Mr Right Next Door

Making nice, innocent women like her hate him.

Chapter Two

Nick’s bag showed up before hers, which meant he wouldn’t have to live out of his carry-on.

He could have managed, of course. He could have made it for weeks with nothing more than he could carry in a baggie if he had to. But life was more fun with all his nifty surveillance toys and a man couldn’t carry a loaded gun on a plane anymore without a ton of paperwork, which he hadn’t had time to produce in his rush to get on the flight. Fortunately, checked baggage was another story.

He grabbed his bag, shouldered his carry-on and tried not to wince at the added pressure to his wounded knee.

Harry must have been close enough to see his expression, because Harry started chuckling and said, “God, you’re old, Nick.”

Nick suggested several things Harry might do, all of which were probably illegal in this state, then got back to business.

“Tell me you have her, because if you do, I’m going to find my car.”

“You’d better because we spotted the brother’s patrol car parked illegally at the curb. You need to be ready to move, my friend. We’re trying to get another car in place in case you lose ’em.”

“I’m not going to lose a small-town cop who doesn’t even know I’m following him,” Nick protested.

“Yeah, yeah. Just trying to back you up, Nick. That’s all. That’s my job. To make your job easier.”

Nick swore softly then spotted a tiny, expensive-looking convertible that gave the appearance of being capable of flying, and produced his government ID for the young agent standing by the car.

“Here you are, sir,” the kid said, holding a briefing report, what little they’d been able to prepare by the time Nick landed.

“Thank you.” His bag went into the tiny trunk, the carry-on onto the passenger seat and then, with a kind of exaggerated care that irritated him greatly, Nick managed to fit himself into the driver’s seat without crushing his sore knee on the steering wheel or the dashboard, while Harry started laughing again.

“Son of a bitch,” Nick said. “You did this on purpose, didn’t you?”

“I just figured you’d be happy to sacrifice your own comfort, if necessary, for speed and maneuverability. Was I wrong? I mean, we could look for one of those cars outfitted for special-needs drivers, if we need to. Do you need one of those, Nick?”

“I’ll put this sore knee of mine in your gut, Harry, if you need to know how well it still works,” he said, though it might have been a pure bluff.

Honestly, he wasn’t sure he could manage it. Hours on a plane had left his knee stiff and sore beyond reason. He could just imagine Harry’s glee if he called room service that night and asked if they could provide a heating pad for him.

If his pretty blonde gave him any time to relax.

She could have a string of men waiting for her. Weyzinski could already be here, waiting for her. She could be up to all sorts of things that didn’t involve teaching little children how to finger paint.

Honestly, how innocent could a woman who looked like that in a bikini possibly be?

Nick started the car and moved the seat all the way back to accommodate his length. He adjusted his mirrors, spotted the small-town cop car, just where Harry said it would be, then checked the car’s satellite navigation system, preprogrammed for the destination of Magnolia Falls.

It shouldn’t be hard to follow the blonde and her brother. After choosing whether to take the freeway loop around Atlanta or plow straight through downtown, it looked like there was only one real choice of roads that went from the other side of the metro area to Magnolia Falls.

Nick didn’t think he’d ever been to a town this small.

“Okay, here they come,” Harry told him.

Nick didn’t turn his head, following them out of the corner of his eyes. The pretty blonde was laughing, looking as relaxed and happy as could be. Her brother looked like he could cheerfully spit nails.

Nick wondered why.

Of course, if he had a little sister who looked like her, Nick could imagine her giving him headaches. And he’d be none too happy to have her go off on vacation and get attacked by pirates.

The brother’s expression could be nothing but that.

And it could be so much more.

She could be a woman constantly getting into trouble of one sort or another. Man trouble. The kind that came from making really bad decisions and not thinking things through. Or from just being young and impulsive.

Innocent.

She could be completely innocent, a victim in all of this.

Nick frowned.

He’d watched her on the ship in a way that had nothing to do with his job, simply hadn’t been able to help himself.

The older and more jaded he got, the more he needed to believe that there were still people like her in this world or, at least, people like she appeared to be. Young, innocent, carefree. Happy. Sexy in a sweetly inviting way, nothing cold or calculating in the least about her.

Not that he could imagine her giving him the time of day or him accepting such an offer.

She was not a creature of his world and he wasn’t a man of hers. And he’d bet she wasn’t the kind of woman to have a quick, thoroughly satisfying fling with a man like him, despite what he’d seen on that ship.

She and her brother got into the police cruiser and pulled out into traffic. Nick followed them, all the while telling himself to treat her as he would any other woman he met in the course of an investigation.

No, to treat her better than that.

To try to stay the hell away from her and not break her heart too badly when he showed her how foolish it was to fall in love with a man she knew nothing about.

Atlanta traffic turned out to be brutal and the cop drove like a bat out of hell. If Nick didn’t know better, he would have sworn half the drivers on the freeway had gone through the same defensive-driving training he had.

No, more like offensive-driving training. He’d had that, too, but maybe not as much as the other drivers on the road had.

Damn.

He’d been cut off ruthlessly more times than he could count and when traffic got really annoying, the brother wasn’t shy about applying his siren to get out of it, a luxury Nick didn’t have.

If Harry had seen him, he’d have howled.

Honestly, the day he couldn’t manage to follow a small-town cop successfully was the day he gave up government work and started fishing for a living or contemplating his navel or some other ridiculously worthless form of life.

They made it to Magnolia Falls in an hour and twenty-seven mind-boggling minutes on the road. Truth was, Nick wasn’t absolutely sure the brother hadn’t picked up on the fact that he was being tailed.

It was sad really, the depths to which Nick’s life had sunk.

His knee hurt. He hadn’t slept for more than a few hours in two days, and he was as grumpy as… well, as an old man, much as it pained him to admit it.