Loe raamatut: «Secret Service Dad»

Chapter One

Washington, D.C., April

It was said by some that Washington’s Blair House was jinxed.

Now that it looked as if a second State Department guest within six months had become the target of a disgruntled foreign nationalist, Secret Service agent Mike Wheeler was prepared to believe the rumor. At least this shooting, thank God, hadn’t happened on his watch.

For some reason, whenever Mike thought of Blair House, his thoughts turned to the Blair House concierge, Charlene Norris, dubbed Charlie by all who knew her. She was trouble, blond, blue-eyed trouble. If that wasn’t bad enough, she usually got him involved in whatever trouble she managed to get herself into.

His fears had been realized when he reported for duty that day. The foyer of the residence was teeming with activity. The air smelled of cordite. Cell phones were ringing. Sirens screamed outside, Secret Service agents, anyone with the credentials to get in the front door milled around the reception room where, to his dismay, it looked as if another attempted assassination had taken place.

His practiced eye took in a wounded man who lay sprawled, groaning on the marble entry floor clutching his bleeding shoulder. An agitated man dressed in a foreign military uniform stood handcuffed in the custody of two D.C. policemen. The cuffed man was protesting at the top of his lungs, but the police seemed to be ignoring their suspect. One D.C. lawman gingerly held a smoking gun by two fingers while a third was preparing to fit the gun into a plastic evidence bag.

Off to the side, six uniformed staff members stood gaping at the scene being played out in front of them. Mike didn’t blame them. He could hardly believe it himself.

He cut through the mob scene until he caught sight of Charlie Norris. She looked as if she was in a state of shock. There was blood on one of her wrists and on the skirt of her tailored beige suit. He was concerned at the sight, but not surprised. He’d had the sinking feeling that somehow she would be in the thick of any action, hadn’t he?

And not for the first time.

As if on cue, his leg started to ache. The pain reminded him of the night a disenchanted Baronovian nationalist had attempted to assassinate Prince Alexis of Baronovia and his daughter, the duchess Mary Louise, the night he’d been wounded in the line of duty.

In his book, trouble, Charlie and his aching leg were synonymous.

He wasn’t actually afraid of what she might do next. Almost half his size, he could have handled two of her. Besides, problem-solving was his job. What he was afraid of was a loose cannon, a description that custom-fit Charlie Norris to a T.

There was another concern, he thought uneasily as he made his way through the crowded room to where the shooting had taken place. He was too fascinated with Charlie for his own good. A fatal attraction if there ever was one, he thought unhappily.

Gazing at Charlie today, he realized that Charlie Norris, the coltish figure from the Baronovia caper, obviously was a magnet for trouble. Her hair was summer sunbeams, her eyes the color of clear blue summer skies. Used as a weapon, à la the famed Helen of Troy, her blue eyes could have sunk a thousand battleships. But instead of her usual professional, tailored appearance, tonight she looked distraught and disheveled.

Normally, Charlie had the most sinful and inviting smile he’d ever encountered on a woman. And, to his professional way of thinking, the darndest way of talking herself out of any problem she managed to get herself into. She wasn’t smiling now. After a glance around at the chaotic activity, he couldn’t blame her.

He bit back his frustration as he came up along her side. To his chagrin, his body reminded him he hadn’t been with a woman for a while; not since before the Baronovian shooting. Why in the hell he remembered this now, in a room full of people that resembled a scene out of a TV mystery comedy, beat the hell out of him. Maybe it was the excitement of the moment—he always seemed to feel high when danger threatened. If that weren’t so, he never would have joined the Secret Service nor would he have met Charlie.

Mike ground to a halt and turned his gaze on her. From the distressed expression on her face, he knew she had to have been present when all hell had broken loose.

“What?” she said before he could open his mouth. She glared at him from under narrowed eyebrows and crossed her arms in front of her as if to put some distance between them. She certainly didn’t look pleased to see him. Maybe it was difficult for her to read his opinion of the situation.

He might have been more surprised at her question, if he’d been paying closer attention. The truth was, he’d been so busy admiring the dimple on her left cheek he hadn’t been concentrating.

Wrong.

He knew better than most that the best defense, when you’ve painted yourself into a corner, was a good offense. After his experience with Charlie in Baronovia, he knew firsthand she was damn good at the offensive end of the game. To complicate matters, she made him feel guilty for not trusting her even when he had nothing to feel guilty about.

“Wheeler! Over here!” a loud voice cut through the noise and confusion.

Mike glanced over to where several Secret Service men and women were huddled in conference. His assistant gestured for him to come over. “In a minute,” he called, then turned back to Charlie. “What happened here?”

She glared at him, her blue eyes blazing. “You mean, what did I have to do with it, don’t you?”

“You’ve got it.” Damn, that fierce look cooled any sexual fantasies he might have entertained. Just as well. Another thing he’d learned the hard way was that it was never wise to fraternize with the people you worked with. It didn’t look as if she were interested in fraternizing, anyway. If looks could freeze, he would have been an icicle by now. He jammed his hands into his pockets and waited for the fur to fly.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing,” she said and gestured to the handcuffed swarthy man who by now had lost his voice and was glowering at her. “All I did was introduce General Negri here, to Mr. Oberhammer of the visiting United Nations’ contingent over there.” She gestured to a man who lay on the marble floor in the entryway. “At the general’s request, I might add.”

“That’s all that happened?”

“No,” she answered breathlessly. “That was only the beginning. The general pulled a gun. At first I thought it had to be joke.”

“A joke?” Mike glanced over at the gun. “That doesn’t look like a toy gun to me.”

She plastered her hands on her hips before he got any further. “How was I to know the man was going to start shooting?”

Mike glanced at the man who lay moaning on the marble floor. “Have you called 911?”

“Of course. That’s part of my job.”

Mike nodded curtly. From his previous experiences with Charlie, he had the feeling she wrote her job description as she went along. As for the wounded man, from the look of things, he would keep until the paramedics arrived. “Anyone else get hurt?”

“Well,” she went on, brushing her hand across her forehead, seemingly unaware her wrist was bleeding. “I guess you could say so.” She aimed a shaking finger at a ceramic bas relief sculpture over the mantel that depicted a trio of angels holding hands and dancing across a cloud-filled sky. A bullet hole was visible where one of the angel’s belly button would have been. “He took the other bullet.”

“Get real,” he snapped to keep himself from laughing. Where else but here would a plaster angel have taken a bullet in its belly button? On the other hand, it wasn’t all that had happened. The bullet had apparently grazed Charlie’s hand in passing. “This is serious.”

“Yes, I know,” she said in a shaking voice. “I couldn’t believe it myself. But it’s true. I tried to grab the gun when I realized things were getting serious.” She stopped to catch her breath. “Anyway, it’s a little late to get upset about it now, isn’t it?”

“You haven’t learned much since the last time you set fire to a powder keg, have you?” Mike growled. He pulled a fresh white handkerchief from his back pocket and wrapped it around her right wrist. Thank goodness she was shaken enough to let him do it.

“You could have checked the guy’s credentials before you made the introduction,” he went on, surprised at the tender feeling that came over him as he wrapped the makeshift bandage around her slender wrist. That was Charlie all right. A mixed bag of sensuality and danger.

“It’s my job to introduce guests to each other, Mr. Wheeler, not to interrogate or to search them,” she retorted. “Among other things, I am the official hostess here. It says so in the fine print of my contract.”

Mike gave up. If Charlie hadn’t learned by now how to run a tight ship, nothing he could say was going to change her.

The alternative was to keep a close eye on her. To see to it she stopped trusting anyone who came along with some innocent request or another. Especially if they wore the uniform of a foreign country.

Somehow the prospect of watching over Charlie didn’t seem to bother him as much as it might have—if only he’d had his head on straight. Hell, he’d be the first to admit that she drove him nuts at the same time she fascinated the hell out of him. Without her, his job as the Blair House Special-Agent-in-Charge would have been boring as hell.

Not that he was looking for excitement. At thirty-five, he was looking forward to a peaceful period in his life. At least until his son Jake reached puberty.

“Don’t leave the premises,” he said and turned away. “I may want to talk to you later.”

“That’s what you think,” she answered. She gestured to the splatter of blood on her beige skirt. “I’m going home to change as soon as I can get out of here. And as for you, Mr. Wheeler, I don’t care if I never lay eyes on you again.”

To her chagrin, Mike winked and went on his way.

She grimly watched him stride over to the group waiting for him. If ever a man had the ability to get under her skin, it was this take-charge, go-by-the-book, stuffy Mike Wheeler. A man who apparently had never forgiven her for passing Commander Wade Stevens’s address to Prince Alexis’s turncoat bodyguard months ago. How was she to have known the man had been out to kidnap the prince’s daughter, Mary Louise? Or that an attempted assassination of the prince would follow?

She would have really been annoyed with Mike Wheeler tonight, if, heaven help her, she weren’t so attracted to him.

His hair, cut in the approved military style, topped a fit body that had to be the result of daily trips to the Blair House gym. As if that weren’t enough to feed his ego, he was tall, dark and, except for the scar at the side of his chin, handsome. Handsome enough to interest any woman foolish enough to fall for a lawman.

As for the Secret Service, from what she had observed in the two years she’d been working as the Blair House concierge, the profession was not only dangerous and demanding, it took all of a man’s time and attention, and sometimes his life. With her late father as an example, she didn’t want any part of it.

Not that she knew much about Mike. If he had any kind of a home life, she wasn’t aware of it. He kept his private life, what there was of it, to himself.

Which somehow seemed to make him more of a challenge.

She shook the cobwebs out of her mind. She would do well to remember that she wasn’t prepared to fall in love with any man she’d kiss goodbye in the morning and suffer the uncertainty of not knowing if he would live to come back to her at night. She never wanted to suffer as her mother had after her policeman father had been killed attempting to foil a bank robbery.

She wasn’t going to let herself fall in love with a lawman. Not even if he managed to make her hormones snap to attention whenever she laid eyes on him.

No way.

What really irked the heck out of her was the realization that he acted as if she couldn’t be relied on.

“Sorry to bother you at a time like this, Miss Norris,” a voice broke into her dark thoughts. “There’s a man out front who says he wants to talk to you.”

Charlie swung around to face Henry Ochoa, the Blair House doorman. Too frustrated with her mixed emotions over Mike’s evident low opinion of her to be polite, she snapped, “Too bad. Right now, there isn’t a man alive I want to talk to.”

Startled, the doorman took a step backward and cleared his throat. “But Miss Norris,” he stammered. “He says he’s Commander Daniel O’Hara from JAG. Since he’s wearing the uniform of a United States naval officer, I guess I have to believe him.”

Dan O’Hara! Of course! Commander Wade Stevens’s fellow lawyer at JAG and the best man at the recent wedding in Baronovia.

“Let him in, please.” She took a deep breath and tried to pull herself together. No way was she going to let Mike’s opinion of her make a difference in how she thought of herself. She was comfortable with herself and that was all that mattered. “He might turn out to be the only intelligent man around here I can talk to.”

Suddenly, the scene around her erupted in chaos as the general suddenly tried to wrestle his way out of custody. “I have diplomatic immunity, I tell you!” the distraught man shouted. “You cannot hold me against my will!”

“Unfortunately, the man is right,” Dan O’Hara muttered under his breath as he joined Charlie. “He doesn’t even have to make a statement if he doesn’t want to.” He paused to look at the numerous men in black and uniformed D.C. police milling around the room. “What kind of trouble did you manage to get yourself into this time?”

Charlie’s zero opinion of men immediately extended to O’Hara. What had happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?

“You too, Dan? What’s with you men? Why does it always have to be something I did?”

Seemingly unabashed, O’Hara grinned. “Maybe because I know how deeply you were involved the last time hell broke out around here?”

Charlie glared her frustration. “As I told Mike Wheeler, I was just doing my job back then. Just as I was trying to do it today. Can I help it if things don’t always go as planned?”

“If you say so.” Dan gazed around the foyer. “Say, who’s in charge around here, anyway?”

“Wheeler, but he’s busy right now,” Charlie answered with a frown as the general recovered his voice and began to rant and rave again. “Since you’re a lawyer, maybe you can do something with the general over there.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Dan laughed. “I’m a JAG lawyer, United States Navy, period. This is State Department business. I just dropped by to deliver a message from Wade and the duchess.”

“How is May doing?” Charlie thought back to the time when JAG Commander Wade Stevens and the Dowager Duchess of Lorrania, then a guest of the U.S. government, had met at a diplomatic function. And she remembered the fur that had flown between them before they realized they were meant for each other. If Stevens and his duchess had managed to find each other in spite of a similar, if not worse, mess than she found herself in now, then maybe there was some hope to get Mike to listen to reason.

“May asked me to tell you she’s deliriously happy. And that she and Wade expect to be back in D.C. in a couple of weeks.”

Charlie considered Dan for a long moment. The frantic activity surrounding her faded into the background as the past flashed through her mind. Wade Stevens and May Baron had had a rocky relationship until May had managed to change Wade for the better. Maybe that’s what it would take to turn a robot like Mike into a feeling man; a woman who was interested and determined enough to humanize him. And maybe even to save the man from himself. If ever there was a man who needed saving, she thought sourly, it was Mike Wheeler. “Really? So you’re saying JAG commanders can be tamed.”

Dan shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, but you have to shoot them first to get their attention.”

“Really?” Charlie gazed over to where Mike was now briefing the new crew reporting for night duty. His all-business, take-charge attitude might be okay for them, but it wasn’t for her.

One thing she did know, Mike’s attitude about women left something to be desired. She wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. It was time to show Mike he was as human as the next man. And to find a way to show him that no matter what he thought about her methods of operation, there was nothing wrong with her. Even if her why-not attitude apparently drove him up a wall.

If getting a man shot was a requirement or prelude to taming him, she mused as she watched Mike limp back to her, at least she was halfway home.

She absentmindedly thanked Dan for delivering the message from the duchess. If he only knew, he’d also delivered another, more interesting message; a Secret Service agent could undoubtedly be tamed by the same means the duchess had used on her JAG lawyer. And Charlie felt she was just the woman to do it.

“O’Hara?” Mike held out his hand. “Haven’t seen you since the wedding. How you doing?”

“Better than you, from what I’ve heard.” Dan grinned as Charlie sniffed and left to speak to the paramedics.

Mike raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Come again?”

“I was thinking about how you and Charlie seldom saw eye-to-eye during the Baronovia caper. Doesn’t look as if much has changed since then, has it?”

“If you’re talking about my reaction to Charlie’s idea of a Frisbee contest in an unguarded park with the duchess’s safety at stake, you’ve got that right,” Mike said after a glance to make sure Charlie was out of hearing. “The lady has a knack for acting before thinking.”

Dan grinned. “From the way you look at her it hasn’t prevented you from falling for her.”

“You’ve got that right, too,” Mike agreed. “But I’ll be damned if I understand why when she attracts trouble the way a cat attracts fleas.”

Dan smothered a laugh and turned to leave. “If anyone can handle Charlie, I have a feeling you’re the man to do it.”

“Not if I can help it,” Mike muttered.

Charlie came back in time to hear him. “Did you have something else to say, Mr. Wheeler?”

Mike glanced at her. Mr. Wheeler? She was back to the best-offense-is-the-best-defense position that fried him. “No. Talk to you later.”

Charlie frowned when Mike walked away. The man was a puzzle, all right. But, first things first, she mused as she set her mind back to the business at hand. There was a wounded man waiting to be taken to the emergency hospital. There was also the shooter, whom the FBI was going to have to debrief. And, to her annoyance, there was Mike wanting to know more about the shooting incident after she’d already told him everything she knew.

Her first opportunity to do something about turning Mike into a more reasonable man would have to wait until Sunday. A day when she’d volunteered her place for a do-it-yourself Blair House picnic. Surely by then they would have a chance to talk to each other like two reasonable people. The only problem was that every time they got together, something major seemed to happen to Mike.

All she had to do was make sure Mike wouldn’t come to harm in the process of taming him, she thought with a guilty twinge of conscience as he limped away. What could possibly go wrong at a picnic?

Squaring her jaw, Charlie turned back to matters at hand. She wasn’t interested in winning Mike for herself, mind you, but showing Mike he was as human as the next person could be interesting. No matter how she looked at it, taming Mike Wheeler was going to be a job and a half.