The Newlyweds. Elizabeth Bevarly

were kind of lumi—“I would have thought it was a lot like the place where you grew up,” he hurried to add. “I mean, the house you showed me as being your parents’ looked even bigger than this one.”

      She seemed to give his comment some thought before replying, but then she nodded. “Yeah, our house was a little bigger, maybe, but my parents were more minimalist when it came to furnishings. I mean, our house didn’t have nearly this much color or this much…” She threw her arms open wide, and he tried not to notice how the gesture caused her breasts to strain against her white shirt enough that he could see the outline of her bra beneath, and how it looked sort of pink and lacy. “…stuff,” she concluded. “Everything in this house is just so…so extravagant. How did the Bureau find this place, anyway?”

      Sam wondered that himself. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “It might be a house the federal government owns that they keep for visiting dignitaries. Or they might have made arrangements with a homeowner who isn’t using it right now because they’re working overseas or taking an extended vacation. It might have even been confiscated for tax evasion. Ours is not to question why,” he told her.

      “Yeah, and we never do, do we?” she asked.

      And Sam wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected just a hint of sarcasm in the question. Well, my, my, my. Maybe Golden Girl Logan wasn’t such a perfect little agent, after all.

      “Can we go over this thing one more time?” she asked. “I’m sorry. Usually once is enough for me, but I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours, and my brain is just having some trouble processing everything Pennington told me. We’re a just-married couple, right?” she began without even waiting for his okay.

      “Right,” Sam told her. “We’re newlyweds. We met in the fall, then eloped to Vegas a month ago because we were so wildly in love. We just recently surprised your family with the news, and that’s why there was no talk of our marriage around town before now. At the time we married, we were living in the Washington, D.C., area, but I put my house up for sale and you listed your condo right after the wedding because we knew we’d be moving to Portland after we married. I’m bringing my business headquarters out here so we can be closer to your family—that’s my wedding present to you.”

      “Well, aren’t you the generous spouse, relocating your entire business on your trophy wife’s behalf?” Logan asked with a smile. Strangely, she seemed to be teasing him when she did. Sam told himself he was just imagining it. It was not wishful thinking.

      “Well, I am a wealthy steel baron, after all,” he told her. “I can afford to be generous. Besides, from what I hear, I just dote on my trophy wife and would do anything to indulge her.” And where the prospect of playing that role had made him feel like a complete sucker a few days ago, suddenly, for some reason, it didn’t seem nearly as distasteful now.

      “So that’s how you made your reeking piles of filthy lucre,” she said, still smiling. Still seeming to be teasing him. And Sam still told himself he was only imagining it and not thinking wishfully. “You’re a steel baron.” She tilted her head to the side and studied him. “That’s going to make this role even more interesting to play, not to mention more challenging, since I’ve never really been a woman who went for the big-business-mogul type.”

      No, what was interesting, never mind challenging, Sam thought, was how badly he wanted to ask her just what type she did go for. Especially since she came from a family full of big-business-mogul types and seemed to be the kind of woman who had been groomed to marry just such a man. Then again, maybe that was precisely why she didn’t go for them. Tamping down his curiosity, he kept his question to himself. That was none of his business. And it wouldn’t be in any way helpful for working the case.

      In spite of his self-admonition, however—and much to his own horror—he heard himself ask her, “Are you saying you don’t think anyone will buy the idea of your being attracted to me, Logan?”

      Her eyes widened at that, and her smile fell. She didn’t seem to be teasing at all now, when she said, “Of course not. My God, any woman would be—” But she cut herself off before finishing whatever she had intended to say, her cheeks burning bright pink at whatever had inspired her to say it.

      And damned if Sam didn’t find himself wanting to move closer to her and demand to know exactly what she was thinking at that moment. Though it wasn’t necessarily his desire to know what she was thinking that made him want to move closer to her. No, unfortunately he was pretty sure it was his desire to do something else entirely that inspired that. Realizing it only made him feel even more rancorous. The last thing he wanted or needed was to get any closer to Logan than he already had. And why he understood that on one level but not another made him feel like a fool.

      “What?” he heard himself asking her in response to her stumble, not even sure when he’d made the decision to speak and knowing it was a mistake to do so. “Any woman would what?”

      Her eyes went wide again, in clear panic, and she opened her mouth, as if she were about to finish whatever she had been about to say automatically. But then she quickly closed her mouth again, clearly reconsidering and thinking better of it. Eventually, though, she did continue. “And we met in D.C., right? Which is totally credible since that’s where I went to college.”

      Although there was a part of him—a-none-too-small part, dammit—that didn’t want to change the subject, Sam reluctantly let it be. “Right,” he said. “You were living in the city, in Dupont Circle, and I was in the Virginia suburbs.”

      “But I was managing an art gallery at the time,” she recalled correctly, “which is going to be a little tough to fake, because, quite frankly, I couldn’t tell you the difference between Jackson Pollack and Jackson, Mississippi.”

      “Hey, at least you know Jackson Pollack’s name and that he was an artist,” Sam said helpfully.

      “Only because I saw the movie,” she said by way of an explanation. “And that’s about the full extent of my art history education.”

      “Ah.”

      She shook her head ruefully and crossed her arms over her chest, and Sam tried not to be too heartbroken about that. He also tried to tell himself it wasn’t a defensive gesture. But it did seem defensive. What she said next, though, told him the gesture wasn’t meant for him.

      “Boy, my parents would be so thrilled if this were all really true,” she said, her voice tinged not with teasing now but with a hint of melancholy.

      “They didn’t want you to go into law enforcement?” he asked.

      “Well, they always told me they wanted me to be whatever I wanted to be, and to pursue a career that would make me happy, because that was all that was important,” she hedged.

      “But?” Sam asked, because he heard the word coming.

      She expelled a soft sound of resignation. “But I think they always hoped that what would make me happy would be to marry a wealthy local businessman, preferably the son of one of my father’s colleagues, then buy a house up the street from them like this one and be a full-time mom to a houseful of kids, preferably with names like Ashley and Emily and Brandon and Biff.”

      Sam couldn’t quite help but smile himself at that. “And instead, you go for names like Destiny and Zenith and Aurora, is that it?”

      Now Logan smiled, too, and where she had been merely dazzling before, suddenly she was downright beatific. And those, too, were words Sam knew he shouldn’t be using in relation to her. So what if they were totally appropriate?

      “Actually, it’s not so much the names I object to as the actual children. Don’t get me wrong,” she hurried on to say before he could comment one way or another, “I think raising kids is probably the most important job out there, for a woman or a man. But it’s not for me. I wouldn’t be good at it. Which is another reason why this assignment is going to be so difficult.”

      It was going to be difficult for Sam, too, but for different reasons.