The Secretary Gets Her Man. Mindy Neff

tough to get along with, bitter, but nobody deserved to die and be buried alone. If it hadn’t been for the latest case the Texas Confidential unit had been working on, Penny would have come. But she’d been tied up and the funeral had taken place without her.

      Uncharacteristically, Penny flipped down the visor and checked her appearance in the lighted mirror as she turned onto Main Street. The image staring back at her gave her a momentary jolt. An hour back, when she’d stopped for gas, she’d impulsively exchanged her stylish, wire-rimmed glasses for a pair of contact lenses. Vanity wasn’t normally part of her makeup, but some devil had urged Penny to take off the glasses, to play up her assets, to show off the good bone structure she’d enhanced with a few cosmetics.

      Annoyed with herself, she flipped the visor back in place. It was as dark as sin out, for heaven’s sake. The sidewalks in town had been rolled up by five no doubt and it was after eleven now. Not another soul was on the road. Who did she expect to see? Or impress?

      An image of a boy with dark hair, broad shoulders and gentle brown eyes flashed like a strobe in her brain and she immediately cut it off. Her life was on a different course now and there wasn’t room for foolish fantasies.

      For the past twelve years, Penny had been working as Mitchell Forbes’s executive assistant in the highly secretive Texas Confidential organization. She knew the cases and the agents better than anyone. And although her position with Texas Confidential was important and fulfilling, lately Penny had yearned for more. She hadn’t quite been able to put her finger on what that “more” was until she’d single-handedly apprehended a band of cattle rustlers who’d been plaguing the Smoking Barrel ranch—Texas Confidential headquarters—for months. The adrenaline rush, the sense of accomplishment and the recognition and praise she’d gotten from her friends and colleagues had given her the courage to tell Mitchell that she wanted a more active role in the agency.

      She wanted to be an agent.

      Mitchell had agreed, and by this time next month, she would begin her training. But first she had to take care of her grandmother’s estate.

      And perhaps, to a certain degree, Penny needed to face up to her past before she could actually move on. Where that thought came from, she had no idea. And it made her more than a little uncomfortable.

      Through the Cadillac’s heavily tinted windows, she gazed out at the dark storefronts where shadowy mannequins posing in the boutiques seemed to follow the progress of her car as she passed. The crazy thought had Penny laughing out loud. She’d obviously been hanging around secret agents too long—needed a vacation more than she’d realized. She was starting to see menace in plastic dummies in store windows.

      A banner stretching across the street from opposite light poles announced the coming of the Fourth of July parade. Three weeks away. Where had the year gone already?

      Leaving the quiet streets of town, she wound her way through a tree-lined residential area and turned into the driveway of her grandmother’s wood-and-brick house. Two strips of concrete represented the driveway. Untended grass growing along the center of the drive brushed the Cadillac’s undercarriage. Behind the house, the detached garage loomed like a big old barn—with a padlock threaded through the hinge. Evidently, Grandma hadn’t gotten around to installing the automatic garage door opener Penny had sent.

      When she shut off the engine, silence pressed in on her. She was used to living on an isolated ranch, listening to the sounds of animals and insects and nature. She was used to being alone—or at least single. Tonight the quiet unnerved her.

      She reached for her purse and got out of the car, digging through the bag as she went up the back porch steps. When her fingers didn’t touch the set of keys she was certain she’d put there, she used a pen-light to search the interior of the leather pocketbook, then ended up dumping the contents on the porch.

      Great. She’d forgotten the darn keys the attorney had mailed to her. That wasn’t like her. She was efficient to a fault—she had to be to run a highly secretive agency like Texas Confidential. Well, not exactly run it, but close to it. She was their right-hand woman—albeit behind the scenes. But all that was about to change.

      Running her hands above the door and along the sides of the shutters, she searched for a spare key, knowing she wasn’t likely to find one. Agnes Archer had been a private, paranoid woman. In a town where most people never locked their doors, Agnes had installed double dead bolts. She wouldn’t have set out a spare key for some criminal to find.

      Penny often wondered why her grandmother had been so fixated on criminals to begin with.

      Unable to jimmy the windows that had been virtually painted shut over the years, Penny knew the only way she was going to get in and get any rest was to break a window. Going back to the car, she retrieved her tire iron and a blanket she kept in the trunk for emergencies.

      Although she was prepared for the sound, she cringed as shattering glass rained inside against the pinewood floor. Wrapping her hand and arm in the blanket, she cleared the jagged edges away, then climbed through the opening onto the service porch.

      Agnes had been gone for over two weeks now, but the clean, familiar scent of starch still lingered. The narrow beam of her flashlight passed over the ironing board sitting in the corner, the iron resting face down amid a rusty brown water stain.

      Entering the kitchen, Penny slapped at the light switch, distressed when the power didn’t come on. She was tired, her nerves rawer than she’d anticipated and she wasn’t in the mood to stumble around in a dark house that evoked more emotions than she cared to feel.

      Hoping it was just a burned-out bulb, she went into the living room and tried the lamp, knocking her shin against the end table and barely suppressing a curse.

      When that light didn’t come on either, she tried to recall where the circuit breaker panel was.

      “Hold it right there.”

      Fear, primal and burning, stole her breath and shot through her blood with a dizzying jolt. For a fleeting, hysterical instant, her thought was that this was the wrong reaction for a government agent to have. Never mind that she wasn’t a full-fledged agent yet. She should be deadly calm, ready to act and react.

      Belatedly, though no more than a second could have passed, Penny whirled around, simultaneously shutting off the pitifully weak beam of the flashlight so as not to make herself a target. Her eyes not yet adjusted to the inky blackness, she crouched and reached for the gun in her purse. But before she could even register that her pocketbook wasn’t hanging at her side, a shoulder slammed into her midsection and she went down hard, her hip jarring against the unyielding hardwood floor.

      Finesse gave way to sheer terror and self-preservation as she squirmed and kicked and jabbed. “You son of a—”

      “Wait! Hold it…”

      “Not a chance, buddy.” She arched beneath her assailant. Unable to get good enough leverage to throw a decent punch, she started to bring her knee up.

      “Hold on, wildcat…damn it…Penny, it’s me.”

      He didn’t have to identify who “me” was.

      Memories flashed.

      That voice. A voice she hadn’t heard in sixteen years.

      The voice of the only man she’d ever truly loved—or thought she’d loved—a man who’d made a fool out of her and broke her heart, a man who’d proved what her grandmother had spent nearly a lifetime drumming into Penny’s head. That men were no good and not to be trusted with your heart.

      Joe Colter.

      Flat on her back, Penny hesitated in her wild struggle and it was distraction enough for Joe to get the upper hand. He manacled her wrists in one of his hands and jerked her arms above her head. With his free hand, he shined a flashlight in her eyes.

      Penny was alternately stunned, confused and spitting mad. She bucked against him. “Damn it, get the hell off me.”

      From the flashlight’s