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don't approve of O'Connor?”
    The Colonel shrugged. “Nothing wrong with the boy, I guess. Polite. Successful. Just seems a bit soft around the edges, if you know what 1 mean. The kind who should have done a stint in the military to toughen him up.”
    “'Soft around the edges' is right. Not the kind of man my Ricky would have wanted behind him in a fight,” Shirley declared forcefully. “Maggie can do a lot better than Clay.”
    “I'm not so sure about that,” Odessa countered with a small sigh. “Clay is really a very nice man, as Maggie says. No different than most men these days and better than a lot of them. At least he's got a steady job and he knows his manners, which is more than I can say about some.”
    “That don't say much for men in general these days,” Shirley muttered. “A good job and slick manners don't necessarily make for a good man. Like I said, Maggie can do better.”
    “Maybe you're all a bit overprotective of Maggie,” Josh suggested thoughtfully.
    The Colonel smiled with just enough steel to remind Josh that the man had once trained other men for war.
    “Maybe we are. Like I said, we're a family.”

Chapter 3

    SEVERAL HOURS LATER Josh lay propped against the overstuffed bed pillows and stared sleeplessly up at the chintz canopy overhead. It cut off his view of the high ceiling, but he probably could not have seen much there, anyway. He had opened the heavy velvet drapes earlier but a dense cloud-cover was obscuring the moon tonight. There was almost no light coming in through the window.
    His thoughts shifted restlessly back and forth between three subjects: Maggie in the room next door, the book, and the idiotic case he had accepted here at Peregrine Manor. Of the three, it was his awareness that Maggie was sleeping in the room next door that was having the strongest effect on him-Inwardly, he sighed.
    He was too old to be reacting to a woman with this kind of sudden, intensely erotic need.
    But the truth was. Josh admitted, he had been strangely fascinated by her from the moment he had opened her crazy letter. Perhaps it had been the incredible audacity of her appeal for help in exchange for a month's free rent that had intrigued him. And most people would never have approached a major security firm for this ridiculous little situation here at Peregrine Point.
    No doubt about it, it had taken nerve to write that letter. Josh admired nerve.
    He turned on his side, wincing as his bruised ribs protested. He listened for sounds from the room next door. All was silent. Earlier he had heard the water running in the tiny bathroom and his imagination had fed him tantalizing images of Maggie getting ready for bed.
    He tried to decide what it was about her that appealed to him. She wasn't stunningly beautiful. She had a surprisingly sharp tongue for a sweet little small-town girl. And Josh just knew that she was going to be one of those demanding clients who wanted a lot more than they were willing to pay for in the way of service.
    But something in her had struck a responding chord within him and the more he thought about it, the more he was afraid he knew just what that chord was. He recognized in Maggie the same naive, misplaced desire to ride to the rescue of the weak and innocent that had once driven him into his present line of work. That explained what she was doing here trying to keep this white elephant of an inn going, of course. She was going to do her best to protect the home of those three aging eccentrics down the hall.
    Maggie Gladstone clearly hadn't yet learned that playing knight in shining armour was a thankless task and generally a waste of time.
    The clock on the bedside table ticked softly, recording the passage of what was apparently going to be an endless night.
    The hell with it, Josh decided. If he wasn't going to get to sleep, he might as well get some work done. He would get started on the book tonight. Sooner or later he was going to have to find out whether he