“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?”