“No problem,” Nick replied. He wasn’t aware that he slipped his arm protectively around Georgie, but Jericho was. He noted, too, that she made no effort to shrug the arm away.
It was another two hours before Nick and Georgie were finally back in his car, driving to her ranch. But first they needed to stop by her brother’s place to pick up her daughter.
The air was pregnant with the smell of impending rain. The silence between them grew oppressive.
Nick broke the silence first.
“Come with me,” he said without any preamble. He spared her a glance before turning back to the monotonous road that stretched out before him. “Pack your things, pack up Emmie and come with me.” The two sentences probably qualified as the most impulsive thing he’d ever said.
She could feel her heart aching already. But this wasn’t just about her, or even just about them. There was Emmie to think of. Emmie, who deserved the best she could give her. Emmie, who deserved the chances she never had. “I can’t.”
“Why not?” Even as he formed the question, he knew the answer. But if he talked fast enough, maybe it wouldn’t come. “By your own admission, you’ve been going from place to place at a moment’s notice. Here today, someplace else tomorrow, living inside a rattling tin can on wheels.” He looked at her again. God help him, he didn’t want to stop looking at her. Ever. She was like a fever in his blood. He struggled to be rational. “I can offer you something a lot better than that.”
Georgie clenched her hands in her lap, as if that could somehow ground her. “I know, and I’m tempted. Oh, God, Nick, you have no idea how much I’m tempted—”
If she felt that way, what was the problem? “Then come.”
“I can’t,” she repeated, her voice threatening to break.
He could feel his patience unraveling. It seemed so damn simple from the outside. Could be so damn simple. “For God’s sake, why not?”
How did she make him understand when even her own heart was rebelling against her? “Because ever since I had Emmie, this was the plan. To make enough money to finally give her a home, something secure. Something my brothers and I didn’t have, no matter how hard my mother tried. Money buys you security.”
His hands tightened on the wheel as he struggled to understand and to be gracious. “So if I hadn’t found that gym bag in the back of Rebecca’s closet, I would have had a better chance of your coming with me.”
She still wouldn’t have left. Because this was Emmie’s home. This were where their roots were and roots were oh so important to both of them.
“Don’t,” she begged. “Please don’t.” She blinked back tears. “You could stay here.”
He saw no prospects for work in a place like Esperanza. “And do what?”
“Love me.”
He felt his heart twist in his chest. “Not that that isn’t a tempting proposition, but I need to be able to provide for you,” he pointed out.
“No, you don’t,” she protested quickly. “I’ve got enough money to last us for a while. And then there’s the ranch.”
He wasn’t cowboy material and they both knew it. And no way would he live off her earnings. “That’s not how it works,” he told her.
A ragged sigh escaped her lips. Turning her head so that he wouldn’t see her tears, Georgie looked out the side window. “I know.”
The first thing Nick did when he arrived back in California was report to the Senator, who was still at his Prosperino estate. He found the man in his den, going over the latest draft to his next speech.
Joe Colton seemed delighted to see his chief Secret Service agent back.
Nick closed the door behind him. “It’s over, sir.”
Joe immediately thought of the threatening e-mails. The flow, according to his people, had ceased just before Nick had left for Texas. “You caught the man?”
“Woman,” Nick corrected. “Turned out to be a twenty-one-year-old ex-waitress from Reno. Rebecca Totten.”
The name meant nothing to the Senator. “Tell me, did she say what she had against me?”
Nick shook his head. “She didn’t say much of anything.”
Very quickly, Nick ran through the events, giving the Senator as succinct a version of the last five days as he could. He left out certain details, all of which had to do with Georgie. In his opinion, they neither added nor subtracted from the narrative.
Joe looked pleased at how things had been resolved, although he made it clear that he regretted that the young woman paid for her misdeeds with her life.
“Great job, Nick. I really appreciate your going the extra mile on this. Or extra several thousand miles as the case may be.” Joe flashed the smile he was so famous for, the one that was from the heart and guileless and had won him such a huge following. He settled back in his chair. “Tell me, how’s my niece doing?” he asked, noting that any reference to her was conspicuously missing.
Nick’s voice was clipped as he said, “I managed to recover her money, so she can get on with her life, setting up a ranch to breed quarter horses.”
Joe’s smile widened. “From what I hear, that sort of thing is in her blood. Her older brother, Clay, has a ranch around there, too.”
“I met him,” Nick volunteered cautiously, wondering if this was going somewhere or if it was just harmless conversation.
Joe nodded. From where he stood, the head of his Secret Service detail seemed preoccupied. “Something wrong, Nick?”
“Jet lag,” Nick told him a little too quickly.
“Uh-huh.” Joe eyed him knowingly—or was that just his imagination? Nick wondered. “Why don’t you take some time off to deal with that?” the Senator suggested. “You’ve more than earned it.”
Time off was the last thing he needed. He needed to fill up his days with routines, not have them empty so that he could spend his time thinking.
“If it’s all the same to you, sir,” Nick said, “I’d rather just get right back into it. I’ve been away from the job too long.”
Joe laughed, shaking his head. “Seems to me, you’ve been on it all this time.”
Nick shrugged. “It’s what I’m paid to do,” he replied. “If there’s nothing else—”
“Not right now,” Joe answered.
With a nod, Nick took his leave. The moment he walked away from the Senator’s den, he threw himself into his work. The first order of business was to get a complete update from the agent he’d left in charge about what had been going on in his absence.
And all the while, as he worked, reviewing schedules, planning for contingencies, Nick struggled to block out any and all extraneous thoughts. Extraneous thoughts that involved a woman with flaming red hair and eyes the color of a field of four-leaf clovers.
It was a losing battle.
Nick knew when he was licked. After two days of trying to get the upper hand and place his life back on the course it had been on these last few years, he was forced, for his own sanity, to surrender.
The first step was to tell the Senator that he needed to resign.
“Do you mind if I come in?” he asked the Senator, popping his head into Joe’s office.
In the midst of packing up for yet another fund-raiser, this one taking place in Phoenix the next afternoon, Joe stopped what he was doing and beckoned Nick into his study.
“Come on in,” he urged. Noting the serious expression on the Secret Service agent’s face, Joe wondered if any more e-mails had surfaced. “What’s on your mind?”
Tip-toeing around a subject had never been Nick’s way. “Your niece, sir.”
For a split second, Joe looked mildly surprised. And then he smiled. “Took you a while, didn’t it?”
He’d thought he’d hidden his feelings rather well. The Senator’s question caught him off guard. “Excuse me, Senator?”
Joe laughed. “Don’t play dumb with me, Nick. It doesn’t suit you.” Pausing to pour two fingers of Napoleon brandy for both himself and his, he felt, about-to-be-ex-head of
Secret Service, Joe held out one glass to Nick. “I could see it when you came back to report to me.”
Accepting the glass, Nick looked at him, puzzled. “See what?”
“That you didn’t belong here anymore,” Joe answered simply. “You belong back there, with her.”
Nick paused to take a sip. The amber liquid warmed a path down to his gut. “I don’t think I ‘belong’ anywhere,” he confessed. “Esperanza is a one-horse town.”
“It’s a little bigger than that,” Joe assured him. He’d kept tabs on its progress, as he did on everything that interested him. “And it’s growing all the time. Man of your capabilities and talents can find a lot of opportunities there—or make your own. Heading a security firm comes to mind,” he commented just before he took a sip of the brandy himself. “Seems to me that you’ve already found the most important thing.”
He’d always admired and respected the Senator and enjoyed being privy to the man’s insight whenever he could. He was going to miss that, he thought. “What’s that?”
“The love of a good woman.”
Joe looked at the framed photograph that stood on his desk. It was of Meredith and him taken on one of their all-too-brief vacations. He couldn’t recall the location, only that something had caught her fancy and she’d been laughing when her image was captured, forever freezing the moment. Looking at the photograph now, he could almost hear her laughter. Warm like sunshine, he thought.
“Trust me, Nick, everything else is a distant second.” Placing his glass of brandy on his desk, Joe put out his hand. “Much as I hate to lose you—and I do—this is the best reason in the world for you to leave.”
“I’ll stay until my replacement’s trained,” Nick promised, but Joe shook his head.
“Don’t even give it another thought. Just go, get the girl,” Joe encouraged.
“All right, then,” Nick said, more than ready to do just that. “I need to ask a favor, sir.”
Joe smiled at him warmly. “If it’s in my power, it’s yours.”
Georgie couldn’t sleep. Sighing, she surrendered to the haunting insomnia. That made two nights in a row now that she’d tossed and turned, exhausted and too keyed up to sleep.
By all rights, she thought angrily, she should be sleeping like a baby. Her name had been cleared, her money and her jewelry had been restored. Even the credit card companies had been convinced to cover their losses, restoring her credit along with her good credit standing. All of that had been Nick’s doing and it meant that she could get on with her life unimpeded.
But despite all that, her life felt as if it was stuck in a tar pit and she couldn’t move forward. Couldn’t move because her heart was no longer a functioning part of her anatomy. It was two or three thousand miles away.
Where the hell was Prosperino, California, anyway? she wondered impatiently.
A sound she couldn’t quite identify nudged its way into her consciousness.
What was that? Thunder?
No, this was constant, she realized, sitting up. Thunder rolled and then lightning flashed. This just continued. Besides, the weather forecast called for clear skies for the next day or so.
The only place it was raining was in her heart, she thought.
The unidentified noise sounded as if it was getting closer.
Georgie kicked off the sheet she’d had covering her. Leaving the shelter of her bed, she grabbed her robe and went to the front door. Might as well satisfy her curiosity if she couldn’t satisfy anything else.
Her hand was on the doorknob, about to open the door in order to see what she could see. The knock startled her, causing a stifled gasp to escape.
Who the hell would be out this early, paying her a call? There was a chain on her door, fallout from her experience with that woman posing as her. She left it in place and cautiously opened the door a crack.
Her mouth dropped open. Fumbling with the chain, she yanked the door open.
“Nick?”
He smiled at her sheepishly. “It’s me,” he confirmed. The last word was muffled as Georgie framed his face with her hands and kissed him hard and long.
If this was a dream, she wanted to get the most out of it before it faded, she thought, her head spinning.
But it didn’t fade.
And from her experience, dreams did not kiss like that.
Breathless, she dropped her hands to her sides and took a step back, still half expecting him to vanish. After two sleepless nights, she was a perfect candidate for hallucinations.
He was still here, clutching flowers whose heads were bent.
“What are you doing here?” she cried, squeezing the question out.
“I came back,” was his simple reply. And then he added, “To give you these.” He thrust the bouquet of slightly wilting daisies into her hands. It was a pathetic offering, but when a man proposed and had no ring, he needed to bring something. Flowers were all he could think of and she’d mentioned liking daisies. “I had the pilot set the helicopter down in a field so I could pick them for you.” He shrugged, embarrassed at the offering. “It was all I could find. They don’t have twenty-four-hour flower shops.”
She grinned, blinking back tears. He was here, he was really here. It didn’t matter for how long, what mattered was that he was here. She pressed her lips together, feeling positively giddy, her thoughts making no sense. That was the only explanation for her saying, “Maybe you could open one.”
“Mama?”
The sleepy voice belonged to Emmie who was standing in the living room, rubbing her eyes. When she focused them, the grin that came over her face threatened to split it in two.
“Nick!” she cried happily. The next moment, she broke into a run and launched herself into his arms.
Dropping to his knees, he scooped her up, love, unbidden, flooding through his veins.
“Mr. Sheffield,” Georgie corrected her daughter, sniffing to keep the tears back.
“How about Daddy?” Nick suggested.
Stunned, Georgie looked at him. She was hallucinating, she thought. She had to be. But still the mirage remained where it was.
“What?”
“These are for you,” he was saying to Emmie, taking out a very small, kid-sized pair of handcuffs. He’d obtained a pair and meant to mail them to her. Bringing them in person seemed like a better idea. “I got a junior set just for you.”
But Georgie was still stuck on his last statement. “Nick, what are you saying?” Georgie demanded. “Why are you telling her to call you Daddy?”
“Because I want you—both of you,” he clarified, looking at Emmie first, then Georgie, “to marry me.”
“Yes!” Emmie cried before her mother could say anything, tightening her hold around his neck.
Georgie looked at him, dazed. She’d had time to think. Time to regret. As much as she felt her life was here, life without Nick was barren. The first two days had hardly moved. She had no reason to believe the days after would be any better.
“Do you really mean it?” she asked him, stunned and overjoyed at the same time.
“If I don’t, that helicopter pilot who flew me here is going to be really ticked off. He wanted to take off at dawn, not in the middle of the night.” But once the Senator had made the proper calls to facilitate the trip, Nick had been too eager to wait a minute longer.
Georgie pressed her lips together, her head whirling as she tried to make plans. “It’s going to take me a little while to settle up,” she calculated, “put the ranch up for sale—”
Nick interrupted her. “But then where will we live?” he wanted to know. “More important, where would the horses live?”
Georgie came to a screeching halt, completely confused. What was he saying to her? “What?”
Nick grinned, spelling it out for her. “I’m staying here. With you. God knows there’s got to be something I can do besides shield people with my body.”
She remembered he’d done just that in Rebecca’s apartment.
This time, Georgie didn’t bother wiping away her tears. She kissed this man who had captured her heart long and hard, with all her soul. “Don’t be too hasty, I like being shielded.”
“Then it’s yes?” he asked, not bothering to hide how important her answer was to him.
“Say yes, Mama,” Emmie urged. “Say yes!”
“Yes,” Georgie declared, laughing and crying at the same time. And then she regained a little control over herself. “I love you, Nick Sheffield,” she told him with feeling.
She made his heart swell, he thought, and she always would. “I love you, too, Georgie,” he told her. And then he dropped a kiss on Emmie’s head. “Both of you.”
With a cry of joy, Georgie wrapped her arms around his neck just as Emmie wrapped herself around both of their lower torsos, hugging them for all she was worth.
Nick lowered his mouth to Georgie’s. The kiss was long and emotional and promised to bind them together for the rest of their natural lives.
Epilogue
The rain came down, sliding along the surface of the headstones like tears heavy with grief.
Because of the inclement weather, the cemetery was empty, except for the one lone figure who stood before a grave site that had only the simplest of markers to designate where the woman known as Rebecca Totten was buried.
Rebecca had no family, no people who came forward to claim her. No one who came to see her simple wooden casket as it was lowered into the ground. An anonymous envelope containing cash had been sent to the morgue. The note inside, printed on a generic laser printer, said the money was to be used for her burial. It was the only thing that had kept her from meeting eternity in the county’s potter’s field.
“They’re going to pay for this, Rebecca. I swear to you, they’re going to pay for this. Every last one of those Coltons is going to wish they were never born before I’m finished with them. And I’m going to get that Sheffield guy, too. He should be lying here, not you. Not you.” The last words ended in a sob he barely suppressed.
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