not very professional of you, Nicky.
He wasn’t supposed to be taking sides. His only interest in being here was to guarantee Senator Joe Colton’s safety as the latter continued to make his bid for the presidency. Everything else was supposed to be secondary.
But, Nick had to silently admit, that was just a wee bit hard to remember right now.
Earlier, before she’d put her precocious handful of a daughter to bed, Georgie had fed his appetite by whipping up some kind of a delicious concoction out of the vegetables she’d pulled from her garden. Vegetables that, by all rights, should have been withered and dried. She’d mentioned that a friend came by on occasion to weed and tend the garden. Still, it surprised him that somehow she’d managed to make something mouth-watering out of very little.
Almost as mouth-watering as she looked to him right then.
Again, he was reminded of the appetite that hadn’t been fed, hadn’t been satisfied.
And wasn’t going to be, Nick sternly told himself. At least, not now. Maybe when things took on a more definite shape and all the questions in his head were, once a
nd for all, answered to his satisfaction, there would be time to explore this feeling. To explore this woman. But not now.
Damn it.
“I can turn the lights back up,” Georgie said, breaking into his train of thought as she turned around to face him. If she noticed the way he was looking at her, she gave no indication. “But Emmie wanted to pretend that we were still roughing it. This way, she could pretend we were camping out. Emmie really likes to camp out.”
“And you?” Nick asked, moving closer. “What do you like?”
The very breath stopped in Georgie’s throat as she looked up at him.
And then, all sorts of things ricocheted in her head.
Things that didn’t make sense.
Things that had to do with needs rather than the logical behavior she had been trying so hard to embrace for the last few hours.
“I think you’ve got a fair shot of guessing that one,” she told him softly.
Chapter 10
Nick was acutely aware that he was crossing a line. A line he had never ventured over before in his adult life.
His action was reminiscent of the rebellious youth he’d been rather than the man he had carefully and painstakingly evolved into. The man would have never given in to the moment, to the temptation shimmering before him.
No matter how much he wanted to.
But it was the rebellious teen, who hadn’t quite figured out how to harness himself, how to tame his impulses, who surfaced.
Nick cupped the sides of Georgie’s face in his hands and brought his mouth down to hers as if he had no choice in the matter. And it was that needy soul, the one who had never connected with anyone after his mother’s desertion, who silently cheered as sensations shot through him, causing him to deepen the kiss that was far from innocent.
My God, what’s going on?
The shell-shocked question echoed in Georgie’s brain before it showered down on her in shattered fragments. Before she embraced the wild feelings that had materialized out of nowhere. When Nick kissed her, she voluntarily fell headlong into it, losing herself. She could sooner stop breathing than pull back.
The ensuing rush was incredible.
It had been so long since she’d allowed a man to kiss her. The last few years, she’d lived her life almost exclusively in the world of men, but they were her friends, her mentors, her protectors. They looked out for her almost as if she were a beloved little sister. Once or twice, a new member had joined the circle and attempted to hit on her. But there was always someone to set the newcomer straight and he would obligingly back off.
As far as the men on the rodeo circuit were concerned, Georgie was family. Her boundaries were to be respected and not crossed.
And she had gone along, silently grateful for the protection, for being left alone on the complex romantic playing field.
She thought she was all right with that. She thought wrong.
This need that had sprung up from nowhere, exploding like a misstep taken in an active minefield, had to have had its origins somewhere, didn’t it?
The more Nick kissed her, the more she wanted to be kissed. The more she realized how much she’d missed being kissed, being treated like a desirable woman rather than just a mother, just a sister, just a worthy competitor. There was nothing wrong with any of that, but it didn’t begin to address the needs that had quietly been growing in the dark. Growing until they burst at the seams.
He should pull back.
He should get a grip and stop. Now, before he compounded the mistake.
But the feel of her soft body urgently pressing against his had set off all sorts of demands within him that were close to impossible to rein in.
He tried to talk himself out of it, using logic. It could all be just part of her plan to seduce him, to turn his head and make him oblivious to her guilt, to the con she wanted to put over on him.
God help him, he didn’t care.
He’d sort it all out later. Right now, something far more important was going on. And besides, deep in his gut, he felt she was innocent. That was supposed to count for something, wasn’t it? Gut feelings?
Or was he just trying to rationalize his behavior?
Breath short, pulse racing and adrenaline pumped up so high he thought he was about to plunge off the side of a cliff into a glass of water three hundred feet below, Nick still somehow managed to break contact and pull his head back.
Somehow managed to pull his lips away from hers. “Georgie—”
That’s all he said. That’s all he could say. Because she rose up on her toes, whispered a plea, “Don’t ruin this,” and sealed her mouth to his as she drove her fingers into his hair, anchoring herself to the sensation that thundered through her.
It was all he needed. The go-ahead signal. Had he been made of cardboard or metal, he could have called a stop to it. But he was flesh and blood and his flesh and blood called to hers.
As he tightened his arms around her, his mouth roamed Georgie’s face, her neck, the soft skin that peered out from where the first button of her blouse pulled against its hole.
As he kissed her, his mouth doing wild, wonderful things to her system she’d never experienced, Georgie felt his fingers freeing the buttons on her blouse.
And then her blouse was hanging open, exposing her lacy bra and showing off her tanned, firm skin to its best advantage.
His lips anointed her skin.
With unsteady hands, Georgie began to undress him, first pushing the damn black jacket off his shoulders, down his arms, then setting siege to his shirt. She yanked the edges out of his waistband, but as she began to free the buttons, she felt herself being picked up into the air.
Startled, she looked at Nick, a silent question in her eyes.
“Your daughter might wake up,” he told her, his voice husky with emotions that had yet to be spent.
Oh, God, Emmie. She’d forgotten about Emmie.
If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have been embarrassed that he was the one who thought of Emmie. After all, she was Emmie’s mother. But Georgie was grateful that he knew Emmie could come out of her room at any time, looking for her. Her heart swelled and an incredible wave of tenderness washed over her. That one simple act made her see him in a completely different light.
Again she sealed her mouth to his, kissing him long and hard. The only reason she broke contact was because he was depositing her on her bed.
And then he was helping her out of her jeans, pulling them down about her thighs and then her knees. His own knees felt almost weak as she raised her hips to help with the effort. Raised them so that they were closer to him.
Tossing the jeans aside on the floor, Nick reached for the soft, light blue bikini panties she still had on. Meanwhile, she had tangled her fingers in his belt, drawing it quickly through its loops. She didn’t even wait to have it hit the floor before she yanked on the zipper.
The button that fastened the trousers in place went flying. Momentarily distracted, Nick glanced to see where it had landed.
Georgie pulled his face back down to hers. “I can sew,” she told him just before she captured his mouth again.
She desperately wanted nothing to stop her. If she paused, if she thought, logic and her sense of self-preservation would get in the way and stop her.
And she didn’t want to stop.
She wanted to dash up to the highest pinnacle, to feel that rush through her veins just a moment before it was all over. She needed to feel that more than she could possibly ever put into words.
With a mighty tug, Georgie freed him of both his trousers and the underwear beneath them, bringing both down around his surprisingly muscular thighs and then off his torso completely. They fell into the shadows, along with the button.
“Learn that on the circuit?” he asked, trying to hide the desire that throbbed through his veins beneath a glimmer of humor.
“No,” she whispered, her breath lingering on his face, “but I could hog-tie you in a m
inute eight if you want a demonstration of what I did learn on the circuit.”
He framed her face with his hands, drawing the length of his naked body over hers. “Later.”
“Okay.”
It was the last thing she remembered saying before everything exploded within her. Before he made her feel beautiful. Before her skin went on fire as he branded her with his hands, his mouth, his tongue.
Georgie swallowed strangled cries as he made her climax and then continued, doing it again.
And again.
Until she thought she was just going to expire from exhaustion.
With her last ounce of available strength, Georgie wrapped her legs around Nick’s torso, stirring up temptation he couldn’t resist, couldn’t ignore or back away from.
Balancing his weight across his hands as if he were coming down from a powerful push-up, Nick plunged into her. A moment later, he was employing a rhythm that was older than time, and as new as the next second.
At the end, she would have cried out if his mouth hadn’t covered hers. She arched up as far as she could, trying to absorb every last fragment of sensation and hug it to her breast.
Then she realized that he had stopped moving.
When he rolled off her the next moment, she expected Nick to get up. To act as if all of this was no big deal. The way Jason had. Jason was her only frame of reference, the only other man she had slept with.
That Nick didn’t automatically get up surprised her. That he slipped his arm around her and drew her closer to him surprised her even more.
Almost as much as it surprised him.
He wanted to hang on to the sensation, to the exquisite moment, knowing that once it faded, there would be anger.
His own directed at himself.
Because he had slipped off the path he’d laid out for himself—slipped off big time. But just for a moment longer, he wanted to pretend that there were no consequences, that he had done nothing wrong. He’d simply enjoyed another human being.
He felt her turning her head toward him. Felt her studying him for a long, silent moment. And then she asked, “Did I just compromise you, or did you just compromise me?”
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