Major Nanny

by Paula Graves

  “Can take care of my own son without your interference,” Stacy finished for him.

  He turned his head to find her only a couple of feet away, her hands on her hips. Her dark eyes blazed at him.

  He held up his hands in surrender. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just-I see a situation developing, I try to fix it. But I had no right.”

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “I can see it was a mistake to try to meet for dinner,” Harlan looked down at Zachary, who had apparently gotten over the trauma of being picked up and hauled to the table. He was eating his soup again, one hand closed over a toy horse, making it trot circles around his bowl.

  “I think so, too.”

  Her short, angry replies were beginning to bring out a little of his own ire. What crime had he committed to deserve Stacy Giordano’s cold fury? Picking up her kid? He didn’t hurt Zachary, and the kid was acting like a brat, anyway. Maybe if she spent a little more time with him…

  “I’ll check in with you in the morning. We have a lot to go over,” he said brusquely, crossing to the closet where she’d hung his coat.

  She caught up with him. “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do to make this fundraiser happen safely. But keep your hands off my son.”

  His control snapped. “What the hell is your problem? I didn’t hurt your kid. I was trying to insert a little discipline into a situation that was getting completely out of control-”

  “It’s not your place to discipline my son.”

  “I just tried to get him to be quiet so you could do your job,” Harlan threw back at her. “The kid could talk paint off a wall, and he has no sense of control over his impulses. Do you let him just do whatever he wants whenever he wants?”

  “He has impulse control issues because he has Asperger’s syndrome,” Stacy snapped back. “Ever heard of it?”

  Harlan shook his head.

  Stacy shoved his coat at him. “Look it up. And if you can’t deal with what you find, stay far away from my son.”

  He stepped out into the cool October evening, wincing at the sound of the door shutting firmly behind him the second he stepped through the opening.

  “That went well, don’t you think?” he asked the waxing moon rising over the cottonwood trees to the east.

  The moon remained silent.

  He glanced at his watch. Just a little after seven-thirty. And he’d barely touched his burger.

  Yeah, a spectacularly successful night all the way around.

  Maybe he could coax the cook at the ranch house to make him a sandwich. He could eat it in the office the governor had set up for him down the hall from her own.

  Anything was preferable to going to his lonely, sparsely furnished apartment and trying to pretend it felt like home.

  Or that he didn’t feel like a complete idiot.

  “ARE WE GOING to get a horse?” Zachary asked.

  Stacy’s head was pounding, but she tried not to let her son see how much stress she was feeling. “Zachary, we don’t actually own this house. Ms. Lila just lets us live here, so we can’t bring a horse onto her property. She has her own horses and you get to ride them sometimes, don’t you?”

  “Only sometimes,” Zachary complained. “I want a horse I can ride all the time. And I can feed it apples and carrots and give it a name I pick. I think I would name him Zachary’s Horse. Because he’d be mine. And a horse.”

  Stacy let out a soft chuckle, feeling a bit of her tension beginning to ease away. “Zachary, we’re going to be staying here with the governor for a long while more.” At least, she hoped they were, although if Harlan McClain was the vindictive sort, he could be making trouble for her even as they spoke.

  She pushed the bleak thought aside. “We’re just going to have to ride Ms. Lila’s horses for now. If we ever get our own place, though, and we have enough room and it’s not against the law, we’ll talk about getting our own horse. I promise.”

  Zachary looked as if he were inclined to argue some more, but Stacy couldn’t spend the rest of her evening treading the same rhetorical ground with her son when her job might be dangling by a very thin thread.

  “Zachary, would you like to go see Chico?” she asked, taking her son by the hand. Chico was the half-Siamese cat that belonged to the governor’s groundskeeper, Miguel. The cat seemed to disdain most visitors, but for some reason, he loved Stacy’s young son.

  They walked along the dark path to the original ranch house, where the ranch staff now worked, and dutifully checked in with the guard at the checkpoint. Miguel and his wife, Rhonda, greeted her and Zachary with delight, and almost immediately, Chico wound himself around Zachary’s ankles, purring audibly.

  “Rhonda, I’m so sorry to ask this of you, but can you keep an eye on Zachary for a few minutes? I need to speak to the governor for a little while.”

  “Of course, we’ll watch him,” Rhonda said immediately, smiling her understanding. Rhonda and Miguel had become her immediate allies here on the ranch, as they had a grandson with autism and understood the challenges their own daughter and son-in-law were now facing.

  Stacy was very lucky to be surrounded with so many people who were willing and eager to help her out with her son. She just had to make sure she still had this job come morning.

  As she walked back to the main house, she spotted Harlan McClain’s shiny black truck parked in the side parking area, near the governor’s office and the smaller office the governor had set up for him earlier that day.

  So he’d gone from her house straight to see the governor. That couldn’t be good.

  Tamping down her dread, she signed in with the man standing guard at the side entrance and entered, heading straight to the governor’s office. She expected to find her deep in discussion with Harlan, but to her surprise, the governor was alone.

  “I’m surprised to see you here so late, Stacy.” Lila slipped her glasses off and waved at the empty chair in front of her desk. “Have you hit a snag with the fundraiser?”

  “No, I- No. Everything’s going surprisingly well. I was able to reach more people on the first call than I expected.”

  “Perhaps my recent brush with death has made people feel more inclined to take your calls,” Lila said with a wry smile. “In case it’s their last chance to do business with me.”

  “Don’t even joke about that,” Stacy said, her stomach aching with the memory of just how close they’d both come to dying only a couple of days earlier.

  “Sorry. Sometimes the only way to deal with a bad memory is to laugh at it.” Lila leaned back in her chair. “So, if you’re not here with a work problem, it must be something personal. Is your ex giving you trouble?”

  “No, I haven’t heard from Anthony in a couple of months.” Stacy started to get up, realizing she’d made a mistake coming here. She wanted to hide her troubles from the governor, not lay them at the woman’s feet.

  “Sit. Spill.”

  Stacy resumed her seat. Before she knew it, she’d told the governor everything about her disastrous reaction to Harlan McClain’s attempt to discipline her son. “I know he meant well, but I didn’t take it well. You know how defensive I can be when it comes to Zachary-”

  “And you thought he’d come here and tell on you?”

  Stacy nodded. “I guess that was stupid, huh?”

  “Not stupid, but I have to tell you, if you were worried that I’d sack you just because some big strappin’ hunk of a fellow came in here telling tales, you don’t know me very well. A man who’d tattle like a grade-schooler about something so petty isn’t the sort of man I’d want guarding my rose garden, much less my life.”

  Stacy smiled. “So he hasn’t even spoken to you tonight?”

  “He dropped by a few minutes ago to make sure it was okay for him to stay late and do a little work. He didn’t mention seeing you.”

  Stacy felt a sliver of guilt dig into the center of her chest. Here she’d been expecting the worst from him, and he hadn’t even mentioned s
eeing her at all, much less spilled all her deep, dark secrets. “I guess I’d better go apologize for snapping at him.”

  “Might be a good idea,” Lila agreed. “You know where to find him.”

  Stacy left the governor’s office and walked down the long hallway, past her own office, to the office she and the governor had helped set up earlier that morning. The door was open a few inches, but Stacy knocked anyway. “Mr. McClain?”

  He looked up as she entered, his expression wary. He filled the small office, not just with his muscular chest and broad shoulders but also the intensity of personality burning in his dark eyes.

  He gave her a brief, businesslike nod. “Ms. Giordano.”

  “Mr. McClain.” She paused where she stood a few feet away from him, trying to figure out what to say next. She could explain herself a little more directly, tell him why her salary was so important, how it paid for the therapies that gave her son half a chance at a more normal life. She could tell him how she hadn’t anticipated being left alone to deal with her son’s problems without his father’s help.

  But when she opened her mouth to speak, only one word came out. “Sorry,” she said.

  And realized he’d just said the exact same thing.

  Chapter Seven

  She looked tired, Harlan thought. Not just tired like a woman who’d had a long day but tired like a woman who’d had a long and stressful life. And he was more than a little surprised when the first words out of her mouth were an apology.

  “Nothing to be sorry for.” Rising from his desk chair, Harlan waved at the armless chair in front of his desk that was, temporarily at least, the only other seating accommodation he could offer. “Where’s Zachary?”

  “I took him to visit Miguel and Rhonda-Miguel’s the groundskeeper.”

  “I’ve met him. Nice guy.”

  “Their youngest grandson is autistic.”

  Heat burned Harlan’s neck. “Sorry about what happened with Zachary. I looked up Asperger’s syndrome, like you suggested.”

  “I overreacted. I’m just a mama bear where my son’s concerned. I should have explained instead of getting angry. It’s just-he’s going to have problems ahead of him, no matter what I do. Therapy only goes so far.” She hunched forward as if the world was heavy on her back. “Sooner or later, kids will start making fun of him because he’s different. He’s not going to have any kind of defense against it. And it’s worse for him because it’s not immediately obvious he has a problem.”

  “He has an amazing vocabulary for his age. I understand that’s a symptom?”

  “Or a blessing,” she said with a sad half smile that made Harlan’s chest hurt. “I’m luckier than a lot of mothers with special needs children. My son talks to me. He communicates pretty well. If he’s in the mood, he’ll hug me.”

  “But he doesn’t respond to most of your overtures, right?”

  “Reading social cues is beyond him. He doesn’t know that when I frown at him when he’s making a pest of himself, it means he should stop. He doesn’t understand that not everybody loves horses as much as he does.”

  “How long has he been obsessed with horses?”

  “Since his first rocking horse. When I took him for riding lessons, that was that. It’s all he talks about these days.” Her smile was wider this time, less bittersweet. “When he was three, he was obsessed with his father’s cell phone. He’d sneak it out of Anthony’s briefcase and play with it. He made God knows how many calls to people on Anthony’s list of contacts.” Her smile faded. “Anthony got so angry. He thought Zachary was acting up and that if he disciplined him, he’d behave.”

  Harlan’s heart sank. “And when you saw me pick him up and try to make him stop bothering you-”

  She nodded. “Anthony didn’t know, either. Not then.”

  “He must have felt bad about how he behaved once you figured out something was different about Zachary.” Harlan had felt like a complete lowlife, himself. He couldn’t imagine how the boy’s father must have reacted.

  “He felt bad that he had a defective son.” The bitterness in her voice came as a bit of a surprise. “He didn’t stick around long after that.”

  Harlan frowned. “He just left?”

  Stacy’s cheeks went pink. She stood up, already turning toward the door. “I didn’t come here to talk about my marriage. I just wanted to say I was sorry and I hope we can work together without letting what happened tonight get in the way.”

  He rose with her. “We can do that. How about we start fresh in the morning? Eight o’clock?”

  “Eight it is.” She managed another tentative smile. “I’d better go get Zachary before he makes Miguel and Rhonda regret they said they’d watch him.”

  Harlan walked her to the door of his office. “Be careful going back to your house.”

  She shot him a wry look. “This place is crawling with security. I’ve never been safer in my life.”

  Watching her walk down the hall toward the exit, he fervently hoped she was right. But he wasn’t sure anyone on the ranch was safe at the moment, no matter how many checkpoints he’d set up. For earlier that day, before he met Stacy for dinner, he’d gone over the security summaries from the event at the capitol, and something had struck him as highly significant.

  Nobody on the staff at the capitol had known what the governor had planned until the evening before it happened. They’d worked overnight to set up the dais and the sound system for the announcement. To get the event set up on time, the governor had to send her own staffers from the ranch-both office staff and ranch staff-to aid with the setup.

  About the only way the bomber could have known to set the bomb when and where he did was if he’d had prior notice. Which meant the culprit almost certainly was a member of the governor’s staff, which had known about the event at least a day and a half before the staff at the capitol. Whoever had planted the bombs had to be part of the governor’s staff in Freedom.

  And that put Stacy and her son right in the crosshairs.

  “YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS.” Stacy stared at Harlan with a mixture of disbelief and growing horror the next morning, when they met for their first orientation meeting. “Why on earth would anyone here want to hurt Lila?”

  “Maybe she said the wrong thing to the wrong person.” Harlan shrugged. “People go off for all kinds of reasons.”

  “Not this staff,” Stacy disagreed. “People here would open a vein for Lila. She’s the kind of honest, straightforward and sensible person this nation needs, and we’d never do anything to sabotage her, much less hurt her.”

  “And she pays well.”

  Heat rose in Stacy’s face. “That’s not the reason I took this job. I’ve been following the governor’s career since I was a teenager in Arkansas. I knew even then she was going to be big news. That’s the way almost all of us who work for her feel. I don’t know how much you know about working in politics, but it’s not the kind of job you do just because you want to bring home a nice paycheck.”

  “Fair enough,” Harlan conceded, looking pleased with her answer. “But what about the ranch staff? Could it have been one of them?”

  “Lila doesn’t exactly include them in her event planning,” Stacy pointed out.

  But she didn’t exactly treat them as potential leaks, either, Stacy had to admit. She’d warned the governor more than once that she should be a little more discreet about talking government business in the stables, at least. Stacy would concede that the house staff were loyal employees whom the governor treated like beloved family. But only the most senior of ranch hands were long-timers. Most of the junior stable grooms and a lot of the cowboys were relatively recent hires, as the jobs could be dirty, grueling and physically demanding. There was a lot of turnover.

  “What is it?” Harlan’s eyes narrowed. Apparently he’d noticed her hesitation.

  “The governor spends a lot of time out of her office when she’s here. She loves this ranch, and she likes to be hands-on about how
it’s run when she gets the chance.”

  “And it’s possible she might have said something about the announcement event in Austin within the hearing of one of the ranch hands?”

  “Maybe. You’ll have to ask the governor if she said anything to anyone about the event within earshot of the ranch staff. I don’t remember any particular incident, but she tries to oversee ranch business three or four times a week when she’s here in Freedom, so there could have been ample opportunity.”

  “I’ll definitely ask her.” Harlan nodded. “Meanwhile, when you get a chance in between your phone calls, will you get me a list of the ranch hands? The governor only gave me names of the office staff for my background checks, but I reckon now I need to go a little deeper.”

  “You’re doing background checks?” Stacy blurted, then realized it was a stupid question. Of course he was doing background checks. It would be a foolish breach of security protocol not to. “I just mean-we were all screened before we took jobs with the governor.”

  “I know, but those screeners were looking for different things than I am. And they didn’t know what I know now.”

  “That you think one of us could be a bomber?”

  He flashed her a wry smile. “It does add a new wrinkle.”

  Stacy dragged her gaze away from the dimple that had formed in Harlan’s cheek when he smiled and made a note on her BlackBerry to get the list of ranch staff for Harlan.

  “I’ll also want to see your event plans each step of the way,” Harlan added.

  She looked up in surprise. “By each step, do you mean-”

  “I mean I want to know everything you’ve done each day toward throwing this shindig. Is that a problem?”

  She frowned. “It’s a little control-freakish,” she blurted before she could stop herself.

  Harlan’s lips curved again. “Maybe. But if I find security loopholes at this stage, it’ll be a lot easier to fix them than if we wait until the party’s half-planned, right?”