Against the Wind by Anne Stuart

Thompson was just her height, and she had once made the mistake of wearing heels when she went to visit his sister Vickie. Eric had taken one look at the tall skinny amazon towering over him and beat a hasty retreat. She wouldn’t have to worry about spike heels with Jake Murphy, she thought with absent delight. His body was narrow, lean, and whipcord tough, even beneath the conservative suit. Eric was bulging with muscles, and yet Maddy had little doubt that Jake Murphy could dispose of him with one hand tied behind his back. It was a lovely, instantaneous fantasy, the two of them fighting over her. When in actuality neither of them could care less, she reminded herself dismally, pulling the enveloping white shirt tighter around her damp body.
    He held out the coffee, and in her rush to get it she stubbed her toe on the kitchen table. “Sugar!” she snapped, limping the last few steps.
    “Was that a curse or a request?” Jake asked, the smile still hovering over what was in repose a grim mouth.
    “A curse,” Maddy said, leaning against the sink and massaging her foot. “I drink my coffee black.”
    “Maybe if you didn’t wear sunglasses in the dark you wouldn’t bump into things,” he offered gently.
    Maddy shook her head. “If I weren’t wearing these I wouldn’t see anything at all. They’re prescription—I left my regular ones up in my room.”
    “Well, there’s nothing to see right now, so you may as well humor me.” Before Maddy could divine his attention he’d reached out and removed the sunglasses from her nose. “That’s much better. Such pretty brown eyes shouldn’t be hidden.”
    The compliment was gentle, almost absentminded, and her immediate reaction startled even her. She struggled for something to say. “I thought Secret Service men always wore sunglasses,” she said, blinking in the sudden light. He was even more overwhelming up close, without the shadow of her glasses between them.
    Jake grinned. “We do. Maybe that’s why I hate to see them when I’m not working.”
    “You’re not working now?” It was an impossibly inane thing to say, she told herself mournfully, but she was desperate to keep up the conversation. If she didn’t she’d have to go back up stairs, alone, away from this gloriously mysterious creature who’d turned up in her parents’ kitchen.
    He shook his head. “Not until your father gets up.”
    “Are you staying here? In the house, I mean?”
    “Actually I’m staying in the pool house.”
    “Oh, my gosh, did I wake you?”
    “I didn’t know anyone still said gosh and sugar when they swore,” Jake said in a wry voice. “How old are you, Maddy? I should know but I’ve forgotten.”
    “Seventeen,” she lied.
    His eyes narrowed for a moment. “I should tell you that I have an instinct for when someone lies. Also a good memory when it’s prodded. You won’t be seventeen till August.”
    “Close enough,” she said.
    “Close enough,” he agreed, taking a drink of his coffee.
    “How old are you?”
    “A hundred years older than you,” he said with a distant smile. “Twenty-six.”
    Maddy did a rapid calculation in her head. “That’s only nine years older than me.”
    “Ten. You’re sixteen, remember?”
    “Nine and a half,” she said. “Have you always been in the Secret Service?”
    Wrong question. His face closed up, the light went out of his hazel eyes, and his mouth showed its full potential for grimness. “I was in Vietnam for two years.”
    Maddy’s recoil was instinctive. Most of her father’s political career had been built on opposition to that and any other war, and Maddy’s revulsion was deeply ingrained. She could feel those empty hazel eyes watching her reaction, and she quickly swallowed a sip of the scalding coffee. “Good coffee,” she manged in a croak.
    Jake Murphy stared at her for a long, silent moment and then his mouth relaxed, his eyes warmed, and the tension left his body. “Thanks,” he said, and