The pretty blonde he’d been tracking for weeks stood right in front of him.

“I’m Nick. Nick Callahan,” he said. He offered his hand.

She took it, and it was warm to the touch. Had she been sunning herself? Sweet hell. This assignment was going to kill him.

“I’m Kim Cassidy,” she said. “I have the apartment next door. Welcome to Magnolia Falls. Will you be staying long?”

“I’m not sure yet. Depends on how long my business takes, and then… Well, they owe me some time off. Seems like a nice, quiet place.” He shrugged.

“It is a nice place, and friendly,” she said.

Friendly? Was she going to be friendly? And what did this girl-next-door beauty think friendly entailed? Please, please, don’t let this assignment take awhile, he thought. If she got friendly, he just might not be able to take it.

TERESA HILL

lives in South Carolina with her husband, son and daughter. A former journalist for a South Carolina newspaper, she fondly remembers that her decision to write and explore the frontiers of romance came at about the same time she discovered that she’d never be able to join the crew of the Starship Enterprise.

Happy and proud to be a stay-home mum, she is thrilled to be living her lifelong dream of writing romances.

Mr Right Next Door

Teresa Hill

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For the real Khleo, who lay under my feet,

hoping I’d rub his belly with my toes,

while I wrote most of this book.

My daughter insists everyone know he’s a male

cat, spells his name Khleo and is a sweet, gentle

soul, without a violent or vindictive bone

in his giant, furry body.

And for his brother, Inky,

who we call our $900 kitty, after his stay

at the Emergency Vet’s last Christmas.

Chapter One

Kim Cassidy grinned like crazy as she made her way off the plane at the Atlanta airport and into the arms of an exasperated-looking blond giant of a man who happened to be her brother.

Jackson Cassidy was gorgeous, solid as they came and most definitely mad.

“Are you trying to make me old before my time?” Jax demanded, crushing her to him for a long moment.

“No, I am not trying,” she said, hugging him in return before easing back to smile at him. “And you? Been flashing your badge around again?”

“What if I have?” he said, completely unrepentant, as he waved off the contingent of airport security waiting three paces behind him. “I’ve got it from here, guys. She’s not going to get away from me.”

Kim laughed.

“Come along quietly, miss, and I won’t get out the handcuffs,” he said, hustling her away from the gate.

Kim’s fellow passengers, many of whom she’d chatted with on the plane from Heathrow, looked aghast. Airport security understandably looked annoyed. She’d been met at the gate like this more than once, having an unfortunate tendency to run into trouble when traveling. Not that it had been all trouble this time.

“Honestly, baby girl, pirates?” he said, taking her tote bag from her and throwing it over his shoulder.

She giggled, couldn’t help it.

“Pirates?” he repeated, louder this time and sounding even more irate.

“Just a couple,” she said.

“That’s not what I heard.”

And, knowing him, he’d heard all about it by now. He probably knew more about the incident than she did, even though she’d been there and he’d been thousands of miles away.

It was truly annoying at times, sweet at others.

“It was not my fault,” she insisted. “I was minding my own business, doing nothing more dangerous than sunning myself on the pool deck of the ship. That’s it. Just lying there sipping my froufrou drink with one of those cute little umbrellas sticking out of it, when…”

Her cruise ship was attacked by pirates!

It was nearly impossible to believe.

She won a trip on a luxury cruise ship and what happened?

Attacked by modern-day pirates?

Who knew?

Leave it to her to find—on vacation—a disaster of the sort she’d thought had been extinct for hundreds of years.

“I mean…come on?” she tried. “Did you know there were still pirates floating around looking for ships to hijack? I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know?”

Looking no less worried or annoyed, Jax flipped open his cell phone and hit Speed Dial. As they continued to walk, he put the phone to his ear and said, “Got her. All in one piece, too….Yeah, we’ll be there in an hour and a half if I use my sirens.”

“There’s no need for sirens,” she insisted, trying to take the phone from him, but he just frowned down at her, flipped it shut and put it away, which meant he intended to interrogate her all by himself on the ride home without anyone getting in the way.

“Hey, I could still pull out the handcuffs,” he said.

“Do it and you won’t get a word from me about my trip or the guy I met there,” she threatened.

That got his attention. “There’s a guy?”

She nodded, her grin back full force as she looked up at him.

“Jax…” she sighed, knowing her voice had taken on a silly, dreamy quality and simply unable to help it. “I think… No, I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure that I’m in love!”

He looked completely taken aback for a moment, stopped dead in his tracks, the line of airline passengers behind them coming to a grumbling halt, some cursing softly as they made their way around her and him, all in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Okay, just…tell me he’s not one of the pirates?” he asked with a look that said he couldn’t handle that right now.

“No!”

“’Cause that could definitely give me gray hairs. That would be cause for handcuffs and sirens and maybe a jail cell—and you know I could arrange it—until you came to your senses.”

“He is not a pirate! He’s the guy who saved me from the pirates.” She beamed just thinking about it.

“Oh,” her brother said, finally giving in to the grumbling of the crowd now flowing around them and starting to walk again. “A cop?”

“No.”

“Rent-a-cop?” His disdainful label of anyone who worked security but wasn’t a real cop.

“No,” Kim said.

“Soldier?” he tried.

“No. Nothing like that. He was just there and… He was wonderful. He made sure I was completely safe and he even helped fight off the attack. It was amazing, really. You’re going to love him.”

“So that means I get to meet him, right? Preferably sooner than later?”

“Of course. He’s meeting me here in a few days, as soon as he gets back home—”

“Which is where?”

“California—”

“California? I don’t like him,” her brother insisted.

“You haven’t even met him. You can’t dislike him just because he’s from California.”

“Sure I can.”

They made it into the wide hallway connecting the main terminal to Baggage Claim, which was packed as usual, and headed toward the down escalator. Kim leaned back against her brother as they rode down.

“Jax? Come on. Don’t be like that.” She’d known from the start that he’d hate the idea of anyone taking her as far away from the family as California. Not that she wasn’t a bit apprehensive about that part herself.

Her family meant a lot to her, her brother and his wife, two older sisters and their husbands, one absolutely adorable two-year-old niece, a baby nephew, the teenager her oldest sister and husband had adopted and two more teens they were foster-parenting at the moment.

Their family life was rich, full and happy, more so than she’d ever thought it could be after losing their beloved mother to cancer four years ago and losing their father, also a cop, when Kim was just two years old.

How could she ever walk away from them?

“That’s it. I don’t like him. You’ll just have to fall for a local guy,” her brother said, looking more worried than he had been about the ridiculous pirates who’d tried to board her ship and rob them.

“Serves you right,” she claimed. “All those years of you making it so difficult for me to date locally… You should have known there’d be consequences one day.”

Jax frowned at that. He was overprotective to a fault at times, but he thought, when he wasn’t really annoying her, she could understand why. It couldn’t have been easy, taking over as surrogate father to three little girls when he’d been all of eleven years old when their father died.

Still, Kim was twenty-four years old now, something he couldn’t quite grasp in moments like this. It was time for him to back off.

“Just don’t be a jerk to him when he shows up, all right?” Kim asked as they found the luggage carousel for her flight, still empty at the moment, and stood there to wait.

“I won’t be a jerk—”

“And don’t try to scare him.”

“If he’s tough enough to save you from pirates, he should for damned sure be able to handle one older brother with a gun,” Jax said.

“No threatening him. And no dragging him off into the woods and beating him up, like you did with Joe.” Her middle sister, Kathie’s, husband. They’d had a rocky start, especially with her brother.

“I never beat him up in the woods,” Jax insisted.

“Just threatened him there?”

“Yeah. I just threatened him there.”

“And beat him up at the bank,” Kim quipped.

Jax gave her an exasperated look. “We’ve all moved on from there. You should, too.”

“I just don’t want anything to go wrong when he shows up.”

Because she was fairly certain that he was it.

The one.

The guy she’d been waiting her whole life to find.

It had been a little crazy with him on the ship after the attack. The whole thing had been a classic whirlwind romance, granted, but still…

Beside her, her brother gave a heavy sigh.

Kim linked her arm with his. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly fall in love in a week?”

“No, I was going to let Kate do that.”

Older sister. Impossibly practical until she fell in love inside of six weeks herself. Would Kate think it was impossible to do in a week? Kim wasn’t sure.

“Hey, you didn’t even tell me his name,” her brother said.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You’re not even going to tell us his name?”

“Why? So you can run him through the FBI’s computer?”

Her brother shrugged, like there was nothing unreasonable about him doing that to everyone she dated.

“Then no, I’m not going to tell you his name,” she said, just to annoy him even more.

“Looks sweet as can be, doesn’t she?” a tinny voice quipped through what looked like an ordinary, blue-tooth headset that agent Nick Cavanaugh wore, as he followed the woman through the Atlanta airport.

“Find out yet how the guy got through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick said, speaking into the mike of the headset.

It was a really nice break, everyone using those little wireless receivers to talk into their cell phones these days. No more needing to hide a mike and an earpiece discreetly on his body. He just had to look like a guy who was always on the phone.

Technology was absolutely grand.

“Come on, Nick. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how fine that woman looks. Eye candy of the sweetest variety. I mean, yum,” Harry said, his voice piped directly into Nick’s ear. “You’re not dead yet, are you?”

“Not yet,” Nick admitted, although his right shoulder was killing him from a nasty little mishap on the ship.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t even notice how she looks. Somebody said you were surveilling her in a bikini for hours on the ship. Man, I don’t know if my heart could have taken it.”

“What can I say? That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Nick said.

Because he could supposedly handle the sight of sweet little things like her in a bikini and still keep his mind on his job.

“So…how’d the guy with her get through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick asked again.

“Claimed he was a cop.”

“She’s got a local cop waiting to pick her up as she gets off the plane?” What had the woman done before she’d left town to go on her expensive vacation?

“Yeah, but you didn’t see the greeting the cop got as she got off the plane. He did not show up to arrest her.”

“Oh,” Nick said.

“Yeah. Give us a minute. We’re checking right now to see if he’s really a cop or not.”

“Okay,” Nick said and kept walking.

“So maybe she’s not as sweet and innocent as she looks, huh?” Harry said. “She’s got the guy on the cruise who was just a little vacation fling and her regular guy waiting for her at home?”

“Don’t know, Harry.”

It was certainly not what they hoped to find when they’d decided at the last minute to tail her as she’d left the ship.

She and the blond guy with a badge stopped dead in the middle of the busy corridor filled with travelers and their luggage, the move so abrupt that Nick had no choice but to keep walking. He’d go pick up a newspaper at the store fifteen feet down and to the right, wait for them to move on and then…

He slipped right past them and…

Ahhh.

It was a sound a man might make when he’d accidentally touched a hot stove. Like he’d been burned.

That’s how it felt. Burning.

He’d gotten a little too close.

And with her, it mattered.

He’d actually touched her, brushed past her right shoulder as she’d turned her hair at just the right moment. A wave of pretty, blond curls had teased their way past his nose, just out of reach but leaving him with a giant whiff of her.

And she smelled really good.

He’d found that out on the ship, too.

The woman smelled great, looked… Well, it was scary what that woman could do to a little, yellow bikini. It was downright unfair. Criminal, even.

He had indeed been forced to watch her for hours sunning herself in a bikini. She’d rubbed lotion on herself and he’d watched. Drank a silly, fruity drink, licking her lips when she was done, and he’d watched. Rolled over onto a perfectly toned tummy and then reached behind her back to untie the strings of her top, baring a completely naked back, while he watched and another agent had been whispering in his ear, speculating about how much Nick and the rest of the crew would pay him to dump a cup of ice water on her back and make her jump up, leaving the top behind.

Nick had watched it all.

There’d been a secluded deck on the ship reserved for nude sunbathing. He would be forever grateful she hadn’t gone there and taken any more of her little suit off.

But now he’d gotten close enough to smell her hair, actually brush past her shoulder, and every other thought—except what torment she’d already caused him—had simply vanished from his head.

“Hey, what did she say?” Harry asked.

Nick had no earthly idea.

Damn.

“I think it was something about being in love,” Harry said.

Nick frowned. Love was not an emotion he wanted involved in any of his cases. Lust was trouble enough, especially when it was him lusting after a pretty woman in a bikini, but love… Love was bad. It was awful. People who thought they were in love did completely unpredictable, illogical, often incredibly stupid things. They got mad. They got hurt. They set out for revenge, ruining their lives and often the lives of people around them, all in the name of that foolish thing called love.

God save him from another woman in love.

“Did you get that on tape?” Nick asked. “Can you play it back?”

“Yeah, hang on. It’ll be up in a second or two. We’ll up the volume on the playback for you. Here it comes.”

There was a lot of background noise, but he knew her voice by now, just as well as he knew how she smelled.

He might try to fool the other guys working with him on this case, but he wasn’t going to try to fool himself. It was hard not to remember the woman’s sweet, slow, genuine-sounding Southern drawl. He’d fallen into an exhausted, all-too-brief sleep the last two nights with the sound of her voice and the things she’d said running through his head.

The way she laughed.

The pretty smile she so often flashed.

The twinkle in her pretty blue eyes.

And yes, the way she’d looked in that little, yellow string bikini.

Contrary to popular belief, he was not inhuman, just disciplined and focused most of the time, better than most at hiding any feelings he might be unfortunate enough to have and suspicious as hell of almost anyone he met, especially a pretty woman who might or might not be innocent of whatever crime he happened to be investigating.

Okay, there it was, the tape of the conversation she’d had not thirty seconds ago, playing in his head, the way her voice had been doing for the last forty-eight hours already.

“I think…” she said. “No…” The tape cut in and out. “Sure…” Come on. Let ’em hear it. “I’m in love.”

“Oh, great,” Nick said.

“Yeah, baby,” Harry said. “What do you think? From the way our guy was hanging all over her the last few days, it’s gotta be him, right?”

“Hell, I don’t know. You know how women are, Harry.”

Nick had to hope one Eric Weyzinski didn’t feel the same way. That he wouldn’t have a little fling with someone like her on a ship and just walk away from her when it was over. He had to hope Weyzinski was either coming here, or she was going to him, so Nick could follow her and find Weyzinski again. Because they’d screwed up as the ship’s passengers left, lost Weyzinski and they still hadn’t figured out whether he was their bad guy or not.

That was Nick’s job.

Catching the bad guys.

Catch ’em and move on.

That was his motto, his life, and it suited him just fine.

One crook after the next.

Bring ’em on.

“Okay,” Harry said through his earpiece. “The guy with her did flash a badge to get through security. From a police force in a little town north of the city called Magnolia Falls, which is where our pretty blonde claims to live. We’ll check with the cops there and get back to you to tell you for sure if he is who he claims he is. And from the information I’ve got now, looks like he and our blonde have the same last name. Cassidy. His name is Jackson Cassidy.”

“Tell me she’s not his wife,” Nick said.

Because the thing people thought was love, coupled with a marriage license and a wedding ring, mixed in with jealousy and another man who happened to be a crook… That was sure to be a disaster in the making.

“If the cop’s her husband, she wouldn’t come home from vacation alone and announce to him that she’s in love with someone else,” Harry reminded him.

“Oh, she just might.” He’d seen more than one unhappy wife throw something like that in her husband’s face.

“Hey, buddy, remember that little problem of yours we’ve talked about before? The woman thing?”

“I don’t have a problem with women,” he claimed. “I just have women who happen to cause me problems quite often.”

Her being merely the latest in a long string of problem-causing women.

“But I don’t have a problem with women,” Nick insisted.

“All right, buddy. Whatever you say. What’s your pretty blonde doing now?”

“Well, the cop looks unhappy about her little announcement, but not pissed off. So I’d say he’s not her husband.”

One thing to be grateful for.

“Okay,” Harry said. “Didn’t think so.”

“Hang on. We’re moving again,” Nick said, putting down the newspaper he’d picked up moments ago and falling into step behind them, blending into the crowd as best he could.

They made it to the escalator and he managed to get a spot right behind her by rudely cutting in front of an older couple and a woman with a baby, jostling his sore shoulder as he went.

Oh well.

A guy had to do what a guy had to do.

So what if the shoulder still hurt when all he’d done was taken a fall and rolled through it? So what if he didn’t roll as well as he used to and he grew more cynical by the moment?

He could still do the job better than most.

And he was not old.

Thirty-eight was not old for an agent.

Thirty-eight meant he was simply more experienced and therefore smarter than most.

Knew all about women and love.

And this was nothing but another job.

With the kind of discipline his job demanded, he put his focus firmly back on his case. They had a band of modern-day pirates based off the northern coast of Africa preying on passing vessels. Private boats at first, the crooks stealing to fund whatever other things they might be doing. Then they’d moved on to bigger and better things. Luxury yachts and, now, cruise ships.

How the hell did they expect to actually board a cruise ship?

Nick didn’t know, but if they ever did, the potential consequences were enormous.

Hostage-taking? Massive ransom demands? Terrorism?

Nick didn’t even want to think of what they might do if they weren’t stopped soon.

His agency had gotten a tip that the luxury liner The Paradigm was the group’s next target, and he’d been on board since the ship docked in Rome eight days ago.

There’d been more than a thousand passengers, plus a crew of over six hundred on its maiden voyage. The pretty, young blonde he was following had been one of them. The guy she’d been hanging out with might have been in league with the pirates—on board in advance to help them take control of the ship—or he might not have been. Nick didn’t know yet. They hadn’t focused on Weyzinski until very late in the game. There’d simply been too many possible suspects to check them all quickly. By the time they’d grown suspicious of Weyzinski, the cruise had been nearly over. Then Weyzinski had managed to give another agent the slip as he’d left the ship.

Which meant one of the few leads they still had to Weyzinski was the pretty blonde, supposedly one Kimberly Ann Cassidy of a little town called Magnolia Falls, Georgia.

They’d been scrambling just to follow her, to get Nick on her plane for the States and get agents in place waiting for her in the Atlanta airport when she arrived. They didn’t even know yet if Kim Cassidy was her real name. They didn’t know if she was working with Weyzinski or just an innocent victim.

Nick had to find out.

He followed her and the cop through the baggage-claim area until they stopped at an empty carousel. He hoped he’d at least have time to grab his checked bag before she found hers and took off.

“My car’s waiting at the curb?” Nick asked, knowing Harry would have tried to arrange things that way.

“It’s there. Bright red Lexus convertible. Sorry about the color, but the car will flat-out fly if you need it to. Try not to hurt it, okay?”

Nick sighed. “That was not my fault, Harry.”

A car chase on a freeway near L.A. six months ago had ended badly and he was still catching hell for it. Nick’s right knee had plowed into the dashboard. It still bothered him at times, usually when it rained.

“I don’t suppose you can get someone to hold her bag in the back for a while?”

“We’re working on it. Sorry, buddy. I didn’t get here until fifteen minutes before her plane touched down. But I’m getting a sheet on the cop right now. Okay… Looks like he is her brother.”

“Okay. So she wasn’t two-timing him with the guy on the ship.”

One point in her favor.

And if she was announcing that she was in love like that, as she arrived home from her trip, odds are it was with Weyzinski.

“Yeah, here’s the brother’s driver’s license photo and hers. Definitely the same guy who’s with her now. Looks like he’s been on the force for seven years now. Somebody talked to his supervisor in Magnolia Falls. Tried to make it all sound routine, but I don’t know, Nick. Maybe the department just didn’t like the idea of him flashing his badge around the airport without them knowing anything about it. Could be that. Could be something else. But they definitely didn’t like someone asking questions about one of their guys.”

Okay, so it looked like he wouldn’t be asking for cooperation from the local law enforcement agencies anytime soon. And he was going to be tailing a cop’s sister.

No problem.

“Don’t see any red flags on his service record, except something about a brawl in a bank a couple of years ago,” Harry said. “Wait… Damn.”

“What is it?”

“Their father was a cop. Shot and killed trying to stop a convenience-store robbery when our blonde was just a baby.”

Great.

Cops took care of their own. They took care of the families of cops. And more than anything else, they took care of the families of fallen officers.

Harry started laughing.

“Oh jeez, Nick. Are you ready for this? The town is all of twenty-four-hundred people. You’re entering a different world, my friend. You will not fit in well.”

“You don’t know that,” Nick argued. “I can fit in anywhere.”

Small-town America.

How hard could it be?

He’d blend with the best of ’em.

“She’s lived there her entire life,” Harry continued.

“So everybody knows her. Should be easy to get information on her.”

“If you can get ’em to talk.”

“I can get anybody to talk,” Nick boasted.

“She has not only the brother, but two sisters. Our pretty blonde is the baby of the family.” Harry laughed. “Looks like she’s been babied her whole life, doesn’t she?”

Nick felt an odd little kick in the gut at that.

A pretty, impossibly young pampered blonde who looked like a million bucks in a yellow string bikini, and who was probably used to getting her way in everything, indulged in every whim. God help him.

“Oh, man. All three of her siblings are married and living right there in Magnolia Falls,” Harry said. “This will not be good.”

Nick sighed.

Okay, so it didn’t sound good.

A cop for a brother, dead cop for a father.

A ton of relatives.

A tiny town.

A whole police force that would be looking out for her if anyone got wind of what Nick was doing in town.

Harry laughed some more.

“Guess what she does?”

“No clue,” Nick said, but he wasn’t going to like it. He could already tell.

“Elementary school art teacher. Isn’t that sweet?”

Nick swore.

He had a nice, maybe sweet, definitely innocent-looking elementary school teacher, the baby of a family of four, the daughter of a slain police officer, in love with a guy Nick was sure was a crook.

And Nick had to use her to find the crook.

“She’s gonna love you before you’re through,” Harry said.

“Yeah.”

This was why he got the big bucks.

Making nice, innocent women like her hate him.

Chapter Two

Nick’s bag showed up before hers, which meant he wouldn’t have to live out of his carry-on.

He could have managed, of course. He could have made it for weeks with nothing more than he could carry in a baggie if he had to. But life was more fun with all his nifty surveillance toys and a man couldn’t carry a loaded gun on a plane anymore without a ton of paperwork, which he hadn’t had time to produce in his rush to get on the flight. Fortunately, checked baggage was another story.

He grabbed his bag, shouldered his carry-on and tried not to wince at the added pressure to his wounded knee.

Harry must have been close enough to see his expression, because Harry started chuckling and said, “God, you’re old, Nick.”

Nick suggested several things Harry might do, all of which were probably illegal in this state, then got back to business.

“Tell me you have her, because if you do, I’m going to find my car.”

“You’d better because we spotted the brother’s patrol car parked illegally at the curb. You need to be ready to move, my friend. We’re trying to get another car in place in case you lose ’em.”

“I’m not going to lose a small-town cop who doesn’t even know I’m following him,” Nick protested.

“Yeah, yeah. Just trying to back you up, Nick. That’s all. That’s my job. To make your job easier.”

Nick swore softly then spotted a tiny, expensive-looking convertible that gave the appearance of being capable of flying, and produced his government ID for the young agent standing by the car.

“Here you are, sir,” the kid said, holding a briefing report, what little they’d been able to prepare by the time Nick landed.

“Thank you.” His bag went into the tiny trunk, the carry-on onto the passenger seat and then, with a kind of exaggerated care that irritated him greatly, Nick managed to fit himself into the driver’s seat without crushing his sore knee on the steering wheel or the dashboard, while Harry started laughing again.

“Son of a bitch,” Nick said. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

“I just figured you’d be happy to sacrifice your own comfort, if necessary, for speed and maneuverability. Was I wrong? I mean, we could look for one of those cars outfitted for special-needs drivers, if we need to. Do you need one of those, Nick?”

“I’ll put this sore knee of mine in your gut, Harry, if you need to know how well it still works,” he said, though it might have been a pure bluff.

Honestly, he wasn’t sure he could manage it. Hours on a plane had left his knee stiff and sore beyond reason. He could just imagine Harry’s glee if he called room service that night and asked if they could provide a heating pad for him.

If his pretty blonde gave him any time to relax.

She could have a string of men waiting for her. Weyzinski could already be here, waiting for her. She could be up to all sorts of things that didn’t involve teaching little children how to finger paint.

Honestly, how innocent could a woman who looked like that in a bikini possibly be?

Nick started the car and moved the seat all the way back to accommodate his length. He adjusted his mirrors, spotted the small-town cop car, just where Harry said it would be, then checked the car’s satellite navigation system, preprogrammed for the destination of Magnolia Falls.

It shouldn’t be hard to follow the blonde and her brother. After choosing whether to take the freeway loop around Atlanta or plow straight through downtown, it looked like there was only one real choice of roads that went from the other side of the metro area to Magnolia Falls.

Nick didn’t think he’d ever been to a town this small.

“Okay, here they come,” Harry told him.

Nick didn’t turn his head, following them out of the corner of his eyes. The pretty blonde was laughing, looking as relaxed and happy as could be. Her brother looked like he could cheerfully spit nails.

Nick wondered why.

Of course, if he had a little sister who looked like her, Nick could imagine her giving him headaches. And he’d be none too happy to have her go off on vacation and get attacked by pirates.

The brother’s expression could be nothing but that.

And it could be so much more.

She could be a woman constantly getting into trouble of one sort or another. Man trouble. The kind that came from making really bad decisions and not thinking things through. Or from just being young and impulsive.

Innocent.

She could be completely innocent, a victim in all of this.

Nick frowned.

He’d watched her on the ship in a way that had nothing to do with his job, simply hadn’t been able to help himself.

The older and more jaded he got, the more he needed to believe that there were still people like her in this world or, at least, people like she appeared to be. Young, innocent, carefree. Happy. Sexy in a sweetly inviting way, nothing cold or calculating in the least about her.

Not that he could imagine her giving him the time of day or him accepting such an offer.

She was not a creature of his world and he wasn’t a man of hers. And he’d bet she wasn’t the kind of woman to have a quick, thoroughly satisfying fling with a man like him, despite what he’d seen on that ship.

She and her brother got into the police cruiser and pulled out into traffic. Nick followed them, all the while telling himself to treat her as he would any other woman he met in the course of an investigation.

No, to treat her better than that.

To try to stay the hell away from her and not break her heart too badly when he showed her how foolish it was to fall in love with a man she knew nothing about.

Atlanta traffic turned out to be brutal and the cop drove like a bat out of hell. If Nick didn’t know better, he would have sworn half the drivers on the freeway had gone through the same defensive-driving training he had.

No, more like offensive-driving training. He’d had that, too, but maybe not as much as the other drivers on the road had.

Damn.

He’d been cut off ruthlessly more times than he could count and when traffic got really annoying, the brother wasn’t shy about applying his siren to get out of it, a luxury Nick didn’t have.

If Harry had seen him, he’d have howled.

Honestly, the day he couldn’t manage to follow a small-town cop successfully was the day he gave up government work and started fishing for a living or contemplating his navel or some other ridiculously worthless form of life.

They made it to Magnolia Falls in an hour and twenty-seven mind-boggling minutes on the road. Truth was, Nick wasn’t absolutely sure the brother hadn’t picked up on the fact that he was being tailed.

It was sad really, the depths to which Nick’s life had sunk.

His knee hurt. He hadn’t slept for more than a few hours in two days, and he was as grumpy as… well, as an old man, much as it pained him to admit it.

His pretty blonde was delivered to the address Harry had given him, the one listed on her driver’s license.

It turned out to be an old monstrosity of a house that, from her address—2B—he’d guess had been cut up into apartments. Either that or the blonde was clearly not living on a beginning teacher’s salary.

Nick parked half a block down the road and watched the brother carry in her bags and then leave. Harry, he knew, would be working on getting a tap on Ms. Kim Cassidy’s home phone. With luck, they could zero in on some of her cell phone calls, too. Nick would have backup from a team of agents as soon as they could be put into place, but for the moment, the blonde was all his.

He frowned, thinking about virtually living out of a car this small and what that would do to his screwy knee, thinking of nosy small-town neighbors and being pestered by small-town cops.

Already, he thought a little old lady from the house across the street was staring at him through her front window.

Did these people have nothing else to do other than monitor traffic on the street?

“Harry,” he said into the mike in his headset, “I think the old woman across the street’s made me. I’m going to have to move.”

His knee said so clearly. Move, move, move.

“You’re in luck. The house next door to the blonde has just been converted into a bed-and-breakfast. I called to try and book a room but they said they’re not officially opening until next week. I bet if you’re sweet, you can show up at the door and talk them into giving you a room now anyway.”

Nick offered up a quick thanks to the universe on behalf of his knee, hoping he hadn’t entirely lost his power of sweet-talking. It had never been his strong point and he wasn’t feeling even remotely syrupy at the moment. Hell, he never did.

“Tell them you’re an early riser and that you’d like a room that gets morning sunshine,” Harry said.

“Do I look like a guy who gives a crap about morning sunshine?”

Harry just laughed. “That’ll put you on the side of the house facing our pretty blonde’s apartment. Get a room on the second floor and you might be able to look in her windows.”

No way Nick wanted to look in her windows. He was starting to sweat just thinking about it. And he wondered how long Harry’d known about the B&B but left him sitting in the cramped car. He fought the urge to bang his head against the steering wheel in a general expression of dismay about most everything in his life at the moment, most of all this assignment and the woman upstairs with the innocent eyes and the body that just wouldn’t quit.

The one who made him feel about a hundred and sixty years old.

He started his toy of a car and tried to prepare himself for what might pass for sweet talk to the owners of the new B&B.

Nick finger-combed his dark brown hair, which had grown too long for him and was desperately in need of a trim, then ran a hand along his jaw. A shave was definitely in order. Clean clothes, a shower, a real bed…these were the things of his dreams.

If he could just knock out the blonde and ensure that she’d be unconscious for a few hours, he could take a nap, but he really didn’t want to try to sneak up behind her and do the Vulcan neck-pinch thing and get caught. Plus, it would definitely put her on the defensive when she woke up and he didn’t want that. He wanted her to relax and tell him everything—or at least tell someone in such a way that Nick could eavesdrop on the conversation.

Which meant no Vulcan neck pinch.

No nap anywhere in his near future.

He was grumpy as an old bear.

He grimaced as he started his toy car and peeled off down the street and into the driveway of the B&B.

“Harry, you there?” he said into his headpiece.

“Yeah. Try not to scare the nice people with the nice, soft bed and the hot shower, Nickie.”

“Why would I scare them?”

“’Cause you’re a scary guy,” Harry quipped.

Nick got out of the car, scanning the area even more carefully than before. “Are you looking at me right now, Harry?”

“Why? You see me?”

“No, I haven’t spotted you.”

“Then I’m not looking at you, Nick.”

Shaking his head and swearing, Nick gabbed his carry-on, popped the trunk and pulled out his suitcase, trying not to grimace at the way it pulled tight something deep inside his sore shoulder. Dammit.

“So before, you were just guessing about the expression I might have on my face?” Nick asked.

“Nah, just knowing your sweet disposition and thinking about how much we need this room next door to the pretty blonde, that’s all. Trying to look out for you, give you some helpful hints to make the job easier.”

“Gee, thanks,” Nick grumbled, making his way to the front door.

It was made of leaded glass and highly polished oak. A discreet aged-brass plate to the left of the door said, Baker B&B, Main & Vine, Magnolia Falls, Ga.

Okay, he was going to make nice with the Bakers of Baker B&B if it killed him; beg for a shower then spy on their nice neighbor next door.

He put on what he hoped was a mild-mannered but tired-to-the-verge-of-exhausted, plain-old-businessman smile, trying to look nonthreatening and ordinary, definitely not grumpy. Like he’d be no trouble at all as a guest of a not-quite-open B&B.

A woman in sweats, a T-shirt and holding a dust mop answered the door.

Cleaning lady or Mrs. Baker?

He had to decide quick.

He’d insult her if she was Mrs. Baker and he thought she was the cleaning lady and he couldn’t insult her and get a room.

“Ma’am,” Harry said. “Just say ma’am. It’s what all good Southern boys do.”

So Harry was watching. The rat.

Still, Harry wouldn’t steer him wrong when it came to spying. Nick went with it.

“Ma’am,” he said, respectfully tipping his head to her. “Am I too early to get a room?”

“Oh, my.” She frowned, then started trying to dust herself, succeeding only in creating a cloud of dust between them. “We’re really not open yet. Not until next week.”

“That’s what I heard in town, but I was hoping I could change your mind. I love old houses. So much charm and character.” He managed not to choke on the words. He even, he thought, sounded remotely sincere. “And yours looks so inviting.”

“Thank you,” she said warily. “It’s just that we have so much to get done before we actually open…”

“Oh, I won’t get in your way. Not in the least. I’m very self-sufficient. And I don’t even eat breakfast—”

“You don’t?”

Nick fell silent, not used to strangers asking about his eating habits. He’d only said that to be nice, to make her think he would cause no trouble at all as a guest. Did she expect an answer?

He gleaned from her expression that she did.

“Well…no,” he said. “Not usually.”

“We all need a good breakfast,” she said, taking on a tone he might expect from a maiden aunt, if he had a maiden aunt.

Nick frowned. He might have a maiden aunt. He couldn’t quite remember. There were all sorts of relatives on his mother’s side of the family who he hardly ever saw. He was doing good if he saw his mother every now and then, let alone anyone else he might be related to.

“We can’t have you running around without breakfast all the time. No wonder you look so. Well, so…”

Her words trailed off.

He gathered that she might want to take care of him?

Nick didn’t understand. She didn’t even know him. Why would she want to take care of him?

Still, this was not a bad thing considering what he wanted from her: a room next to his pretty blonde.

Nick tried to look in need of sympathy and a hot breakfast, but at the same time, like a man who’d cause no trouble at all in an unopened B&B full of dust.

“Tired?” he suggested. “I look tired?”

The woman nodded, as if to say that didn’t nearly cover what she thought he looked like.

“Overnight flight from Brazil,” he said. “Hate those. Absolutely hate them. Getting way too old for them.”

Harry chuckled in his ear.

Nick struggled to show no signs of conversing with two people at once, one of whom the woman couldn’t see.

“Honey,” she said, “if you’re too old, I should be in my grave soon.”

To which Nick had no idea what to say.

He stood there looking puzzled, tired but not sickly, he hoped, and in need of sympathy and some kindhearted womanly care, which he thought she could provide if she felt sorry for him, which he hoped she did.

“Still, I really don’t know,” she began.

“Sure. I understand,” he said, telling himself not to beg. “I had a room downtown at the…the…”

“Bluebird Inn,” Harry supplied.

There was a Bluebird Inn ?

“Bluebird Inn,” Nick tried.

“Yes. Lovely place,” Mrs. Baker said. “They’ll take good care of you—”

“Oh, I’m sure they would have,” Nick said. “They just… Well, there was a little problem with the electricity.”

“Electricity?” Harry said. “Sure. Okay. We can do that. Power’s going out at the Bluebird in minutes. I’m on it.”

“They don’t have any power,” Nick said. Harry could make it true. “Don’t know when it’ll be back up and they wouldn’t let me check in, not knowing if they’d have electricity.”

“Oh, well… You poor thing,” she said.

Nick tried hard to look like a poor thing.

He feared it wouldn’t take much effort.

“On that plane all night and now you don’t even have a room,” Mrs. Baker said, shaking her head sympathetically. “And you’re hurt?”

It was only then that he realized he was rubbing his sore shoulder.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Really, ma’am.”

Hurt, tired, no room and no breakfast, unless she took him in.

He stood there and let it all sink in.

He could limp a little if he had to.

“Well, we can’t leave you in such a sad state with no place to stay,” she said. “If you don’t care that the place is not quite ready, I guess I don’t, either.”

Okay.

He was in.

“So, would you happen to have a room that gets morning sun? I’m an early riser, love morning sunshine,” he said, trying not to choke on the words as he went inside.

Nick feared he would indeed be able to look into Kim Cassidy’s living room window from his room.

God help him.

He tugged on his tie, which was absolutely too tight when he thought about what he might see of her in those windows, in what she believed was the privacy of her own living room.

“You dog,” Harry said, when he told him about the view.

Please let her close her blinds very tightly at night. Please.

As it was, he could glance over and see her moving around in there. The blinds were tilted at an angle that would have blocked any view from the street, but the second floor of the B&B was higher than the second floor of her house, and he was afraid the angle coupled with a light being left on inside once it got dark would prove devastating to a man who’d been looking at her for way too long already.

“I’ve got to get some air,” he told Harry, abandoning the unpacking and hiding of his little spy toys, in case he couldn’t convince Mrs. Baker not to clean his room.

He bolted from the room, down the stairs, startling her as she swept the kitchen.

“Sorry,” he said. “Just need some air.”

“Oh, well try the patio. The backyard is glorious this time of year.”

“Okay.”

Out he went, finding himself on a flagstone patio complete with a wrought iron table and chairs, plus a chaise lounge. He considered collapsing upon the lounge chair, but after doing such a great sell job on being exhausted and hurt, his landlady would probably call EMS for him. So he stayed on his feet, trying not to pace too obviously and maybe muttering to himself. He couldn’t quite be sure, just hoped it wasn’t classified information coming out of his mouth.

He got to one end of the stone patio, lined with all sorts of blooming things in big stone planters, then pivoted to head in the other direction. Back and forth he went, until he pivoted for the last time and…

Nearly found himself with an armful of woman.

“Ahhh.” She caught her breath.

He did, too.

Was he dreaming? Hallucinating? Sleeping right now?

Nick shook his head to clear it, but the image before him remained stubbornly the same.

Her.

His pretty, distracting blonde, right here in front of him.

She tried to back up but couldn’t because he held her by her arms. Because he’d been afraid of knocking her over. And then she smiled up at him.

“Hi,” she said. “Sorry. I was going to say hi, and then you turned around and…well… Hi.”

“Hi,” he said, nearly incoherently.

“Oh, yeah. Forgot to tell you,” Harry said into his ear. “She’s on her way over there.”

Harry was such an ass and Nick could not for the life of him figure out where the man was, what possible spot could give him the vantage point he needed to see everything that he’d seen.

The jerk.

In front of him, the pretty blonde’s smile faltered, no doubt because of the scowl on Nick’s own face.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” she said.

“No. No. It’s not that,” he said, making himself let go of her. If she wanted to run away from him, he wasn’t going to stop her. Hell, he’d probably thank her, despite the job he had to do. “I was just distracted. That’s all. Sorry I almost plowed into you.”

“I’m fine. Just surprised. I thought you were Sam.”

“Sam?”

“Mrs. Baker’s nephew. I saw you from the back and you’re about the same height and he has brown hair like yours. Although I would have been surprised to see Sam in a suit. Still… Sam’s been working in the backyard for weeks, helping to get the B&B ready. I was just going to say hi to him before I went inside to see Mrs. Baker.”

She smiled again, stood there with the full light of the sun glinting off her blond curls, her legs bare, her arms, all that golden sun-kissed skin. Not as much as she’d shown off in the yellow bikini, but more than enough to give a man all sorts of ideas.

He’d kept thinking on the ship, as she’d sunned herself, of how warm her skin must be after she laid in the sunshine for so long. How hot she’d be to the touch.

Nick made a face, then tried not to. He’d already nearly scared her away. He just had to stop thinking about her and her skin and touching her. He just needed to spy on her without thinking of her.

How the hell was he supposed to do that?

Into his head came that old Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones song.

You make a grown man cryyyyy-eeyyyyyyee. Do-do-do-do. You make a grown man cryyyy-eeyyyyyee.

She could definitely make a man cry.

“So…” she said, still looking way too friendly despite his Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde act. “Did Mrs. Baker open up the B&B while I was gone?”

“She didn’t plan on it, but I convinced her to take me in early.” He tried to gather up enough scattered brain cells to put together another sentence. Come on, Nick. She’s just a woman, one who’s likely in love with a crook at that. “I’m Nick. Nick Cavanaugh.”

He had no choice but to offer his hand and, despite his every wish or maybe because of things he wouldn’t even let himself admit he wanted, she took it. He didn’t think he was standing there with his mouth hanging open, thinking way too much about having her hand in his, but he couldn’t be sure. And yes, even her hand was hot to the touch. Had she been sunning herself and he’d missed it?

“Down, boy,” Harry said.

Sweet hell.

This assignment was going to kill him.

“I’m Kim Cassidy. I have an apartment next door. Welcome to Magnolia Falls.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you staying long?”

“I’m not sure yet. Depends on how long my business takes, and then… Well, they owe me some time off. Seems like a nice, quiet place.” He shrugged. Damn, his shoulder hurt. He was falling apart. Whereas she seemed perfectly put together.

“It is a nice place. And friendly,” she said.

Friendly? Was she going to be friendly? And just what did she think being friendly entailed?

“I might stay awhile,” he said.

Please, please don’t let this take a while. Please don’t let her get all that friendly. He couldn’t take it.

Let her crook of a boyfriend show up tomorrow. Let him get this over with and get out of here and forget all about her and the way he feared she’d look once he was done here.

“Well, I hope you like it. Let me know if you need anything.”

“I will,” he said, then couldn’t let it go at that. He did have a job to do. He couldn’t stand to fumble around gawking over her, not if he was going to get the job done. “Actually, I need lunch. A place to have lunch. What’s good here in town?”

“That’s easy. The Corner Diner on Main. Just go that way.” She pointed off to the left. “It’s about eight blocks down. You can’t miss it. I’m meeting my sisters there in a few minutes, trying to beat the lunch crowd.”

“There’s a crowd?”

She nodded. “Just about the only one you’ll ever see in town. If you want lunch without having to wait, you should go now. I’m going inside to say hello to Mrs. Baker before I head that way myself.”

“Okay. I’ll give it a try.”

“Then I guess I’ll see you there,” she said, heading up the steps and inside, calling out Mrs. Baker’s name and knocking only as she went through the doorway.

So, he was going to lunch and she was going to be there. Hopefully telling her sisters all about her little trip and the guy she’d met.

Nick sighed.

Maybe this would be easy.

Maybe it would be easy and he could finish it up and go home.

“Not bad,” Harry said. “Not as smooth as I’ve seen you, but still…not bad.”

“Where the hell are you?” he barked.

Harry just laughed.

Nick headed off to lunch.

To spy on her.

Chapter Three

Nick was happily eating his lunch—meat loaf and mashed potatoes smothered in heart-clogging gravy—when people started screaming.

At least, at first he thought they were screaming.

He nearly pulled out his gun before he realized it wasn’t really screaming.

It was more like…squealing.

Happy squealing?

Sounds he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard come out of a woman’s mouth before in public, maybe not even in the privacy of his own bedroom, and here he was thinking that he could make women make some really interesting, happy sounds.

But there he was, in the Corner Diner in Magnolia Falls, and his prime lead in the case of the pirate ring had just entered the establishment in a rush, thrown open her pretty suntanned arms, embracing three different women at the same time, and all four of them were doing something that could only be described as squealing for joy.

“Good God,” Nick muttered, just loud enough for Harry to hear, apparently.

Because the next thing he heard was Harry in his ear saying, “It’s a Southern thing. Southern women do that.”

“Do they do it in bed?” Nick asked, unable to help himself.

Harry laughed. “If you do it right, Southern women can make all sorts of little sounds like that in bed.’ Course the way you’re limping along right now and with that bad back of yours—”

“I don’t have a bad back. A shoulder. Just a shoulder—”

“Okay. Shoulder. I don’t think you should attempt a move like that, Nickie. I don’t want you to hurt yourself, you know?”

“In bed?” he muttered. “The day I can’t take a woman to bed without hurting myself is the day I—”

Nick looked up into the half-disapproving, half-amused face of the woman who’d seated him at the diner, the owner herself, Darlene Hodges.

“Sorry,” he told her. “I was just…” He gestured feebly at the headset he wore and shrugged.

“No problem, honey. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, either.” She nodded understandingly. “But just in case, you should know, a man gets to a certain age and all sorts of things just start to go. Women understand these things. At least, some women do. Not that I think you really need to worry all that much.”

Harry was howling.

Nick gulped. He had no idea what to say.

“You want some more coffee?” Darlene asked, smiling in that understanding way of hers.

“Sure,” Nick said, so that maybe she’d go away and not come back again anytime soon, so that he wouldn’t have to decide whether she was flirting with him or making fun of him and his feebleness. He really wasn’t sure. He really didn’t want to know.

His head hurt. His shoulder and his back hurt. His knee hurt. And he just wanted to go to sleep but was afraid he’d dream about Kim and things a man ten years younger than him might be able to do to her to make her make that sound Nick had never heard before from a woman in bed.

Darlene poured his coffee and walked away.

“That was the funniest damned thing I’ve heard all week,” Harry proclaimed. “Maybe so far this year—”

“Shut up, Harry,” Nick said. Then, in disgust over having Harry and his smart-ass comments in his ear, Nick hit a button and cut off the connection. It wasn’t like Harry was helping.

Nick sat there, pretending to eat, watching as Kim continued to greet the two women—who had to be her sisters from the resemblance between the three of them—and a petite brunette. Most of the squealing had stopped, but the hugging hadn’t and the women were chattering like mad, all at the same time. He couldn’t make out anything, really, and he was only two tables away.

He’d spotted her sisters the minute he’d walked into the diner. It was frightening to think there were two other women in the world who looked nearly as good as her. Really scary. Same shade of blond hair, same young, happy, girl-next-door sexy looks. They must have driven the men in this town nuts for years. He was scared to be in the same room with the three of them, but he had to. So Nick planted himself at a table nearby and expected to be able to hear everything. He had very good hearing. Unlike his knee, his hearing wasn’t going, yet.

And he was sure there was good stuff to hear. He just couldn’t keep up, because he could swear every one of the four women was talking at once. He stared, thinking that looking at them as they talked might make it easier to follow the conversation.

It swirled around him in a practically indistinguishable blob of chatter.

“Really in love—?”

“Knew the minute you saw him—?”

“Just like that—?”

“Scared—?”

“Hear all about the attack—”

“So brave—”

“Protect you—?”

“Ever get home—?”

“Worse than that time in Vienna—?”

Vienna?

What had she done in Vienna?

The pirate ring might have been in Vienna recently. They weren’t sure. They were still checking.

Vienna?

Nick had lost at least a dozen lines of dialogue just thinking of it. Vienna?

“Can’t wait to meet him—”

“Coming here—?”

Wait a minute. What was that?

Had she said he was coming here?

Her pirate/terrorist/lover boy?

Did he make her squeal?

“Ahhhh!” Nick closed his eyes and groaned, disgusted to even think his thoughts had gone in that direction—her and the pirate wannabe in bed, her making those sounds, him with too bad a back or shoulder or knee to even think of doing things like that with her or anyone else.

When he opened his eyes again, he saw Darlene and one of the waitresses huddled in the corner looking at him strangely. Like they might be a little bit afraid of him.

Couldn’t have that.

Nick smiled his best I’m-just-an-ordinary-boring-old-guy smile, his harmless-as-can-be look.

Darlene and the waitress didn’t appear to be buying it.

Which meant Nick had to be more careful.

Which meant keeping his mind on his own business was a good idea.

Which shouldn’t be that hard.

She was just a woman, after all.

Nick hadn’t met a woman yet that he couldn’t handle.

Kim sat there with her sisters, Kate and Kathie, as well as Jax’s wife, Gwen, who was very much a sister now, feeling happy as could be, as if absolutely all was right with the world. She was home. She was surrounded by her family and she was in love.

“So…tell us everything!” Kate commanded.

“Well, it was like all of a sudden he was all I could see, you know?”

The three of them nodded in unison, happy, girl-talk looks on their faces.

She was the only one of the three who was still single, the only one who’d never been in love. She’d been afraid it might never happen to her and now that it had, it was like it filled her entire body, like she was overflowing with this silly, giddy, bubbly, happy feeling. Like she couldn’t even contain it.

She was babbling, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t even want to help it. She wanted the whole world to know! Especially her sisters.

“Everything on the ship just got a little crazy and then there he was, right in front of me. He didn’t look scared at all. He didn’t even look surprised. He just looked like whatever happened, he could handle it, you know?”

They all sighed appreciatively.

“Self-confidence is just soooo sexy in a man,” Gwen said.

Kathie nodded. “There’s just something about a man who can handle anything. One you know you can count on.”

“Yes,” Kim said.

More sighs all around.

They were a bunch of happy women. Syrupy, gooey, mushy happy. It was that bad. And that good.

“So what did he do? The pirates attacked and then what?” Kate asked.

“He pushed me down on the deck, out of the way, because they had guns and were firing at the ship! Can you believe it?”

“No,” they all said.

“No one could believe it,” Kim said. “I thought it was fireworks at first or maybe a kid’s game. The crew had some great games for the kids. I kept expecting an army of five-year-olds with toy guns to come running at any minute, explaining the noise and the commotion. And then we heard the bullets bouncing off the metal of the ship and people started screaming. It was crazy.”

“Were you really scared?” Gwen asked.

“I don’t know. I guess so… I mean, I don’t know if I even had time to be scared. I’d just started to believe that maybe I should be scared and then…there he was.” She grinned widely. It was like her face should hurt already, from grinning so much. She was just so ridiculously happy. “He pushed me down onto the deck and told me to stay down, then he put his own body between me and the pirates, like no matter what, he wasn’t going to let them hurt me. We were on the lowest deck, not far at all from the surface of the water, right out in the open. It was the main sun deck, so it was full of space for lounge chairs and things. There was just nowhere to go for cover and he wouldn’t let me move anyway.”

Heavy, heavy sighs.

“Wow,” Kathie said. “I’m so glad he was there to take care of you.”

“Me, too,” Kim said.

What would she have done without him? Maybe gotten herself shot, that’s what.

“He stayed with me the whole time, until the entire thing was over and told me to stay calm, that everything would be all right, that he’d take care of me. He was wonderful!”

Nick heard that and thought he was going to puke.

Wonderful!

Near as they could tell, her Mr. Wonderful was on board to help the pirates board the ship, if the attack had gone just a little better. If Nick and his crew hadn’t been waiting for them. Then Mr. Wonderful would have used pretty Kim Cassidy as cover while he helped his friends board the ship.

Nick could just see her with a gun at her head, Mr. Wonderful’s arms wrapped around her, not to shield her but to keep her from getting away while the coward used her body to protect him and the thugs he worked with.

She’d really have thought he was something then.

Let her try to tell herself she was in love with the jerk then!

Of course, she didn’t know that, poor, silly, naive woman that she was.

Why were the gorgeous ones always so…senseless when it came to men?

He’d wanted to say stupid. He’d normally say stupid. How could women be so stupid?

But he thought she was a nice woman, and not just because she had a great body, so he couldn’t bring himself to call her stupid. He was already worrying about how she was going to take it when her lover boy turned out to be a crook.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to be the one to tell her, but since it was his case, he’d probably have to do the deed.

She’d probably slap him. She’d cry. She might squeal, a really unhappy, awful squeal that wouldn’t make him think of anything like taking her to bed with him. Not that she’d be getting anywhere near him once she knew what he was doing here.

Still, he didn’t want her to cry.

He just wanted her to be smart and not get involved with jerks or pirates or international terrorists.

Was that too much to ask?

Nick watched, waited and listened as best he could as Kim chattered on.

He couldn’t be sure, but he thought she’d said her new boyfriend was coming here…soon? Somebody had squealed again at that point in the conversation, so he just wasn’t sure.

Maybe she’d call someone tonight and they’d have the phone tap in place and no one would squeal. Did women squeal on the phone, too? He hoped not. It was starting to make his head hurt.

Nick had finished his meal and the lunch rush was in full force. He ordered dessert to have an excuse to stay. It seemed half the town was there and that all of them knew Kim Cassidy and wanted to know about her adventure with the pirates. They all stopped at her table. She hugged quite a few of them, grinned broadly at others and gave them all a condensed version of the story.

Nick became aware that everyone in the place seemed to be talking about her.

He kept catching bits and pieces, none of which made sense.

“Engaged—” That from the guy in mechanic’s overalls, heading to the cash register to pay his ticket.

Were they engaged? Surely not. Surely she wasn’t that stupid.

Nick fought the urge to close his eyes and swear.

“From Colorado—”

So, the guy was from Colorado? That was something they could check. Nick made a mental note to tell Harry. Check Colorado.

“Cleveland—”

The guy in the dark blue suit said Cleveland?

Okay, check Colorado and Cleveland.

“Pittsburgh—”

What the hell? How could three different people in the same diner at the same time as her all think the guy was from three different places?

“Next week maybe—”

This from one of the waitresses who’d just been at Kim’s table.

That was promising.

“Next month—”

No, no. Not next month. He would not make it until next month. Not here. Not with her.

“Huge party for them—”

“Soon as he gets here—”

“Falls Park—”

“Hold the crowd—”

“Award—”

Someone wanted to give the damned guy an award? For saving Kim?

Nick groaned.

“Great idea—”

“Talk to the mayor—”

“Talk to her sisters—”

“Award and engagement party, all at once—”

Nick hoped his head didn’t explode and that he didn’t blurt out something outrageous, like the truth of the matter, to everyone present at the Corner Diner that day.

Couldn’t any of them get their stories straight?

Wasn’t there one, solid, reliable piece of information in the whole place?

Other than the possibility that she might be engaged to the criminal?

Surely not.

Surely she wasn’t that stupid.

He was thinking it now. Maybe the woman was just stupid. Nice but not very smart. From his experience, a frighteningly large number of women fit into that category. Maybe it wasn’t their fault. Maybe they couldn’t help it. Maybe men like Eric Weyzinski had some strange power over them and they just couldn’t tell a jerk from a nice guy.

God knows Nick fooled enough of them into thinking everything he said was genuine, when hardly anything that came out of his mouth was.

Which, he realized, meant he had a lot in common with the crook who was about to break her heart.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” he told Harry once he got back to the B&B.

Kim had walked.

Nick had followed her very, very slowly.

Watched her stroll along like a woman without a care in the world, smiling, stopping to talk to a dozen people along the way, staring up at the blue sky, stopping to smell the flowers.

It was like something out of one of those sickening long-distance commercials.

They were all so happy.

Nick didn’t know what to make of it.

“What’s the problem?” Harry said agreeably.

He said everything in that same I’m-your-buddy tone and it wasn’t natural to be that happy. Nick tended to be suspicious of happy people. Harry and Kim and most people in this town were way too happy.

“I have no idea what’s going on. That’s the problem,” Nick said, deciding to ignore the too-much-happiness thing for the moment. He had other more pressing concerns.

“You didn’t hear anything at the diner?” Harry asked.

“No, I heard everything at the diner. That she might be engaged. That the guy was coming here, either the next day, the next week or the next month. Take your pick. That he’s from Colorado or Cleveland or maybe Pittsburgh. What the hell?”

Harry laughed.

It was starting to annoy Nick every time Harry made that sound and Harry made it quite often.

“It’s a small town,” Harry said.

“So?”

“So people talk. All of them talk. All the time. But only about twenty percent of it’s true, and that’s just a guess. It might be less than twenty percent. I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows.”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were trying to confuse me,” Nick said. “That all of them are in on it and they’re deliberately trying to confuse me.”

“No, they’re just talking. They gossip. All about each other. Trust me, this is normal.”

“Then how the hell am I supposed to figure out what’s going on?”

“You follow her, Nickie. You stay really close to her. So close you can smell her pretty perfume. And you don’t trust anything except what comes out of her sweet, little mouth and maybe not even that. Meanwhile, I’ll look for your guy in Colorado, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky, and the guy’ll show up tomorrow.”

“Or maybe we won’t.”

“Yeah. Maybe.” Harry chuckled. “Hey, I got the blueprint from the conversion they did on her house, when they cut it up into apartments. Am I crazy or is your view even more spectacular than we thought it might be?”

Nick said nothing.

“I mean, I don’t have the same vantage point as you. But looking at it from street level, I’d have to say the angle is highly favorable. You could look into her living room and, off to the right, see through the doorway into her bedroom—”

“Shut up, Harry.”

“You know you don’t deserve perks like this, right? No man could be that lucky—”

Nick cut him off again.

He had hours before it got dark. Before she turned on the lights in her apartment and closed the blinds a little more tightly.

Would she do that? Or would she think she was far enough off the ground that no one could see in?

Maybe she wouldn’t bother. After all, glancing around, he thought his was the only window with the perfect vantage point to be spying on her this way and if the B&B had been empty for some time while it was being renovated… Well, she might not have worried about anyone looking in on her.

Please let her close the blinds, he thought.

And please don’t let her be in love with a crook who was going to break her heart.

Chapter Four

She made a few phone calls while sitting on the floor of her apartment doing some stretching moves that looked like yoga. Nick knew because he watched her every move. He sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, looking down into her apartment from what was, as Harry guessed, a perfect vantage point and watched nothing but her for hours.

She had the light on, as light was fading outside, and he kept his light off, his window blinds angled downward, his own private pipeline to her living room and tiny kitchen and, off to the right—yes, indeed—was the open door to her bedroom and bathroom. Not a great view into those rooms, but a view.

Nick listened in on the calls as she made them.

Two friends from high school, another from college. Fellow teachers at the elementary school where classes had ended only two weeks before. All wanting to know the same thing—what had happened on her trip?

Was he mistaken or did she sound less excited with each recitation of events? Did she sound a little sad? Maybe a little worried?

He thought she did.

And he had a name the guy had given her.

Eric Daniels.

An occupation. Something vague having to do with investments.

Yeah, right.

The place? Apparently, the guy moved around a lot because she did indeed mention the guy being in Colorado and Cleveland. No Pittsburgh. And apparently, his home base was California. She didn’t mention a city. So half of what Nick had heard at the diner had some basis in reality? How was he supposed to function in this town?

She vacuumed and dusted her apartment, and he watched. She cleaned out the refrigerator and wiped down the counter-tops, and he watched. She went into the bathroom and, judging from the time she spent in there and the way she looked when she came out, she must have taken a bath. Nick, thankfully, saw nothing but the closed bathroom door and a view of her that made him groan out loud when she emerged, hair wrapped in a towel with a few damp curls escaping down her pretty neck, a flimsy, shimmering robe—God help him—clinging to what had to be still slightly damp curves, bare legs peeking out from the slit in the ends when she walked. Bare feet, he thought. Bare toes. With his high-powered binoculars, which he’d gotten out and used out of sheer curiosity, he caught a hint of bold color on her toenails and felt like a complete voyeur.

Which he was.

He was a damned Peeping Tom.

Night had fallen.

Her living room was lit with the light of a lamp in the corner. She had window blinds, but they were angled up toward the sun, no doubt to let the light in. But Nick was sitting there by his window, maybe five feet higher than hers, and he could see everything.

It looked like she was talking to herself, humming or maybe singing—some silly song about being in love, he feared.

He watched the robe billow out and flow behind her as she walked, the fabric swishing slightly this way and that with the movement of her hips. She grabbed a bottle of lotion out of the bathroom, propped her leg up on the coffee table in the living room and started smoothing it down her legs and onto her feet. That was…okay. He could handle that. He’d seen her put on sunscreen lotion on the ship and survived to tell the tale.

Then her hands started working their way up, slipping under the ends of the robe, to her pretty thighs. Had to keep that tan looking good, he suspected, groaning as he watched her hands move over herself. It was so much worse than what he’d seen on the ship. Her out-in-public touching herself had been difficult enough, but her alone-in-her-nightclothes touching herself was something out of an erotic film. She hadn’t really looked up at him and said, Do you want to touch me here? Had she?

No. She hadn’t.

It was just all too easy to imagine that she had, imagine his hands following hers.

They could play a game.

His hands following hers, wherever they went, wherever she wanted.

Nick made a pitiful, whimpering sound.

Honest to God, he was pathetic.

She pushed up a sleeve and spread lotion over one of her forearms and then the other.

Okay. That was better.

Then one of her hands slipped inside her robe, working on her neck, her shoulder and, he suspected, her chest.

Nick decided it was one of the sexiest things he’d ever seen. Pretty Kim Cassidy rubbing lotion all over herself, her hands slipping beneath her own robe, caressing her own bare skin.

You’re going straight to hell for this one day, Nick told himself.

Straight to hell.

What was it about a woman touching herself that did this to men?

He’d never understood it, never bought it.

The man should want to be the one doing the touching, right? Not the other way around.

His hands on her. That’s what a man should want.

But with her he got the whole fantasy thing.

Got that silly male voyeur thing and the effect of her with her hands all over her body and what it was doing to him. It was like an invitation, he decided. He could imagine her whispering, See what I’m doing? Come here. You could be doing this, too.

Or she could simply be giving him some helpful hints. See this? I like this. I like to be touched like this.

Fine by him.

He had a raging hard-on and couldn’t take his eyes off her.

He imagined her getting ready for a date to show up. For a lover. Soaking in her bath, the water a little murky, just enough to keep him from having a perfectly clear view of her. Her hair would be piled on her head, her face and arms damp with moisture from the heat and the bath. Her eyes would be closed, dreamily, her knees breaking the surface of the water as she hunched down in the tub and maybe the tips of her breasts visible, too. She’d lie there, sweet perfume in the water seeping into every inch of her skin, and then she’d get out, water running down her body in ways that made him groan. She’d towel herself off or maybe he’d dry her. She’d slip into that silky robe and maybe he’d watch while she rubbed lotion all over herself, getting herself ready. For him.

She’d smile when he showed up at the door, greet him wearing nothing but the robe and hold out her welcoming arms to him. He’d pull her to him, feeling every bit of the heat of her and her pretty curves through the thin silk of the robe, then slip his hands inside, as he’d just watched her do, running his hands over soft, silky, still-damp skin.

She’d open herself up to him in every way.

Would he carry her to the bedroom or stop at the couch, too impatient to go any farther? Or have her right there against the wall, that robe still wrapped around her, but pushed aside so he could see her breasts, her pretty thighs? He wasn’t sure if he’d have the patience to take it off of her. To do anything more than he absolutely had to do to get where he wanted to be, which was inside of her.

He could just imagine what she’d feel like in his arms, how she’d taste, the little sounds she’d make as…

As…

The lights went out.

Nick blinked once, then again.

He couldn’t see anything anymore.

No more Kim in her pretty robe, her hands all over herself.

She’d turned out the light!

And left him sitting here practically panting after her, having some damned sexual fantasy worthy of a seventeen-year-old Peeping Tom.

Nick groaned, a mixture of disgust at himself and frustrated desire. Completely inappropriate for a man in his position but, honestly, he was just a man and she’d been… Well, she’d been doing things any woman might do in the privacy of her own apartment. In what she believed was the privacy of her own apartment.

How many women expected someone like Nick to be watching their every semierotic move while in the privacy of their own apartment?

Nick fought the urge to beat his own head against the wall.

Women who fell in love with crooks and potential terrorists should expect exactly this sort of treatment and should exercise some caution all around. He wanted to go give her a lecture on the subject, to yell at her until she listened to him and understood and promised to be more careful in the future. He wanted to tell her she didn’t love that jerk, that he was nothing but a manipulating bastard, far more experienced in using people than she would ever be, and that she shouldn’t feel too bad about this. It was just a simple mistake that innocent women like her made all too often.

He was fairly certain she was innocent in all this. Way too trusting and falling in love too easily and just not taking the kind of care with her emotions that she should take.

Of course, he couldn’t tell her any of that. She couldn’t even know he was watching.

And he had to keep doing this, night after night, just like this.

Did she take a bath every night? he wondered.

Did she always wear the robe and put lotion on herself like that?

He was doomed, Nick decided.

Doomed.

* * *

Kim got up early, ate an apple, talked to her sister Kate on the phone, then dressed in a little T-shirt, shorts and sandals.

She planned to take a walk to the nearby Falls Park to check out the fountain she was redoing as a summer art project with some of the kids from Big Brothers Big Sisters. But as she left her apartment, she happened to glance over at Mrs. Baker’s and there, sitting on the patio all by himself, was Nick Cavanaugh, not moving at all, not even… Was he even awake?

Kim waited, standing just on the other side of the low hedge that separated Mrs. Baker’s property from Kim’s landlady’s.

He was so still she wasn’t even sure he was breathing. He sat in one of the big, comfy, cushioned Adirondack chairs, his head leaning against the back of it, a dark pair of sunglasses on and… No, wait… Every now and then she could see his chest rise and fall, so he was breathing at least. Deeply and slowly. She knew because she watched.

Just to the right of where he sat, a curtain in the window was pushed aside. Mrs. Baker looked out, saw Kim, then motioned for her to wait; Mrs. Baker was coming out.

She stopped opposite Kim, on the other side of the hedge, stared back at Nick, shook her head and whispered, “Poor man. I don’t think he’s well.”

“Really?”

Mrs. Baker nodded. “I was stripping wallpaper in the dining room until all hours and I was being quiet because that room is right below his bedroom. He kept getting up, walking around, going back to bed. Getting up, walking around, going back to bed. Couldn’t sleep at all. I went to the door and knocked, asked him if he was all right and he swore that he was, but I’m not so sure. He practically begged for a room here. Said he’d been up all night on an overnight flight from South America, hadn’t gotten any rest and had a bad back, I think. Or maybe his shoulder. He seems to be favoring both. And he was limping, too. When he couldn’t sleep I wondered if he was in pain or something. And for him to be sleeping outside this morning… I thought the poor man must be simply exhausted when he first came, but now I’m worried it might be something more. Something serious.”

“He wouldn’t tell you what was wrong last night?” Kim asked.

“No. Not a word. Do you think he’s all right over there? I mean, he’s just sleeping, right? I don’t want my first official guest collapsing here or well…you know? I can’t lose my first guest. That would be a terrible omen.”

Kim frowned.

Mrs. Baker tended to worry too much and Kim didn’t think Nick Cavanaugh was dying. Granted, there was something a little off about him and he seemed tired yesterday and a little bit… Not grumpy. Rattled? Distracted? Easily confused? No, not that. Just…off.

But she liked Mrs. Baker a lot and the woman put a lot of stock in her omens and little twinges and all sorts of things like that.

“Would you go make sure he’s okay?” Mrs. Baker asked. “I’d do it myself, but I don’t think he appreciated my concern when I asked him last night. It was like I’d caught him doing something he shouldn’t or… Well, that’s the way it felt to me.”

“Okay. I’ll talk to him,” Kim said.

“I’ll bring you two some tea, to give you an excuse to sit and talk awhile.”

Mrs. Baker went inside to make tea. Kim walked around the hedges and onto Mrs. Baker’s patio, pausing there, trying to decide what to do. She didn’t want to startle him. If he had been up all night in pain, he probably needed his rest this morning. And it wasn’t like the man wasn’t breathing.

Kim sat down in the chair next to his, leaned back and propped her feet up on the comfy stool in front of her chair to wait. If he wasn’t awake when Mrs. Baker came out with their tea, she’d wake him up. Until then, it was a gorgeous, early-summer morning. The sky was a happy shade of light blue, the sun was beaming down on them. There was a perfect, slight breeze and the temperatures hadn’t yet climbed too high.

She could almost imagine she was back on the ship, before the pirates hit, when she hadn’t had a care in the world.

Kim leaned back and closed her eyes, picturing Eric’s handsome face, trying not to worry that she hadn’t heard from him.

She’d been sure he’d call last night but he hadn’t, and she hadn’t been able to reach him at the number he gave her. Oh, he could have been stuck on a plane somewhere and gotten in really late, especially considering the time difference on the West Coast. That was probably it. Surely he’d call today.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.