The Coltons: Nick, Clay & Jericho

As genuine as she claimed to be?

Something inside him hoped so.

Not very professional of you, Nicky.

He wasn’t supposed to be taking sides. His only interest in being here was to guarantee Senator Joe Colton’s safety as the latter continued to make his bid for the presidency. Everything else was supposed to be secondary.

But, Nick had to silently admit, that was just a wee bit hard to remember right now.

Earlier, before she’d put her precocious handful of a daughter to bed, Georgie had fed his appetite by whipping up some kind of a delicious concoction out of the vegetables she’d pulled from her garden. Vegetables that, by all rights, should have been withered and dried. She’d mentioned that a friend came by on occasion to weed and tend the garden. Still, it surprised him that somehow she’d managed to make something mouth-watering out of very little.

Almost as mouth-watering as she looked to him right then.

Again, he was reminded of the appetite that hadn’t been fed, hadn’t been satisfied.

And wasn’t going to be, Nick sternly told himself. At least, not now. Maybe when things took on a more definite shape and all the questions in his head were, once and for all, answered to his satisfaction, there would be time to explore this feeling. To explore this woman. But not now.

Damn it.

“I can turn the lights back up,” Georgie said, breaking into his train of thought as she turned around to face him. If she noticed the way he was looking at her, she gave no indication. “But Emmie wanted to pretend that we were still roughing it. This way, she could pretend we were camping out. Emmie really likes to camp out.”

“And you?” Nick asked, moving closer. “What do you like?”

The very breath stopped in Georgie’s throat as she looked up at him.

And then, all sorts of things ricocheted in her head.

Things that didn’t make sense.

Things that had to do with needs rather than the logical behavior she had been trying so hard to embrace for the last few hours.

“I think you’ve got a fair shot of guessing that one,” she told him softly.

Chapter 10

Nick was acutely aware that he was crossing a line. A line he had never ventured over before in his adult life.

His action was reminiscent of the rebellious youth he’d been rather than the man he had carefully and painstakingly evolved into. The man would have never given in to the moment, to the temptation shimmering before him.

No matter how much he wanted to.

But it was the rebellious teen, who hadn’t quite figured out how to harness himself, how to tame his impulses, who surfaced.

Nick cupped the sides of Georgie’s face in his hands and brought his mouth down to hers as if he had no choice in the matter. And it was that needy soul, the one who had never connected with anyone after his mother’s desertion, who silently cheered as sensations shot through him, causing him to deepen the kiss that was far from innocent.

My God, what’s going on?

The shell-shocked question echoed in Georgie’s brain before it showered down on her in shattered fragments. Before she embraced the wild feelings that had materialized out of nowhere. When Nick kissed her, she voluntarily fell headlong into it, losing herself. She could sooner stop breathing than pull back.

The ensuing rush was incredible.

It had been so long since she’d allowed a man to kiss her. The last few years, she’d lived her life almost exclusively in the world of men, but they were her friends, her mentors, her protectors. They looked out for her almost as if she were a beloved little sister. Once or twice, a new member had joined the circle and attempted to hit on her. But there was always someone to set the newcomer straight and he would obligingly back off.

As far as the men on the rodeo circuit were concerned, Georgie was family. Her boundaries were to be respected and not crossed.

And she had gone along, silently grateful for the protection, for being left alone on the complex romantic playing field.

She thought she was all right with that. She thought wrong.

This need that had sprung up from nowhere, exploding like a misstep taken in an active minefield, had to have had its origins somewhere, didn’t it?

The more Nick kissed her, the more she wanted to be kissed. The more she realized how much she’d missed being kissed, being treated like a desirable woman rather than just a mother, just a sister, just a worthy competitor. There was nothing wrong with any of that, but it didn’t begin to address the needs that had quietly been growing in the dark. Growing until they burst at the seams.

He should pull back.

He should get a grip and stop. Now, before he compounded the mistake.

But the feel of her soft body urgently pressing against his had set off all sorts of demands within him that were close to impossible to rein in.

He tried to talk himself out of it, using logic. It could all be just part of her plan to seduce him, to turn his head and make him oblivious to her guilt, to the con she wanted to put over on him.

God help him, he didn’t care.

He’d sort it all out later. Right now, something far more important was going on. And besides, deep in his gut, he felt she was innocent. That was supposed to count for something, wasn’t it? Gut feelings?

Or was he just trying to rationalize his behavior?

Breath short, pulse racing and adrenaline pumped up so high he thought he was about to plunge off the side of a cliff into a glass of water three hundred feet below, Nick still somehow managed to break contact and pull his head back.

Somehow managed to pull his lips away from hers. “Georgie—”

That’s all he said. That’s all he could say. Because she rose up on her toes, whispered a plea, “Don’t ruin this,” and sealed her mouth to his as she drove her fingers into his hair, anchoring herself to the sensation that thundered through her.

It was all he needed. The go-ahead signal. Had he been made of cardboard or metal, he could have called a stop to it. But he was flesh and blood and his flesh and blood called to hers.

As he tightened his arms around her, his mouth roamed Georgie’s face, her neck, the soft skin that peered out from where the first button of her blouse pulled against its hole.

As he kissed her, his mouth doing wild, wonderful things to her system she’d never experienced, Georgie felt his fingers freeing the buttons on her blouse.

And then her blouse was hanging open, exposing her lacy bra and showing off her tanned, firm skin to its best advantage.

His lips anointed her skin.

With unsteady hands, Georgie began to undress him, first pushing the damn black jacket off his shoulders, down his arms, then setting siege to his shirt. She yanked the edges out of his waistband, but as she began to free the buttons, she felt herself being picked up into the air.

Startled, she looked at Nick, a silent question in her eyes.

“Your daughter might wake up,” he told her, his voice husky with emotions that had yet to be spent.

Oh, God, Emmie. She’d forgotten about Emmie.

If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have been embarrassed that he was the one who thought of Emmie. After all, she was Emmie’s mother. But Georgie was grateful that he knew Emmie could come out of her room at any time, looking for her. Her heart swelled and an incredible wave of tenderness washed over her. That one simple act made her see him in a completely different light.

Again she sealed her mouth to his, kissing him long and hard. The only reason she broke contact was because he was depositing her on her bed.

And then he was helping her out of her jeans, pulling them down about her thighs and then her knees. His own knees felt almost weak as she raised her hips to help with the effort. Raised them so that they were closer to him.

Tossing the jeans aside on the floor, Nick reached for the soft, light blue bikini panties she still had on. Meanwhile, she had tangled her fingers in his belt, drawing it quickly through its loops. She didn’t even wait to have it hit the floor before she yanked on the zipper.

The button that fastened the trousers in place went flying. Momentarily distracted, Nick glanced to see where it had landed.

Georgie pulled his face back down to hers. “I can sew,” she told him just before she captured his mouth again.

She desperately wanted nothing to stop her. If she paused, if she thought, logic and her sense of self-preservation would get in the way and stop her.

And she didn’t want to stop.

She wanted to dash up to the highest pinnacle, to feel that rush through her veins just a moment before it was all over. She needed to feel that more than she could possibly ever put into words.

With a mighty tug, Georgie freed him of both his trousers and the underwear beneath them, bringing both down around his surprisingly muscular thighs and then off his torso completely. They fell into the shadows, along with the button.

“Learn that on the circuit?” he asked, trying to hide the desire that throbbed through his veins beneath a glimmer of humor.

“No,” she whispered, her breath lingering on his face, “but I could hog-tie you in a minute eight if you want a demonstration of what I did learn on the circuit.”

He framed her face with his hands, drawing the length of his naked body over hers. “Later.”

“Okay.”

It was the last thing she remembered saying before everything exploded within her. Before he made her feel beautiful. Before her skin went on fire as he branded her with his hands, his mouth, his tongue.

Georgie swallowed strangled cries as he made her climax and then continued, doing it again.

And again.

Until she thought she was just going to expire from exhaustion.

With her last ounce of available strength, Georgie wrapped her legs around Nick’s torso, stirring up temptation he couldn’t resist, couldn’t ignore or back away from.

Balancing his weight across his hands as if he were coming down from a powerful push-up, Nick plunged into her. A moment later, he was employing a rhythm that was older than time, and as new as the next second.

At the end, she would have cried out if his mouth hadn’t covered hers. She arched up as far as she could, trying to absorb every last fragment of sensation and hug it to her breast.

Then she realized that he had stopped moving.

When he rolled off her the next moment, she expected Nick to get up. To act as if all of this was no big deal. The way Jason had. Jason was her only frame of reference, the only other man she had slept with.

That Nick didn’t automatically get up surprised her. That he slipped his arm around her and drew her closer to him surprised her even more.

Almost as much as it surprised him.

He wanted to hang on to the sensation, to the exquisite moment, knowing that once it faded, there would be anger.

His own directed at himself.

Because he had slipped off the path he’d laid out for himself—slipped off big time. But just for a moment longer, he wanted to pretend that there were no consequences, that he had done nothing wrong. He’d simply enjoyed another human being.

He felt her turning her head toward him. Felt her studying him for a long, silent moment. And then she asked, “Did I just compromise you, or did you just compromise me?”

The question took him aback. So much so that he raised himself up on his elbow in order to look at down her. “What?”

Georgie blew out a long breath. “What just happened here?”

He grinned. The temptation to say that they’d just stood in the path of a twister was hard to resist. Instead, he teased her. “You are Emmie’s biological mother, right?”

Georgie frowned as she shook her head. “I’m not talking about the process. I know what happened here, but,” she looked up at him. “What happened here?”

She couldn’t word it any better than that. Because something had happened here. Something unsettling and overwhelming.

Nick shrugged, trying his best to regain ground, to appear nonchalant. But underneath, he was wondering the same thing. He did his best to define it. “I think we just had a moment.”

She glanced at her wristwatch. “It was a hell of a lot longer than just a moment. More like an hour,” she corrected.

He laughed then. And laughing beside her felt almost as good as making love with her.

It had been a long time since he’d laughed. Longer than the last time he’d allowed himself to make love to a woman.

His laugh was deep and rich, making her feel inherently good. Inherently happy.

“That’s a nice sound,” she told him, unconsciously curling her body into his. “You should laugh more often.”

He thought of the life he had been leading. There was satisfaction, but no humor. “Not much to laugh at in my line of work,” he responded.

“Your line of work,” she echoed thoughtfully. And then she smiled to herself at the irony. “You mean catching bad guys like me?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Again, his instincts told him she was innocent. But there was the evidence to consider. Her IP address and her computer were involved in this. Logically, that would mean that she was too. And she had hidden her last name from him. Because she was accustomed to using her stage name, or because it made her look guilty?

“Tell me about your father,” he finally said.

He felt her stiffen slightly against him, and then he saw her force herself to relax. “Is this how you conduct your second wave of interrogation? Naked?”

Nick shifted, pulling her toward him. His hand gently rested on the swell of her hip. He felt himself being aroused again. Something else out of the ordinary, he thought. Usually, when he got to this part, he’d be sated and that would be that.

Not this time.

“It does have its advantages.” Maybe it was the moment, or the aftermath of lovemaking, but he leveled with her. “My gut tells me you’re innocent—”

She didn’t bother suppressing the smile that rose to her lips. “Your ‘gut,’ or something else?”

“My gut,” he assured her. “But I need to be convinced a little more.” A wary expression came into her eyes. He could guess at what she was thinking. That he was coaxing her to make love with him again. “No, not like that. Answer my question. Tell me about your father.”

“Nothing to tell.” Rather than look at him, Georgie stared off into space, doing her best to divorce herself from her words. She’d convinced herself that it didn’t matter, that the years when she’d wanted her father were in her past. She’d gotten over that. But a part of her still hurt, still smarted from being abandoned along with her brothers and mother. And she would never forgive him for turning his back on her mother.

“He came into my mother’s life, turned her whole world upside down, gave her three babies and then left. He went back to his rich wife. I never knew him when I was growing up, although Clay said he came around for a little while.” She set her jaw hard as she continued. “Now he’s back, trying to make amends. Probably because his own kids can’t stand him from what I hear.” She told him with no little feeling, “I’ve got no use for him.”

This didn’t sound like the Joe Colton he knew. Joe Colton was an honorable man. He would have never had an affair, especially not one that extended over several years’ time. But to be thorough, he had to ask. “What’s your father’s first name?”

“Graham.” She knew where he was going with this. “Don’t worry, Secret Service Agent Sheffield, it’s not your precious Senator. Just somebody with the same last name.”

He watched her face. Unless she was one hell of an accomplished actress, he thought, she was telling the truth. “But you’re all related.”

“Maybe. But I don’t care,” she added truthfully. “I care about my immediate family. My daughter and my brothers.” Ryder might have taken a few wrong turns that had landed him in prison, but he was still her brother and she loved him. There were ties that went beyond logic. “I care about the men I ride the rodeo circuit with,” she told him. “And that’s it. Oh, and I care about who’s been impersonating me.” She could see that the addition surprised him. And then she said with feeling, “Because I’m going to strangle her.”

He laughed softly at first, then realized that there was no humor in her eyes. “You sound as if you mean that.”

“Of course I mean it.” As she spoke, her indignation at what the other woman had done grew like a flash fire. “She stole something precious from me.”

Her life savings. He could understand her anger. “The money—”

But Georgie waved her hand at that. The money represented security and was exceedingly important, but something was more important to her. “That’s secondary. She stole my good name. I don’t know about where you come from, Sheffield, but around here, your good name, your word, means something.”

A woman of integrity, he thought, nodding. But then he supposed he could expect nothing less of her, just from what he’d learned in the last twenty-four hours.

Georgie cleared her throat, feeling somewhat awkward. She was still naked, still lying beside a naked man and without her passion, which was spent, or her anger, which was slowly settling down, she felt uncomfortably vulnerable even though she couldn’t exactly explain why.

“Um, don’t you think you should get up and go to your bed in the guest room?”

“Right. Sure.” And then, giving in to impulse, Nick lightly brushed his lips against her bare shoulder. Something began to stir within him again. “In a minute—or so.”

Damn, there it went again, that blaze that he seemed to be able to ignite within her. She should be sated, for heaven’s sake, and yet, she wanted more. She wanted to take another wild ride before the night was over. What had come over her?

“Are you starting up again?” she asked, turning her body to his. And then she smiled before he could answer—because another part of his body had answered her question for him. The smile entered her eyes and seemed to simply glow everywhere. “I guess so.”

Damn but she was beautiful, he thought. “Anybody ever tell you you talk too much?”

She seemed to roll his question over in her mind, her smile widening as she did so, pulling him in. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

“I didn’t think so.” But something inside of him, as he brought his mouth down to hers again, whispered that he wanted to be the last. And telling Georgie she talked too much had nothing to do with it.

Chapter 11

In order to keep his word and satisfy Emmie, who popped up like toast the next morning to remind him of his promise to “make everything right for Mama,” Nick spent the first part of his morning at Georgie’s computer, tracking down all the charges incurred on her credit cards. Just to play it safe, armed with the user names and passwords Steve had sent him, Nick decided to go back over the last five months.

One by one, he secured the information, then printed it out for her. When he had the charges in a rather overwhelming stack, he gave the pages to her and left it up to Georgie to decipher, separating the piles into charges she had run up and the ones that could be attributed to the “Georgie” doppelganger.

Having lived up to his part of the bargain, Nick got down to his real work. He decided that it might be advantageous to find out as much as he could about the man who had fathered Georgie and her brothers, the mysterious and, from what he’d gathered, self-centered Graham Colton.

It took some digging at first, but once he had some key pieces of information to work with, the rest came more easily.

An hour after he’d gotten started, hopping from screen to screen and from site to site, he found himself staring at the information the winding trail had brought him to. And discovering something he would have rather not found out.

Because what he’d found out unearthed another battery of questions and, more importantly, doubts.

Away from Georgie and the attraction he experienced whenever he was within ten feet of her, Nick felt uncertainty taking root again.

Had he been played?

Or was there some outside chance that she actually didn’t know that her father, Graham Colton, was the Senator’s younger brother? After all, not even he had known that the Senator had a younger brother, much less what his name was.

But then, Graham Colton wasn’t his father. Wouldn’t Georgie have connected the dots? Or was politics something she blocked out, the way so many other people did? After all, it wasn’t as if Graham Colton had been a doting father. All the evidence he’d come across so far pointed to the fact that he’d been, probably still was, a womanizing, narcissistic, greedy scum. In Georgie’s place, he wouldn’t have wanted to have anything to do with the man either. But did not wanting contact mean ignorance of his family background?

He wasn’t sure.

With a sigh, Nick stretched out his legs beneath the table, debating his next move. What he’d just found out wasn’t something he could keep to himself.

But if he told Georgie, one of two things could happen. If she didn’t know, this would be a hell of a shock for her. And if she did know and had lied to him, he wasn’t certain how he’d deal with that particular scenario.

He supposed that he could hold off telling her. There was time enough to discover whether he’d made love with an innocent or a scheming witch. He’d just begun to entertain illusions, he didn’t want to have to risk losing them already.

There was one person he did have to tell. The one person who deserved to be apprised of anything he found out as soon as possible.

Nick shifted in his chair, sitting up straight again as he took his cell phone out of his pocket. He pressed the single button that would connect him to the Senator’s private cell.

Waiting, Nick counted off four rings before he heard the sound of a phone coming to life on the other end of the line. A dynamic, resonant voice said, “Hello?”

Even the man’s voice inspired him with confidence, Nick thought. “Senator Colton, this is Nick Sheffield.”

“Nick.” Pleasure flooded the Senator’s voice. “I was just wondering when I’d be hearing from you. I was beginning to get concerned that you decided to forget about the campaign and just settle in.” There was almost a wistful note in his tone. “Awfully pretty country down there.”

“If you like the rustic life,” Nick responded, not quite able to get himself to agree to the Senator’s assessment. He was just not the rural type. Nick was fairly certain that his voice gave him away on that count. “I’m calling because I found where the e-mails were coming from.”

The Senator immediately heard what wasn’t being said. “But not the person sending them?”

No doubt about it, Nick thought. The Senator was quick on the uptake. “Well, there seems to be some doubt about it,” he told the man. “The woman whose computer was used to send the e-mails was out of town during the period of time we’ve blocked off.”

“Is someone else in the family doing the sending, then?”

“I’m looking into that,” Nick told the man. Uncomfortable with what he was about to say, he shifted in his seat. “Senator, there’s something else.”

“Go on.”

There was no easy way to say this. Since the Senator didn’t talk about his brother, Nick assumed that there was bad blood between them. Or hard feelings. The Senator was a successful, powerful, well-liked man. Maybe his brother, who hadn’t seemed to have amounted to very much in his lifetime, was resentful of his success. “The woman’s last name’s Colton. Graham Colton’s her father.”

“It was Georgie’s computer that was being used to send the e-mails?” Joe asked, surprised.