The man who shattered her trust is back to protect her... New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer delivers a breathtaking story of second-chance love.

When Paul Fiore disappeared from Isabel Grayling’s life, he told himself it was for all the right reasons. She was young and innocent, and he was her millionaire father’s lowly employee. Three years on, Paul is the FBI agent assigned to Isabel’s case. Too late, he realizes what life in her Texas mansion was really like back then—and how much damage he did when he left.

Once love-struck and sheltered, Isabel has become an assistant district attorney committed to serving the law, no matter how risky it gets. But right now, the man she can’t forgive is the one thing standing between her and a deadly stalker. She knows Paul won’t hesitate to protect her life with his own. But if she can’t trust herself to resist him, how can she trust him not to break her heart all over again?

Praise for the novels of New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Diana Palmer

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“The popular Palmer has penned another winning novel, a perfect blend of romance and suspense.”

—Booklist on Lawman

“Readers will be moved by this tale of revenge and justice, grief and healing.”

—Booklist on Dangerous

“Diana Palmer is one of those authors whose books are always enjoyable. She throws in romance, suspense and a good story line.”

—The Romance Reader on Before Sunrise

“Lots of passion, thrills, and plenty of suspense… Protector is a top-notch read!”

—Romance Reviews Today

“A delightful romance with interesting new characters and many familiar faces.”

—RT Book Reviews on Wyoming Tough

Defender
Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Dear Reader,

This book is something different. It has new faces, although it’s set in Jacobsville and Comanche Wells, with cameos by old friends. The heroine is the daughter of a multimillionaire. The hero is her father’s head of security for his home and racehorses.

But her life of privilege is not what it seems. A tragic decision leads to what seems the end of her dream of love. Her employment as a new assistant district attorney in Jacobsville is the beginning of a murder investigation in which she, her younger sister and their former head of security—now with the San Antonio FBI office—are entwined. The end of this book is the beginning of her sister’s story, which takes place in Wyoming. I loved doing this story. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

This book is dedicated to our nephew. He leaves behind his wife, Heather, his sister, Kathy, his mother, Kathleen, and two great kids, Austin and Tyler. The boys and I play video games together on Xbox One.

As always, thank you for your kindness over the long years, and your friendship. I am your biggest fan.

Love,

For our sweet nephew Tony Woodall, 1965–2015, who left a hole in our hearts with his passing.

Sweet dreams, sweet boy.

Contents

COVER

BACK COVER TEXT

Praise

TITLE PAGE

Dear Reader

DEDICATION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EXTRACT

COPYRIGHT

ONE

Isabel Grayling stuck her head around the study door and peered in. The big desk was empty. The chair hadn’t been moved from its position, carefully pushed underneath. Everything on the oak surface was neatly placed; not a pencil wasn’t neatly in a cup; not a scrap of paper was out of line. She let out a breath. Her father wasn’t home, but the desk kept the fanatical order he insisted on, even when he wasn’t here.

She darted out of the office with a relieved sigh and pushed back the long tangle of her reddish-gold hair. Blue, blue eyes were filled with relief. She wrinkled her straight nose, where just a tiny line of freckles ran over its bridge. Her name was Isabel, but only Paul Fiore called her that. To everyone else, she was Sari, just as her sister, Meredith, was always called Merrie.

“Well?” her younger sister, Merrie, asked in a whisper.

Sari turned. The other girl was slender, like herself, but Merrie had hair almost platinum blond, straight and to her waist in back. Her eyes, like Sari’s, were blue, but paler, more the color of a winter sky. Both girls looked like their late mother, who was pretty but not beautiful.

“Gone!” Sari said with a wicked grin.

Merrie let out a sigh of relief. “Paul said that Daddy was going to Germany for a few weeks. Maybe he’ll find some other people to harass once he’s in Europe.”

Sari went up to the shorter girl and hugged her. “It will be all right.”

Merrie fought tears. “I only wanted to have my hair trimmed, not cut. Honestly, Sari, he’s so unreasonable…!”

“I know.” She didn’t dare say more. Paul had told her things in confidence that she couldn’t bear to share with her baby sister. Their father was far more dangerous than either of them had known.

To any outsider, the Grayling sisters had everything. Their father was rich beyond any dream. They lived in a gray stone mansion on acres and acres of land in Comanche Wells, Texas, where their father kept Thoroughbred horses. Rather, his foreman kept them. The old man was carefully maneuvered away from the livestock by the foreman, who’d once had to save a horse from the man. Darwin Grayling had beaten animals before. It was rumored that he’d beaten his wife. She died of a massive concussion, but Grayling swore that she’d fallen. Not many people in Comanche Wells or nearby Jacobsville, Texas, wanted to argue with a man who could buy and sell anybody in the state.

That hadn’t stopped local physician Jeb “Copper” Coltrain from asking for a coroner’s inquest and making accusations that Grayling’s description of the accident didn’t match the head injuries. But Copper had been called out of town on an emergency by a friend and when he returned, the coroner’s inquest was over and accidental death had been put on the death certificate. Case closed.

The Grayling girls didn’t know what had truly happened. Sari had been in high school, Merrie in grammar school, when their mother died. They knew only what their father had told them. They were much too afraid of him to ask questions.

Now, Merrie was in her last year of high school and Sari was a senior in college. Sari had majored in history in preparation for a law degree. She went to school in San Antonio, but wasn’t allowed to live on campus. Her father had her driven back and forth every day. It was the same with Merrie. Darwin wasn’t having either of his daughters around other people. He’d fought and won when Sari tried to move onto the college campus. He was wealthy and his children were targets, he’d said implacably, and they weren’t going anywhere without one of his security people.

Which was why Sari and Paul Fiore, head of security for the Grayling Corporation, were such good friends. They’d known each other since Paul moved down from New Jersey to take the job, while Sari was in her last year of high school. Paul drove the girls to school every day.

He’d wondered, but only to Sari, why her father hadn’t placed them both in private schools. Sari knew, but she didn’t dare say. It was because her father didn’t want them out of his sight, where they might say something that he didn’t approve of. They knew too much about him, about his business, about the way he treated animals and people.

He was paranoid about his private life. He had women, Sari was certain of it, but never around the house. He had a mistress. She worked for the federal government. Paul had told her, in confidence. He wasn’t afraid of Darwin Grayling—Paul wasn’t afraid of anyone. But he liked his job and he didn’t want to go back to the FBI. He’d worked for the Bureau years ago. Nobody knew why he’d suddenly given up a lucrative government job to become a rent-a-cop for a Texas millionaire in a small town at the back of beyond. Paul never said, either.

Sari touched Merrie’s slightly bruised cheek and winced. “I warned you about talking back, honey,” she said worriedly. “I’m so sorry!”

“My mouth and my brain don’t stay connected,” Merrie laughed, but bitterly. Her blue eyes met her sister’s. “If we could just tell somebody!”

“We could, and Daddy would make sure they never worked again,” Sari said. “That’s why I’ve never told Paul anything…” She bit her lip.

But Merrie knew already. She hugged the taller girl. “I won’t tell him. I know how you feel about Paul.”

“I wish he felt something for me,” Sari said with a long sigh. “He’s always been affectionate with me. He takes good care of me. But it’s… I don’t know how to say it. Impersonal?” She drew away, her expression sad. “He just doesn’t get close to people. He dated that out-of-town auditor two years ago, remember? She called here over and over, and he wouldn’t talk to her. He said he just wanted someone to go to the movies with, and she was looking at wedding rings.” She laughed involuntarily. She shook her head. “He won’t get involved.”

“Maybe he was involved, and something happened,” her sister said softly. “He looks like the sort of person who dives into things headfirst. You know, all or nothing. Maybe he lost somebody he loved, Sari.”

“I guess that would explain a lot.” She moved away, grimacing. “It’s just my luck, to go loopy over a man who thinks a special relationship is something you have with a vehicle.”

“It’s a very nice vehicle,” Merrie began.

“It’s a truck, Merrie!” she interrupted, throwing up her hands. “Gosh, you’d think it was a child the way he takes care of it. Special mats, taking it to the car wash once a week. He even waxes it himself.” She glowered. “It’s a truck!”

“I like trucks,” Merrie said. “That cowboy who worked for us last year had a fancy black one. He wanted to take me to a movie.” She shivered. “I thought Daddy was going to kill him.”

“So did I.” Sari swallowed, hard. She wrapped her arms around her chest. “The cowboy went all the way to Arizona, they said, to make sure Daddy didn’t have him followed. He was scared.”

“So was I,” Merrie confessed. “You know, I’m eighteen years old and I’ve never gone on a date with a real boy. I’ve never been kissed, except on the cheek.”

“Join the club,” her sister laughed softly. “Well, one day we’ll break out of here. We’ll escape!” she said dramatically. “I’ll hire a team of mercenaries to hide us from Daddy!”

“With what money?” Merrie asked sadly. “Neither of us has a dime. Daddy makes sure we can’t even get a part-time job to make money. You can’t even live at your college campus. I’ll bet that gets you talked about.”

“It does,” Sari confided. “But they figure our father is just eccentric because he’s so rich, and they let it go. I don’t have any real friends, anyway.”

“Just me,” Merrie teased.

Sari hugged her. “Just you. You’re my best friend, Merrie.”

“You’re mine, too, even if you are my sister.”

Sari drew back. “One day, things will change.”

“You’ve been saying that since we were in grammar school. It hasn’t.”

“It will.”

Merrie touched her cheek and winced. “I told Paul I fell down the steps,” she said, when she noticed her sister’s worried expression.

“I wonder if he believed you,” Sari replied solemnly. “He’s not afraid of Daddy.”

“He should be. I’ve heard Daddy has this friend back East,” Merrie told her. “He’s in with some underworld group. They say he’s killed people, that he’ll do anything for money.” She bit her lower lip. “I don’t want Paul hurt any more than you do. The less he knows about what goes on here when he’s off duty, the better. He couldn’t save us, anyway. He could only be dragged down with us.”

“He wouldn’t let Daddy hurt us, if he knew,” Sari replied.

“So he won’t know.”

“Someone else might tell him,” Sari began.

“Not anybody who works here,” Merrie sighed. “Mandy’s kept house for over twenty years, since before you were born. She knows stuff, but she’s afraid to tell. She has a brother who does illegal things. Daddy told her he could have her brother sent to prison if she ever opened her mouth. She’s afraid of him.” She looked up. “I’m afraid of him.”

Sari winced. “Yes. Me, too.”

“I don’t ever want to get married, Sari,” the younger woman said huskily. “Not ever!”

“One day, you might, if the right man comes along.”

Merrie laughed. “He’s not likely to come along while Daddy’s around, or he’ll be leaving in a body bag in the back of a pickup truck.”

The dark humor in that statement sent them both into gales of laughter.

* * *

Paul Fiore was Italian. He also had a Greek grandmother. It accounted for his olive complexion and thick, jet-black hair and large brown eyes. He was handsome, too, tall and broad-shouldered, muscular without making a point of it. He walked like a panther, light on his feet, and he had a quick mind. He’d been in law enforcement most of his life until he took the job with the Grayling Corporation. He’d wanted to get as far away from federal work—and New Jersey—as he could. Jacobsville, Texas, came close to his ideal place.

He was fond of the girls, Merrie and Sari, and he took charge of the house when Mr. Grayling was out of the country. He could handle any problem that came up. His main responsibility was to keep the girls safe, but he also kept a close watch on the property, especially the very expensive Thoroughbreds Grayling raised for sale.

The housekeeper, Mandy Swilling, was fond of him. She was always baking him the cinnamon cookies he liked so much, and tucking little surprises into his truck when he had to be away on business.

“You’ve got me ruined,” he accused her one morning. “I’ll be so spoiled that I’ll never be able to get along in the world if I ever get fired from here.”

“Mr. Darwin will never fire you,” Mandy said confidently. “You keep your mouth shut and you don’t ask questions.”

His eyes narrowed. “Odd reason to keep a man on, isn’t it?”

“Not around here,” she said heavily.

He stared at her, his dark eyes twinkling. “You know where all the bodies are buried, huh? That why you still have work?”

She didn’t laugh, as he’d expected her to. She just glanced at him and winced. “Don’t even joke about things like that, Mr. Paul.”

He groaned at her form of addressing him.

“Now, now,” she said. “I’ve always called the boss Mr. Darwin, just like I call the foreman Mr. Edward. It’s a way of speaking that Southern folk are raised with. You, being a Yankee…” She stopped and grinned. “Sorry. I meant to say, you, being a northerner, wouldn’t know about that.”

“I guess so.”

“You still sound like a person born up North.”

He shrugged and grinned back at her. “We are what we are.”

“I suppose so.”

He watched her work at making rolls for lunch. She wasn’t much to look at. She was about fifty pounds overweight, had short silver hair and dark eyes, and she was slightly stooped over from years of working in gardens with a hoe. But she could cook! The woman was a magician in the kitchen. Paul remembered his tiny little grandmother, making ravioli and antipasto when he was a child, the scent of flour and oil that always seemed to cling to her. Kitchens were comforting to a child who had no real home. His father had worked for a local mob boss, and done all sorts of illegal things, like most of the rest of his family. His mother had died miserable, watching her husband run around with an endless parade of other women, shuddering every time the big boss or law enforcement came to the front door. After his mother died and his father went to jail for the twentieth time, Paul went to live with his little Greek grandmother. He and his cousin Mikey had stayed with her until they were almost grown. Paul watched Mikey go the same route his father had, attached like a tick to the local big crime boss. His father never came around. In fact, he couldn’t remember seeing his father more than a dozen times before the man died in a shootout with a rival mob.

It was why he’d gone into law enforcement at seventeen, fresh out of high school. He hated the hold crime had on his family. He hoped he could make a difference, help clean up his old neighborhood and free it from the talons of organized crime. He went from local police right up into the FBI. He’d felt that he was unstoppable, that he could fight crime and win. Pride had blinded him to the reality of life. It had cost him everything.

Still, he missed the Bureau sometimes. But the memories had been lethal. He couldn’t face them, not even now, years after the tragedy that had sent him running from New Jersey to Texas on a job tip from a coworker. He’d given up dreams of a home and all the things that went with it. Now, it was just the job, doing the job. He didn’t look forward. Ever. One Day at a Time was his credo.

“Why are you hiding in here?” Mandy asked suddenly, breaking into his thoughts.

“It’s that obvious, huh?” he asked, the New Jersey accent still prevalent even after the years he’d spent in Texas.

“Yes, it is.”

He sipped the black coffee she’d placed in front of him at the table. “Livestock foreman’s got a daughter. She came with him today.”

“Oh, dear,” Mandy replied.

He shrugged. “I took her to lunch at Barbara’s Cafe a few weeks ago. Just a casual thing. I met her at the courthouse. She works there. She decided that I was looking for a meaningful relationship. So now she’s over here every Saturday like clockwork, hanging out with her dad.”

“That will end when Mr. Darwin comes back,” she said with feeling. “He doesn’t like strangers on the place, even strangers related to people who work here.”

He smiled sadly. “Or it will end when I lose my temper and start cursing in Italian.”

“You look Italian,” she said, studying him.

He chuckled. “You should see my cousin Mikey. He could have auditioned for The Godfather. I’ve got Greek in me, too. My grandmother was from a little town near Athens. She could barely speak English at all. But could she cook! Kind of like you,” he added with twinkling eyes. “She’d have liked you, Mandy.”

Her hard face softened. “You never speak of your parents.”

“I try not to think about them too much. Funny, how we carry our childhoods around on our backs.”

She nodded. She was making rolls for lunch and they had to have time to rise. Her hands were floury as she kneaded the soft dough. She nodded toward the rest of the house. “Neither of those poor girls has had a childhood. He keeps them locked up all the time. No parties, no dancing and especially no boys.”

He scowled. “I noticed that. I asked the boss once why he didn’t let the girls go out occasionally.” He took a sip of his coffee.

“What did he tell you?”

“That the last employee who asked him that question is now waiting tables in a little town in the Yukon Territory.”

She shook her head. “That’s probably true. A cowboy who tried to take Merrie out on a date once got a job in Arizona. They say he’s still looking behind him for hired assassins.” Her hands stilled in the dough. “Don’t you ever mention that outside the house,” she advised. “Or to Mr. Darwin. I kind of like having you around,” she added with a smile and went back to her chore.

“I like this job. No big-city noise, no pressure, no pressing deadlines on cases.”

She glanced up at him, then back down to the bowl again. “We’ve never talked about it, but you were in law enforcement once, weren’t you?”

He scowled. “How did you know that?”

“Small towns. Cash Grier let something slip to a friend, who told Barbara at the café, who told her cook, who told me.”

“Our police chief knew I was in law enforcement? How?” he wondered aloud, feeling insecure. He didn’t want his past widely known here.

She laughed softly. “Nobody knows how he finds out things. But he worked for the government once.” She glanced at him. “He was a high-level assassin.”

His eyes widened. “The police chief?” he exclaimed.

She nodded. “Then he was a Texas Ranger—that ended when he slugged the temporary captain and got fired. Afterward he worked for the DA in San Antonio and then he came here.”

He whistled. “Slugged the captain.” He chuckled. “He’s still a pretty tough customer, despite the gorgeous wife and two little kids.”

“That’s what everyone says. We’re pretty protective of him. Our late mayor—who was heavily into drug smuggling on the side—tried to fire Chief Grier, and the whole city police force and fire department, and all our city employees, said they’d quit on the spot if he did.”

“Obviously he wasn’t fired.”

She smiled. “Not hardly. It turns out that the state attorney general, Simon Hart, is Cash Grier’s cousin. He showed up, along with some reporters, at the hearing they had to discuss the firing of the chief’s patrol officers. They arrested a drunk politician and he told the mayor to fire them. The chief said over his dead body.”

“I’ve been here for years, and I heard gossip about it, but that’s the first time I’ve heard the whole story.”

“An amazing man, our chief.”

“Oh, yes.” He finished his coffee. “Nobody makes coffee like you do, Mandy. Never weak and pitiful, always strong and robust!”

“Yes, and the coffee usually comes out that way, too!” she said with a wicked grin.

He laughed as he got up from the table, and went back to work.

* * *

That night he was researching a story about an attempted Texas Thoroughbred kidnapping on the internet when Sari walked in the open door. He was perched on the bed in just his pajama bottoms with the laptop beside him. Sari had on a long blue cotton nightgown with a thick, ruffled matching housecoat buttoned way up to the throat. She jumped onto the bed with him, her long hair in a braid, her eyes twinkling as she crossed her legs under the voluminous garment.

“Do that when your dad comes home, and we’ll both be sitting on the front lawn with the door locked,” he teased.

“You know I never do it when he’s home. What are you looking up?”

“Remember that story last week about the so-called traveling horse groomer who turned up at the White Stables in Lexington, Kentucky, and walked off with a Thoroughbred in the middle of the night?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, just in case he headed south when he jumped bail, I’m checking out similar attempts. I found one in Texas that happened two weeks ago. So I’m reading about his possible MO.”

She frowned. “MO?”

“Modus operandi,” he said. “It’s Latin. It means…”

“Please,” she said. “I know Latin. It means method of operation.”

“Close enough,” he said with a gentle smile. His eyes went back to the computer screen. “Generally speaking, once a criminal finds a method that works, he uses it over and over until he’s caught. I want to make sure that he doesn’t sashay in here while your dad’s gone and make off with Grayling’s Pride.”

“Sashay?” she teased.

He wrinkled his nose. “You’re a bad influence on me,” he mused, his eyes still on the computer screen. “That’s one of your favorite words.”

“It’s just a useful one. Snit is my favorite one.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“And lately you’re in a snit more than you’re not,” she pointed out.

He managed a smile. “Bad memories. Anniversaries hit hard.”

She bit her tongue. She’d never discussed really personal things with him. She’d tried once and he’d closed up immediately. So she smiled impersonally. “So they say,” she said instead of posing the question she was dying to.

He admired her tact. He didn’t say so, of course. She couldn’t know the memories that tormented him, that had him up walking the floor late at night. She couldn’t know the guilt that ate at him night and day because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when it really mattered.

“Are you okay?” she asked suddenly.

His dark eyebrows went up. “What?”

She shrugged. “You looked wounded just then.”

She was more perceptive than he’d realized. He scrolled down the story he was reading online. “Wounded. Odd choice of words there, Isabel.”

“You’re the only person who ever called me that.”

“What? Isabel?” He looked up, studying her softly rounded face, her lovely complexion, her blue, blue eyes. “You look like an Isabel.”

“Is that a compliment or something else?”

“Definitely a compliment.” He looked back at the computer screen. “I used to love to read about your namesake. She was queen of Spain in the fifteenth century. She and her husband led a crusade to push foreigners out of their country. They succeeded in 1492.”

Her lips parted. “Isabella la Catolica.”

His chiseled lips pursed. “My God. You know your history.”

She laughed softly. “I’m a history major,” she reminded him. “Also a Spanish scholar. I’m doing a semester of Spanish immersion. English isn’t spoken in the classroom, ever. And we read some of the classic novels in Spanish.”

He chuckled softly. “My favorite was Pio Baroja. He was Basque, something of a legend in the early twentieth century.”

“Mine was Sangre y Arena.”

“Blasco Ibáñez,” he shot back. “Blood and Sand. Bullfighting?” he added in a surprised tone.

She laughed. “Yes, well, I didn’t realize what the book would be about until I got into it, and then I couldn’t put it down.”

“They made a movie about it back in the forties, I think it was,” he told her. “It starred Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth. Painful, bittersweet story. He ran around on his saintly wife with a woman who was little more than a prostitute.”

“I suppose saintly women weren’t much in demand in some circles in those days. And especially not today,” she added with a wistful little sigh. “Men want experienced women.”

“Not all of them,” he said, looking away from her.

“Really?”

He forced himself to keep his eyes on the computer screen. “Think about it. A man would have to be crazy to risk STDs or HIV for an hour’s pleasure with a woman who knew her way around bedrooms.”

She fought a blush and lost.

He saw it and laughed. “Honey, you aren’t worldly at all, are you?”

“I’m alternately backward or unliberated, to hear my classmates tell it. But mostly they tolerate my odd point of view. I think one of them actually feels sorry for me.”

“Twenty years down the road, they may wish they’d had your sterling morals,” he replied. He looked up, into her eyes, and for a few endless seconds, he didn’t look away. She felt her body glowing, burning with sensations she’d never felt before. But just when she thought she’d go crazy if she didn’t do something, footsteps sounded in the hall.

“So there you are,” Mandy exclaimed. “I’ve looked everywhere.” She stared at them.

Paul made a face. “Do I look like a suicidal man looking for the unemployment line to you?” he asked sourly.

Both women laughed.

“All the same, don’t do that when your dad’s home,” she told Sari firmly.

“I never would, you know that,” Sari said gently. “Why were you looking for me?”

“That girl at college who can’t ever find her history notes wants to talk to you about tomorrow’s test.”

“Nancy,” she groaned. “Honestly, I don’t know how she passed anything until I came along! She actually called up one of our professors at night and asked if he could give her the high points of his lecture. He hung up on her.”

“I’m not surprised,” Paul said. “Better go answer the questions, tidbit,” he added to Sari.

“I guess so,” she said. She got off the bed, reluctantly. The way he’d looked at her had made her feel shaky inside. She wanted him to do it again. But he was already buried in his computer screen.

“There was an attempted horse heist just two days ago up near San Antonio,” he was muttering. “I think I’ll call the DA up there and see if he’s made any arrests.”

“Good night, Paul,” Sari said as she left the room.

“Night, sprout. Sleep well.”

“You, too.”

* * *

Mandy led her into the kitchen and pointed to the phone.

“Hello, Nancy?” Sari said.

“Oh, thank goodness,” the other girl rushed. “I’m in such a mess! I can’t find my notes, and I’ll fail the test…!”

“No worries. Let me get mine and I’ll read them to you.”

“You could fax them…”

“You’d never read my handwriting,” Sari laughed. “Besides, it will help me remember what I need for tomorrow’s test.”

“In that case, thanks,” Nancy said.

“You’re welcome. Give me your number and I’ll call you back. I’ll have to hunt up my own notes.”

Nancy gave it to her and hung up.

Sari came back down with the notes she’d retrieved from her bulky book bag. She phoned Nancy from the kitchen, where Mandy was cleaning up, and read the notes to her. It didn’t take long.

“I’ll see you in class,” Nancy said. “And thanks! You’ve saved my life!” She hung up.

“She says I saved her life,” Sari said, chuckling.

Mandy gave her a glance. “If you want to save two lives, you’ll stay out of Mr. Paul’s bedroom.”

“Mandy, it’s perfectly innocent. The door’s always open when I’m in there.”

“You don’t understand. It’s how it looks, that easy familiarity between you two. It will carry over to other times, in daylight. If your father sees it, even thinks that there might be something going on…”

“I don’t do it when he’s here.”

“I know that. It’s just…” She grimaced. “I don’t know where he put all the cameras.”

Sari’s heart jumped. “What cameras?”

“He had it done while you girls were at school. He had three security cameras installed. He sent me out of the house on an errand while they were put in place. I don’t know where they are.”

“Surely he wouldn’t have them put in our bedrooms,” Sari began worriedly.

“There’s no telling,” Mandy said. “I only know that he didn’t put one in here. I’d have noticed if anything was moved or displaced. Nothing was.”

Sari chewed on a fingernail. “Gosh, now I’ll worry if I talk in my sleep!”

“The cameras are why you should stay out of Mr. Paul’s bedroom. Besides that,” she added under her breath, “you’re tempting fate.”

“I am? How?” Sari asked blankly.

“Honey, Mr. Paul takes a woman out for a sandwich or a quick dinner. He never goes home with them.”

Sari flushed with sudden pleasure.

“My point is,” the older woman went on, “that he’s a man starved of…well…satisfaction,” she faltered. “You might say something or do something to tempt him, is what I’m trying to say.”

Sari sighed and rested her face on her palms, propped on her elbows. “That would be a fine thing,” she mused. “He’s never even touched me except to help me out of a car,” she added on a wistful sigh.

“If he ever did touch you, your father would be sure to hear about it. And I don’t like to think of the consequences. He’s a violent man, Sari,” she added gently.

“I know that.” Her face showed her misery. She was too innocent to hide her responses.

“So, don’t tempt fate,” Mandy said softly. She hugged the younger woman tight. “I know how you feel about him. But if you start something, he’ll be out on his ear. And what your father would do to you…” She drew back with a grimace. “I love Mr. Paul,” she added. “He’s the kindest man I know. You don’t want to get him fired.”

“Of course I don’t,” Sari replied. “I promise I’ll behave.”

“You always have,” Mandy said with a tender smile. “It all ends, you know,” she said suddenly.

“Ends?”

“Misery. Unrequited love. Even life. It all ends. We live in pieces of emotion. Pieces of life. It doesn’t all get put together until we’re old and ready for the long sleep.”

“Okay, when you get philosophical, I know it’s past my bedtime,” Sari teased.

Mandy hugged her one last time. “You’re a sweet child. Go to bed. Sleep well.”

“You, too.” She went to the doorway and paused. She turned. “Thanks.”

“What for?”

“Caring about me and Merrie,” Sari said gently. “Nobody else has, since Mama died.”

“It’s because I care that I sometimes say things you don’t want to hear, my darling.”

Sari smiled. “I know.” She turned and left the room.

* * *

Mandy, older and wiser, saw what Sari and Paul really felt for each other, and she worried at the possible consequences if that tsunami of emotion ever turned loose in them.

She went back to her chores, closing the kitchen up for the night.

TWO

When Isabel walked past Paul’s bedroom after she called Nancy, she noticed his door was closed and the lights were off.

She went into her own room, climbed into bed and extinguished the single bedroom lamp in the room.

She recalled what Mandy had said, about the dangers of getting too close to him, with sadness. Yes, of course, her father would fire him if anything indiscreet came to light. She also recalled the pain she felt when the older woman spoke of Paul going on dates with other women.

He didn’t take them to bed, that much was clear. But it also indicated that he wasn’t ready to get serious about a woman, that he wasn’t interested in marriage and kids. And Isabel was. She’d gladly have given up college to end up in Paul’s arms with a baby of her own.

But that seemed more unlikely by the day. She was living in pipe dreams. Paul was content to have her at arm’s length. He didn’t want her. At least, he didn’t want her the way she wanted him. She cared more for him than she’d ever cared for anyone, except her mother and sister.

As Paul liked to remind her, though, she hadn’t been out in the world long enough to know what she really wanted. That amused her. He seemed to think she was still the seventeen-year-old he’d taken to school every day in the limo. She was twenty-one, almost twenty-two now. She’d graduate from college in a few months. That made her, in the eyes of the world, an adult. Not to Paul, though. Never to Paul.

She had to start thinking about what she was going to do with her life after college. Law had always fascinated her. She’d been hanging around the courthouse after school, grilling one of District Attorney Blake Kemp’s assistant DAs about what it was like to practice in a courtroom. Glory Ramirez was happy to talk to her, filling her head with thoughts of working in the DA’s office.

“Blake knows how much time you spend here, on my lunch hour and after work,” Glory teased.

“Oh, no,” Sari began.

Glory held up a hand. “He doesn’t mind. There aren’t that many people blazing paths up the street to the courthouse to solicit work in the DA’s office.” She sobered. “It’s hard work, Sari, with long hours. Sometimes defendants’ families target us, because they think we’ve been unfair. Sometimes the defendants themselves try to attack us when they get out. Those instances are rare, but they do happen. Family life is hard.” She smiled gently. “I’m qualified to know that, because my husband and I have a son who’s almost four years old. Rodrigo still works for the DEA and I’m at the courthouse all hours. Sometimes we have to have the Pendletons babysit.” The Pendletons were Glory’s adoptive family. Jason’s father had been Glory, and Gracie’s, guardian.

“I don’t really think they mind,” Sari teased, because it was well-known that although Jason and Gracie Pendleton had a son and daughter of their own now, they still loved to watch their nephew. All the kids had enough toys to stock a nursery.

“Of course not,” Glory laughed. “But I’m still missing out on time with my family to do this job. I love it,” she added gently. “It’s a special thing, to help keep people safe, to make sure people who do terrible things are punished and off the streets. That’s why I do it.”

“I…would do it for that reason, as well,” Sari said, not adding that her terror of a father was one of her own motivations. He was the sort of person who should have been sitting in a jail cell, but never would, because of his wealth. “Justice shouldn’t be dealt according to who has money and who hasn’t,” she added absently.

Glory, who had some idea of Darwin Grayling’s illegal dealings, only nodded her head.

“Anyway, what about those courses you mentioned?” she asked, bringing Glory back to the present.

Glory laughed. “Okay. Here’s what you need to consider in law school…”

* * *

Sari was full of fire for the fall semester in law school, after she got her undergraduate degree. Her cumulative grades assured that she would graduate, the finals from each class notwithstanding. She already had a graduate school picked out. Law school in San Antonio.

“You’ll have to drive me, of course,” Sari told Paul with a sigh when she outlined the courses Glory had told her about. “There’s no way Daddy will ever let me drive myself. I don’t even have a driver’s license.”

He scowled. “Surely not.”

She shrugged. “He holds the purse strings, you know. Either I do it his way or I don’t do it,” she said with the complacency of a woman who’d lived such a sheltered life. “So I do it.”

“Haven’t you ever wanted to break out?” he asked suddenly.

She grinned at him across a plate of cookies, which they were sharing with cups of coffee at the small kitchen table. “You offering to help me?” she teased. “Got a helicopter and a couple of guys wearing ninja suits?”

He chuckled. “Not quite. I used to know a couple of guys like that, though, in the old days.”

“Oh, please,” she said, munching a cookie. “You aren’t old enough to be remembering ‘the old days.’”

His eyebrows rose. “You need glasses, kid. I’ve got gray hair already.”

She eyed him. He was so gorgeous. Black wavy hair, deep-set warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, chiseled mouth; he was any woman’s dream guy. “Gray hair, my left elbow.”

“No kidding. Right here.” He indicated a spot at his temple.

“Oh, that one. Sure. You’re old, all right. You’ve got one whole gray hair.”

He grinned, as she’d expected him to. “Well, maybe a few more than that. I’m like my grandfather. His hair never turned gray. He had a few silver hairs when he died, at the age of eighty.”

“Do you look like him?” she asked, sipping coffee.

“No. I look like my grandmother. Everybody else was Italian. She was tiny and Greek and she had a mouth like a mob boss.” He chuckled. “Do something wrong, and that gnarled little hand came out of nowhere to grab your ear.” He made a face.

“So that’s why your ears are so big,” she mused, looking at them.

“Hey, I was never that bad,” he argued. He glowered at her. “And my ears aren’t that big.”

“If you say so,” she said, hiding the gleam in her eyes.

“You little termagant,” he said, exasperated.

“Where do you get all those big words?” she asked.

“College.”

“Really? You never told me you went to college.”

He shrugged. “I don’t like talking about the past.”

“I noticed.”

“We could talk about your past,” he invited.

“And after those forty-five seconds, we could go back to yours,” she teased, blue eyes twinkling. “Come on, what did you study?”

“Law.” His face hardened with the memories. “Criminal law.”

She frowned. “That was before you came to work for Daddy, yes?”

She was killing him and she didn’t know it. His hand, on the thick white mug, was almost white with the pressure he was exerting. “A long time before that.”

“Then, what…”

Mandy came into the room like a chubby whirlwind. “Where did you put the ribbons I was saving to wrap the holiday cookies with?” she demanded from Sari.

“Oh, my gosh, I was working on homemade Christmas cards and I borrowed them. I’m sorry!”

“Go get them,” Mandy ordered with all the authority of a drill sergeant. “Right now!”

Sari left in a whirlwind, and Mandy turned to Paul, who was paler than normal. His hand, around the mug, was just beginning to loosen its grip.

He gave her a suspicious look.

“Sari doesn’t think,” Mandy said quietly. “She’s curious and she asks questions, because she doesn’t think.”

He didn’t admit anything. He took a deep breath. “Thanks,” he bit off.

“We all have dark memories that we never share, Mr. Paul,” she said gently. She patted his shoulder as she walked behind him. “Age diminishes the sting a bit. But you’re much too young for that just yet,” she added with a soft chuckle.

“You’re a tonic, girl.”

“I haven’t been a girl for forty years, you sweet man, but now I feel like one!”

He laughed, the pain washing away in good humor.

“There. That’s better,” she said, smiling at him. “You just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it gets easier.”

“It’s been almost five years.”

“Thirty years for me,” Mandy said surprisingly. “And it’s much easier now.”

He drew in a breath and finished his coffee. “Maybe in twenty-five years, I’ll forget it all, then.”

She looked at him with a somber little smile. “It would do an injustice to the people we love to forget them,” she said softly. “Pain comes with the memories, sure. But the memories become less painful in time.”

He scowled. “You should have been a philosopher.”

“And then who’d bake cookies for you and Miss Sari and Miss Merrie?” she asked.

“Well, if we had to depend on Isabel’s cooking, I expect we’d all starve,” he said deliberately when he heard Sari coming.

She stopped in the doorway, gasping and glaring. “That is so unfair!” she exclaimed. “Heavens, I made an almost-edible, barely scorched potato casserole just last week!”

“That’s true,” Mandy agreed.

Paul glowered. “Almost being the operative word.”

“And I didn’t even mention that I saw you pushing yours out the back door while I was trying to pry open one of my biscuits so I could butter it!”

Sari sighed. “I guess they were a pretty good substitute for bricks,” she added. “Maybe I’ll learn to cook one day.”

“You’re doing just fine, darlin’,” Mandy said encouragingly. “It takes time to learn.” She shot Paul a glance. “And a lot of encouragement.”

“Damn, Isabel, I almost got one of those biscuits pried open to put butter in!” He glanced at Mandy. “How’s that?”

“Why don’t you go patrol the backyard?” Sari muttered.

“She’s picking on me again, Mandy,” he complained.

“Don’t you be mean to Mr. Paul, young lady.” Mandy took his part at once.

“He says terrible things about me, and you never chastise him!” Sari accused.

“Well, darlin’, I may be old, but I can still appreciate a handsome man.” She grinned at them.

Sari threw up her hands. Paul made her a handsome bow, winked and walked out the back door.

“You always take his side,” Sari groaned.

Mandy chuckled. “He really is handsome,” she said defensively.

“Yes. Too handsome. And too standoffish. He’ll never look at me as anything but the kid I was when he came here.”

“You’ve got law school to get through,” Mandy reminded her. She sobered. “And you know how your dad feels about you getting involved with anyone.”

“Yes, I know,” Sari said miserably. “Especially anybody who works for him.” Shivering softly, she said, “It’s just, I’m getting older. I’m a grown woman. And I can’t even drive myself to San Antonio to go shopping or invite friends over.”

“You don’t have any friends,” Mandy countered.

“I don’t dare. Neither does Merrie,” she added solemnly. “We’re young, with the whole world out there waiting for us, and we have to get permission to leave the house. Why?” she exclaimed.

Mandy ground her teeth. “You know how your dad guards his privacy. He’s afraid one of you might let something slip.”

“Like what? We don’t know anything about his business, or even his private life,” Sari exclaimed.

“And you’re both safe as long as it’s kept that way,” Mandy said without thinking, then slapped a hand across her mouth.

Sari bit her lower lip. She moved closer. “What do you know?”

“Things I’ll die before I’ll tell you,” the older woman replied, turning pale.

“How do you know them?”

Mandy ignored her.

“Your brother, right?” she whispered. “He knows people who know things.”

“Don’t you ever say that out loud,” she cautioned the younger woman, looking hunted until Sari reassured her that she’d never do any such thing.

“It’s like living in a combat zone,” Sari muttered.

“A satin-cushioned one,” came the droll reply. “If you want an apple pie, here’s a do-it-yourself kit.” She put a basin of apples in front of the younger woman. “So get busy and peel.”

Sari started to argue. But then she recalled the delicious pies Mandy could make, so she shut up and started peeling.

* * *

Graduation came all too soon. The household, except for Darwin Grayling, who was in Europe at the time, went to Merrie’s first at the high school and took enough pictures to fill an album. Then, only a few days later, it was Isabel’s graduation from college. Merrie kept fussing with Sari’s high collar.

“It’s okay,” her older sibling protested.

“It’s not! There’s a wrinkle, and I can’t get it smoothed out!” Merrie grumbled.

“It will be hidden under my robes,” Sari said gently, turning. She smiled at her younger sister. She shook her head. With her long blond hair like a curtain down her back, wearing a fluffy blue dress, Merrie looked like a picture of Alice in Wonderland that Sari had seen in a book. “I like your hair like that,” she said.

Merrie laughed, her pale blue eyes lighting up. “I look like Alice. Go ahead. Say it. You’re thinking it,” she accused.

Sari wrinkled her nose.

Merrie sighed. “He decides what we’ll wear, where we’ll go, what we do when we get there,” she said under her breath, her eyes on their father, standing with Paul near the front door. “Sari, normal women don’t live like this! The girls I go to school with have dates, go shopping…!”

“Stop, or I won’t get to graduate at all,” the older sister muttered under her breath when Darwin Grayling shot an irritated glance toward them at Merrie’s slightly raised tone.

Merrie drew in a deep breath. “It’s Sari’s collar,” she called to her father. “I can’t get the wrinkle out!”

“Leave it be,” he shot back. He looked at his watch. “We need to leave now. I have meetings with my board of directors in Dallas in three hours.”

“That’s your graduation, sandwiched in between breakfast and a board meeting,” Merrie teased under her breath. “At least he came home for your graduation,” she added a little bitterly.

Sari kissed her sister’s cheek. “I was there at yours. So were Mandy and Paul. Now shut up or I’ll never graduate,” came the whispered reply. “Let’s go!” She smoothed down her very discreet black dress, regardless of her own wishes, and started toward the door. She noticed Paul’s faint wince as he saw how she was dressed, like someone out of a very old Bette Davis movie instead of a young woman ready to start graduate school.

She didn’t answer that look. It might have been fatal to his employment if she had.

Graduation was boisterous and fun, despite her father, who sat through the entire ceremony texting on his phone and then conducting a business call the minute the graduates filed out into the spring sunshine.

“Maybe it’s glued to him,” Merrie teased as she and Sari were briefly alone.

“Attached by invisible cords,” Sari replied. “Hi, Grace, happy graduation!” Sari called to a fellow graduate.

“Thanks, Sari! You off to law school in the fall?” she asked.

“Yes. You?”

“I’m moving in with my boyfriend,” Grace sighed, indicating a tall, gangly boy talking to another boy. “We’re both going to the University of Tennessee.”

“Oh, I see,” Sari said, still not comfortable with modern ideas and choices.

Grace made a face. “Honestly, Sari, you need to buy normal clothes and go out with boys,” Grace said, loud enough for Sari’s father to hear.

He hung up his phone and moved to join them, looking expensive and coldly angry. “Are you ready to go, Isabel?” he asked curtly. His eyes never left Grace. He looked at her as if she were some disease he was afraid his daughters might catch.

“Uh, congrats, Sari. See you around,” Grace said, red-faced, and went back to her boyfriend.

“Slut,” Darwin said, just loud enough for his voice to carry and Grace to look both ruffled and insulted. “Let’s go.” He took Sari by the arm and almost dragged her to the waiting limousine, with a flustered Merrie running to catch up.

“I’ll have Paul watching,” Darwin said as Paul put the girls into the back of the limo and stood aside, holding the door, so that Darwin could slide into the seat facing them. The door closed. “I’ll expect you to associate with decent girls. Do you understand? That goes for you, too, Meredith!”

“Yes, Daddy,” Sari said.

“I understand,” Merrie added with a sigh.

The sisters didn’t dare look at each other. It would have been fatal.

* * *

The dinner Darwin had referred to was obviously going to be prepared by Mandy and just for the two women. Darwin had Paul drive him to the airport, where his corporate jet was waiting. Sari and Merrie sat down to a lovely chicken casserole with homemade rolls and even a chocolate cake.

“It’s delicious, Mandy,” Sari said halfway through the meal. “Thanks!”

“Yes, it’s wonderful!” Merrie enthused.

“Some graduation,” Mandy muttered. “Should have gone out with your classmates and had fun, not be stuck here with me and an empty house.”

“You know how Daddy is,” Sari said quietly. “He doesn’t think…”

“He doesn’t care,” Merrie interrupted coolly. “It’s the truth, Sari, you just don’t want to admit it. He doesn’t want us going out with men because we might get involved and tell somebody something he doesn’t want known. He doesn’t want us getting married because we’d be out from under his thumb! Besides, some of that money might go outside the family!”

“I suppose you’re right,” Sari said, tasting her cake. “It’s just, you get used to a routine. You don’t even realize that it really is a routine.” Her eyes twinkled. “Honestly, I thought Daddy was going to have a coronary when Grace talked about moving in with her boyfriend!”

Merrie chuckled. “I know! At least four of my classmates live with boys. They say it’s very exciting…”

“Don’t you even think about it,” Mandy told them, waving a spoon in their direction. “There’s enough wild-eyed girls out there already. You two are going to get married and live happily ever after.”

“You make it sound like a fairy tale,” Sari accused.

“Maybe, but I want more for you than being some man’s temporary bed partner while he climbs the ladder to success,” Mandy murmured. “Your mother wanted that, too. She went to church every Sunday. She believed that people have a purpose, that life has a purpose. She was an idealist.”

“Yes, well, she waited to get married and she found Daddy,” Sari said quietly. “So there goes your fairy-tale ending. I remember her more than Merrie does. She was unhappy. She tried not to let it show, but it did. Sometimes I found her crying when she thought nobody was looking. And she had bruises…”

“Don’t ever speak of that where Mr. Darwin or even Mr. Paul could hear you,” Mandy cautioned, looking frightened.

“I never would,” Sari assured her. She grimaced. “But it’s like living in prison,” she muttered.

“A prison with silk hangings and Persian carpets,” Mandy said mischievously.

“You know what she means, Mandy,” Merrie piped in as she finished the last of her cake. “We aren’t even allowed to date. One of my friends thinks our father is nuts.”

“Merrie!”

“It’s okay, he’s from Wyoming,” Merrie said, grinning. “He’s in private school up north somewhere, but he visits a cousin here during the summer. His name is Randall. He’s really nice.”

“Don’t you dare,” Mandy began.

“Oh, it’s not like that. We’re just friends.” She emphasized the word. “He goes through girls like some people go through candy. I’d never want somebody like that! But he’s very easy to talk to, and he listens to me. I like him a lot.”

“As long as you don’t tell him things you shouldn’t,” Mandy replied.

Merrie’s eyes fell. “I’d never do that.”

Sari put down her fork with a sigh. “Well, it was a very nice lunch, even if it didn’t come with scores of well-wishers and dancing.” She frowned. “Come to think of it, I don’t know how to dance. I’ve never been anywhere that I could learn.”

“We went to that Latin restaurant once, where they had the flamenco dancers,” Merrie said, tongue in cheek.

“Oh, sure, and I could have gotten up on a table and practiced the steps,” came the sardonic reply.

Suddenly a door slammed. Paul came into the dining room with his hands deep in his pockets. His thick, wavy black hair was damp and there were droplets on the shoulders of his suit coat. “Well, it’s raining,” he sighed. “At least it held off until after the graduation ceremony.”

“At least,” Sari replied. “There’s plenty left.” She indicated the remnants of the lovely meal. “And lots of cake.”

He chuckled. “I’m sorry.”

“About what?” Sari asked.

“You should have gone out with your friends for a real celebration,” he said, dropping into a chair. “With balloons and music and drinks…”

“Drinks?” Sari asked with raised eyebrows. “What are those?”

“I had balloons at my fifth birthday party, when Mama was still alive,” Merrie added.

“Music. Hmm,” Mandy said, thinking. “I went to a concert in the park last week. They had tubas and saxophones…”

Paul threw up his hands. “You people are hopeless!”

“We live in hopeless times,” Sari said. She stood up and adopted a pose. “But someday, people will put aside their differences and raise balloons in tribute to those who have given their all so that we can have drinks and tubas…”

The rest of them started laughing.

She chuckled and sat back down. “Well, it was a nice thought. Daddy doesn’t like us being around normal people, Paul,” she added. “He thinks we’ll be corrupted.”

“That would be a choice,” he replied. “I don’t think you get one if you live here.”

“Shh!” Sari said at once. “Don’t say that out loud or they’ll find you floating down some river in an oil drum!”

His eyes twinkled. “We found a guy like that once, back when I was a kid. Me and some other guys were goofing off near the river, in Jersey, and we saw this oil drum just floating, near the shore. One of the older boys was curious. He and a friend went and pried off the lid.” He made a horrible face. “We set new land speed records getting out of there! It was a body inside!”

“Did you get the police?” Merrie asked curiously.

He gave her a long look. “Honey, if we’d done that, we’d probably have ended up in matching oil drums ourselves! You don’t mess with the mob.”

“Mob? You mean, real mob…mobsters?” Merrie asked, her eyes as big as saucers.

“Yeah,” he replied, grinning. “I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Almost all of the kids I knew back then ended up in prison.”

“But not you,” Sari said, with more tenderness in her tone than she realized.

“Not me,” Paul agreed. He smiled. “How about a plate?” he asked Mandy. “I’ve fought traffic all the way from San Antonio and I’m starved!”

“You had the nice big breakfast that I made you this morning,” Mandy taunted.

“Yeah, but all of it got used up listening to that guy who spoke at Sari’s graduation ceremony. Who was he again?” he teased.

“That was one of the finer politicians this state has produced,” Sari informed him haughtily. “In fact, he’s your US senator.”

“In that case, may he return to Washington, DC, with best possible speed and stay there from now on!” he said. “Gosh, imagine having to listen to him drone on for hours in Congress!”

“It beats having him drone on at somebody’s graduation,” Merrie said under her breath. “Oh, sorry!” she told her sister, but she ruined her apologetic tone by grinning.

Sari laughed, too. “I think there’s some basic rule that people who speak at graduation ceremonies have to bore people to death.”

“It would seem so.”

“Who spoke at your graduation?” Sari asked Paul.

“The director of the FBI,” he replied without thinking. His fingers, on the fork he was holding, went white.

“That must have been an interesting speech,” Sari said. Not looking at Paul, she didn’t see the effect the words were having on him.

“I’ll bet he bored Paul out of his mind,” Merrie teased.

Paul snapped out of it. He glanced at her and laughed. “Well, not completely. He had a sense of humor, at least.”

“What did he…oh!”

Mandy turned over the cream pitcher as Sari was about to ask Paul something else about his graduation.

“I’m getting so clumsy in my old age! My poor fingers just won’t hold things anymore! Get us a rag, will you, darlin’?” she asked Sari.

“Of course.” She paused to hug the older woman. “And you’re not getting old!”

After Mandy mopped up the spill, the girls went to change out of their finery into casual clothes.

“Saved my bacon. Again. Thanks,” Paul said to Mandy when they were alone.

She sat down beside him. “Whatever it is, you haven’t really faced it, have you, dear?” she asked gently, laying a hand over his big one.

His lips compressed. “I came south,” he said. “I couldn’t stay where I was, doing the job I was doing. I wanted to get away, do something different, be around people I didn’t know.” He shrugged. “It seemed the best thing at the time, but I’m not sure it was. You don’t face problems by running away from them.”

“No,” she said softly. “You never do. They just come along for the ride.” She patted his hand again and got up. “But, that being said, there’s no need to go rushing back to deal with them, either,” she added with a smile. “We’ve gotten used to having you around.”

“I like it here,” he confessed, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t expect to. I mean, a south Texas ranch, cowboys all over the place, people with thick accents who wouldn’t know a dissertation from a dessert.” He glanced at her. “I got a surprise.”

She laughed. “A lot of those drawling people with accents have degrees, in all sorts of surprising subjects,” she translated. “And a slow voice doesn’t equate to a slow mind.”

He nodded. “The Grier boys changed my mind about a lot of things. You don’t expect to find somebody like Cash Grier working as a small-town police chief. Or a guy who worked with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, like his brother Garon, heading up a local FBI office.”

“Cash has been a constant surprise,” Mandy said. “None of us really expected him to settle down here. He was going around with Christabel Gaines before she married his friend Judd Dunn. Then, all of a sudden, he’s married to a former supermodel and he’s got two kids.”

He laughed. “I know what you mean.” He leaned over his coffee cup. “But the big surprise was finding Eb Scott here with a counterterrorism school. I knew him years ago. He worked as an independent contractor when I was overseas, in the Middle East.”

“In the military?”

He nodded. “Spec ops. Green Berets,” he added with twinkling eyes. “Eb saved my life. He went on to bigger and better things.”

“So did you.”

“Me? No, I’m just private security,” he said, pausing to sip coffee.

“Not what you were before, though,” Mandy said.

He glanced at her, frowning.

“My brother.” She averted her eyes. “He…pretty much stays in trouble. He lived in New Jersey for a long time, working for some…well, some people you probably knew in the old days. I mentioned your name. Not deliberately, just in passing.” She swallowed. “He knew about you.”

His face went hard. Very hard. He looked up at her with cold dark eyes.

“I never tell anything I know to anybody, Mr. Paul,” she said quietly. “And shame on you for thinking I would.”

He grimaced. “Sorry.”

“You don’t know me. Not really.” She sat back down beside him. “Our parents died when we were young. Grady took care of me. He worked odd jobs, did some questionable things, but he kept us together and put food on the table. When I graduated high school, I got a job working for Mr. Darwin, here. Grady figured I could take care of myself, so he went north, looking for better pay. He found it.” She drew in a breath. “I keep thinking I’ll hear one day that he’s been found in an oil drum,” she added with a wan smile. “I can’t stop him from doing what he pleases. The best I can hope for is to make sure Mr. Darwin doesn’t ever have a reason to turn him in to the authorities.”

He scowled. “Would he?”

“You know he would,” she replied quietly. Her eyes met his levelly. “It’s why I never tell anything I know. And you’d better make sure you do the same. You may not have people he can blackmail you with, but Mr. Darwin could plant evidence and have you put away. It wouldn’t be the first time,” she added in a whisper, her eyes looking all around.

“There’s no surveillance equipment in here,” he whispered back.

“Would you care to bet on it?” she returned.

He hesitated. Then he pulled out a small electronic device and turned it on. His eyes, when they met Mandy’s, were furious.

THREE

Paul followed the small device’s signature to a hidden microphone in a potted plant. He traced the signal into Darwin’s study, to a small recording device in a drawer. Holding his finger to his lips, he cautioned Mandy not to say anything. He pulled out the recorder, made an adjustment and put it back, careful to wipe his prints first.

He led her outside. “I wiped it,” he said quietly. “But make sure you don’t say anything in the dining room that you wouldn’t like to share with the world. And tell the girls.”

“Maybe you should sweep their bedrooms, too, just in case,” she said worriedly.

“Good God, it’s like living in a camp of some sort!” he exclaimed. “What the hell is he so afraid of?” he added. “What does he think you might say?”

Mandy’s green eyes were old and wise. “I can’t tell you. But I don’t want to see my brother go to federal prison, and I’d rather not see you there, either. Just pretend you know nothing and do your job.”

He grimaced. “Those poor girls,” he sighed. “They have no life at all. No social life. How long does he think he can keep them prisoner like this?”

“As long as he wants to,” she said. “He does have a point, in one respect. He’s one of the richest men in the world, and there have been kidnapping attempts before. You foiled one yourself. The girls don’t have any street sense, especially Merrie. They’d be sheep among wolves, literally, if they had the kind of freedom you’re advocating.”

“They’re young and pretty. Surely they’ll want families one day,” he said, and his eyes darkened as he said it.

“Sari wants a career right now,” she said evasively. “And Merrie’s just graduated high school. She doesn’t know what she wants to do just yet.”

“It’s not a normal life,” he replied.

“It wouldn’t be, under the best of circumstances. They’re worth millions. Mr. Darwin would have problems if they ever wanted to marry, depending on who they wanted to marry. He’d be wary of men who wanted the money instead of the girls.”

He knew that. But he wouldn’t permit himself to think about it. Isabel wanted a career. She wouldn’t be interested in a future with anyone just yet, anyway. Not yet. It was…a relief, although he wouldn’t let himself wonder why.

He found the other two surveillance cameras. One was at the back door, one at the front door and the only bug had been the one in the dining room. Paul took note of where they were.

* * *

Darwin flew home a few days later. He called Paul into his office and closed the door.

“I want to know who’s been in this office since I was away,” he said at once.

Paul raised both eyebrows. “Just me and the girls, when they had to use the encyclopedia—” he indicated volumes on a bookshelf “—or the computer.” He nodded toward the desktop computer. “Nobody else.”

Darwin glared at him. “Somebody wiped part of a surveillance log I was keeping.”

Paul frowned and managed to look completely innocent. “A surveillance log?”

Darwin realized his mistake at once and backtracked. Paul was head of security. He should have known about the cameras.

“I meant to tell you that I’d installed a new set of cameras,” he said, averting his eyes. “I’ve had a threat just recently, one I didn’t tell you about. I ordered the cameras installed and forgot to tell you. Sorry.”

“No harm done, sir, it’s your house and your equipment. But it helps if I know what you’re doing, so that I don’t duplicate efforts and cost you money.”

“Yes, of course.” Darwin hesitated. “I’m involved…with a woman,” he confessed, his back to Paul. “She works for the federal government. Just lately, there have been people following her.” He turned and caught the surprised expression on his security chief’s face. “The girls don’t know, and they’re not to know,” he added firmly. “It’s a long-standing relationship. I don’t want to remarry, but I’m a man. I have needs.” He shrugged, averting his eyes.

“That’s your personal business, sir,” Paul said respectfully.

Darwin cleared his throat and seemed to relax. “Yes, it is. However, I can’t rule out the possibility that we might have a threat here. I don’t want my daughters involved, but I want you to be aware of the threat.”

“What sort of threat is it, sir?”

Darwin looked briefly uncertain. He hesitated, running a hand over his balding head. “She has contact with some unsavory people, in the course of her job.”

Paul’s eyes narrowed. “Unsavory.”

“Yes. Her superiors don’t know. She’s doing some groundwork for a…regional director.”

Paul just watched him. “I still have contacts at the agency…”

“No!” Darwin lowered his voice. “No. I don’t want any federal involvement. She’s in enough danger as it is. You won’t mention this to anyone. But you’ll add on more security, especially in the house. More hidden cameras, microphones, whatever it takes.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get on it today,” Paul promised.

Darwin drew in a breath. “More security. Yes. Many more cameras. Put them everywhere!”

Paul was hesitant.

“Not in the bathrooms, obviously,” the older man said when he read the consternation on Paul’s features. He grimaced. “And not in the girls’ bedrooms. Or yours or mine or Mandy’s. Obviously, nothing going on there that will affect them.” He hesitated. “We can leave the ones at both front and back doors, although you can remove the one in the dining room. But get those cameras installed outside the house, everywhere. Today.”

Paul relaxed. He managed a faint smile. “Yes, sir. I’ll get to work.”

“Monitor the cell phones, too,” he added curtly. “The girls’ especially.”

That would be dead space, Paul thought, because the girls had no friends to call. But he didn’t say so. He just nodded.

Darwin hesitated. He drew in a breath and put a hand to his head. He swayed a little, but caught himself. “Funny, these dizzy spells,” he murmured, drawing in a breath. “Drives me out of my mind.” He turned to Paul, and seemed oddly disoriented. He wiped at his eyes. “Forget what I said about putting more cameras in the house. I don’t know why I wanted them in the house in the first place,” he said suddenly. “Nobody needs to know what goes on in here, anyway. Get rid of the bugs and the indoor cameras. There are only three cameras, actually—one at the front and back doors and in the dining room,” he added. “I had the other two put outside at the stables. In fact, we only need them outside, to monitor who comes and goes. No need to give up my privacy for an external threat,” he added, and Paul relaxed even more.

Darwin’s eyes narrowed. “Cameras can be hacked. I don’t want men staring at my daughters. Any men.”

“Of course not, sir.”

“They’ll make good marriages eventually, when I decide on their husbands,” he continued absently. “Not for years, though. They’re just children.”

Isabel was twenty-one, Merrie was eighteen. And Darwin still thought of them as children, Paul wondered.

“They won’t have the freedom their mother did,” he said to himself. “Tried to sell me out. Damned slut, running to another man with information…” He caught himself and glanced at Paul. “You didn’t hear that.”

“I only hear what you tell me to hear, sir, and I never repeat anything,” Paul said.

Darwin nodded. “I know that. It’s why you’ve lasted here so long. Never had a security chief before who could keep his mouth shut.”

Paul just nodded.

Darwin stared at him. “You don’t mention anything about me to any of those contacts you still have. Got that?”

“Why would I, sir?” Paul asked, frowning.

“Well, of course. No reason to, after all.” He checked his watch. “Have Danny fuel up the Learjet and do the walkaround. I have to be in Denver tonight for a meeting with some…contacts.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll get right on it.”

“Good man.”

Paul went to make the arrangements, giving a silent thanks for small blessings. He’d wondered how he’d ever manage to do his job with cameras watching every move he made. He wouldn’t admit that having Isabel come in and sit on his bed at night to chat was one of his few guilty pleasures. He’d have hated sacrificing that in the name of extra security.

Meanwhile, he wondered why Darwin Grayling was such a fanatic about his privacy. The man obviously had things he was trying to hide. Paul wondered if he was involved in anything illegal. But he didn’t pursue that question, even in his own mind.

* * *

“Do you think he might be paranoid?” Paul asked Mandy outside a few days later, when Darwin had jetted off to a European conference.

“I don’t think it, I know it,” Mandy replied in a hushed tone. She wrapped her arms around her ample figure. Despite her sweater, she was chilled. “He hasn’t ever been exactly right in the head,” she said. “But after the girls’ mother died…” She bit off the rest.

“You might as well tell me,” Paul said. “You know I don’t talk about anything I know.”

She glanced up at him in the semidarkness, because it was dusk. “She fell and hit her head, he said. But Dr. Coltrain demanded an autopsy, because he didn’t believe her injuries were consistent with a fall.”

“And…?” Paul was remembering with cold chills what Darwin had said about his wife selling him out to someone.

“And he was called out of town to consult in a case with a former patient,” she continued. “While he was gone, Mr. Darwin called in a favor and had the autopsy rushed through. Accidental death was what they put on the death certificate. By the time Dr. Coltrain got back, she was buried, and Mr. Darwin threatened legal action if the doctor tried to interfere further.” She shook her head. “Dr. Coltrain has a really nasty temper, but Mr. Darwin is so rich that he could…well, there were strange things that started happening around Dr. Coltrain’s house, around his little boy. He realized what could happen, and he stepped back.” She looked up at Paul. “Mr. Darwin has done some things that I’d rather die than tell you about. He holds my brother over me like a sword. He’ll find something to hold over you, too, Mr. Paul, if he can. He likes having people who work for him over a barrel.”

Paul smiled ruefully. “If there was anything in my past that could be used against me, it would have come out years ago, when I was…when I worked in another field.”

Her old face softened. “You’re wasted here,” she said gently. “I mean it. You’re smart. You could be anything you wanted to be. Hired private security is, well, it’s…”

“I keep you and the girls safe,” he interrupted with a grin. “Not to mention the racehorses. Imagine how the jockeys would mourn if one of the horses got an infected foot or something!”

She laughed, as she was meant to.

“He wanted cameras set up,” he added. “But he had me take out the one he’d put in the dining room, along with the bug he had in his office. I’ll tell the girls. I was afraid I’d have to watch every word I said. And the girls have been worried.” He sighed. “Merrie’s really afraid of him. Sari…not so much, but she doesn’t go against him.” He turned to her. “Why are they so afraid of him?”

Mandy wanted to tell him, but she was too afraid for her brother. “He got physical with them when they were younger,” she compromised. “He believed in that ‘spare the rod, spoil the child’ thing.”

He scowled. “He didn’t abuse them?”

“Not the way you’re thinking,” she said easily.

He let out a breath. “Thank God.”

“It would have been like living in jail, having cameras all over the house,” Mandy said quietly. “I didn’t even know where they were until you told me he’d only put one in the dining room and had his office bugged. We’d have had to watch every word we said.” She hesitated. “And you’d never have been able to let Sari come into your room anymore,” she added with an amused smile.

He chuckled. “Don’t tell her, but I’d have missed that. I enjoy our chats. She’s a sweet child.”

“It’s such a shame,” Mandy said. “Sari and Merrie are two of the sweetest kids I’ve ever known. I was hoping they’d meet someone, get married, have families. I should have realized that Mr. Darwin would fight against that to his last breath.”

“Surely he wants an heir from them, to carry on the line, to inherit what he has.”

She bit her lower lip, hard. “I asked him that, once. He said that he wasn’t sharing his fortune with anybody, and no men were going to trick his daughters into marriage so they could live like kings.”

Paul felt his face tauten. “What if they fell in love?”

“Fat chance,” she replied. “They aren’t allowed to go anywhere that they could meet men. Sari wasn’t even allowed to go to a graduation party. Neither was Merrie. He keeps them under lock and key. They’re only let out to go to school for the most part, although Sari has a little more freedom now. But whether you know it or not, they’re watched every second they’re away from here, even at school.”

“What?”

“I didn’t think you knew that,” she said, walking back toward the house. “He has a couple of men trail behind them when they’re not here. Supposedly it’s to make sure nobody tries to abduct them for ransom. But it’s really to make sure they don’t get involved with boys. Merrie tried to go on a date once…” She let that thought trail away. “It’s getting chilly out here!”

“Wait.” He moved between her and the door. “Merrie tried to go on a date…?”

She looked up at him with real fear. “I can’t say. You can’t ask. Please! You’ll cause problems that you can’t imagine. He’s not…normal.”

“Why do you stay?” he asked.

“Because I’m all they’ve got. It isn’t much, but sometimes I can head off trouble.”

He drew in a long breath. “I thought it was a peach of a job when I first got it. More and more, I think I made a huge mistake.”

“The girls don’t think so. They’re both very fond of you. So am I, but you know that.” She chuckled.

“I know that.” He smiled gently.

“Video cameras in the house,” she said, shaking her head. “I’d have been afraid to open my mouth.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t have been so bad,” he said facetiously. “There’s a community college with a theatrical department,” he teased. “We could have asked somebody to write us a script, and we’d have performed it at every meal. He’d have gotten bored watching it all the time.”

She burst out laughing. “Now, there’s a thought!”

“Send Isabel out, could you? I need to talk to her.” He grimaced. “Just in case he put a bug in that I didn’t find, it’s safer out here. I’ll sweep the house again later.”

“I’ll do it. Want Merrie, too?”

“Just Isabel,” he said, smiling.

“Okay.”

* * *

He paced between the light from the house and the distant fence and ranch gate that led to the stables. He was uneasy. He didn’t like being under surveillance, and he didn’t buy Darwin Grayling’s explanation of why it was necessary. He wondered if Darwin had learned about Sari’s visits to Paul’s room. He knew Mandy hadn’t sold him out, but what if there were other cameras and bugs that Paul didn’t know about? He was going to make a thorough search later.

The back door opened. Sari came out, wearing a long blue-checked dress with a white blouse under it. The garment covered her from neck to ankles, but it fit in just the right places to give Paul an uncomfortable ache. She had pert little breasts and a narrow waist that led down to softly curving full hips and long legs. Her reddish-gold hair was piled on top of her head, curling wildly down from a ponytail clip, and her blue, blue eyes twinkled at him in the pale light from the house.

“Mandy said you wanted to talk to me. Are we going to get bulletproof vests issued? Maybe a gun?” she teased.

He shrugged. “Beats me. I feel like some of those guys used to on a show called Candid Camera. That’s before your time, tidbit,” he added with a grin.

“It is not. I watch it on YouTube.”

He shook his head.

“Don’t knock it,” she chided. “All the best programming is on YouTube. I can watch shows from fifty years ago. I can travel all over the world in somebody’s backpack,” she added with a chuckle. “I was just touring the Incan ruins in Peru.”

“I’d love to see that,” he mused. “I never miss an archaeological special on TV.”

“Me, neither,” she agreed. “I used to think I’d get to see the sites in person one day, but Daddy says it’s too dangerous to let us travel outside the country.”

“It probably is,” he said noncommittally.

“So, what do you want to talk to me about?” she asked. She cocked her head. “Are you going to ask me to run away with you and live in sin somewhere in Kansas?”

He was disconcerted. “Why Kansas?”

“Well, it’s probably the last place on earth Daddy would think to look for us,” she sighed. She tilted her face up to his. “Sure you don’t want to run away with me? We could get jobs working in a convenience store and live on doughnuts and Slurpees.”

He burst out laughing. “Honest to God, Isabel…!”

“I like it when you laugh,” she observed, smiling. “You almost never do.”

He sobered. “It doesn’t really go with the job description,” he said. He studied her quietly. “Your father has had me update all the security systems. He had the dining room bugged and you were on camera wherever you went that was in sight of the doors, except to the head.”

“The who?”

He scowled. “The head. Sorry. The bathroom.”

“You said it was wired?” she asked worriedly.

He nodded. “I wiped the recordings.”

Sari was catching her breath. She’d been sitting on Paul’s bed…

“I wiped everything,” he repeated. “Just in case there were bugs in other places besides in the dining room. I couldn’t be sure.”

“Why was everything wired?” she wondered.

“I’m not sure. He gave me some pretty wild reasons. But the only security cameras left are the two at the front and back doors and the ones on the outside. So you can still come bouncing into my room and sit on my bed in your pajamas.” He grinned. “As long as I make doubly sure he hasn’t put any hidden cameras or bugs up there.”

“Oh, dear.” She glanced at him. “Imagine if Daddy saw that on YouTube,” she mused.

“Then imagine me lying in a dark alley with parts missing,” he returned.

“He wouldn’t dare,” she said simply. “I’d avenge you.”

“Your allowance is a little over a hundred dollars a month. I think guys in ninja suits cost a bit more than that,” he mused, his dark eyes twinkling.

“I’m saving up,” she promised.

He chuckled and started walking back toward the house, hands in his pockets. “He says there’s a threat. Something external, and to do with someone he knows.”

“That woman he sees,” Sari said. She looked up at Paul’s surprised expression. “Merrie and I know about her,” she added. “Her name is Betty Leeds. She came here once, driving a new Mercedes, all decked out in expensive clothes with a purse that cost more than my leather coat. She looked down her nose at me and Merrie, went into Daddy’s study with him and closed the door.”

He frowned. “She can afford all that on a government salary?”

She scowled. “I didn’t think about that. I don’t think the government pays salaried workers that much, and I overheard Daddy tell somebody that she worked in an office as an analyst or something.”

He let out a breath. “Best not advertise that news, tidbit.”

“I wouldn’t. Daddy has an unpredictable temper.” Her whole body went taut. “Neither of us wants to make him mad, ever.”

He turned to her in the shadow of the porch, out of range of the security cameras. “Why are you afraid of him, honey?” he asked softly, his voice unconsciously tender.

Sari’s heart jumped. She wasn’t used to endearments from anyone except Mandy. Paul never used them. She looked up at him with quiet, soft eyes, searching over his hard face. “He’s just volatile,” she hedged. “We never know how he’s going to react to anything we say. It’s almost like he’s two different people, especially when he has those dizzy spells.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Merrie and I learned early not to make him mad.”

“He wouldn’t really hurt you, would he?”

“Oh, of course not,” she lied, managing a smile. “It’s not like that. He just yells and stuff.”

“I see.”

“Where are the cameras?” she asked suddenly.

He pointed to one at the corner of the house that had the security light, and to another camera just over their heads, pointing away from the house.

“Do they have microphones?” she worried.

“They do.” He pulled a little device out of his pocket. “But that one—” he indicated the one overhead “—has had a slight malfunction.” He showed her the device and grinned.

She grinned back. “Devious.”

“Very. I’m going to turn it back on. Watch what you say.”

She nodded. He pointed the device at the camera and clicked it.

“I wonder what Mandy’s got in mind for supper?” he asked conversationally. “I’m starved.”

“Me, too. Thanks for showing me the new foal, Mr. Fiore,” she lied. She’d seen it much earlier, but it was for the sake of the recording, in case her father saw it.

“My pleasure, Miss Grayling,” he replied, and went to hold the door open for her.

* * *

Later, Paul was reading Herodotus when Isabel came through the door and jumped onto the bed with him. She was wearing a gown this time, a pink silk one with a matching peignoir. She was nicely covered, but the silk slithered over her firm, pretty little breasts and it dipped down so that just the tops of them showed. It was a modest gown. The problem was that little sliver of pretty, pale, freckled flesh. Paul had to drag his eyes away from it, especially when he saw quite suddenly two little peaks on either side of the bodice. She liked his eyes on her, and it was visible in a way she didn’t even seem to know.

The girls didn’t date. They had no knowledge of men, or even their own bodies. Isabel was very likely a virgin. It made him react unexpectedly, in a very masculine way. He leaned forward carefully so that his reaction was less noticeable in the folds of his black silk pajama bottoms.

“You’re reading that man again,” she noted, looking at the book in front of him on the bed. “Wouldn’t it be easier to read him in English?”

“You lose something in the translation,” he said easily, smiling.

“How did you learn Greek?”

He smiled. “From my grandmother. She was a firecracker. I never saw anything or anyone she was afraid of.” He shook his head. “She went after a mob boss once with a length of salami. Damn, she had spunk!”

“A mob boss? A real one?” Isabel asked, fascinated.

He nodded. “Most of our family worked for, shall we say, underworld elements. One of them was a mob boss with a real attitude problem. He came to a family gathering and insulted one of her grandsons. She took after him with a salami and damned near unmanned him with it. He actually apologized to her.” His eyes were far away and thoughtful. “After that, he sent her a present every Christmas. Shocked us all. He wasn’t the type, you see.”

She smiled. “I never knew my grandparents, on either side,” she recalled sadly. “Mama’s people originally came from Georgia. Her parents were pretty old when I was born and they died when I was a baby. Mama was worth millions. Her people were a founding family in Jacobs County. My father never talked about his people much. His father was very wealthy—that’s where Daddy’s money came from. He inherited after he married my mother. His mother died when he was a baby. He didn’t have brothers or sisters.”

“That’s sad, not to have family.”

“Do you have any?” she asked softly.

He averted his eyes. The question hurt, but she didn’t realize it. “No. Not anymore,” he said tautly. “Except for a cousin.”

He didn’t like remembering it. His grandmother had died years ago. He’d had a brother, but when he was in his teens, his sibling had died in a particularly horrible way, and not one he felt comfortable telling an innocent girl about. The others, well, he had a lot of guilt about the way they went, and the memories tore at his heart like talons.

“I’m sorry,” she said gently, touching his muscular arm.

He looked up, surprised at her empathy.

She shrugged. “You never talk about your past. I guess you have some memories that are pretty bad, huh?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Pretty bad.”

She drew her hand back. “I’ve never had the opportunity to make any real memories,” she said on a sigh. “I go to school and come home, do class work, eat, sleep, get up and do it all again, except in the summer.”

“I get up, work, eat, sleep, go to bed.” He chuckled. “I suppose there’s some sort of comfort in the routine. No great shocks. No big surprises.”

“It’s tedious, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly, surprising an odd look in his large brown eyes. “We don’t do much except go through the motions of living.”

He cocked his head. “You’re pretty clued in, for a sheltered little chick.”

“I listen,” she said simply. “I don’t have much experience of my own, but women talk. I overhear things I don’t really understand, but once in a while, a woman is nice enough to explain it to me without making it sound vulgar.”

Both thick eyebrows went up. “Now I’m intrigued.”

She cleared her throat. “It’s nothing I could talk about in mixed company,” she said, lowering her eyes.

“I see. It’s that sort of conversation, is it?” he teased.

She flushed. “Well, books and movies and television sort of hint at things, but you don’t really know, do you? It’s just secondhand.”

“So is hearsay evidence,” he mused.

“Now you sound like a policeman,” she accused.

His eyes narrowed. “And you’d know that how?”

“There’s this nice policeman who works for Chief Grier,” she said. “I have lunch in Barbara’s Cafe every Friday with Blake Kemp’s assistant. The policeman is usually having lunch there, too, with a couple of his friends. They sit next to us and we talk.” She laughed. “He’s really funny. I like him.”

He felt an unreasonable surge of jealousy. He fought it down and even managed a convincing smile. “Your age?”

“Oh, no, he’s closer to your age. At least, to what I think is your age,” she added, because Paul had never told her how old he was.

“Is he new here?”

She nodded. She leaned toward him. “There’s some gossip about him,” she said in a stealthy, mischievous tone.

“Is there? What is it?” he asked.

“You remember Kilraven, who was supposed to be working for the chief, but was really an undercover Fed?”

“I remember. He married Winnie Sinclair.”

She nodded. “Well, our policeman is apparently an undercover Fed, too, working on some mob-related criminal activity.”

Paul’s heart jumped. He had an inkling of what that might be, but he didn’t dare tell Isabel. He still had contacts inside—well, actually, on both sides of that issue—and he didn’t want to have to admit to them. He was still raw from the past, despite the years of distance.

“Know what it is?” he asked.

“No,” she returned. “He isn’t telling anybody about that. I heard all about it from Mr. Kemp’s paralegal, who’s friends with the chief’s secretary, Carlie Farwalker.”

He let out a breath. “Isabel, is there anybody you don’t know?”

“Well, Jacobsville is a very small town. And Comanche Wells, where we live, is even smaller. I’ve lived here all my life. I know everybody. Is it like that, where you come from?” she asked, curious. “I mean, did you come from a small town?”

He burst out laughing. “I came from Jersey,” he said. “Nothing small about New Jersey, kid.”

“But don’t you have neighborhoods there, where people live for a long time together?”

He thought back to his childhood, to the place he grew up. “I suppose we did. My grandmother had lived in the same house since she was married. She knew everybody in the neighborhood, and I mean everybody.”

“So it was like here?”

“Only if everybody here was Greek or Italian,” he said with a grin. “On my mother’s side, mostly Italian. My grandmother and her father were the only Greek blood in the family.”

“I guess you speak Italian, too,” she said softly.

“Italian, Greek and an odd little dialect of Farsi.”

“Farsi?” She frowned. “Our police chief speaks that. So does Wolf Patterson’s wife, Sara. In fact, he speaks it, too. They had some extraordinary arguments in Farsi before they married.” She grinned. “I heard about it from Bonnie, who works in the pharmacy in Jacobsville.”

“I’ll have to watch my back, so people don’t tell you girls anything about me,” he chided with twinkling brown eyes. But he wasn’t mentioning his time in Afghanistan in Special Forces.

“Nobody knows anything about you, Paul. You’re a mystery,” she said with a sigh.

The way she said his name made something inside him wake up. He didn’t want that.

“I don’t talk about my past. Ever,” he said absently.

“Oh? Were you, like, a hit man for the mob?” she teased with twinkling blue eyes.

His face tautened to steel. His eyes blazed for an instant, and he seemed made of stone.

“I was kidding!” she said at once, shocked at the reaction she’d provoked. “I’m sorry, really I am…!”

He forced the anguish out of his face. It wasn’t her fault. It was nothing to do with her. She’d simply made a joke, hitting a tender spot without even knowing it.

“No sweat,” he said, and forced a smile. “Hey, I’m Italian. We get too many mob jokes,” he added.

“Sorry,” she said again, her voice softening. “It was a dumb remark.”

“It’s okay.” He reached out and tweaked a long, curly strand of red-gold hair. It was the first time he’d really touched her. “I guess you get Irish jokes all the time, huh?”

“Irish?”

“You’re redheaded, kid,” he teased.

His hand in her hair was provoking some very unusual stirrings in her untried body, and she was trying to pretend she felt nothing. She wasn’t successful. Paul, with his greater experience, could see everything she felt. It flattered him, that she could find him attractive.

“Oh. Redheaded. Irish. I get it.” She laughed nervously. “No, it isn’t Irish. My father’s people were from Wales.”

“Wales!” He laughed. “I never knew a single person from Wales.”

“Me, neither,” she confessed. “I did try to learn a word or two of the language, but I think I sprained my tongue, so I never tried again.”

“Sprained your tongue.” He smiled and let his attention drift down her softly rounded face, over her lightly freckled straight nose, to the pretty bow-shaped mouth under it. His gaze lingered there for a long time. So long, in fact, that he heard her breathing change.

His eyes narrowed. His chest rose and fell quickly. It had been a long time since he’d felt this way; years, in fact, and he felt the stirring of his body with fascination and regret. But she was off-limits. Period. He didn’t dare touch her. Her father would string him up.

He let go of her hair with a grin. “Better get some sleep, kid. I’ve got an early appointment.”

“Okay.” She jumped up from the bed, and then hesitated beside it, frowning. “Paul, you’re sure about the cameras? That there aren’t any around here?” She looked around worriedly.

“I swept the whole house myself twice,” he assured her. “No cameras. No bugs. Nothing.”

“All right, then.” She hesitated. “I wouldn’t want to get you into trouble with my father. We’re just friends, but if he saw us together like this… I mean, he might get ideas.”

“No cameras, no bugs,” he repeated gently. “On my honor.”

She smiled at him. “Okay.”

“Go to bed.”

She sighed and turned toward the door. She paused at the doorway. “And I’m sorry again.”

“For what?”

She made a face. “Bringing back bad memories for you. Good night.”

She was gone before he could protest, in a whirl of pink froth.

He lay awake in the dark, memories haunting him. Memories of blood. So much blood. Blond hair, darkened with it, spread on the bare floor, and a smaller form…

He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. Don’t think, don’t remember, it’s gone, it’s over. He closed his eyes. Eventually, he slept.

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