the hell of it was, she wasn’t even at her best. Even travel-rumpled and exhausted, she’d managed to take his breath away when she’d walked up to him in the airport. So much so, that he’d forgotten himself for a moment, had introduced himself simply as Sam Jones, instead of Special Agent Samuel Jones.
And there was a big difference between the two men. Sam Jones was the guy who spent his weekends in blue jeans and sweatshirts, hiking in the Cascades and kayaking on the Willamette, and coaching Little League for the Boys and Girls Club downtown. Sam Jones liked reading Raymond Chandler and watching sports on TV and tipping a few with his friends at Foley’s Bar and Grill in the blue-collar neighborhood where he’d grown up and still lived.
Special Agent Samuel Jones, on the other hand, was the man who put on nondescript suits Monday through Friday and investigated interstate crimes and helped put scumbags in cages, where they belonged. Agent Jones was focused, driven, no-nonsense and effective. He always concentrated on the job, and he got the job done right.
It was important that he keep Sam Jones and Special Agent Samuel Jones separate. And it was essential that he be the former when he was relaxing and the latter when he was working. That was the only way he could keep himself sane in the face of the viciousness and violence of some of the crimes he investigated.
And even if this case wasn’t especially violent, he still had to keep those two men separate. Because Samuel was suddenly feeling a lot like Sam, looking at the woman with him not as a special agent who also had a job to do, but as a beautiful, desirable woman he might want to get to know better. And he couldn’t allow himself to think about Agent Logan in any terms other than the professional. Not just because he didn’t care for her personally—and he was having a hell of a problem warming up to her professionally, too, truth be told—but because that just wasn’t the way he operated. Not as an agent. And not as a man. He and Logan had a job to do. Period. And they would do it. Period. And they would be cool and focused when they did it. Period. And then they’d go their separate ways and never see each other again.
Period.
“Wow, this place is unbelievable,” she said now as she turned to look at him, surprising him both because she’d just echoed his own initial thoughts about the place and because she was impressed by what he would have thought was an unremarkable environment to her.
She stood in the middle of the big living room, bathed in the warm golden glow of a lamp that had already been on when they’d entered. Pennington had told them that someone from the Bureau had been in earlier to prepare the house for their residence, supplying some basic groceries and turning on the heat and such. They’d obviously remembered lights, too, knowing it would be dark—or nearly so—by the time they arrived. The soft light brought out flecks of amber amid the red in Logan’s hair, and made her complexion seem almost radiant. He wondered if her eyes would be as luminous and was tempted to draw closer to her to find out.
And just what the hell was he doing, thinking words like warm and amber and radiant and luminous in relation to her? he berated himself. He and Logan were working, for God’s sake. That was the only word he needed to be thinking about right now.
“You think so?” he asked, feigning blandness. But he did allow himself to stride farther into the room, halting when only a couple of feet of space lay between them. Wow. In this light, her eyes really were kind of lumi—“I would have thought it was a lot like the place where you grew up,” he hurried to add. “I mean, the house you showed me as being your parents’ looked even bigger than this one.”
She seemed to give his comment some thought before replying, but then she nodded. “Yeah, our house was a little bigger, maybe, but my parents were more minimalist when it came to furnishings. I mean, our house didn’t have nearly this much color or this much…” She threw her arms open wide, and he tried not to notice how the gesture caused her breasts to strain against her white shirt enough that he could see the outline of her bra beneath, and how it looked sort of pink and lacy. “…stuff,” she concluded. “Everything in this house is just so…so extravagant. How did the Bureau find this place, anyway?”
Sam wondered that himself. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It might be a house the federal government owns that they keep for visiting dignitaries. Or they might have made arrangements with a homeowner who isn’t using it right now because they’re working overseas or taking an extended vacation. It might have even been confiscated for tax evasion. Ours is not to question why,” he told her.
“Yeah, and we never do, do we?” she asked.
And Sam wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected just a hint of sarcasm in the question. Well, my, my, my. Maybe Golden Girl Logan wasn’t such a perfect little agent, after all.
“Can we go over this thing one more time?” she asked. “I’m sorry. Usually once is enough for me, but I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours, and my brain is just having some trouble processing everything Pennington told me. We’re a just-married couple, right?” she began without even waiting for his okay.
“Right,” Sam told her. “We’re newlyweds. We met in the fall, then eloped to Vegas a month ago because we were so wildly in love. We just recently surprised your family with the news, and that’s why there was no talk of our marriage around town before now. At the time we married, we were living in the Washington, D.C., area, but I put my house up for sale and you listed your condo right after the wedding because we knew we’d be moving to Portland after we married. I’m bringing my business headquarters out here so we can be closer to your family—that’s my wedding present to you.”
“Well, aren’t you the generous spouse, relocating your entire business on your trophy wife’s behalf?” Logan asked with a smile. Strangely, she seemed to be teasing him when she did. Sam told himself he was just imagining it. It was not wishful thinking.
“Well, I am a wealthy steel baron, after all,” he told her. “I can afford to be generous. Besides, from what I hear, I just dote on my trophy wife and would do anything to indulge her.” And where the prospect of playing that role had made him feel like a complete sucker a few days ago, suddenly, for some reason, it didn’t seem nearly as distasteful now.
“So that’s how you made your reeking piles of filthy lucre,” she said, still smiling. Still seeming to be teasing him. And Sam still told himself he was only imagining it and not thinking wishfully. “You’re a steel baron.” She tilted her head to the side and studied him. “That’s going to make this role even more interesting to play, not to mention more challenging, since I’ve never really been a woman who went for the big-business-mogul type.”
No, what was interesting, never mind challenging, Sam thought, was how badly he wanted to ask her just what type she did go for. Especially since she came from a family full of big-business-mogul types and seemed to be the kind of woman who had been groomed to marry just such a man. Then again, maybe that was precisely why she didn’t go for them. Tamping down his curiosity, he kept his question to himself. That was none of his business. And it wouldn’t be in any way helpful for working the case.
In spite of his self-admonition, however—and much to his own horror—he heard himself ask her, “Are you saying you don’t think anyone will buy the idea of your being attracted to me, Logan?”
Her eyes widened at that, and her smile fell. She didn’t seem to be teasing at all now, when she said, “Of course not. My God, any woman would be—” But she cut herself off before finishing whatever she had intended to say, her cheeks burning bright pink at whatever had inspired her to say it.
And damned if Sam didn’t find himself wanting to move closer to her and demand
