The sick feeling inside Nick’s stomach spread throughout his body. He placed his fingers against Georgie’s throat. The pulse he located made his own heart leap. She was still alive.
Emmie looked at him with huge, frightened eyes. “She’s not dead, right? She’s not dead.” It wasn’t a question, it was a plea.
“No, she’s not dead,” he assured her, relief flooding through him.
Emmie began to cry. “Why won’t she open her eyes?”
He had to calm down Emmie. The last thing he needed right now was to have a hysterical child on his hands. He wasn’t equipped to handle that. “Your mother hit her head pretty hard. It knocked her out.”
Emmie caught her lower lip between her teeth. It was an obvious effort to keep herself from crying. She was more adult than some adults he’d known. “Like in the cartoons?”
He had no idea what they were showing in cartoons these days. The last cartoon he remembered was from a childhood that seemed as if it was light years away from now. He vaguely remembered that there’d been a coyote walking on thin air, falling into the chasm only when he looked down and realized that there was nothing beneath his feet.
“Not quite like in the cartoons,” he told her. He rose to his feet with Georgie’s unconscious body in his arms. Rather than running off, the horse she’d ridden stood like a sentry beside her mistress. He knew Georgie wouldn’t want the palomino to wander off. Nick glanced at Emmie. Despite the accident, the horse seemed tame enough. “Emmie, do you think you can take the horse back to the stable?”
“Sure.” The little girl obediently picked up the reins that were trailing along on the ground. Authoritatively, she said, “Let’s go, Belle.”
The animal trotted patiently beside her like an oversized pet. Emmie quickly led the horse into the stable and closed the stall, then dashed across the yard to join Nick as he entered the house.
Nick placed Georgie’s inert form on the sofa. Emmie dashed into the kitchen. Within a minute, she reappeared with a wet towel.
“Here,” she held it out to Nick. “You put it on her head,” she told him solemnly. “Mama says it makes her feel better sometimes.”
“Let’s hope this is one of those times,” he replied as he spread the cloth on Georgie’s forehead, praying that there wasn’t any internal damage.
The second the cold cloth touched her skin, Georgie began to moan. And then her eyes fluttered open. They shifted from Nick to her daughter as she struggled to put her world back in order. Her head felt as if it was coming apart.
“Mama!” Emmie cried. “You’re back!” Ecstatic, she threw her small arms around her mother’s neck.
Nick was tempted to pull the little girl back, but he decided that both Emmie and Georgie needed this reaffirming moment. Any pain that might have been generated from Emmie’s hug was more than balanced out by the warmth he knew the contact created.
“Don’t cry, honey, I’m okay,” Georgie comforted her daughter, slowly rubbing Emmie’s back the way she used to when Emmie was a baby and needed soothing. Feeling as if she’d been trampled by a herd of horses, Georgie raised her eyes to Nick. “What happened?”
She didn’t remember, Nick thought. Had there been damage? Should he be rushing her to the hospital instead of just standing here? Being grateful that she was alive? It occurred to him that he didn’t even know if Esperanza had a hospital.
“You fell off your horse and hit your head,” Nick told her.
Georgie just stared at him, certain that she couldn’t have heard correctly. “No. I never fall off my horse. Not once in all those years of competition. Not since I was ten,” she recalled with emphasis.
He sat down on the edge of the scarred coffee table. “You did today.”
She started to shake her head, then stopped as arrows of pain shot through her. “That’s not possible,” she protested in a voice that was definitely having trouble remaining even.
Emmie lifted her head from Georgie’s chest. “I saw you, Mama,” she confirmed.
“Look, that was a pretty nasty spill. I’m going to take you to the hospital. You just wait—” Rising from the table, Nick didn’t get a chance to finish.
“No, no hospital,” she said, her voice growing stronger. “I don’t want to go to any hospital.” Georgie closed her eyes for a moment as a wave of pain washed over her. And then it began to recede. “I just want to find out what’s going on here.”
“You fell off your horse,” Nick repeated. “The saddle came off,” he elaborated. “You must have forgotten to tighten the cinch.”
She gave him a look that told him she’d sooner forget to put her clothes on when she left the house than to forget to tighten her cinch. “The saddle came off?” she asked incredulously.
He nodded. “Slid right off like butter.”
Upset, confused, Georgie tried to sit up and get off the sofa. The room began to spin and she lay back even before Nick gently pushed her back.
“Something’s wrong,” she protested. “That’s a hand-tooled saddle. My grandfather gave it to my mother and she passed it on to me—”
“Then it’s old,” he pointed out. “Things wear out.”
“Not this saddle. It’s well made and it’s always been lovingly taken care of. There’s no reason that it should have come off Belle like that.”
He knew she wasn’t going to let the matter drop and he wanted her to get some rest. “I’ll go check it out,” he told her. He began to go, then doubled back. He didn’t trust her. “But you have to promise to stay here.” When she didn’t say anything, he pressed the issue. “You have to promise.”
Trapped, Georgie blew out a breath. Emmie had climbed up onto the sofa and curled up on her as if she was part of the sofa. “Okay.”
Nick still didn’t trust her. He decided to enlist help. “Emmie, I’m making you a deputy Secret Service agent—”
“You can do that?” Emmie asked, her eyes widening again. For the first time since she’d seen her mother fall, a smile flitted along her rosebud lips.
“I can do that,” he assured her. “Now, you watch your mother. And whatever you do, don’t let her get up.”
“Not even to go to the bathroom?” Emmie wanted to know.
“Not even then,” he said, starting to leave the room.
“You’re a hard man, Nick Sheffield,” Georgie called after him. She winced as her voice echoed in her head.
“And don’t you forget it,” he tossed back over his shoulder. “I’m counting on you, Emmie,” he told the little girl.
“Okay,” she answered solemnly. Emmie had scrambled off the sofa and had assumed a rigid stance, carefully watching her mother for any movement.
Nick hurried outside and ran the length of the yard until he reach where the saddle was lying on the ground. About to pick it up and bring it into the house, he decided to examine it. At first glance, it appeared that Georgie was right. The saddle was in excellent condition, despite its age.
He was in foreign territory here, Nick thought, looking over the square skirt, lifting the heavily decorated fender. Unfamiliar with a saddle’s construction, he had no idea what he was looking for.
And then, miraculously, he found it. Despite his ignorance, even he could identify a cut cinch when he saw one. He examined the offending length of leather. The cinch had been cut three quarters of the way through. It was torn the rest of the way.
Someone had tampered with her saddle, hoping for just this kind of a scenario. Were they out to kill her, or just to scare her? And if it was the latter, to what end?
Either way, it confirmed what he was thinking. That Georgie was the prime target. He had to make her understand that without frightening her.
Or maybe, he decided, a little fear might just do the trick. Otherwise, he had a feeling she would continue thumbing her nose and being damn reckless. It was apparently in her blood.
Georgie stared at him. What he was saying wasn’t making any sense. “Cut?” He nodded. “You’r
e sure?”
“I might not be able to lasso a steer or whatever it is you lasso around here,” he told her. “But I know a cut cinch when I see one. Hey, hey, hey.” She’d begun to get off the sofa again. Nick pushed her back down just as he had the first time. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She didn’t do helpless well. The dizziness had abated and she wanted to examine her saddle. She just couldn’t believe someone would have actually done this on purpose. “I want to go see my saddle for myself.”
Nick looked at her for a long moment. He’d never met someone quite like her. But right now, her stubbornness was loosing its appeal. “Why would I make that up?”
Frustration ate away at her. None of this made any sense. She felt as if she was trapped in some surreal story. “I don’t know, why would you?”
“I wouldn’t,” he told her firmly. “Someone deliberately cut your cinch in a place you wouldn’t immediately notice if you were in a hurry.” And maybe there was something she hadn’t realized, he thought. “If you’d fallen off your horse ten minutes later than you did, God only knows how long you would have laid there, unconscious.”
No longer a sentry, Emmie was once again huddled against her, holding on as much to receive comfort as to give it. “You’re scaring her,” Georgie chided him.
“No need to be scared,” he told her. “I’m not leaving your side until this thing gets resolved.”
He had some time coming to him, time he hadn’t used because there’d been no reason to use it. He wasn’t the type who enjoyed flying off to some fashionably popular vacation site just to spend hours lying on a beach. He enjoyed working, being useful. Finding out who was after Georgie came under that heading.
Georgie didn’t reply, but Emmie raised her head and smiled at him as if she thought he was the Angel Gabriel, sent down to protect them. It was reward enough.
Chapter 13
The silence within the house was so pervasive, it all but throbbed. Only the sound of his fingers hitting the keyboard interrupted the quiet.
Having gotten as much as he could from the computer tower in Georgie’s bedroom, Nick was now working on the laptop he’d brought from Prosperino. At the moment, he used a popular software to enhance the strip of videotape he’d frozen. He attempted to isolate a decent close-up of the woman posing as Georgie in order to print a photograph. He intended to show that around town until he found someone who recognized her.
A faint noise behind him caught his attention and he was on his feet, his weapon drawn. And then he let out a breath as he saw what or rather who was responsible for the noise.
“Do you have duct tape lying around?” he asked Georgie.
She vaguely remembered seeing a round wheel of silver, but for the life of her, she couldn’t recall just where. “Some place, I guess,” she said with a shrug, then asked, “Why?”
“I figured I’d use it to tape you to your bed,” he told her, sitting down again and turning his attention to the laptop.
He heard the smile in Georgie’s voice, heard the slight rustle as she crossed to the sofa rather than back to her room as he’d hinted.
“I didn’t know that Secret Service agents were allowed to be kinky.”
“Nothing kinky about it,” he said matter-of-factly, doing his best to concentrate. It wasn’t easy with her in the room. Not when she was standing there, wearing an oversized T-shirt and what he imagined to be little else underneath. “I just want you resting.”
“I’m fine,” she assured him. She leaned against the sofa’s overstuffed arm. “Headache’s almost gone.”
“If you’re so fine, what are you doing up?” he asked. Rather than look at her, he glanced at his watch. “It’s almost midnight.”
She shrugged and the hem of her T-shirt rose dangerously high across her thighs. His thoughts went AWOL for a moment before he reined them in again. “I heard you typing.”
Nick cleared his throat. It felt as dry as dust. “Sorry, I’ll try to type softer.”
“No, I’m sorry,” she said with feeling, surprising him. “Sorry you have to put in all this extra time. Sorry you feel you need to stand guard.”
In his estimation, there was no need to be sorry.
“Nothing I haven’t done before.” Nick assured her. And then he smiled as a distant memory floated through his mind. “This beats sitting in a car all night, making sure no one tampers with it.”
“When did you do that?”
“When I first became a Secret Service agent, I got tapped to babysit the President’s car the night before he flew in to tour Los Angeles,” he explained. “Some sort of political fund-raiser,” as he recalled. “It’s kind of a rite of passage, testing the new agent to make sure he’s got the stamina for boredom.”
“You actually had to sit in his car all night?”
Nick nodded. “Right from the time it was certified as ‘clean’—no bugs, no bombs, no surprises,” he elaborated. “Everything was deemed in perfect running order. It was my job to see it stayed that way.”
Georgie couldn’t envision herself doing something like that. She needed to move around. “I would have gone crazy, having to sit still like that for that long,” she confessed.
He’d felt the same way. “Point is,” he told her, “I can stay awake for a long time and I don’t mind ‘guarding’ you.” He smiled at her, keeping his eyes on her face. “You’re a lot prettier than the car was. Now go to bed.” He tried to turn back to his work.
“I’m not tired,” she protested. She remained leaning against the arm. “I’ve had too much resting as it is.” Georgie decided to sit down on the sofa beside him and slid into place. She tugged the errant T-shirt down before it had a chance to ride up. “Do you mind having some company?” It was intended as a rhetorical question.
He had the uneasy feeling that one thing would lead to another. The only way he would get anything done tonight was if she retreated and left the room.
“I’d rather you were in bed.” He did his best to sound removed.
Her eyes caressed his face. “I’d rather you were there with me.”
Did she have any idea how much he wanted her at this moment? He sincerely doubted it. And if he didn’t get her to leave soon, he was going to act on his impulse. Still, he tried to verbally push her away by sounding flip. “I don’t think you’re in any shape for what that implies.”
Sensing he was weakening—which was only fair because she was already there—Georgie feathered her fingertips through his hair. “You’d be surprised. I’m very resilient.”
He grinned, thinking of the other night. “Not to mention incredibly flexible.”
“With what I do—did,” she corrected herself since rodeo competition was supposed to be in her past now, “for a living, I had to be.”
He picked up on the correction. She meant to stick it out, he surmised. Good for her. “What are you going to do now?”
The future no longer looked nearly as certain as it had a little more than forty-eight hours ago. “I was going to settle down, give the rest of my life some thought. Maybe raise quarter horses.” But a ranch like that required money, a good deal of it. Her voice took on a tinge of sarcasm. “But that was before my bank account suffered a crippling withdrawal—”
Nick cut in. “I’ll find your money for you,” he promised.
That he did so surprised him since he’d never been one to give his word easily. He preferred coming through and having success speak for him instead of making promises ahead of time. That way, if he failed, his word wasn’t compromised.
Georgie watched him for a long moment, her eyes searching his face for signs that he was just paying lip service. She didn’t find any. “You’re that confident?”
His mouth curved. “I’m that good.”
Georgie laughed. “No shaky self-esteem problem found here.”
He knew his abilities and that he usually did what he set out to do.
“Can’t afford it,” he said sim
ply. “You’ve got to have confidence in yourself. In my line of work, you hesitate and you’re not just risking your own life but the life of the person you’re supposed to be guarding.”
Which meant that he had to be alert twenty-four/seven. “Pretty nerve wracking way to earn a living if you ask me.”
Nick inclined his head in silent agreement. “Almost as bad as galloping at break-neck speed, zigging and zagging between barrels,” he commented drily.
Amused at the wording, she said, “The horse does the galloping.”
He spread his hands wide, as if accepting the correction. “My mistake.”
Curious, and far more relaxed than when she’d walked in, Georgie looked at what he worked on. Her mouth dropped open when she saw the blown up image he’d enhanced. Life-size, it was more startling. “My God, that almost does look like me.”
“The nose is wrong,” he pointed out. “Hers is sharp, yours is…perfect,” he finally said for lack of a better word.
Every time she tried to shut things down inside, to bar him access, he’d say or do some sweet little thing and throw everything off again. She might as well stop telling herself that she wasn’t attracted to him because she was. And pretending that she didn’t care if he stayed or left was a crock as well. She cared—even though she knew it was futile.
“You know,” she told him, “for a closed-mouth person, you do say some very nice things.”
He didn’t quite see it that way. If anything, he was being abrupt. It was easier maintaining distance that way. “I skipped class the day they handed out silver tongues.”
She thought of Jason, of how he’d gotten to her, saying things that made her lower her guard. Made her dream. “Silver tongues are highly overrated.”
Nick read between the lines. “Oh? Did Emmie’s father have a silver tongue?”
She stiffened and he knew he’d wandered out onto sensitive territory. But his curiosity, his need to know about her past, about the man she’d made love with, got the better of him. He told himself it was just to fill out her profile, but he knew he was lying.
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