Is there such a thing as a wolf/sheep hybrid? Or only wolves in sheep clothing? Or more interesting still . . . is it possible for a sheep to doff the fleece for a fur coat? Even temporarily? I guess what I’m really asking is, can a sheep get his inner wolf on? And, while he’s at it, get me off?

Chapter 11

Riley flipped his bacon and scraped at the scramble of eggs frying on the massive stainless-steel griddle. Any other time he’d have been drooling over what amounted to a three-foot-square frying pan.

But it wasn’t any other time. It was morning. The morning after, to be more specific. The morning after he almost blew the best chance Parrish Securities had to climb permanently out of debt and start to become the successful company he’d been telling his father it always should have been.

Not that Finn seemed overly concerned one way or the other. Riley sighed and scraped the eggs in the other direction. At what point, he wondered, had everything stopped making sense?

He’d always thought it was the moment his knee had connected with John Rockingham’s helmet, ending everything his life had been focused on since he first picked up a football at age seven. Then he’d come home, teamed up with his dad, and convinced himself that maybe things happened for a reason. That maybe the two of them would find a deeper satisfaction building something together, both professionally and personally. But, while he knew his dad loved him, Finn didn’t seem as interested in building something as he did in getting a little something-something.

“And, apparently, you’re not much better,” he muttered disgustedly, flipping the bacon, then swearing when hot grease spattered his arm. He’d had no business going to her room last night. His rationale had been that she’d be more open to listening to him at the end of what had been a long day. Tired, exhausted from party planning, anxious over the note, over what had happened at the station. He’d somehow convinced himself that it was best to deal with it, with her, right then, straight out.

Then she’d opened the door. And what in the hell was it about that faded old jersey and those damn ridiculous bunny slippers anyway? He might have had no earthly clue, but his body sure had. In fact, it had stood right up and saluted the whole ensemble. Of course, it had probably been at half mast before he’d left his room. A good indicator he’d had no business going anywhere near her, no matter the rationale.

“Something smells good.”

It took willpower not to look at her. It took even more not to swear when the grease spattered him again. “There’s enough for two, if you’d like.”

God, he sounded like Sheepman Riley even when he didn’t mean to. Maybe it was a defense mechanism.

Then she moved in behind him and his entire body tightened. And he realized that not even the best offense in the NFL could get him out of this one unscathed.

“Looks that way,” she said, observing the mound of eggs and raft of bacon sizzling in front of him.

So maybe he had gotten a little too enthusiastic about the griddle. Better he was too carried away with eggs and bacon than with her.

“That is, unless you’ve got a football team coming over to help you out,” she added dryly.

Football team. There was an opening if ever there was one.

Then she darted a hand past him and snatched up a piece of bacon. He reached instinctively to block her. “Watch it. That’s hot!”

She just smiled and crunched down on her pilfered slice—hard enough and with just enough gleam in her eyes to make him think about switching to defense.

Green eyes still glittering, she added, “And here I seem to recall you making it clear that, in your opinion, hot things don’t bother me overly much.”

“That’s not what I said.” He knew. He’d spent a sleepless night trying to forget the stupid things he had said.

She ignored him. “You also mentioned something to the effect that you weren’t impervious to the occasional . . . hot element yourself. Or you implied as much.” She snapped another chunk of bacon between white shiny teeth.

He turned his attention back to the griddle, deciding retreat might be the best strategy at the moment. She was in rare form this morning and he wasn’t prepared for this yet. Any of it. He’d hoped for a nice, hearty breakfast, followed with a rejuvenating shower and shave, by which time he’d have miraculously figured out exactly how he was going to handle this whole thing. He hadn’t even gotten to the hearty breakfast part yet.

Time for a draw play. Divert and conquer. “I thought you slept in on Tuesdays.”

“Really. And you would know this how?”

He paused, then turned off the heat before carefully placing the spatula on the counter. It was too handy a weapon. He turned to face her, arms folded. “You know, I was going to handle this calmly, rationally, with great finesse and charm,” he said evenly.

“That would be predictable,” she said. “Except for the charm part.”

“Very funny.”

“Thank you, I try. But you have to admit you take calm and cool to a whole new level.” She looked at him consideringly. It made him edgy. “Until last night, anyway.”

“I believe I apologized for that.”

She threw her hands up. “Okay, I give. Which guy are you? The calm, polished professional, or the sweats-wearing dude who looked at me last night like he wanted scrambled eggs with me on the side instead of bacon.”

Riley just stared at her. It was a good question. He thought he’d been playing a role. But somewhere along the way the sheep Riley and the real Riley had intersected, until he had no clue which part was what. He shrugged and decided to run the ball straight up the middle. He looked her dead in the eye and said, “Maybe I’m a little of both.”

That shut her up.

Which was great, as it gave him a whole split second to huddle up and draw his next play.

She still snapped the ball early. “So you didn’t come to my room just to talk last night?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Dammit.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and wondered when he’d lost total control of the ball. Pretty much every time she comes within three feet of you. Great. He took a deep, calming breath. “I wanted to talk. I knew I wasn’t going to sleep until I explained everything. I should have waited.”

Now she folded her arms. “ ‘Everything’ being what exactly?”

He ground his teeth. “If you’d give me half a chance, I’d tell you.”

She nodded at the grill. “Well then, why don’t you serve us both up a plate and I’ll get some drinks, then you can explain to your heart’s content.”

“Fine.” With barely restrained, very unsheeplike violence, he snatched another plate from the cupboard and slapped it smartly on the counter, muttering under his breath as he heard her open up the Mighty Fridge. “Try to explain things and you can’t because they won’t let you, then they get all pissy because you don’t explain things.”

“I heard that,” she said.

And she was going to hear a lot more before he was done, too. He scraped eggs and flipped several pieces of bacon onto each plate, wishing he felt more confident about that.

“And I wasn’t pissy,” she went on, talking over the sound of ice grinding out of the icemaker in the Mighty’s door. “In fact, I think I’m being pretty perky, all things considered. And if you really knew me like you seem to think you do, you’d know what great lengths I’m going to to embody said perkiness prior to my first injection of carbonated caffeine.” This statement was followed by the unmistakable hiss of two pop-tops being flipped open.

He turned to find her pouring Coke into two glasses filled with ice.

“What are you doing?” he asked, heavily laden plates in hand.

“Getting us something to drink.”

“I heard ice hitting glass, so I was thinking orange juice. Tomato juice, maybe.”

“Hey, I can only maintain this front for so long. I need caffeine.”

“What’s wrong with coffee?”

She sniffed the air. “I don’t do coffee. Roasted beans.” She shuddered. “And if you know I sleep in on Tuesdays, which I only do when I turn in my Tuesday column Monday night, by the way, then you’d think you’d have noticed my morning beverage of choice. Come to think of it, it’s my midday and nighttime choice, as well.”

“I thought you just didn’t have time to make coffee.”

“Well, I would have poured you some, but I didn’t smell any being brewed and just assumed—”

“That I drink Coke with my eggs?”

“Gotta get the caffeine from somewhere and this”—she raised the famous red and silver can—“is as valid a source as any.” She eyed him when he scowled. “I thought you could use the energy boost. The fizz will perk you right up if the caffeine doesn’t.”

When he merely continued to look at her like she was speaking in foreign tongues, she sighed. “There’s juice in the fridge if you insist.”

“On what, having something healthy and good for you?”

“You mean like bacon?” she countered sweetly.

Again he was reduced to muttering under his breath.

“My hearing is really quite acute, you know. Comes from eavesdropping on other people’s conversations in public.”

And to think he’d admired her forthrightness.

“What, you didn’t think all my column observations were from personal experience, did you?”

He put both plates on the table and ran a glass of water for himself before taking a seat.

“Taking the fifth, are we?”

He just picked up his fork and nodded at her plate. “Sit. Your eggs are getting cold.”

She eyed him, but sat without comment. They’d consumed about half of the eggs when she finally said, “I’m not sure I like this Riley better than the old one.”

“Tough,” he said, wishing like hell he had a newspaper to read. A cereal box, even. Anything to give him an excuse to look anywhere other than across the table at her.

“So, what’s this big explanation? Will it explain this whole split personality thing?”

“Finish your eggs, then we’ll talk.”

She raised both eyebrows. “Wow, quite the autocrat, aren’t we?”

An autocrat who is saving your personal bacon, he wanted to retort, but didn’t. This whole thing was already way off on the wrong foot. Best to just keep his trap shut until they were done eating and out of this room. It felt too intimate in here, which was ridiculous, considering the cavernous size of the kitchens. Maybe it was eating together at the same table. Too . . . domesticated for his peace of mind. Which was a joke. Tanzy was about as undomesticated as they came. In every sense of the word.

Still, he’d feel better when they moved to one of the more formal rooms in the house. Maybe then he’d have a chance in hell of remembering that he was an employee.

And not a man who had no other right to sit across a breakfast table from her.

Tanzy grabbed another Coke and waited for Riley to scrape the plates off and put them in the sink. It was like being with an entirely different man. She snapped her fingers. “Wait a minute! You’re Riley’s identical twin, right?” She looked around. “Am I on Candid Camera or something? Did Marty put you up to this?”

He just scowled and moved past her.

A scowling, unshaven, grouchy, and amazingly hunky Riley. Who could ever have imagined? “So, I take that as a no.” She shifted, barely, out of his way as he headed out of the kitchen and down the hall, toward the front parlor. What would he have done, she wondered, if at the last second she’d shifted and let him come up smack against her?

Okay, so maybe she was wondering what she’d have done. She’d been wondering about that, in fact, since he’d left her gaping in the hallway last night. She’d finally pinpointed the limo ride home from the dance as being the real moment where everything had changed. But she’d be damned if she could figure out what had triggered it.

She scuffed down the hall after him, bunny slippers sliding across the polished oak flooring. He’d hardly looked twice at her this morning. In fact, he seemed to have gone out of his way not to notice her. And although it appeared as if she’d just thrown on sweats and the first T-shirt in her drawer for that totally-unconcerned-with-my-appearance look, the pile of clothes on her bed upstairs was proof of her preoccupation with exactly what sort of persona she should project this morning. For all the good it was doing.

Of course, she’d noticed every detail about him. Unable to tear her gaze away from him as he stood at the stove. The way his navy blue sweats hung low on his hips. The way the gray and blue Pioneers T-shirt snugged up tight around those triceps and draped across shoulders whose breadth and definition still defied explanation. Was there really tailoring so bad that it would hide a body like his? And if so, why?

She watched him now as he strode down the hall, totally at a loss to explain any of this amazing transformation, even after a night of no sleep. He even walked differently.

One conclusion she had come to, and it had been somewhat of a relief, she realized now what her hormones had been reacting to. Obviously they’d sniffed out the wolf beneath those sheep suits. She hadn’t really been aching for the quiet, calm Riley to put his hands on her. This man striding down the hall in front of her . . . now, that made much more sense. And yet, she’d continued to toss and turn.

Even now, in the light of a new day, she couldn’t entirely erase the vague sense of disappointment. That while it was possible she might have gained a formidable opponent to play bed tag with, she’d lost something special. That shoulder, maybe? The calm, rational center in the eye of the storm?

She was still ruminating when she flap-flapped into the front parlor, to find Riley pacing beneath the snowflake chandelier. She wandered over to stand beneath it herself. “It seems like a lifetime ago that we stood right here.” She looked at him. “I was going to say that you were a completely different person then. But, somehow, with everything that’s happened lately, I feel like I was, too.” She lowered her can, all taunting and provoking aside now. “What’s going on?”

He stopped pacing, looked at her, then let out a deep sigh and gestured to the small grouping of furniture behind her. “Why don’t you sit down.”

She lifted a brow at his tone. “Sounds ominous.”

“It is. In a way.”

That gave her pause. “Okay,” she murmured, thinking she’d rather stand for whatever this was about, always the one to hold her ground. But looking into his eyes—so dark and mysterious without all that wavy glass hiding them—she found her knees bending and her butt hitting the hard, floral surface of the nearest settee. “Shoot.”

He paced to the mantel, then turned and leaned against it. “I was hired by your great-aunt.”

“I believe that’s old news.”

He merely gave her a look. “I was not hired as her personal assistant.”

Oh. Well. This was unexpected. Not that she’d known what to expect. “Exactly what were you hired as, then?”

“She contracted my services, the services of my company.” To his credit, he held her gaze directly. “Parrish Securities.”

“Aunt Millicent hired a—” Tanzy stopped, trying to process what this meant. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to explain. Do you mean securities as in stocks and bonds? Or—”

“As in private protection and investigation. I was hired to watch out for you and look into the threatening notes you’ve been receiving.”

If he’d told her he was the Easter Bunny, she couldn’t have been more shocked. She took a moment to let the news filter through the shock. Regrouping quickly, she replayed the events of the last couple of days, the last two weeks, in fact, and it all fell rather slickly into place. She was so stunned, she didn’t know exactly how she felt. Angry? Betrayed? Embarrassed? A tiny bit relieved? She was all of those things and more.

Striving for a calm she definitely didn’t feel, she clutched her Coke and said, “What, exactly, have your, uh, duties been?”

He stayed by the mantel, several yards away. Smart man. “I spent some time researching you, your background, your work. Millicent aided me in that, but I used my own sources as well. I’ve been following the contact being made, assessing the threat to you.”

Her mind was spinning, so she opted to stay focused on the specific matter at hand. The rest she could deal with—and be mortified by—later. “But the contact being made was in email. You couldn’t have been reading—” One look at his face told her that, in fact, he could have been. And was.

“I was only interested in notes from SoulM8.”

“Thanks. I feel so much less violated now.” Then she thought about the other contact SoulM8 had made. The note, the dance, and her mouth fell open again. “Millicent made sure you accompanied me to the dance. Not as my escort, but as my bodyguard.” And after the note popped up that night on their table, he’d accompanied her whenever she’d gone out in public. The radio station. His reaction to the paper missile and the crowd . . . putting her into the limo. “Oh my God.”

Now he crossed the room, but before he could sit next to her she was springing up and putting as much distance as she could between them.

She paced the length of the room, then swung back around. “So you’ve been my bodyguard for how long?”

“A little over two weeks.”

She stopped abruptly. “But you’ve only been my shadow since Sunday night. So how, exactly, were you providing protection before the dance?”

“You were under observation when you were away from the house.”

Under observation. “You followed me?” She rapidly tried to recall every place she’d been since moving in here. Only one leaped out in her mind. The Four Seasons. Her face colored despite her wishing desperately that it hadn’t. “Oh no.”

He nodded. And damn if there wasn’t that hint of a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “I was under orders.”

She crossed to the couch and sank onto it.

“If it makes you feel any better, sitting at the end of the hall on the ninth floor of the Four Seasons was a much better detail than hauling ass after you while you did your Christmas shopping. It’s like an Olympic event with you or something.”

She merely glared at him. He merely shrugged.

“What else?” she demanded, unable to think clearly. Her brain was a red haze at this point. “I want to know everything. From day one.”

“I followed you as part of the protection Millicent thought you should have. I didn’t eavesdrop, I didn’t watch, I didn’t do anything other than make sure you weren’t approached or contacted by anyone unusual.”

His reassurances didn’t make her feel even remotely better.

“And the investigation part? I only told Millicent about the emails, I never showed them to her. How did you get a look at them?”

He shifted on the settee to face her more squarely, resting his arms on his knees. “This is where my contacts come into play. Trade secret. And I told you, I didn’t look at anything else.”

She huffed. “Fine. And what did you do after reading them?”

“I have someone tracking them back to their source, trying to identify him that way. I took some prints off the note he left. We ran those and—”

“Wait a minute. How did you get—?” Then she remembered. She’d been sidetracked by him, in the limo, by the new side of him that was emerging. Only now she realized it was because SoulM8 had made direct contact, on his watch. She’d left her purse in the car. It had been on the table at the foot of the stairs the next morning. She hadn’t thought a thing about it, too sidetracked by the note inside.

“Nothing popped on him, so he has no priors. We’re trying to see if his employer has prints on file for their employees. If so, we should have a name shortly.”

“Employer? You know who he works for?”

“We think we do. The service provider for your Internet account, FishNet. It’s why he’s been so hard for us to track. He uses the same screen name, but the account information continues to change. Normally when you close an account, your screen name is canceled for a period of time, usually six months. Only he’s been able to open up new accounts with the same service, using the same screen name. So we believe he’s an employee.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“I work with my father, but we have contacts in other fields that we use from time to time.”

She slumped back, beyond anger and embarrassment now. All this talk, such serious talk, about SoulM8 and all the work being done behind the scenes for her benefit left her feeling numb more than anything.

“We have . . . we have one other lead.”

The clear discomfort in his tone got her attention. “Who?”

“Let me give you the details first. And I will say your aunt was quite adamant in not believing this one, but a trail is a trail. Even if the facts are seemingly coincidence and nothing more, I—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, who is the other suspect?”

“Martin Stanton.”

Her mouth dropped open in shock, then she laughed. Hard. He was scowling at her by the time she got her act back together. “You can’t be serious,” she said, shaking her head. But the expression on his face made it clear he was. “What did he do to warrant your suspicion?”

Riley explained about the email accounts, the fact that he was present at the charity ball, and his recent changes in behavior.

“What do you know about that?” she asked.

“Just what little you’ve commented on. As I said, taken separately, they might mean nothing, but together . . .” He shrugged. “You’ve got to be prepared to look at anyone and everyone.”

“Meaning you’ve looked into all my friends and acquaintances.”

He nodded. She blanched. He held up his hand. “I can assure you I’ve been discreet. They don’t realize a thing. And I agree with your aunt that extreme caution must be used in our suspicion of Martin. I don’t want to jeopardize your career.”

She sat there, numb again. He was serious. “You really think someone who is that close to me would terrorize me this way? What possible reason would he have for doing that? What’s the motive?”

“Could be a number of things. You mentioned he seemed to be in some sort of midlife crisis. Maybe, from his perspective, he thinks he’s merely being flattering. An anonymous affair of the heart. He’s a good deal older than you, so this way he can indulge in the fantasy without fear of rejection.”

“Do you honestly think he’d assume I’d be flattered? That I’d see these notes as being from some secret admirer and enjoy the thrill of it?”

“It’s possible. As I said, it’s only one path we’re following. But you needed to be made aware of it. If I could get his fingerprints on something, that would help. We could match it to the latent prints I pulled from the note.”

“And if it’s not a match, you stop suspecting him?”

Riley just looked at her.

She held his gaze for a long moment, then said, “You weren’t kidding when you said I didn’t know you.”

She’d said it kind of hollowly, not really intending to elicit a response. So she was surprised when his face colored slightly.

“Yeah. About that.”

She sat up a little straighter, glad to be off the subject of her stalker, her very real stalker, whoever the hell he was. Martin? No way. She simply couldn’t—wouldn’t—believe that. “About what?”

“My, uh, split personality.”

She’d been so caught up in the revelations, she hadn’t really thought about that part. “I assumed you were just maintaining some sort of professional distance or something.”

“Partly, yes. But I took it a little further than my job actually dictated.” He paused, shifted his weight, then shifted it again.

Tanzy didn’t exactly smile, but she suddenly felt a little better. Something about not being the only uncomfortable one in the room. “In what way?”

He blew out a sigh, might have even sworn a little beneath his breath. Which made her think about his behavior in the hall last night, in the kitchen this morning. This was the real Riley. All the rest had been an act. At the dance, in the limo . . . all of it. The calm, rational center of the storm didn’t really exist. At least not in the way she knew it.

Somehow, rather than anger her all over again, it left a rather hollow, achy spot inside her chest. Like she’d lost a friend. She glanced over at him. A friend she’d never really had.

“Why?” she asked quietly.

He looked up, directly into her eyes, and she knew he understood what she was asking. “You know,” he said, his tone just as quiet, “one of the things I admire about you is how direct and forthright you are. And you’re as honest about yourself as you are in dealing with others.” He straightened then, held her gaze. “So you deserve at least that much from me now. When Millicent hired me, I looked at the information available, and my recommendation at the time was that this was not a serious threat. That you weren’t in any immediate danger. In fact, up until the dance the other night, I still felt that way. I was going to do my best to come up with a name, something to give the authorities, so that we’d at least have gone on record with our concerns about this guy, but that was all I thought this would amount to. A nice, cushy job over the holidays.”

“Go on.”

“Part of my research was reading your columns. I enjoyed them. More than I thought I would. You’re sharp, witty, but the jabs you take, while meant to be amusing, are usually dead-on, with a kind of insight that forces a person to look at things in a new way. I don’t always agree with your conclusions, but I respect the way you present your case.”

She could only nod, stunned again, as much by his well-thought-out opinion as the obvious sincerity behind it.

“In the meantime,” he went on, looking a bit uncomfortable again, “your aunt had given me explicit instructions. She knew that if you were aware she’d hired me, you’d hightail it out of here.”

“Wait a minute.” She hadn’t put this part together, though she would have as soon as it had all sunk in. “Millicent set me up to stay here, didn’t she? With you.”

He nodded. “It was the easiest way to keep an eye on you while we dug into the situation. Don’t be angry at her, she was—”

Tanzy just laughed, though there wasn’t much warmth in it. “Oh no, this is Aunt Millicent at her manipulating best.” She sighed, her smile fading. “I’m not happy about it, but I know she only did it because she was worried.”

“There’s more.”

“More?”

He nodded. “Yeah. She warned me to steer clear of you.”

Now Tanzy laughed for real. “Oh? So much for me being worried about her meddling in my social life. I guess I should be glad she only sets me up with guys she’s paid to go out with me.”

Riley didn’t laugh. Or smile. “She didn’t want me getting tangled up with you, didn’t want me to compromise my ability to maintain my objectivity.”

Tanzy’s laughter faded. The expression on his face . . . the way he was looking at her . . . She thought again about their dance, the moment when she knew—knew, dammit—that he’d been going to kiss her. And last night, in the hall . . . he had wanted her, had come to her room . . . to tell her this. But the way he’d looked at her, before shutting the door between them . . .

“I thought it was going to be a short assignment,” he went on, “so when I read your column about the wolves and the sheep . . .” He didn’t finish, merely lifted a shoulder, his expression apologetic. “It seemed like an amusing idea at the time. I didn’t intend it as an insult or anything, but . . .”

Her mouth dropped open as his meaning became clear. Then she burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?” he demanded, obviously feeling as if he’d exposed his soft white underbelly, only to have her laugh at him. Well, he deserved at least that much.

“Nothing, it’s just that if the situation had been reversed and it had been me, I might have done the same thing.” She snorted again. “You know, I was researching you, too.”

“What?” Now he looked confused.

Good. She ought to get some pleasure out of this whole fiasco. “You were my Sheep Research Project. Here I am, alone, with all my friends married off and planning families. And I’m trying to figure out what the attraction is to the guy you take home to Mama. Do they marry him because they just think it’s time? Or because he will make a steady, stable mate? Or is there some underlying attraction?” She looked at him. “I had an underlying attraction to you,” she said with a half laugh. “So I decided to try to figure out why.”

The sudden change in his expression had her realizing that perhaps she’d just revealed too much. And now the advantage was shifting again.

“But now I realize why,” she hurried on to say. “You were just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. That’s what some part of me was reacting to.”

He got up off the settee and she started talking faster, and somehow, a lump had crept into her throat.

“You’re not a settling down kind of guy at all. You’re just like me. Another wolf on the prowl.”

He was crossing the room toward her.

She kept up, almost babbling, even as her throat started to close up. “You’re not the stable, dependable, calm, rational eye of my storm. Not my shoulder to rely on, not the friend I needed, the one I’d turn to—”

And then he was pulling her up off the couch. And to her absolute horror she realized she was crying.

“Come here.”

“Riley, don’t. You aren’t— You can’t—”

“No, you’re right,” he murmured, pulling her into his arms anyway.

He didn’t kiss her. That she could have understood, dealt with. Instead he tugged her close and tucked her against his chest, so that his heart thudded beneath her cheek. Steady, and strong.

And there she was, being held tight inside the calm center of her storm anyway.

And she was confused all over again.

She felt him press his lips against her hair, heard him say, “I can’t be all those things. But I’ll be damned if you don’t make me want to be.”