Cold Pursuit - Carla Neggers [5]
But the damage was done. The video was out there forever, with Secret Service Special Agent Jo Harper grabbing the vice president’s son by the ear and giving him a piece of her mind.
Not one of the finer moments in her career.
Marissa Neal was sympathetic, having fallen victim to her brother’s pranks herself. Jo’s quick action a few weeks earlier had saved Marissa from severe burns and possibly death when a gas stove had exploded in a cabin she and friends had rented in the Shenandoah Mountains. A simple accident. It wasn’t publicized, much less splashed over the Internet.
“Dyeing your hair these days, Jo?”
She frowned at Elijah. “What?”
“I like the copper,” he said, then nodded to the flowers. “That must explain Charlie’s choice of colors for your lilies. They go with your hair.”
“He has an IQ of a hundred and eighty. He knows how to manipulate people.”
“Maybe he has a crush on you.”
“I doubt that.”
The youngest of five and the only son of a busy, popular vice president, Charlie was also desperate to be noticed, desperate to matter. As a Secret Service agent, and one not directly assigned to him, Jo couldn’t let that be her concern—but she couldn’t help but notice, either.
He was also fair-haired, good-looking, exceptionally bright and surprisingly unworldly given his wealthy, high-profile family background.
Elijah pushed open the screen door and glanced back at her. “You really can’t tell a toy gun from a real one?”
“Go ahead, Elijah, have your fun. Yes, I can tell. That’s not why I got hit.” She set the bananas on the two-foot cracked Formica counter in the bare-bones kitchen area. They’d be mush by morning. “It doesn’t matter. Charlie and the rest of those kids are all safe.”
“You did your job,” Elijah said.
“That’s the way I look at it.”
His eyes stayed on her for a fraction longer than she found comfortable. “Didn’t know I was back, did you?”
“No.”
She returned to the box and saw that she’d made a mistake in packing the three cartons of yogurt she’d had in her fridge. They were squished now, and ten hours in her trunk couldn’t have been good for their contents.
Thinking about yogurt gone bad wasn’t enough to distract her from the man standing in the doorway.
“I heard you were wounded,” she said, raising her gaze to him. “You’re okay now?”
“Never better.”
His response was classic Elijah. Jo had never met anyone more resilient. Most of his years as a Special Forces soldier were clouded in mystery and the subject of much speculation in Black Falls. Even with her high-level security clearances, Jo doubted she could find out the specifics of the April firefight. She’d heard that a bullet had nicked his femoral artery, a highly dangerous injury. He could have easily bled to death.
According to her sister, he was evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in southern Germany, and only when he was out of danger had his family informed him of his father’s death. Beth had heard the story straight from Rose Cameron, Elijah’s younger sister, who had flown to Germany to be with her brother.
“But he already knew,” Beth had said. “No one had to tell him.”
Jo suspected that one look at Rose’s face probably had been enough for Elijah to figure out the bad news for himself.
“I’m sorry about your father.” She ran a finger along the delicate edge of a dark maroon lily. “I had no idea he planned to leave me this place. I never asked him for anything, Elijah. Ever. He didn’t owe me.”
His expression was unreadable. “That doesn’t seem to be how he saw it, does it?”
She resisted comment. To get into a discussion about Drew Cameron now, after her long day and lousy week, in the very cabin in which he had discovered her and Elijah as teenagers and changed the course of their lives, made no sense.
“Thanks for delivering the flowers,” she said.
“Anytime. And relax. Give yourself time to heal.” He grinned suddenly. “I hear those airsoft pellets sting like hell.”
“Funny, Elijah.”
“You haven’t seen the video, have you?”
“No, and I don’t intend to.” A colleague had brought his personal laptop to her desk to show