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 States naval officer, I guess I have to believe him.”
Dan O’Hara! Of course! Commander Wade Stevens’s fellow lawyer at JAG and the best man at the recent wedding in Baronovia.
“Let him in, please.” She took a deep breath and tried to pull herself together. No way was she going to let Mike’s opinion of her make a difference in how she thought of herself. She was comfortable with herself and that was all that mattered. “He might turn out to be the only intelligent man around here I can talk to.”
Suddenly, the scene around her erupted in chaos as the general suddenly tried to wrestle his way out of custody. “I have diplomatic immunity, I tell you!” the distraught man shouted. “You cannot hold me against my will!”
“Unfortunately, the man is right,” Dan O’Hara muttered under his breath as he joined Charlie. “He doesn’t even have to make a statement if he doesn’t want to.” He paused to look at the numerous men in black and uniformed D.C. police milling around the room. “What kind of trouble did you manage to get yourself into this time?”
Charlie’s zero opinion of men immediately extended to O’Hara. What had happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?
“You too, Dan? What’s with you men? Why does it always have to be something I did?”
Seemingly unabashed, O’Hara grinned. “Maybe because I know how deeply you were involved the last time hell broke out around here?”
Charlie glared her frustration. “As I told Mike Wheeler, I was just doing my job back then. Just as I was trying to do it today. Can I help it if things don’t always go as planned?”
“If you say so.” Dan gazed around the foyer. “Say, who’s in charge around here, anyway?”
“Wheeler, but he’s busy right now,” Charlie answered with a frown as the general recovered his voice and began to rant and rave again. “Since you’re a lawyer, maybe you can do something with the general over there.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Dan laughed. “I’m a JAG lawyer, United States Navy, period. This is State Department business. I just dropped by to deliver a message from Wade and the duchess.”
“How is May doing?” Charlie thought back to the time when JAG Commander Wade Stevens and the Dowager Duchess of Lorrania, then a guest of the U.S. government, had met at a diplomatic function. And she remembered the fur that had flown between them before they realized they were meant for each other. If Stevens and his duchess had managed to find each other in spite of a similar, if not worse, mess than she found herself in now, then maybe there was some hope to get Mike to listen to reason.
“May asked me to tell you she’s deliriously happy. And that she and Wade expect to be back in D.C. in a couple of weeks.”
Charlie considered Dan for a long moment. The frantic activity surrounding her faded into the background as the past flashed through her mind. Wade Stevens and May Baron had had a rocky relationship until May had managed to change Wade for the better. Maybe that’s what it would take to turn a robot like Mike into a feeling man; a woman who was interested and determined enough to humanize him. And maybe even to save the man from himself. If ever there was a man who needed saving, she thought sourly, it was Mike Wheeler. “Really? So you’re saying JAG commanders can be tamed.”
Dan shrugged and grinned sheepishly. “Yeah, but you have to shoot them first to get their attention.”
“Really?” Charlie gazed over to where Mike was now briefing the new crew reporting for night duty. His all-business, take-charge attitude might be okay for them, but it wasn’t for her.
One thing she did know, Mike’s attitude about women left something to be desired. She wasn’t going to put up with it any longer. It was time to show Mike he was as human as the next man. And to find a way to show him that no matter what he thought about her methods of operation, there was nothing wrong with her. Even if her why-not attitude apparently drove him up a wall.
If getting a man shot was a requirement or prelude to taming him, she mused as she watched Mike limp back to her, at least she was halfway home.
She absentmindedly thanked Dan for delivering the message from the duchess. If he only knew, he’d also delivered another, more interesting message; a Secret Service agent could undoubtedly be tamed by the same means the duchess had used on her JAG lawyer. And Charlie felt she was just the woman to do it.
“O’Hara?” Mike held out his hand. “Haven’t seen you since the wedding. How you doing?”
“Better than you, from what I’ve heard.” Dan grinned as Charlie sniffed and left to speak to the paramedics.
Mike raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Come again?”
“I was thinking about how you and Charlie seldom saw eye-to-eye during the Baronovia caper. Doesn’t look as if much has changed since then,
