Guardian in Disguise

Finally he pulled his cell phone out of its holster and punched a number he tried not to call too often. One he definitely never put on speed dial and always erased from the phone’s memory of recent calls.

“Ames here,” said a familiar voice.

“Max.”

“Oh, man, what’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure. I just got the inquisition from a reporter. Are you sure my background holds up?”

“Considering how many databases we had to modify, yeah. It had better.”

“A J.D. looks pretty funny hanging off a beat cop.”

“Not if that cop wants to be a detective someday. Or run for prosecutor. Or teach at a college. Take your pick.”

Max sighed and ran an impatient hand through his hair. “Okay.”

“Why? Did she say she was going to check into you?”

“No, but her eyes did.”

Ames surprised him with a laugh. “She must be pretty.”

“You could say that. Why?”

“You noticed her eyes. Okay, we’ll keep tabs on it. What’s her name?”

“Liza Enders.”

“Got it. What paper is she with?”

“None. She teaches at the college, too.”

“All right. I’ll blow the whistle if anything looks suspicious. In the meantime, I think one of our nerds can make sure she runs around the maypole a few times if she tries to crack your background.”

“Thanks, buddy.”

“That’s what I’m here for. Need anything else?”

“No, that was it.”

He put the phone away and resumed his contemplation of the ceiling. It wasn’t long, though, before he was seeing Liza Enders rather than the Texas water spot.

She sure was an attractive armful. He didn’t go for the skinny women who looked more like boys, and no one would mistake Liza Enders for a boy.

She might be a great reporter, but he was better at a far more dangerous game. He knew from long experience how to cover his butt. And there was entirely too much at stake to let a reporter blow it.

His life, for one thing. And the lives of other innocents, too. Not to mention if he let anyone close to him, they could get caught in the cross fire.

He had to find a way to keep her distant.

He closed his eyes. At least it was safe to fantasize about her. It would never be more than that, but he’d been living on fantasies for a long time.

One more surely wouldn’t hurt.

Growing hot and heavy, he imagined removing the clothes from Liza’s curvy body.

Nope, it couldn’t hurt.

He awoke in a cold sweat and sat bolt upright with his heart pounding. The room was dark except for a nervous strip of blinking red neon light that crept between the curtains.

For an instant he couldn’t remember where he was. For an instant he wondered if someone had entered the room while he slept.

Reaching out, he found the pistol on his bedside table and thumbed off the safety. Was someone in the room with him? He listened, but heard nothing except the whine of truck tires on the state highway outside.

At last he flipped on the bedside light. Empty. Shoving himself off the bed he checked the tiny bathroom. He was all alone, the door still locked.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, pistol still in hand, he waited for the adrenaline to wash away. Nightmares. He’d had a few of them in his time.

Dimly he remembered some of it. They’d found him. Yes, that was it. They’d found him. They surrounded him and threatened him and kept demanding his real name.

He hadn’t been able to remember it. And each time he failed, they hit him again. It may have been a dream, but his head and stomach felt as if those blows had been real.

And Liza. She’d been there, too, demanding his identity.

As if he had one anymore.

Crap. He thumbed the safety on again and put the pistol on the table. Now he felt cold from the sweat drenching. He needed a shower, but didn’t feel safe enough to take one. Not yet.

That damn reporter was going to be a problem. He had to get rid of her somehow.

This might look like a game to her, but for him it was life or death.

Chapter 2

By morning, Liza’s curiosity had only grown. Max McKenny had indeed graduated from the University of Michigan and Stetson College of Law, both with high honors. Beyond that, she hadn’t found a thing, even when she searched Michigan newspapers for his name, thinking he might have been on a case that had gotten some publicity.

But responding cops seldom made the news unless something spectacular came down. Unless a cop was involved in a shoot-out or something equally serious, only the Public Information Officer talked to the press, rarely mentioning the specific cops involved. Very often the names of the first responders never rose to the surface of awareness. So Max might just have had a dull career.

The lack of information wasn’t terribly surprising, except that there was no record at all of any Maxwell McKennys in Michigan. It wasn’t a common name, and that should have made her job easier. Instead, her search was giving her a blank wall.

The American Bar Association had proved opaque. If it had a public membership directory, it wasn’t available online. Checking state licensing boards, as she’d learned long ago, was a total wash if you didn’t get the name exactly right. Maxwell McKenny, if listed as Maxwell D. McKenny, would never show up in a search.

Ah, well.

She tried to force her attention back to the day’s work ahead and forget she’d awakened from a dream that morning about a gorgeous hunk of manhood who resembled Max. Not entirely, but close enough that she couldn’t fool her waking brain into thinking it had just been a generalized dream.

Maybe part of her problem was that it had been way too long since she’d had a boyfriend, something which had everything to do with her former career. There were just so many times you could break a date before a guy went looking elsewhere. Which pretty much meant she had to date other reporters who would understand her schedule, except most of the single men in her newsroom just hadn’t appealed to her. There had been one guy—but she cut that thought off with a scythe. She was not going there.

So maybe she was just focusing on Max because a hunk had walked into view. Maybe this was all some kind of female reaction and not her nose for news at all.

A Harley roared by her as she strode down the sidewalk toward campus, and even from the back she could see it was Max, helmet notwithstanding. Of course. He would have a Harley, big and black, a machine that throbbed with energy and a deep-throated roar. It fit.

Hadn’t she read somewhere that motorcycle cops had thrown fits in some state when officials had wanted to replace their Harleys with something less expensive? Apparently other motorcycles just didn’t sound as good.

Or something. That had been a long time ago, and she couldn’t even remember where she’d read it. Maybe Max had been a motorcycle cop. That would have made his life more boring than most, though handing out traffic tickets was one of the most dangerous jobs cops faced. Even so, most motorcycle cops never ran into any real trouble.

And almost none of them made the news.

She shook her head at herself, deciding she was probably making a mountain out of a molehill. It wasn’t as if her instincts were infallible. She could be very wrong about this.

Much to her amazement, the Harley stopped at the corner and pulled a U-turn, coming back to idle beside her. “Want a lift?” Max asked as he raised the smoky visor that concealed his face.

She was tempted to tell him no, that she enjoyed walking on such a lovely morning, and that would have been true. But equally true was the fact that she hadn’t been on a motorcycle since her college days, and she’d liked it back then. It was tempting.

Even more tempting was wrapping her arms around his waist and discovering if his stomach was as hard and flat as it had looked in that T-shirt. Having her legs extended around his.

Was she losing her mind? Common sense reared. “Thanks,” she said, “but no helmet.”

He flipped open a steel compartment on the side of the hog and pulled one out. “I always carry an extra.” Reaching out, he strapped it to her head, securing it beneath her chin. “You done this before?”

“A long, long time ago.” Part of her wanted to rebel at the way he was taking charge, but another, stronger part of her really wanted to ride behind him on that bike.

So he guided her onto the seat behind him, warning her about the exhaust pipes, and helped her place her feet properly.

“Lean with me,” he reminded her, and then she was sailing toward the school with her arms and legs wrapped around him, thinking how envious all those young girls were going to be when they saw this.

The thought startled her, it was so juvenile, and she laughed out loud at herself.

“It’s fun, isn’t it,” his muffled voice said, misunderstanding the source of her laughter. There was certainly no reason to tell him the truth.

Well, she could now testify that his stomach was hard and flat beneath the leather jacket, and the thighs she was pressed against were every bit as hard. Being wrapped around him this way was causing a deep throbbing in her center.

Oh, man, she had it bad. The bug had bitten. Knowing not one thing about him, really, she wanted to have sex with him. Shouldn’t she have outgrown that a long time ago?

All too soon he pulled them into a faculty parking slot, and seconds later the engine’s roar choked off.

“Wow,” she said. “I haven’t done that in so long.”

“Maybe one Saturday before the weather turns cold I’ll take her out on the mountain roads,” he said easily. “I’ll bet it’s beautiful up there.”

“Right now especially.”

He twisted, offering one arm to help her lever herself off the bike. She was honestly sorry when her feet hit firm ground again. Reluctantly, she reached up to unsnap the helmet.

“That was awesome,” she admitted as she handed the helmet back, then watched him stow it. “Thanks.”

“My pleasure.” He pulled his own helmet off and hesitated. “Maybe, if you want, you could take that mountain ride with me.”

It was her turn to hesitate. The ride sounded like incredible fun, but she still couldn’t escape that strange feeling about him. “I don’t know anything about you,” she said finally.

His polar-ice eyes narrowed a hair, then he surprised her by laughing. “Of course you don’t. We just met. Do you want my fingerprints and birth certificate first?”

All of a sudden she felt foolish for her suspicions. “No, of course not.”

He leaned toward her a little, his teeth still gleaming in a smile. “Getting to know each other takes time, Liza. Don’t you think?”

Then he hopped off the bike, waved and headed to his class.

She stood there feeling utterly flat-footed. How had he done that? He’d told her exactly not one thing more about himself yet had managed to make her feel foolish for even wondering.

Yet, she argued with herself, he was right. It took time to get to know someone personally. But she was still annoyed by the feeling that he was deflecting her.

Why should he? Surely the college wouldn’t have hired someone with a criminal record. They did background checks as well she knew. So why couldn’t she be satisfied with just knowing that he was another instructor like her? Exactly like her.

Because something about him seemed different? Because something didn’t feel quite right?

Sheesh. Shouldering her backpack, she started the short hike to her office. She hated questioning her own instincts, but maybe it was time to start. She was rusty, and even when she hadn’t been rusty she’d made an occasional mistake.

Well, she thought they were occasional mistakes only because she hadn’t come up with anything about the person who aroused her suspicions. That didn’t exactly mean those persons were okay.

When she reached her office, she tossed her bag on her desk and powered up her computer. She needed to check the presentation for her first class, a comparison between a TV news story and the actual facts of a legal case that showed how easily a reporter could create a false impression. It was important to her that her students understood exactly how the news could be bent before they got into the nitty-gritty of trying to write it.

Maybe she was getting a false impression now. Maybe Max was nobody at all but a former cop with a law degree who had decided to take a break by teaching at a community college. Maybe all her questions arose from the simple fact that he seemed out of place here.

It could all be as simple as that. As simple as her training driving her to look for the story behind the story, even if there wasn’t one. Man, no wonder guys didn’t much hang out with her. Not only had she worked weird hours, but dating her must have been like dating an inquisitor, now that she thought about it.

Few answers were good enough for her. She always wanted more information.

All of a sudden she remembered a boyfriend from five years ago who had erupted at her. “I can’t just say it’s a nice day,” he had snapped. “You always want to know exactly what kind of nice day it is. Did something good happen? What’s the temperature? Can I tell you the exact color blue of the sky?”

She winced at the memory, mostly because there was more than a kernel of truth to it.

She had defended herself by demanding to know what was wrong with curiosity. She still believed there was nothing wrong with it, but maybe she was just too impatient for the answers. She’d give Max some time, she decided. If she kept getting the feeling he was too much of a mystery, then she could start digging.

She wondered how long she’d be able to rein herself in.

She learned the answer not two minutes later when she realized she was researching active law licenses in the state of Michigan.

She had it bad.

Max strolled to his office, wondering if he’d done the right thing in stopping to pick up Liza and offering her a trip into the mountains.

Yes, he decided. One of the things he had learned quickly was not to act suspiciously, and one of the most suspicious things you could do was avoid someone who was asking questions about you.

The only way to seem aboveboard was to act as if you were. And while he was at it, maybe he could convince her that she really didn’t want to know him or know more about him. Given his job, he knew how to be obnoxiously overbearing, and with an independent woman like Liza, that might be just the ticket.

He tossed his helmet on the desk and brought his computer up. He had some idea how to teach the course he was about to begin. It hadn’t been that long since he’d taken such a course himself, and he knew that part of what students would want to hear were actual on-the-job experiences. He’d heard enough stories to tell them as if they were his own.

He’d even managed to rustle up his own course outline and enough handouts to get him rolling. He figured he could pull this off as well as any role he’d ever had to play. And unlike Liza Enders, his students weren’t going to be suspicious.

Nope, the teaching part would be a walk in the park compared to some of the stuff he’d had to do—like lie.

There were some folks who deserved to be lied to. And then there were the rest, who didn’t deserve it at all.

What was that old joke? The drug dealer is more honest than the average narc, because the narc lies about what he is.

The thought made him shift uncomfortably in his seat.

Keep your eye on the ball, he reminded himself. It was a familiar refrain in his life. He had to keep his eye on the ball here, an important ball. And that was definitely going to mean keeping an eye on Liza Enders.

There were worse jobs, he decided. But nothing that began with a lie could end well. In fact, lies usually just blew up on you.

And right now, he wondered if Liza Enders was going to wind up being a grenade.

Two days later, Liza sat in the back of her own classroom, listening as Sheriff Gage Dalton explained why cops used Public Information Officers to speak with the press. But her mind was elsewhere.

She’d learned that Max did indeed have an active law license in Michigan, but no address for a practice. Private addresses were confidential. Okay, he was licensed. That part of his CV was real. But she had learned absolutely not one more thing, and that bothered her.

Gage, a former DEA agent, a man with a limp and a face badly scarred from burns received from a car bomb that had killed his first family, looked comfortable in front of the class explaining matters.

“You’ve got to understand why we need to control information flow,” he said. “First off, ongoing investigations need to be protected. We can’t share information that might tip off a criminal to how much we know. We can’t share information that might implicate someone who is innocent. We can’t share anything we’re not a hundred percent certain of. So we have a spokesperson who knows exactly what we can and cannot say.”

She nodded to herself, understanding it only too well, although it had caused her a lot of frustration during her years on the crime beat.

He went into some detail about the Atlanta Olympics bombing and how he felt that had been mishandled. Pencils and pens were scrabbling quickly across notepaper, fingers were typing rapidly on laptops as the students listened, enthralled.

Finally Gage looked at her. “Do you have anything to add, Ms. Enders?”

She smiled and stood up. “Of course I do. It’s still my job as a reporter to get everything out of you and any other source I can find and report it. So, class, you could say we have an adversarial relationship here. There’s a fine line between respecting an investigation and buying public statements hook, line and sinker.”

Gage nodded agreement. “Sometimes the press can be really helpful to us. Other times they can cause problems.”

The two of them batted stories back and forth and answered students’ questions until the class ended. Gage remained until the last student left, then he turned to Liza.

“I haven’t told you yet, but it’s good to have you back in town.”

“I haven’t been back that long and you hardly knew me before I left.”

He winked. “But I’m sure you knew me.”

“Oh, everyone knew who you were.”

“Hell’s own archangel,” he said.

She almost gasped. “You heard that?”

“Everything gets around this town sooner or later. I can’t say I blame anyone for calling me that. I came out of nowhere with death in my eye, I suppose.”

“But no one thinks of you that way anymore,” she assured him.

“No, probably not anymore.”

She hesitated. “Say, Gage?”

“Yes?”

“Do you know Max McKenny?”

Cops were good, especially cops like Gage, who’d worked undercover, but she caught an instant of stillness before he responded. “Only that he asked me to talk to one of his classes, too.”

“Yeah? About what?”

“My undercover days and how you have to work to stay inside the law when you’re trying to get in with people who are constantly breaking it.”

“That’s a good topic,” she admitted. “You were DEA, right?”

He nodded. “And I had to get through it without ever doing drugs myself. It’s not easy, and it can cause a lot of suspicion. Why do you want to know about McKenny?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about him,” she said frankly. “Something doesn’t add up.”

“Such as?”

“I can’t exactly put my finger on it. He wants to take me up into the mountains on a ride sometime.”

Gage shook his head. “You reporters. I did his background check for the college, Liza. Is that good enough?”

She felt like squirming, wondering yet again if she was being unreasonable about all this. Maybe this was nothing but a major fail for her instincts. Or maybe her whole problem with Max was that she was nervous about the attraction she felt for him. Attraction had given her nothing but grief in her past.

“I guess it’s good enough,” she said finally to Gage.

“He’s clean?”

“They hired him, didn’t they?” Gage smiled that crooked smile of his and headed for the door. “Let me know if he does anything to justify your suspicion.”

Ouch, she said to herself as Gage disappeared.

She thought again about the complaint her ex-boyfriend had made. Was she really too inquisitive? Too suspicious? Maybe so, she admitted as she returned to her office. Max McKenny had passed a background check performed by the sheriff’s office. That should be enough for her. Absolutely enough.

His reasons for coming here to teach were purely personal and none of her business unless he made it hers. God, she needed to rein this in. Even Gage thought she was being a bit ridiculous, although he hadn’t come right out and said so.

She was walking head down, waging an internal war with herself as she crossed the quadrangle. A few dead leaves rustled as they blew by her, an early announcement of autumn, but she barely noticed them.

Okay, she was trained to want to know everything, but she wasn’t trained to question everyone who crossed her path. What had Max done to arouse her suspicion except seem out of place? And who was she to decide he was out of place?

Heck, she was out of place herself.

So a good-looking guy with a law enforcement background came all the way from Michigan to teach at an out-of-the-way junior college. Maybe it was the only job he could find, given that jobs were harder to find than ladybugs without spots. She ought to know that, since she’d spent months searching after she got her pink slip.

Maybe he really did just want a break from chasing speeders. He wouldn’t be the first cop who found the job not to his taste after a while.

And look at her. If her life had followed her plan, she’d be working at an even bigger daily paper now instead of teaching.

She sighed.

Okay, maybe all this was happening simply because she was frightened of being so attracted to him. Maybe she was doing the deflecting, finding reasons to try to stomp down that attraction. Any other woman with these feelings would be trying to draw Max’s attention, not trying to find something unsavory in his past.

Maybe years as a reporter had screwed up her thinking in some major way. It had certainly screwed up her life and her relationships with men.

Just as she was concluding that this was all about scars from old relationships and fears of garnering new ones, she saw the booted feet in front of her.

Too late to stop, she collided with Max McKenny’s hard body. At once he gripped her elbows and steadied her.

“Oops,” she said and looked up reluctantly. To her horror a blush heated her cheeks, as if he could read every thought in her head. Not to mention her lack of attention that had caused the collision.

“Sorry,” he said. “Are you all right? I wasn’t paying close enough attention.”

Another ouch. If her head had been up, she wouldn’t have been able to avoid seeing him approach. She would have fixated on it. But he hadn’t even noticed her.

“I’m fine,” she said in a muffled voice, embarrassment and annoyance both rising in her.

“One of my students called to me,” he offered pleasantly enough as he released her elbows. “Note to self, never turn head while walking forward.”

The heat began to leave her cheeks. “I could give myself the same note.”

“You were lost in thought. Your head was down. I should have kept that in mind.”

“I shouldn’t walk when I’m woolgathering,” she admitted, stepping back a little when all she wanted to do was step forward and press herself up against him. Her cheeks warmed again. “Sorry.”

“Hey, we teach at a college. Aren’t we supposed to be absentminded?”

That smile again, that devastating smile. It reached out and filled her with warmth, especially in her most secret places. God, she hoped he couldn’t smell her pheromones. She was glad when the breeze quickened, blowing any possibility away. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be that absentminded,” she replied.