Page 1 of Protected By West
CHAPTER 1
TRACY
Walking into a work conference always had the ability to make Tracy a little nervous. It wasn’t the work that bothered her, it was usually the expectations that everyone had from a glance. The first thing people did when you walked into a meeting room or a round table was look at your name tag, not for your name but your job description.
And at this particular security conference it was going to be a little worse than normal. They’d opened it to all financial institutions in her area, but as the manager of a Credit Union, she was expecting those from banks to have that inbred issue with where she worked.
She’d yet to meet a manager of a bank who didn’t have that instinctual grimace on their face when they heard the words ‘Credit Union.’ The next morning, when she showed up with her lanyard badge with Military City Credit Union under her name Tracy Fagan, she expected to keep her smile firmly on her lips, but at the moment…
It was likely why she was just about to start her second drink at the hotel bar in Fredrickson, Texas.
That is, if the bartender ever got around to bringing it to her.
The bartender was busy at the other end of the bar, so Tracy made use of her time swishing her cherry around in the remains of her watered-down Cherry Whiskey Sour.
She barely took notice of the chair beside her moving back from the bar.
Barely, because as a woman and the daughter of a police officer she was always worried about who was going to end up in her personal space.
“Mind if I sit here?”
Her eyebrow lifted at his words.
The tone of his voice was nice. Deep, but not too deep. Rich. Warm.
So far so good.
“Go ahead.” She told him. “I’m not using it.”
His laughter sent chills up her arm.
“Good. I was hoping you weren’t waiting for someone.”
“Ha.” She let the cherry stem drop from her fingers and turned to say something quippy, but stopped.
The man settling into the chair beside her looked like what her friend Jaime called a ‘long, tall, drink of water.’
He wore his slacks fitted and his cowboy boots shone in the low lamp-light of the bar. And he wore a plaid shirt under his blazer that made him look part lumberjack as well as cowboy with the way his muscular arms filled out his sleeves.
She wasn’t all that much a fan of the whole beard thing, but on him?
Oh… it worked.
It really worked!
He looked over at her drink and gave her a quick side-long glance. “Do you want another?”
Want another… oh!
“Sure,” Tracy could feel her mouth quirk up into a little bit of a wistful smirk, “that is if I can get the bartender’s attention.”
Handsome as sin beside her cleared his throat and the bartender whirled around, her eyes finding him like a heat-seeking missile.
She sashayed over and leaned on her side of the bar. “Hey, handsome.”
Tracy grimaced inside. She was already calling him that, thank you very much.
“What can I get for you?”
