Colton Showdown

by Marie Ferrarella

  Her singing just added fuel to the daydream that insisted on blooming in his head, taking over all his thoughts.

  If she didn’t stop singing soon, he was going to need a cold shower himself.

  He closed his eyes, which only made things worse. Because then he could vividly envision Hannah, her sleek, supple body submerged in the suds-filled tub of warm water, each movement making the suds recede a little more...

  The very image wreaked havoc on his already twisted gut, not to mention on adjoining parts of his body as well.

  His job left no time for extracurricular activity, no time for him to remember that he was still human, still a man with a man’s needs. He kept that part of himself tightly under wraps because he’d told himself that gratifying those needs wasn’t nearly as important as the assignment he undertook.

  But being this close to Hannah, to her innocence, her purity, not to mention her exceedingly appealing face and body, unearthed all those thoughts, feelings and reactions he thought he had kept buried so well. Unleashed them in spades.

  He wondered if the department gave out awards for sainthood.

  It should, he couldn’t help thinking, as the volume of her voice swelled and the sheer beauty of it completely encompassed him.

  It really, really should.

  Chapter 10

  When Hannah came out of the bathroom fifteen minutes later, fully dressed, her skin glowing as she was towel-drying her hair, Tate had already made a few decisions as to what their next move had to be.

  He was well aware that he was going to have to be at his most persuasive to convince Hannah to go along with something that, although less than an order, had to be more than just a polite suggestion.

  However, at the moment, Hannah embodied such an entrancing picture of innocence, he just had to pause and take it all in. How could someone who appeared to look so simple be so stirring at the same time?

  Hannah was quick to pick up on her rescuer’s ambiguity. Utterly without vanity, she stopped drying her hair, letting it begin to air-dry instead. Given the thickness of her hair, the process would take a long time.

  “Is something wrong?” she wanted to know.

  “No—well, maybe.” He wasn’t accustomed to stumbling over his words. It was almost as if he was unsure of himself and he couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t recall a single time—which made what he was experiencing all the more irritatingly puzzling. Finally, he said, “It depends on your point of view.”

  All he had managed to do was make his explanation more confusing, not less. Hannah flashed a shy smile at him as she shook her head. Then, to his surprise, she placed the blame on her inability to comprehend rather than on his inability to communicate.

  “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand.”

  He’d never had trouble making himself understood or getting his point across before. He had a very organized, practical mind that approached everything in a logical fashion. More than once, he’d been accused of being born old. But what was going on here, the way his feelings kept scrambling and retreating, would definitely not stand up to any close scrutiny. The young woman whose safety he was assigned to ensure was getting to him. Getting under his skin. Big-time.

  Tate took a breath and forced himself to be blunt, rather than tiptoeing around the subject. “I think, in order for you to stay safe while the Bureau and the Philly P.D. try to locate Maddox, you’re going to have to change your appearance a little.” This was one time he couldn’t allow himself to soften the blow. It would ultimately be a disservice to her. “Actually, more than a little,” he amended.

  She was still wearing his jeans and shirt with the cuffs both rolled up as much as possible. Even so, she was all but literally swimming inside the clothing. Hannah looked down at herself, as if trying to home in on what he was referring to. What she was wearing was legions away from her normal garb.

  “I thought I had already changed my appearance—more than a little,” she underscored.

  Tate laughed. There was no getting away from the fact that she looked like an adorable waif. And that, right now, was working against them, rather than in their favor.

  “That’ll only attract attention. We need you to blend in, not stand out.” Without meaning to, he scrutinized her hair as he spoke. “But still look different than you do now.”

  The shift was not lost on Hannah. She saw the way he was looking at her hair. Instinctively, her hand went up, covering the length that was draped down over her shoulder. But even as she did it, she sensed that the protective gesture was futile.

  “You want to cut my hair.” It wasn’t a question.

  But Tate pretended to take it as such. “Do I want to? No,” he told her honestly. “But I’m afraid that I think we should. Maddox can afford to have the best men working for him, that means he’s going to have professionals looking for you. Looking for a twenty-year-old young woman with long red hair. The less you look like that, the better your chances are of eluding them until my team finally takes him into custody.”

  For a moment, she focused on the promise of his words. “Do you really think they will?”

  He could hear hope fairly throbbing in Hannah’s voice. He was glad he didn’t have to lie to her, that he believed in what he had to say to her.

  “I do. My team is the best of the best,” he assured her.

  “Then perhaps I don’t have to cut it...” Hannah’s voice trailed off for a moment. But before he could tell her that, although he really regretted it, she was going to have to surrender her hair—better for her hair to be cut than for her to be cut down—Hannah took a deep breath, as if resigning herself to what she was about to say next. “It is only hair. It will grow back.” Her words were stoic. “Do what you must.”

  There was more and he wasn’t happy about having to say it, but this, too, was necessary. “Hannah, we need to dye your hair as well.”

  Her eyes widened. No women in her world would have even considered adding color to their hair, much less changing that color.

  “Dye my hair?” she asked, uttering the words as if each tasted sour on her tongue.

  He nodded. “Redheads stand out. Having your hair cut shorter will change your appearance somewhat, but not enough. Making your hair a different color might very well save your life.”

  Hannah pressed her lips together, suppressing a very real desire to argue with him, to try to save her hair. But despite her desire to keep her hair just the way it was, something inside her sensed that he was right.

  “I understand,” she replied quietly, squaring her shoulders the way a soldier facing a firing squad might. “Do whatever you need to,” she said, giving him blanket permission.

  The first thing he needed to do, Tate thought, was to get a hair-dyeing product. There were a variety of shops on the hotel’s ground floor, not to mention a slew of stores outside the hotel, all located in the immediate vicinity. He had his pick of where to shop.

  For a second he debated leaving Hannah in the hotel room with a strict warning not to open the door to anyone. After all, it would only take him a few minutes to go and purchase the necessary item. Fifteen minutes from start to finish, most likely. But, like a parent with a child who had yet to cross her first street alone, he felt uneasy about the prospect of leaving Hannah alone right now, even for such a short time.

  There was another way.

  Getting on the phone, Tate called down to the front desk and asked the clerk to connect him to the nearest drugstore.

  “Are you ill, sir?” the clerk asked with polite concern.

  “No, nothing like that,” Tate said quickly. “It’s just that my wife thinks her roots are starting to show and she’s insisted that I go buy her some of that hair-coloring product she seems to swear by,” Tate explained with the air of a long-suffering husband who’d been this route before.

  “Would you happen to know what type and color your lovely wife prefers?” the clerk as
ked dutifully. The man seemed genuinely surprised—as was Hannah—when Tate rattled off the name brand and the exact color number of the hair dye he was requesting. The clerk recovered in the next beat and told him, “As it happens, I believe the pharmacy around the corner just might stock that. I’m dispatching a bellman to purchase a box of the aforementioned product right now. Once he has it, he’ll bring it up to your suite—if that’s all right with you, sir.”

  Tate turned to look at Hannah. She appeared somewhat bemused. The sooner they got this over with, the better. “That’ll be perfect with me,” he replied, then hung up. Hannah, he saw, was still looking at him strangely. “What?” he asked her.

  “You know these things?” she marveled, unabashedly surprised. “Do all men in your world know about hair coloring and such?” she asked, curious.

  “The ones who worked in beauty salons to earn spending money while in high school do,” he quipped. His parents had been decidedly well-off, but they went out of their way to teach all their children that money was not something to be taken for granted, that it had to be earned in order to be enjoyed.

  So, to that end, he and all his siblings each had jobs—menial jobs—to teach them what it felt like to work hard to earn a dollar. Though he’d grumbled about it at the time, he had since learned to see the wisdom in that approach and was very grateful that his parents cared enough about him to give him such a solid foundation to fall back on.

  “A beauty salon, like the one in Eden Falls?” Hannah repeated, clearly intrigued by the concept of his working around women focused on outer beauty instead of inner beauty.

  “Yes, just like it.”

  “Why would a woman waste so much time on her hair?” Hannah asked. In her world, brushing for a hundred strokes was all the time and consideration a woman’s hair was allotted. Who had the time to spend so much of it playing with hair and rendering it into unnatural states?

  “Not wasted,” he corrected amiably. “Hair is referred to as a woman’s crowning glory for a reason.” He moved closer to her, then lightly brushed his hand over her hair. Sifting it through his fingers, he was hard-pressed to remember ever touching anything that felt so incredibly soft. “You’re lucky, it feels naturally silky. A lot of women would love to have your hair.”

  She looked down at the lock still resting halfway down her breast. “Soon, I will not have it, either.”

  Tate felt bad for her. He hated having to do this, but the way he saw it, they really had no choice. “I’m not going to shave your head,” he pointed out.

  She regarded him with those eyes that delved right to his core, picking up on something that hadn’t been clear to her before. “Then you are going to be the one to do this?”

  Tate nodded. He’d thought this out as well. “It’s better that way. The fewer people we encounter while you still have that long red hair, the better. Unless you’d rather have someone more professional do it,” he offered. He could see how allowing him to cut and color her hair might make her uneasy.

  Despite his training and his protest that he’d do an incredible job, his teenage sister Piper wouldn’t let him near her hair. Emma wouldn’t either. If Emma needed her hair cut, she went to the same beautician she’d been going to for years.

  Well, if she becomes Amish, that’s going to have to change, he mused.

  “No, I trust you,” Hannah was saying. The next moment she stifled an exclamation when someone knocked on their suite door.

  Fear immediately entered her eyes as they darted from him to the door.

  Instantly alert, his hand hovered over the hilt of the weapon he had tucked into his belt at the back of his trousers. It was all hidden from sight beneath his jacket. Tate crossed to the door.

  “Who is it?” he wanted to know.

  “The hotel bellman, sir.” The tenor voice cracked ever so slightly as he identified himself. Tate judged that the bellman was only recently out of his teens. “I have the hair product that your wife requested.”

  Tate opened the door a crack, just enough to afford him a view of the hallway.

  Satisfied that only the bellman was standing outside his door, Tate opened it a little farther—just enough to trade merchandise for cash.

  “Thanks,” he told the bellman as he attempted to hand the latter a twenty.

  The bellman looked at the denomination a little longingly. “Oh, no, sir. The cost of the hair dye will be on the hotel bill,” the bellman replied.

  Tate nodded. The bellman wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. “I know. This is for your trouble.”

  Now that was a whole different story. The bellman thanked him twice before retreating down the hallway, the twenty clutched in his hand.

  Closing the door, Tate turned around to find Hannah quietly observing him. He didn’t have long to wait to find out why.

  “That was a very nice thing you did, giving him that money.” While she was not devoted to tracking her own money—or lack of it—she had a healthy respect for all the good money could do if spent the right way.

  “It’s called a tip,” he explained.

  Her brow furrowed as she tried to integrate what he’d just said with what she knew already. It didn’t quite fit together.

  “Isn’t a tip something that is said, like advice about something?” she asked.

  She was a treasure, she really was, Tate couldn’t help thinking, charmed again by her uncomplicated innocence.

  “That’s another kind of tip,” he said out loud.

  Hannah shook her head. This was not the first time she’d discovered that the same word could mean two very different, unrelated things. How did these outsiders keep everything straight?

  “You Englischers have a very strange language,” she pronounced with another shake of her head. “So complicated.”

  He laughed, thinking of several examples of words that would undoubtedly prove Hannah’s assessment to be correct. “I guess it is at that.”

  It was time to get serious, he thought, opening the package of hair dye that the bellman had brought him. He double-checked the color. It was marked light golden brown, just as he’d requested. That should do the trick, he reasoned.

  He flashed an encouraging smile at Hannah and said, “C’mon, let’s get this over with.”

  Dutifully, she bobbed her head up and down. She looked around the suite, undecided where to go. “Where do you want me?”

  Home, safe, he silently declared.

  “Let’s go back into the bathroom,” he suggested, nodding toward it.

  Hannah walked ahead of him, stoic and resigned, a prisoner making her way slowly to her own execution. As she crossed the tiled threshold, he stopped to drag in a chair. He pulled it as close up to the sink as he could and she sat down stiffly without a word. He noticed that she deliberately avoided looking into the mirror.

  Probably afraid I’m going to do a hatchet job, he thought. He knew the shorter hair was going to be a shock to her—not to mention when she saw it once it was dyed—but at least he knew that he wasn’t going to make a botched job of it.

  He cut her hair first.

  Hannah sat very still. She kept her eyes closed as if bracing herself to feel each painful snip of the scissors. He noticed her wincing a couple of times, her eyes still squeezed shut. Had to be the anticipation of pain. Either that or she was wincing from the sound of scissors shortening her hair.

  When he was finished, he inspected his handiwork with a critical eye. Her long flowing hair had been converted to an appealing bob, with her hair now framing her face and ending somewhere around the bottom of her chin.

  Not bad, even if I do say so myself, he congratulated himself silently. She might even learn to like it. Granted, it seemed to erase her Amish identity, but the beautiful woman who’d emerged was definitely an unwitting heartbreaker, he couldn’t help feeling.

  Rousing himself, Tate donned the pair of rubber gloves that came in the box and mixed together the two components that formed t
he hair dye. He draped a towel around her neck and shoulders as an afterthought, then proceeded to apply the dye mix in long, even streaks, moving methodically until he’d used up every last drop of the solution in the plastic bottle.

  Done, he tossed the emptied bottle as well as the box and the rubber gloves into the bag the bellman had brought. Closing the top of the bag he folded it over twice before throwing the bag into the wastebasket.

  Sensing he was finished, Hannah asked, “And now?” She still avoided looking at herself in the mirror because she wasn’t certain she was up to dealing with what she saw.

  “Now we wait for twenty minutes,” he told her. Then, because she’d looked at him sharply, waiting for an explanation as to why they had to wait for that particular length of time, he added, “The color has to set.”

  Even as he said it, he set a timer on his watch for twenty minutes.

  When it went off twenty minutes later, as a series of chimes, he motioned her to the sink. “I’ve got to wash that out now.”

  Asking no questions, Hannah dutifully sat down in the chair and ducked her head under the faucet. Tate first rinsed the dye out, then worked the conditioner through her hair before thoroughly rinsing that out as well.

  Wielding the hotel hair dryer like a pro, he not only expertly dried Hannah’s new golden-brown hair, but he styled it as well.

  As he worked, it brought back memories and he smiled to himself. “I got to be pretty good at this before I quit,” he told her, talking to her reflection in the mirror. The words seemed to come out more easily for him that way.

  “Why did you quit?” Hannah wanted to know. Still without actually looking at herself, she managed to engage his eyes in the mirror.

  “College,” he answered simply. “I was accepted out of state and I went.” Tate looked over his handiwork, reviewing what he’d done with an eye that was far more critical than the average man might be.

  He’d done a damn fine job, he thought.

  “I haven’t cut or styled hair since then, but I guess it’s like riding a bike.”