“How about a plate?” he asked Mandy. “I’ve fought traffic all the way from San Antonio and I’m starved!”
“You had the nice big breakfast that I made you this morning,” Mandy taunted.
“Yeah, but all of it got used up listening to that guy who spoke at Sari’s graduation ceremony. Who was he again?” he teased.
“That was one of the finer politicians this state has produced,” Sari informed him haughtily. “In fact, he’s your US senator.”
“In that case, may he return to Washington, DC, with best possible speed and stay there from now on!” he said. “Gosh, imagine having to listen to him drone on for hours in Congress!”
“It beats having him drone on at somebody’s graduation,” Merrie said under her breath. “Oh, sorry!” she told her sister, but she ruined her apologetic tone by grinning.
Sari laughed, too. “I think there’s some basic rule that people who speak at graduation ceremonies have to bore people to death.”
“It would seem so.”
“Who spoke at your graduation?” Sari asked Paul.
“The director of the FBI,” he replied without thinking. His fingers, on the fork he was holding, went white.
“That must have been an interesting speech,” Sari said. Not looking at Paul, she didn’t see the effect the words were having on him.
“I’ll bet he bored Paul out of his mind,” Merrie teased.
Paul snapped out of it. He glanced at her and laughed. “Well, not completely. He had a sense of humor, at least.”
“What did he…oh!”
Mandy turned over the cream pitcher as Sari was about to ask Paul something else about his graduation.
“I’m getting so clumsy in my old age! My poor fingers just won’t hold things anymore! Get us a rag, will you, darlin’?” she asked Sari.
“Of course.” She paused to hug the older woman. “And you’re not getting old!”
After Mandy mopped up the spill, the girls went to change out of their finery into casual clothes.
“Saved my bacon. Again. Thanks,” Paul said to Mandy when they were alone.
She sat down beside him. “Whatever it is, you haven’t really faced it, have you, dear?” she asked gently, laying a hand over his big one.
His lips compressed. “I came south,” he said. “I couldn’t stay where I was, doing the job I was doing. I wanted to get away, do something different, be around people I didn’t know.” He shrugged. “It seemed the best thing at the time, but I’m not sure it was. You don’t face problems by running away from them.”
“No,” she said softly. “You never do. They just come along for the ride.” She patted his hand again and got up. “But, that being said, there’s no need to go rushing back to deal with them, either,” she added with a smile. “We’ve gotten used to having you around.”
“I like it here,” he confessed, leaning back in his chair. “I didn’t expect to. I mean, a south Texas ranch, cowboys all over the place, people with thick accents who wouldn’t know a dissertation from a dessert.” He glanced at her. “I got a surprise.”
She laughed. “A lot of those drawling people with accents have degrees, in all sorts of surprising subjects,” she translated. “And a slow voice doesn’t equate to a slow mind.”
He nodded. “The Grier boys changed my mind about a lot of things. You don’t expect to find somebody like Cash Grier working as a small-town police chief. Or a guy who worked with the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, like his brother Garon, heading up a local FBI office.”
“Cash has been a constant surprise,” Mandy said. “None of us really expected him to settle down here. He was going around with Christabel Gaines before she married his friend Judd Dunn. Then, all of a sudden, he’s married to a former supermodel and he’s got two kids.”
He laughed. “I know what you mean.” He leaned over his coffee cup. “But the big surprise was finding Eb Scott here with a counterterrorism school. I knew him years ago. He worked as an independent contractor when I was overseas, in the Middle East.”
“In the military?”
He nodded. “Spec ops. Green Berets,” he added with twinkling eyes. “Eb saved my life. He went on to bigger and better things.”
“So did you.”
“Me? No, I’m just private security,” he said, pausing to sip coffee.
“Not what you were before, though,” Mandy said.
He glanced at her, frowning.
“My brother.” She averted her eyes. “He…pretty much stays in trouble. He lived in New Jersey for a long time, working for some…well, some people you probably knew in the old days. I mentioned your name. Not deliberately, just in passing.” She swallowed. “He knew about you.”
His face went hard. Very hard. He looked up at her with cold dark eyes.
“I never tell anything I know to anybody, Mr. Paul,” she said quietly. “And shame on you for thinking I would.”
He grimaced. “Sorry.”
“You don’t know me. Not really.” She sat back down beside him. “Our parents died when we were young. Grady took care of me. He worked odd jobs, did some questionable things, but he kept us together and put food on the table. When I graduated high school, I got a job working for Mr. Darwin, here. Grady figured I could take care of myself, so he went north, looking for better pay. He found it.” She drew in a breath. “I keep thinking I’ll hear one day that he’s been found in an oil drum,” she added with a wan smile. “I can’t stop him from doing what he pleases. The best I can hope for is to make sure Mr. Darwin doesn’t ever have a reason to turn him in to the authorities.”
He scowled. “Would he?”
“You know he would,” she replied quietly. Her eyes met his levelly. “It’s why I never tell anything I know. And you’d better make sure you do the same. You may not have people he can blackmail you with, but Mr. Darwin could plant evidence and have you put away. It wouldn’t be the first time,” she added in a whisper, her eyes looking all around.
“There’s no surveillance equipment in here,” he whispered back.
“Would you care to bet on it?” she returned.
He hesitated. Then he pulled out a small electronic device and turned it on. His eyes, when they met Mandy’s, were furious.
Paul followed the small device’s signature to a hidden microphone in a potted plant. He traced the signal into Darwin’s study, to a small recording device in a drawer. Holding his finger to his lips, he cautioned Mandy not to say anything. He pulled out the recorder, made an adjustment and put it back, careful to wipe his prints first.
He led her outside. “I wiped it,” he said quietly. “But make sure you don’t say anything in the dining room that you wouldn’t like to share with the world. And tell the girls.”
“Maybe you should sweep their bedrooms, too, just in case,” she said worriedly.
“Good God, it’s like living in a camp of some sort!” he exclaimed. “What the hell is he so afraid of?” he added. “What does he think you might say?”
Mandy’s green eyes were old and wise. “I can’t tell you. But I don’t want to see my brother go to federal prison, and I’d rather not see you there, either. Just pretend you know nothing and do your job.”
He