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didn’t.
    He turned away from the lake. Jo’s cabin was dark now.
    His father had only bought the lakefront property a few years ago, after finally wearing down old Pete Harper, the original owner, an eccentric ninety-year-old cousin of Jo’s grandfather, who had since died.
    Elijah returned to his woodpile. He’d gone out to his father’s grave in his first days back home. Still recuperating in Germany, he’d missed the funeral. As he’d stared at the simple stone marker, he’d understood, at least in his own mind, that whatever had occurred on Cameron Mountain last April still required a reckoning. Answers. Justice, even.
    He knew himself, and he wouldn’t stop until he had a clear picture of everything that had happened in Black Falls that spring.
    His father would expect no less of him.
    But Jo Harper was back in town, and as Elijah reached for another log, he debated which was the bigger problem—that she was as pretty as ever, or that she was a federal agent with a gun and the power of arrest.
    Not that it mattered. Either way, Jo had never been one to break rules.
    Except, of course, with him.
     
     
     

Chapter Three
     
     
    Thomas Asher folded the
Washington Post
and set it to the side of his table with a chuckle of amusement after reading a rip-roaring, tongue-in-cheek op-ed on the Jo Harper incident. It focused on her and the vice president’s beloved, unruly family—the point being, how could anyone expect the Secret Service to keep track of such incorrigible rascals?
    The furor over Jo’s encounter with Charlie Neal should have abated by now, but it went on because politicians and media hounds wanted it to.
    And because there was that video, of course.
    To Thomas—and to most people, he had no doubt—Jo came across as a competent professional who hadn’t lost control but had simply, finally, done what the vice president or his wife should have done a long time ago: take their one and only son by the ear and read him the riot act.
    Thomas settled back in his upholstered chair. The restaurant was on the first floor of an elegant, historic hotel a few blocks from Lafayette Park and the White House. He’d walked from his office where he worked as a political scientist for a respected think tank. Alex Bruni had called late yesterday afternoon to ask Thomas to breakfast. Of course, Alex was late. It was an annoyance, but not a surprise.
    Thomas thought about Jo again. He suspected she was finished in the Secret Service, if only because it prized anonymity and discretion and both had gotten away from her after Charlie Neal’s prank.
    Unfair, perhaps, but he was secretly glad. She was capable of doing more with her life than working for the Secret Service. An elitist position on his part, he supposed, but an honest one. He’d met Jo in February on a long weekend in Vermont with his daughter. The trip was against his better judgment, but Nora, then a high-school senior, had pleaded with him to go. He was still licking his wounds after his wife—his
ex
-wife—had married Alex, one of Thomas’s closest friends, and Nora was desperate to find a way for them to make peace with each other. She’d wanted beautiful Black Falls, Vermont, to be their common ground. It wasn’t that simple, of course, but Thomas would do anything for his daughter. They’d gone snowshoeing in an apple orchard one morning, and he’d spotted an attractive woman battling her way up an icy, treacherous incline—Jo Harper, as it turned out. He remembered his surprise at discovering she was not only a Black Falls native but a federal agent with an impeccable reputation.
    When he returned to Washington, he’d debated asking Jo out, but she hadn’t shown an interest in a romantic relationship. In the end, he hadn’t risked more rejection.
    Now he realized his hesitation had worked in his favor. In April, when he’d gone back to Black Falls with his daughter, a lovely woman had asked to share his table at a bustling, popular