Dane heard the yacht’s engines stop, although he didn’t hear the grind of the anchor being lowered.

“No matter how much Gable offers to pay you, not a word to him.”

She punched his arm as she pushed herself away. “Stop trying to make light of this,” she snapped.

Gable stepped down the stairs into the main lounge. Dane had lost hold of Shana and she’d started stalking around like she’d lost hold of herself. Maybe there was more worry in that look of hers than he’d realized.

“What’s wrong?” Gable joined Dane on the long white couch.

“What makes you think there’s something wrong?”

Gable looked pointedly in Shana’s direction. She paused a beat in her pacing and gave them the finger.

Dane laughed.

“Nothing to worry about. Once I get her to myself back home, we’ll be fine.”

“You expect me to believe this is all about a lovers’ quarrel?”

Dane raised a brow at him. Damn.

“What else?”

“You didn’t ask me to come out here on the ocean to make a call because you’re—”

Shana whirled. “Cut the crap, Gable. If we needed to come out here to make a call because it was so top secret, then what makes you think we’re going to share it with you?”

Dane put up his hands and rose from the couch.

“Damn.” Gable looked to Dane for a cue. Dane didn’t give him anything.

“You can get us and the dinghy back to the dock,” Dane said.

“Yes, sir. Anything else?”

“Forget you took us for a ride. Forget we made a call.” Dane didn’t bother hiding his seriousness.

Gable’s face went ashen with concern. He looked like he was about to say something but flicked a look at Shana, who now stood scowling at him, hands on hips and feet spread—her Wonder Woman pose—ready to spring into action. Gable apparently decided better of it and retreated out to the main deck without another word. Dane and Shana followed.

Dane would owe him after this. Since Gable wasn’t a stupid man, he’d figure without being told that it had something to do with the President’s imminent visit. Nothing Dane could do about that. But that’s all Gable would ever know.

On the road, before Dane and Shana arrive back at the shack, he swerved the Jeep into the parking lot of a small unfamiliar mom-and-pop convenience store. He hoped to hell they had what he needed.

“What’s up lover boy? Your nerves so shot that you need a pack of cigarettes suddenly?” Shana raised one brow at him. She didn’t give him a wiseass smirk. She was too honestly worried and nervous herself.

“Not yet.” He’d never smoked and she knew it, but they both needed to joke to blow off some of the tension. He got out of the Jeep and she followed as if she didn’t want to let him out of her sight. He caught her around the waist, nuzzled her ear and whispered.

“We’re picking up a pair of throwaway cell phones. If you have cash on you.”

She nodded and pulled away to rummage in her purse past the small gun she kept, her favorite traveling gun. Dane stepped into the store first, setting off the jingling bells to alert Mom and Pop they’d arrived. He searched the old place—the well-worn carpeting, the smell of coffee and deli meat permeating the air, and the tall shelves stocked tight like books in a library. He spotted the carousel rack at the end of the last aisle filled with electronics, including plastic-packaged cell phones. Thank you, Mom and Pop.

Smiling at the older woman behind the counter as they walked by, he went to retrieve what he needed. Shana followed, taking his hand and holding on as if she were in a foreign place.

He went down the aisle and grabbed a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies because they were Shana’s favorites. She aimed a world-stopping smile at him, the kind that caused his pants to get too tight. He held his ground and her hand and they went to the cash register to buy their stash from Mom. He absently wondered where Pop was.

“I’ll take this.” He stopped her from bagging one of the phones and managed to rip open the plastic packaging. “I’m giving it a test run before I go, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure. You can do whatever you want with it—it’s yours. Cutie.” She winked at him and turned to Shana and wiggled her brows with a smile. Shana laughed.

They moved away from the counter and leaned against a chest freezer holding all manner of ice cream treats, and with one arm around Shana to keep her where she could listen, he tapped out Acer’s number with his thumb.

After three rings, Acer came on the line. A frisson of shock went through Dane. Acer never answered his phone. Dane had always left a message and Acer would call back. Ever since he could remember.

“I’ve been anticipating your call,” his friend said.

“No shit. How’d you know?” Mostly for Shana’s sake, but also out of habit, Dane didn’t let on that this had shaken him.

“Give me some credit. The President’s visiting. I figure that means heightened security. I gave you a ring and no answer. Nothing. I knew better than to leave a message. If you hadn’t called me by tonight I was going to contact the Governor. And you know what that means.”

“A sure sign of panic mode.”

“So what the hell is going on that you’ve gone to using throwaway phones?”

“Long story and I—we have short time. You need to get to the island by tonight.”

“No problem.”

“But you can’t get here using the conventional methods.”

“Aha. Going in dark to an island. My specialty.”

“Exactly. Only I can’t give you any help. I’ll send Ronnie Ryan out with a boat if you need it.”

“That’ll work. I’ll send him my coordinates. Tell him to expect me around . . . 2100 hours.”

“Won’t work. We need you here for the dinner hour—by 7 p.m. the latest. We’re under watch.”

There was silence while Acer contemplated what Dane had said. He wasn’t sure if the time frame had given him pause or if it was the fact that he and Shana were under watch.

“Coming in without the cover of dark will be tricky.”

“But you can do it.”

“Of course. Just warn your boy Ronnie.”

“Will do. And Acer, we’ll need all the toys you can manage. Set up at our usual rendezvous spot. Ronnie’ll get you there.”

His friend emitted a string of epithets a sailor might spew and they signed off.

Dane slipped his phone into one of the pockets of his cargo shorts while he studied Shana’s face, focusing mostly on her stunning eyes. The green was so bright they looked like emeralds in a doll’s face. She showed no fear, no anxiety, not even a scowl of annoyance. His heart hammered up and his gut floated around unnaturally.

“We’re all set then?”

He nodded.

“How will Acer manage to get here if not by boat or plane?”

“He’ll swim in. Underwater.”

She laughed. “Let’s go.”

He had a feeling she really didn’t believe him.

She was about to exit the convenience store, but Dane held her arm.

“We need to talk before we get back to the shack and I’d bet my left nut the Jeep is bugged.”

“So you’ve said. You sound all sexy-spy. You sure you’re not getting too melodramatic?”

“What do you think, girlie?”

Her head was tilted only slightly to look into his eyes. He liked that her heels made her close to his height. Gave an extra kick to the challenge of staying on top. Literally. She contemplated the sexy-spy look he put on for her, but he knew her mind was working, knew she was serious. In fact, he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to distract her enough to make love again until the President’s visit was over.

“Our Secret Service pals are going to find out we have these phones sooner or later.”

“We’ll only use them for a day. Until Acer gets set up on the island anonymously.”

“Good luck with that. They’ll make it their business to know who every damn last person is that comes onto this island.”

“Sure. But you know Acer isn’t coming on island in one of the conventional ways.”

“How then—for real?”

“He really is coming in underwater. Did you know our man Acer happens to be an expert scuba diver?”

“You don’t say.” She shook her head in mock disbelief. “Crazy.”

She was up to it. She was a warrior. But a sudden unsettled feeling took hold.

“Not too late to back out now.” He held his breath. Had no idea why he said it. Maybe he was crazy.

The startle in her look made his heart ache. He reached out to her and took hold. He spoke before she had a chance to answer. “Hell. It’s way past too late—”

She squirmed and took his face in her hands, glaring eyes understanding and scolding at the same time.

“It’s been too late since the first day we met. Since you pulled that crushed rose from your pocket and put it in the palm of my hand. You had me.”

“The rose? You mean I didn’t need to go to all that trouble of running to Rio to rescue you from a dungeon?”

She smiled and he noted the sparkle of tears in her eyes and wondered how she could be such a damn warrior and so damn sappy at the same time. He loved it. Both sides, the fact that she could handle it all, that she could handle him and not go running for the hills.

“I love your crazy,” she murmured. Nothing stirred his loins more than her husky murmur, her body close and her hands on him. How the hell could he extract himself from this web of desire? How much did he need to maintain his professional edge?

As much as he needed to save the leader of the free world.

With clenched teeth and a hard dick, he put his vibrating hands over hers and pulled them away from his face. He barely avoided bringing them down lower, but she assisted by stepping back from him.

“I even love that iron will of yours,” she said, her voice cooling off.

“Iron something.” He barely said the words aloud.

She’d heard him. The faint catbird smile lifted her face.

“All in due time.”

He turned away and dismissed her words. There was no room to even contemplate the promise. This had to be a case of all or nothing. He used to be good at that.

But that had been before he knew Shana, before they’d become partners, and before they’d declared their undying love and planned marriage. If he’d thought that last part—the commitment of marriage—might put a damper on the romance, he would have been wrong. But of course, he’d never given any of it a thought. Because he’d never thought it possible.

Shana was flat-out a miracle worker.

They reached the Jeep and he drove them back to the beach shack. He wondered how many Secret Service agents were on island by now. He’d spotted their tail down the street from the Gables’ estate. He’d been right to assume they were under constant surveillance and wondered if they were being monitored by the NSA.

As he brought the Jeep to a stop in the beach shack’s crushed-shell drive behind the nondescript sedan, he put a lid on everything except concentrating on getting a grip on this assignment.

He needed to get some intel from a couple of very secretive guys.

When Dane got out of the Jeep and approached the back door to his beach shack, he heard someone talking in his backyard. Shit.

He waved Shana to stay back—uselessly—and went to the corner of the house, hugging the wall, to take a look.

The two Secret Service men—wearing Bermuda shorts, pineapple shirts, and flip-flops—were set up on lounge chairs. The only nod to their federal agent status was the sunglasses and the laptop computers. Andrews turned and lifted his shades. He didn’t smile, instead telegraphed a warning that a donkey could read. It screamed dire consequences if there was any jocular commentary on their attire.

To Dane, such a warning look translated into a challenge, the kind he never backed away from. After careful consideration that took less than a blink, he decided this time was no different as he walked toward the two agents.

“The set of Magnum, P.I. is about five thousand miles west of here, but I think they discontinued the show a couple decades ago. You two need to update your wardrobe if you want to fit in on Martha’s Vineyard.”

“Shut the f—” Goodley didn’t finish his sentiment before his senior partner cut him off.

“Blaise, I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing or who the hell Sassy is—”

“She’s our house guest. She rented out her apartment to make money and had nowhere else to go. Everything on the island is booked.” He stepped closer to the two men, to where Andrews stood and matched the man’s irate scowl. “She is staying with us.”

Shana came up beside him and said, “And she’s staying in the guest room.”

“How is that going to work?” Andrews didn’t sound like he’d taken Shana seriously.

“You two can stay on cots in the living room. It’s the accommodations you deserve, after barging in uninvited. This isn’t like in your civil war when soldiers could conscript a person’s home and do—”

Shana would have gone on, but Andrews had apparently heard enough, because he said, “Enough.”

Dane put up a hand. “Bottom line, it’s a condition of our cooperation. Sassy stays or you two go.” He didn’t bring up the fact that Ronnie Ryan would be staying too. This wasn’t the time for that detail.

“We’ll see about that,” Goodley said. “We’ll bump it up to our superiors and see what they have to say about it.”

“In the meantime,” Andrews said, “we’re not going to be relegated to doing top secret government work outside because you have a houseguest. We don’t trust you, let alone your guest.”

Andrews seemed to be ending the argument in a truce of sorts for the moment. But Dane was slightly worried that their superiors might have Sassy thrown out, and then either he or Shana would need to stay with them at the shack at all times. Ronnie hadn’t arrived yet and when he did, it might incite another round of discontent from the agents.

The hell with it.

By the time the agents ran it up the chain of command and received instructions on what to do about the house guest, he figured they would have at least twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours to work on finding out what they weren’t being told.

“So you admit it,” Dane said.

“We need to be able to work without worrying that some so-called houseguest is spying on us.”

Dane shrugged. “You can find out exactly who Sassy is if you don’t already know. You can work on the dining room table. She won’t bother you. I’ll even let you put up a curtain to close yourself in if you need privacy.”

“Very funny.”

“I’m not being funny, Andrews, because the truth is, we don’t trust you either. And I’m not having you and Goodley left alone in my home unattended.” Dane figured the truth was as good as anything to tell him. It wasn’t as if Andrews wasn’t going to figure it out on his own.

“What do you have to hide?” Goodley asked the sophomoric question.

“The family jewels. Government secrets. The atomic bomb hidden in my basement. What the hell does it matter? I don’t owe you carte blanche to my life and home. As it is, you’re asking us to go into an assignment half blind.”

“You know exactly what you need to know.” Andrews had calmed down, but he stared back unflinching at Dane. He felt Shana move closer and step slightly forward, as if ready to pounce on anyone if they made a move. Or that could have been Dane’s imagination.

“Sure. Glad we got that settled. Sassy stays and Shana and I do your dirty work.”

He turned and Shana walked with him back toward the house, but he stopped after a couple of steps and turned back to the two Magnum, P.I. impostors.

“You really won’t fit in around here dressed like that. People will stare, possibly laugh at you.”

“What do you know about fitting in?” Andrews looked him up and down with one of those snide expressions that said he was up to the challenge.

Dane didn’t have to look down at his own clothing to know what Andrews saw. The tan cargo shorts with a short-sleeved white linen shirt and mud-colored hiking sneakers might not look right to Andrews, but the attire covered the bases. Casual, classy and practical.

They both looked at Shana who came up from behind to stand next to him. She could wear whatever the hell she wanted, of course, and always fit in because she set the standard for gorgeous no matter where she went. That was Dane’s thinking, but it looked like Agents Andrews and Goodley might agree with him. Andrews sat back down.

“Dane’s right,” she said. “The look on Martha’s Vineyard is more conservative than what you’re wearing. You’ll stand out. But if that’s what you’re going for.” Shana flipped her hand in a dismissive gesture and walked away as if she were bored with them. Dane watched her go into the house.

“Damn it.” Andrews tapped something into his keyboard.

“What are you doing?” Goodley sounded angry, but then, that was how he normally sounded. The chip on the chippy agent’s shoulder must be getting heavier by the minute.

“I’m ordering us some new clothes. They’ll get here by tomorrow.”

“Don’t listen to—”

“Goddamn it, Thaddeus. This is exactly the kind of stuff we’ve been told to listen to.” Andrews shut down his laptop and stood. “Let’s go inside. We need to talk to you about your assignment.”

“Oh?”

“You and your partner. The assignment you agreed to when you agreed to cooperate.”

They all walked to the back door.

“You mean the one where the Secret Service was going to use us?” Dane let Andrews and Goodley go inside first.

Dane asked Sassy to go down to the basement to allow them privacy for the moment. There was some space Shana had set up as a lounge with a television, books and even refreshments if she didn’t mind stale potato chips.

“You sure she can’t hear us from down there?” Goodley stood with his hands poised on his hips, one of them noticeably close to his holstered gun.

“Cut the crap, Goodley. You’ve already run the place over for listening devices and she doesn’t have supersonic hearing,” Dane said.

“Let’s get on with this, gentlemen,” Shana said waving an arm toward the dining table a short distance from where they stood in the hall near the basement door.

No way Dane wanted them going downstairs to have a close look around.

“I can’t wait to find out how you plan to use Shana and me.” He moved forward, herding them toward the dining room where they’d stacked some documents.” I certainly hope it doesn’t involve life-threatening danger.” Dane flicked his eyes in Shana’s direction.

She’d changed her clothes when she’d gone inside ahead of them, from her business suit into a floral sundress and strappy flat sandals. He was sure no one would object to her Hawaiian outfit. She made a nice distraction.

Shana compressed her lips in that way she had when she was trying not to smile.

“Have a seat.” Andrews gestured toward the dining room table.

Dane went still. He’d intended to take a seat, but it was the way the man said it, as if this were his home and he were playing host. No way was this guy, federal agent or not, playing host.

“If I wanted to sit, I would. It’s my home. I’ll stand. Say what you need to say.”

Andrews gave him a measured stare while his junior partner snorted. Dane didn’t pay any attention to him and the four of them stood leaning on walls or the counter dividing the dining room from the kitchen, except Dane, who leaned against the refrigerator with his arms folded.

“I printed out the itinerary for you. You’ll need to attend every one of the President’s public events where he’s away from his vacation home, as well as the dinners and cocktail parties he’s hosting at the house. There are maps and blueprints to the house where the President is staying. Your assignment will be to look for a couple who doesn’t fit into the crowds wherever the President may be.”

“A couple?”

“Yes. We have intel that says we’re looking at a couple—man and woman—likely posing as tourists.”

Dane nodded at Shana. She held her face blank, and the only sign of her triumph was the barely perceptible lift of her chin.

“You’ll start with the President’s arrival on Air Force One tomorrow.”

“What do you expect to accomplish?” Dane knew Andrews was holding back. It was in the man’s posture. His question got the usual hostility from Goodley, but Andrews remained passive.

“Your observations. Let us know if you see someone who could be—”

“What?”

“Assassins. Or lookouts for the assassins.”

“Don’t you have a whole boatload of Secret Service Agents trained to do exactly what you’re telling us to do?”

“Sure, but you two fit in. You can chat people up. If we see someone we’re interested in—you talk to them without tipping them off.”

Dane nodded. He knew it was bullshit. They were being set up. But whatever they were being set up for he still had to think about. Except that he knew it was something dangerous, something they were afraid to tell him about. Or maybe it was something Andrews or his bosses at the Secret Service weren’t telling Homeland Security about, even though it was Homeland Security who was watching the terrorist cell.

Whatever it was, something was afoot and Dane was damned well going to figure it out. Either from Acer’s probing of Internet sources or from pure inference and puzzle-solving.

He and Shana studied the itinerary that was given to them and answered questions about each of the locations—giving the unofficial backgrounds on people they knew. Before the afternoon was over, Dane assessed Andrews to be satisfied that he and Shana were cooperating to their very fullest.

It was time for them to meet with the Acer up their sleeve. There was no way in hell either of them were going along with this game any further without knowing full well what they were getting into.

The Secret Service was about to get out-maneuvered.