The Guardian

“I’m not going to stay,” Dante said bluntly. He wouldn’t be less than honest with her.

“I know,” Sara whispered.

“I’m not going to change my life or who I am, not for you or anyone else.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

“We’re just two unattached adults looking for a little fun. That’s it.”

“If you say so.” She grabbed his belt with one hand and held on.

“Nothing is going to—”

Sara interrupted him with a laugh. “Dammit, Dante, why don’t you just shut up and kiss me?”

Dear Reader,

In many ways, it’s easier to write about a character who’s appeared in a couple of previous stories. You already know him and can avoid the sometimes lengthy process of discovering those wonderful and annoying traits that make him unique.

But I have discovered a flip side. Dante Mangino has been a favorite character of mine for years now. He’s made an appearance in several other stories that featured investigators from the Benning Agency. But after his secondary story line in One Major Distraction, I had a very difficult time finding a woman for him. Maybe he was still grieving for the love he lost, or maybe I simply couldn’t find a woman worthy of him. In any case, he was very, very stubborn. Still, I knew he deserved his happy ending, and I was determined to give it to him.

Eventually the story came together, and this is it. Dante had to rebuild his life, and rediscover joy. Along came Sara, the girl who had gotten away from a teenage Dante many years ago. I hope you enjoy their story.

Best,

Linda

The Guardian

Linda Winstead Jones

www.millsandboon.co.uk

LINDA WINSTEAD JONES

has written more than fifty romance books in several subgenres: historical, fairy tale, paranormal, and of course romantic suspense. She’s won the Colorado Romance Writers Award of Excellence twice, is a three time RITA® Award finalist and (writing as Linda Fallon) was winner of the 2004 RITA® Award for paranormal romance.

Linda lives in North Alabama with her husband of thirty-four years. She can be reached via www.eharlequin.com or her own Web site, www.lindawinsteadjones.com.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

Chapter 1

The doorbell chimed as Sara stepped into a tennis shoe, preparing for her usual evening walk along quiet streets that wound beneath oak trees older than her recently deceased grandfather’s grandfather. She muttered an annoyed, “Shoot,” and stumbled toward the door with one shoe on and untied and the other clutched in her hand. Opal, invaluable housekeeper, chef and occasional answerer of doorbells, had just left for the day. Didn’t that figure?

Sara opened the door, expecting to find a kid selling cookies or band candy, or a neighbor with a complaint or a request, or a Tillman resident with a problem that couldn’t wait until morning. From the day she’d agreed to run for office, she’d known being mayor of the small town she’d always called home—in her heart, at least—would be full-time, but she hadn’t known exactly how full. The fact that more than half the town felt they knew her well enough to drop in unannounced or call at two in the morning didn’t help matters any.

What she found on her front porch was none of the ordinary, boring people she’d expected. For a moment, she was speechless.

They just didn’t make men like this anymore, did they? Not in Tillman, not anywhere that she’d ever seen. The man on her front porch was the clichéd tall, dark and handsome, wearing a nicely fitted suit and expensive shoes and sporting a head of thick black hair that was conservatively cut but not buzzed to the scalp. One look at his face, and her stomach dropped out from under her. Her toes tingled. Whatever words she should’ve spoken got stuck in her throat. She should’ve been better prepared; she’d known she’d see him sooner or later.

Dante Mangino, the object of a long-ago summer romance she’d never been able to forget, shifted his coat jacket aside to reveal the badge attached to his belt. He obviously hadn’t recognized her yet, and with a combination of heartbreak and relief she wondered if he’d forgotten all about her. She’d been so worried about running into him down at city hall, she’d played the possibilities of their first encounter in her mind again and again—and he didn’t even remember her.

She shouldn’t be surprised. After all, they’d been seventeen last time they’d seen one another, a very long eighteen years ago, and while she’d experienced a real, intense love, at least for a while, she’d never fooled herself into thinking that what Dante had felt had been anything more than raging teenage hormones.

He’d changed, just as she had. He was older, bigger, less pretty and more manly. And he’d cut his hair. Sara tried to convince herself that if she hadn’t known Dante was in town, she might not recognize him.

Since he showed no hint of recollection, she decided to play the game that way. She gathered her composure and smiled politely. “You must be Sergeant Mangino.”

“That’s me,” he answered.

“How nice of you to stop by. I heard you were in town, helping out your cousin Chief Edwards during this unfortunate manpower shortage, and I was hoping we’d get a chance to meet.” He’d been in town for two weeks, and until now she’d managed to avoid him. Yes, she’d avoided him at the same time she’d fantasized about their first meeting after all these years. Did that mean she was emotionally twelve years old where he was concerned? How embarrassing. Perhaps it was just as well that they get this over with, once and for all.

Sara opened the door wider and invited him into the foyer, where Vance antiques that had been collected over many years indicated money and influence. Decent money and local influence, at least. She’d inherited everything here, and none of it really felt as if it was hers. She was a keeper. A guardian. “It’s nice of you to stop by to introduce yourself. I’m so grateful that you agreed to join us until we can rebuild the department. The chief and I both appreciate your time and sacrifice. This is a difficult time for our city, but we’ll soon recover and be all the better for it.”

Dante looked confused. His eyes narrowed slightly, his nose wrinkled, and she could see the bewilderment on his face. He had always been so easy to read. For her, at least. His eyes gave away so much. “You’re…”

“Mayor Vance.” Sara offered her hand, the one that didn’t continue to clutch a walking shoe. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I was just on my way out for a walk.” She sat in a foyer chair, which was upholstered in a striped fabric, where she slipped on her other shoe and then bent to tie them both. It was good to break eye contact for a moment; good to take the opportunity to take a deep, calming breath. Even after all these years, Dante made her nervous. She could swear that the very air in the house had changed, grown thicker and warmer the moment he’d entered.

As she stared at her shoelaces and pulled one more snugly into place, she said, “If you have any questions about your job here, or if you have any suggestions about the department, please feel free to stop by my office anytime.”

It was a dismissal, one anyone in their right mind should recognize, but he didn’t move. After a painfully long moment, he said, “I’m not here to introduce myself, Mayor Vance. I’m here about the theft.”

Sara took another long, deep breath, but it did nothing to calm her. Great. Not only had some pervert stolen her underwear, she now had to discuss the matter, in detail, with a man who made her nervous. With a drool-worthy guy who’d once had his hand up her blouse and had apparently forgotten. How unflattering. How humiliating. Again she said, “Come by my office in the morning and…”

“Did the crime take place at your office?”

“Of course not,” she responded.

“Then why would I want to interview you there?”

Interview. Of course. Dante had come to ask her about the bras and panties that had been stolen from the clothesline in her backyard. It made sense, she supposed, that he would want to question her here. She should’ve simply replaced the missing garments and moved on.

“It was no big deal,” she said. “Really. I’m sure it was nothing more than a practical joke played by bored kids. There are lots of middle-school-age kids in the neighborhood, and it’s just the sort of prank they might think was amusing, stealing the mayor’s…underthings.”

Dante didn’t agree with her and leave her in peace, as he should have. He didn’t take another look at her face and ask, “Don’t I know you?” The annoying man took a small notepad from his breast pocket and flipped it open. “Three bras and four pairs of panties,” he said without blushing or stammering, “valued at four hundred and twenty-five dollars.” He flipped the notebook closed with the same grace and ease with which he’d opened it. “That’s some fancy underwear, Mayor Vance.”

Her face grew hot. She’d been raised in a conservative household, and while she had grown up in an age where almost anything was acceptable and she did not exactly embrace the conservatism of her grandparents, she also didn’t feel comfortable discussing her underwear with just anyone. She hadn’t seen Dante in eighteen years and he had forgotten her, so he was in fact, not much better than a stranger. “It was good quality, not fancy,” she responded, proud of herself for not stuttering.

“I’m pretty sure I haven’t spent that much on underwear in my entire life.”

Sara blinked hard. Too much information. “Actually…” She stood, feeling uncomfortable sitting while Dante—what was he these days, anyway, six foot three?—towered over her. “There’s no reason to discuss this any further. I’ve decided to drop the matter.”

“Why?” he asked simply.

“It’s not worth the trouble, and I feel terrible that city time and expense has been wasted on such a trivial matter. I suppose I panicked a bit when I called the police after my housekeeper discovered the…the…”

“Underwear,” he replied when she faltered.

“Was gone,” she finished, annoyed to realize that he could have just as easily supplied the word theft.

“This incident is a nuisance, not worth wasting your valuable time.”

That got a very sexy half grin out of Dante. He was older, bigger, harder, but the grin had not changed. “The way this city pays its officers, at the present my time’s not all that valuable. Mayor Vance,” he added belatedly.

Again, he was out of bounds. “While I do appreciate your help, Sergeant Mangino, the city budget is not something you and I should be discussing,” she said primly, even though getting more money for the city’s employees was high on her wish list. The problem was, she couldn’t fabricate the money required out of thin air, and making budgetary changes was more complicated than she’d thought it would be. She’d been in office not much more than two months, and so far it was slow going. Not that she’d explain any of that to Dante Mangino.

Two things happened at once. Dante turned his head and she got a glimpse of a tattoo creeping out of his starched shirt collar. That was new. Tattoos were pretty much mainstream these days, but they weren’t exactly commonplace among Tillman’s city employees. To have one on his neck…

And the doorbell rang. She walked past Dante to answer, staying well out of his way, happy for the chance to walk away from him for a moment so she could regain her composure. Not much rattled her these days, and she needed to get over this silly reaction to a man who was nothing more than an old boyfriend. An old boyfriend who had forgotten her. As Sara reached for the doorknob, she hoped for the band candy or cookies she had expected when Dante had rung the doorbell.

She threw open the door, and at first she saw nothing. No neighbor, no child selling overpriced fundraiser treats she always felt obligated to buy. Then she glanced down and saw the package sitting on the welcome mat. The smallish—no more than eight inches square—package was pretty, wrapped in bright pink paper and accented with a large silver bow and a stripe of matching ribbon. She bent and picked up the box, wondering if a delivery had mistakenly been made to the wrong house. The package was very light, she noted, but was a little heavier than an empty box of this size should be. As she turned she glanced at the small card attached to the bow. No mistake. Her name—Mayor Sarabeth Louann Vance—was written there in a neat script.

“Your birthday?” Dante asked.

“No.” Sara pushed the front door closed with a gentle push of her hip, then she placed the box on an antique foyer table, carefully pushing back the flower arrangement there to make room for the unexpected gift.

“Who’s it from?” Dante asked sharply.

“I don’t know.” She carefully opened the dangling card, which bore her name. Inside was blank, and she told him so.

She reached for the bow, but suddenly a large, warm, strong hand clamped over her wrist, stilling her movements. Her heart seemed to catch in her chest, not because someone had left her an anonymous package, but because Dante Mangino had touched her.

“Not a good idea, Mayor,” Dante said in a lowered, very dangerous voice that sent a shiver down her spine. He lifted her hand away from the box and dropped it, then fetched a knife from his pocket and opened it with a flick of his thumb.

First he cut the ribbon, then he touched the blade to the end of the box where the paper gapped, barely moving the bright pink wrapping aside with the tip of steel.

“This isn’t necessary,” she said, her voice purposely tight and mayorlike. She was learning to use that tone when necessary. She used it now to push away the unexpected and unwanted physical reaction that had begun—no, that had spiraled out of control—when Dante had touched her.

“Are you sure?” he asked without turning to look at her. “Are you absolutely positive that this box was left by a well-meaning friend who dropped it on your doorstep, rang the bell and ran?”

“Of course I can’t be sure,” she responded.

“Then unbunch your panties and let me do this my way.”

Unbunch her panties? How unprofessional. How ungentlemanly! Unbunch her panties? That was the last straw. She should fire him, here and now. He was insolent and unprofessional and having much too much fun at her expense. Plus he had forgotten her, the most egregious sin of all. She tried to imagine looking Dante in the eye and telling him his services were no longer required. Somehow it didn’t turn out well, not even in her imagination. Better yet, she could call the chief as soon as Dante left her house and insist that the man be fired by someone else.

The problem was they needed this experienced man on the force until more qualified officers could be hired. Tillman needed Dante Mangino much more than he needed them. He was here because his cousin, the chief, had asked for a favor to help rebuild the department, which had been ravaged by a couple of retirements, three transfers to larger departments in the state and one heart attack.

Dante finally studied the attached card with the tip of his knife. His head rotated slowly and he pinned accusing eyes on her. “Sarabeth Louann Caldwell Vance.”

“Yes,” she said, trying very hard to remain calm. Caldwell has not on the card. At least he remembered her name. “My maiden name was Caldwell.” Her mouth went very dry. “Have we met?” The final word came out as a tinny squeak.

He snorted lightly beneath his breath. “You know damn well we have. Sorry, I didn’t immediately connect Mayor Sara Vance with the girl of many names, Sarabeth Louann Caldwell. You’ve changed.” He looked her up and down, openly appraising and seemingly approving. “Your hair’s lighter and you’ve put on twenty pounds, all of it in the right places.” He grinned, and though he was older, the smile was familiarly wicked and tempting. “The eyes haven’t changed at all. Neither has the mouth. As soon as you mentioned the city’s ‘unfortunate manpower shortage’ I knew it was you. Since you didn’t seem to remember me at all, I decided to let it go.” He looked her up and down. “You look good, Sarabeth, and I’m going to kill Jesse for not telling me exactly who the mayor is these days.”

Busted. Dante obviously knew she’d been pretending not to remember him. At least she could pretend not to be mortified. “Everyone just calls me Sara these days, and I do hope you won’t incapacitate my chief of police over a simple misunderstanding. I’m sure he doesn’t have a clue that you and I were once friends.” After all, they’d done their best to hide their short relationship from their friends and families and had done a good job until the very end. Sara had been the A student, good girl, daughter of a prominent local family and, yes, rich. Dante had been in town for the summer to stay with his aunt, uncle and cousins. He’d driven a motorcycle, worn his hair long, smoked too much and stayed out too late. They’d truly had nothing in common, except some perverted chemistry they never would’ve discovered if not for a crazy string of coincidences on one hot summer night.

“Oh, he has more than a clue,” Dante said as he returned his attention to the anonymous gift on the table.

Great. All this time and she’d had no idea that her chief of police knew about her teenage mistake. She’d made more than one, as most teenagers had, but Dante was the big mistake. Foolish of her to think no one outside a very small circle had known. Even more foolish of her to think it mattered now, after so many years.

One piece of tape at a time, the package was unwrapped with Dante’s little knife. Sara watched as he dissected the paper as if he were a surgeon and the hot-pink wrapping paper, his patient. No move was unsteady or unthinking. The work claimed his entire attention, and she was quite sure he had dismissed her entirely. She might as well have not been in the room at all.

Eventually, he revealed a square, white gift box. He listened to the box, hefted it with the tip of his knife, turned it this way and that, and eventually opened it with the same calculating blade he had used to remove the pink paper.

Fine, dark eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” he muttered as he looked down into the box.

Sara moved to stand beside him, since there was obviously no danger. She reached forward, but again Dante stopped her with that strong hand of his. “No touching,” he said. “There might be prints.”

Sara sighed. “Yes, I’m sure the state lab will be anxious to get right on that. Alert, alert,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Drop those murder cases and get right on this anonymous gift of…” she glanced into the box to spy a jumbled mixture of fine, brightly colored silk. Dante reached into the box with his knife and pulled out a demicup red silk bra adorned with a smattering of black lace. The bra dangled from the short, sharp blade.

“Your size?” he asked.

She glanced at the tag and felt her insides drop. “Yes. But seriously, we don’t have our own fingerprinting facilities, and by the time the state lab gets around to something like this, whatever crime has been committed will be well beyond the statute of limitations.”

“I’m not sending it to the state lab,” he said as he returned the bra to the box. “I work for a top-notch private firm, when I’m not doing one family member or another a favor. The Benning Agency has a more than competent facility and crew. They can handle a little fingerprinting.” He looked down at her. “The undergarments will all be ruined in the process.” His knife blade entered the box again, and he came out with an absurdly insubstantial pair of panties that matched the demibra. “So if you’d rather keep these…”

“No!” she responded hotly, stepping away from Dante and the box. “I’m not going to wear underwear that’s been left on my doorstep by a pervert who obviously has some kind of fetish.”

He returned the panties to the box and came up again with an emerald-green bra no more ample than the red one. “A fetish and very good taste.”

Dante dropped the green bra into the box. So far this was the most interesting crime he’d investigated since coming to the small town of Tillman, Alabama. Just last week he’d nabbed a thief who’d tried to make his getaway on a riding lawn mower. Even when the moron had realized he was being followed, he hadn’t stopped, not even to dump his pillowcase full of loot. There had been a nasty fight at the barbershop over a really bad haircut, and a tussle over a prime parking spot in front of the drug store.

And now this. For his newest assignment he’d be hunting down a creep or creeps who stole underwear and replaced it with sexier stuff. Not that he’d seen what had been stolen from her clothesline, but judging by what little he remembered of Sarabeth Caldwell—now Sara Vance—he suspected her drawers—of the furniture sort—were filled with sensible and sturdy underwear that held everything firmly in place. Personally, he liked a little jiggle. Lovely extra pounds aside, Sara looked as if she avoided jiggling at all cost.

It had been a real shock when she’d looked at him just so and pursed her lips and the past had come rushing back. In his mind Sarabeth—Sara—had remained seventeen, skinny and young and timid. To see her in this woman, to instantly have that part of his life come rushing back, had given him a jolt. Fortunately he was much better at hiding his emotions than he’d been at seventeen.

Jesse deserved an ass-whoopin’ for this one. When he’d handed over the slim file on this case, he could’ve warned his unsuspecting cousin that the mayor was the young, beautiful woman Dante had once made out with in a ’72 Camaro that had not afforded him nearly enough maneuvering room, as he remembered. He had heard that the mayor was a widow, and with a common name like Sara he had suspected she’d be an older woman, one who’d taken up local politics in retirement. No wonder the other investigators didn’t want this job. How could any red-blooded man look at Sara Vance and talk about her bras and panties and not get, well, a bit flustered?

Dante didn’t fluster easily, not even when he had to face down a pretty woman who stammered when she said underwear, who looked naturally sexy with her dark blond hair in a thick ponytail and her T-shirt stretched over nicely shaped breasts encased in what appeared to be, from his vantage point, a very sturdy bra, who had changeable and smart blue eyes that revealed everything. Surprise, annoyance, anger…even a woman’s reluctant interest in a man. He’d seen her interest, as well as her disapproval as her eyes had fallen on the curling end of the tattoo that crawled across his shoulder and partway up his neck.

Pretty or not, Sarabeth Louann Caldwell Vance—how many names did any one woman need, anyway?—was not the kind of woman he’d tangle with. This house and her demeanor screamed old money, her position in politics screamed old power. The set of her mouth and the glint in her eyes screamed, “Interested or not, I don’t fall easily, not anymore. If you think you’re going to feel me up again, you are sadly mistaken.” No, she wouldn’t fall, not into bed, not into relationships, short or long. Dante was definitely into easy, at least where women were concerned.

The thought sounded shallow and callous, even to him, but it was honest enough. He hadn’t fought for anything or anyone that wasn’t assigned by the Benning Agency for a very long time.

“I’m going for my walk, now,” Sara said, her voice almost prim as she dismissed him and the box. “If I don’t hurry, I won’t get home before dark.”