Colton's Secret Service. Marie Ferrarella

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      Chapter 2

      It was only through sheer grit that Nick managed to hang on to the fringes of consciousness, gripping the sliver of light with his fingertips and holding on for all he was worth. He knew that if he surrendered to the darkness, there would be no telling what could happen. In his experience these last ten years, death could be hiding behind every conceivable corner. Even in tiny, off-the-beaten-path burgs that made no one’s top-ten list of places to visit.

      Falling backward, Nick teetered, then managed to spring up, somehow still miraculously holding on to his wallet and displaying both his badge and ID.

      Not that anyone was looking at it.

      “Striking a Secret Service agent is a punishable offense that’ll land you in prison,” he barked at his assailant.

      Swinging around to face the person who’d almost bashed in his head, Nick struggled to focus. Everything appeared blurred, with images multiplying themselves. This intense ringing in his ears jarred him down to the very bone. But even though it was wavy, the image of his assailant was legions away from what he had expected.

      Was he hallucinating?

      There, standing with her legs spread apart and firmly planted on the ground, clutching a tire iron that was close to being half as big as she was, was—

      “A kid?” Nick demanded incredulously when he could finally find his voice. “I was almost brained by a little kid?”

      “I’m not little! And you stay off my mama!” the tiny terror shouted. She held on to the tire iron so hard, her knuckles were white and she’d lifted her chin like a pint-sized, old-fashioned prize fighter, daring him to try to touch her.

      His head throbbed and the headache mushrooming over his skull threatened to obliterate everything else.

       Focus, Nick, focus!

      “Your mama?” Nick echoed. Well, that explained it all right. His ears hadn’t been playing tricks on him. The driver he’d tackled had sounded like a woman for a very good reason. “He” was a “she.”

      Even as he fought to clear his brain and try to keep the headache at bay, he saw the woman—and now that he looked, he could see that she was a petite, curvaceous woman whose body could not be mistaken for boyish—move swiftly to stand beside her daughter. She rested her hand on one of the little girl’s shoulders. The woman had lost the ridiculous, oversized cowboy hat she’d had on. Without it, he saw that she had red hair. It was pulled back and tucked into a long, thick braid that ran down to the small of her back.

      The fiery-looking, petite hellcat didn’t look as if she could weigh a hundred pounds even with her daughter perched on her shoulders. He should have easily subdued both of them with no trouble, not find himself at their mercy.

      This wasn’t going to look good in the report.

      The woman took the tire iron from her daughter. But rather than drop it, the way he expected her to, she grasped it like a weapon while gently attempting to push the little hellion behind her. The girl didn’t stay put long. It reminded Nick of a painting he’d once seen in a Washington museum, something that had to do with the spirit of the pioneer women who helped settle the West.

      For one unguarded moment, between the monumental headache, the intermittent confusion and the anger he felt at being caught off guard like this, the word magnificent came to mind.

      The next moment, he realized this was no time for that kind of personal assessment.

      He found himself under fire from that rather pert set of lips.

      “Who the hell are you?” she demanded hotly, moving the tire iron as she shot off the words. “And what are you doing, sneaking around on my land, attacking defenseless women?”

      “I already told you who I was,” he reminded her tersely, “and I’d hardly call you defenseless.”

      As he said that, he rubbed his chin and realized belatedly that the woman he’d inadvertently tackled had actually landed a rather stinging right cross to his chin. Maybe he was damn lucky to be alive, although he probably wouldn’t feel quite that way if word of this incident ever really got out: Nick Sheffield, aspiring Secret Service agent to the President, taken down by two females who collectively weighed less than a well-fed male German shepherd.

      He eyed the tire iron in her hand. “I feel sorry for your husband.”

      “Don’t be,” Georgie snapped. “There isn’t one.”

      Once upon a time, during the summer that she’d been seventeen and full of wonderful, naive dreams, she’d wanted a home, a husband, a family, the whole nine yards. And, equally naively, she’d thought that Jason Prentiss was the answer to all her prayers. Tall, intelligent and handsome, the Dartmouth College junior was spending the summer on his uncle’s farm. She’d lost her heart the first moment she’d seen him. He had eyes the color of heaven and a tongue that was dipped in honey.

      Unfortunately, he also possessed a heart that was chiseled out of old bedrock. Once summer was over, he went back to college, back, she discovered, to his girlfriend. Finding out that their summer romance had created a third party only made Jason pack his bags that much faster. He left with a vague promise to write and quickly vanished from her life. In the months that followed, there wasn’t a single attempt to contact her. The two letters she wrote were returned, unopened.

      Georgie had grown up in a hurry that summer, in more ways than one. Eighteen was a hell of an age to become an adult, but she had and in her opinion, she and Emmie were just fine—barring the occasional bump in the road.

      Like the one standing in front of her now.

      Sucking in his breath against the pain, Nick rubbed the back of his head where Emmie had made more than gentle contact.

      It was a wonder she hadn’t fractured his skull, he thought. As it was, there would be one hell of a lump there. Probing, he could feel it starting to form.

      No husband, huh? “Killed him, did you?” he asked sarcastically.

      He saw the woman’s eyes flash like green lightning. Obviously, he’d struck a nerve. Had she really killed her husband?

      “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I want you to turn around and get the hell off my property or I’m going to СКАЧАТЬ