dislike him just because he’s from California.”
“Sure I can.”
They made it into the wide hallway connecting the main terminal to Baggage Claim, which was packed as usual, and headed toward the down escalator. Kim leaned back against her brother as they rode down.
“Jax? Come on. Don’t be like that.” She’d known from the start that he’d hate the idea of anyone taking her as far away from the family as California. Not that she wasn’t a bit apprehensive about that part herself.
Her family meant a lot to her, her brother and his wife, two older sisters and their husbands, one absolutely adorable two-year-old niece, a baby nephew, the teenager her oldest sister and husband had adopted and two more teens they were foster-parenting at the moment.
Their family life was rich, full and happy, more so than she’d ever thought it could be after losing their beloved mother to cancer four years ago and losing their father, also a cop, when Kim was just two years old.
How could she ever walk away from them?
“That’s it. I don’t like him. You’ll just have to fall for a local guy,” her brother said, looking more worried than he had been about the ridiculous pirates who’d tried to board her ship and rob them.
“Serves you right,” she claimed. “All those years of you making it so difficult for me to date locally… You should have known there’d be consequences one day.”
Jax frowned at that. He was overprotective to a fault at times, but he thought, when he wasn’t really annoying her, she could understand why. It couldn’t have been easy, taking over as surrogate father to three little girls when he’d been all of eleven years old when their father died.
Still, Kim was twenty-four years old now, something he couldn’t quite grasp in moments like this. It was time for him to back off.
“Just don’t be a jerk to him when he shows up, all right?” Kim asked as they found the luggage carousel for her flight, still empty at the moment, and stood there to wait.
“I won’t be a jerk—”
“And don’t try to scare him.”
“If he’s tough enough to save you from pirates, he should for damned sure be able to handle one older brother with a gun,” Jax said.
“No threatening him. And no dragging him off into the woods and beating him up, like you did with Joe.” Her middle sister, Kathie’s, husband. They’d had a rocky start, especially with her brother.
“I never beat him up in the woods,” Jax insisted.
“Just threatened him there?”
“Yeah. I just threatened him there.”
“And beat him up at the bank,” Kim quipped.
Jax gave her an exasperated look. “We’ve all moved on from there. You should, too.”
“I just don’t want anything to go wrong when he shows up.”
Because she was fairly certain that he was it.
The one.
The guy she’d been waiting her whole life to find.
It had been a little crazy with him on the ship after the attack. The whole thing had been a classic whirlwind romance, granted, but still…
Beside her, her brother gave a heavy sigh.
Kim linked her arm with his. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly fall in love in a week?”
“No, I was going to let Kate do that.”
Older sister. Impossibly practical until she fell in love inside of six weeks herself. Would Kate think it was impossible to do in a week? Kim wasn’t sure.
“Hey, you didn’t even tell me his name,” her brother said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re not even going to tell us his name?”
“Why? So you can run him through the FBI’s computer?”
Her brother shrugged, like there was nothing unreasonable about him doing that to everyone she dated.
“Then no, I’m not going to tell you his name,” she said, just to annoy him even more.
“Looks sweet as can be, doesn’t she?” a tinny voice quipped through what looked like an ordinary, blue-tooth headset that agent Nick Cavanaugh wore, as he followed the woman through the Atlanta airport.
“Find out yet how the guy got through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick said, speaking into the mike of the headset.
It was a really nice break, everyone using those little wireless receivers to talk into their cell phones these days. No more needing to hide a mike and an earpiece discreetly on his body. He just had to look like a guy who was always on the phone.
Technology was absolutely grand.
“Come on, Nick. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how fine that woman looks. Eye candy of the sweetest variety. I mean, yum,” Harry said, his voice piped directly into Nick’s ear. “You’re not dead yet, are you?”
“Not yet,” Nick admitted, although his right shoulder was killing him from a nasty little mishap on the ship.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t even notice how she looks. Somebody said you were surveilling her in a bikini for hours on the ship. Man, I don’t know if my heart could have taken it.”
“What can I say? That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Nick said.
Because he could supposedly handle the sight of sweet little things like her in a bikini and still keep his mind on his job.
“So…how’d the guy with her get through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick asked again.
“Claimed he was a cop.”
“She’s got a local cop waiting to pick her up as she gets off the plane?” What had the woman done before she’d left town to go on her expensive vacation?
“Yeah, but you didn’t see the greeting the cop got as she got off the plane. He did not show up to arrest her.”
“Oh,” Nick said.
“Yeah. Give us a minute. We’re checking right now to see if he’s really a cop or not.”
“Okay,” Nick said and kept walking.
“So maybe she’s not as sweet and innocent as she looks, huh?” Harry said. “She’s got the guy on the cruise who was just a little vacation fling and her regular guy waiting for her at home?”
“Don’t know, Harry.”
It was certainly not what they hoped to find when they’d decided at the last minute to tail her as she’d left the ship.
She and the blond guy with a badge stopped dead in the middle of the busy corridor filled with travelers and their luggage, the move so abrupt that Nick had no choice but to keep walking. He’d go pick up a newspaper at the store fifteen feet down and to the right, wait for them to move on and then…
He slipped right past them and…
Ahhh.
It was a sound a man might make when he’d accidentally touched a hot stove. Like he’d been burned.
That’s how it felt. Burning.
He’d gotten a little too close.
And with her, it mattered.
He’d actually touched her, brushed past her right shoulder as she’d turned her hair at just the right moment. A wave of pretty, blond curls had teased their way past his nose, just