LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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