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Chapter One

FBI agent Colt Asher’s new mission: infiltrate an Amish village and recoup a stolen black-and-white guinea pig named Sparkles.

What Colt should be doing right now was planning his vacation, some much-needed R & R, maybe on the Gulf of Mexico or a trip to New Orleans for some beignets and good bourbon. Or he could dust off his passport and take off for France. Italy. Germany. Practice his Spanish in Madrid. Instead, late in the afternoon on the day before his two-week vacation would start, his boss, Harlan Holtzman, had called Colt into his office with a special request.

Yesterday, Harlan had taken his eight-year-old niece out to lunch for her birthday in their hometown, Grass Creek, a suburb of Houston, where the FBI office was located. On the way to the pizzeria, the girl had spotted a black-and-white guinea pig in the window of the pet shop and wistfully said her birthday and Christmas wish combined was to have that guinea pig for her very own and she’d name it Sparkles and take good care of it. Harlan, the old softy, planned to surprise the girl. So this afternoon he’d gone back to the pet shop and bought the critter and a bunch of whatever guinea pigs needed, like a cage and wood shavings and hidey tunnels. He then set down Sparkles in his new cage on the curb near his pickup while he went back in the store to collect the huge bag of shavings and guinea-pig pellets. A clerk had then talked his ear off about proper care of the critter and got him to add a book called Caring for Your New Guinea Pig to the bundle.

“A twenty-four-dollar Christmas present ended up costing me over one hundred and fifty bucks!” Harlan muttered.

Bigger problem: when Harlan finally came out to the truck with the shavings and pellets and book, Sparkles and his cage were gone. A guinea-pig thief in Grass Creek? Most unusual. The boss asked around, and one woman reported that she did see an Amish girl with red pigtails take the cage off the curb and put it in her buggy sometime before it moved on, but the woman hadn’t realized she was witnessing a theft. According to her statement: I mean, the Amish don’t steal, right?

Apparently, they did. Or this one girl did, anyway.

What wasn’t unusual was seeing Amish folks in Grass Creek. The Amish community was about ten minutes away from the large town with its bustling center, where Amish folks had a very popular indoor market to sell their baked goods, wares and handcrafted furniture. Though Colt lived fifteen minutes away in Houston, he’d gone to the Amish market for all the tables in his condo, and last spring, when he wanted to buy two cribs for his then pregnant-with-twins sister, he wouldn’t have shopped anywhere else. The craftsmanship was impeccable. Colt also never passed the stall with the Amish-baked lemon scones and sourdough bread without buying enough to stuff his freezer. There were always several Amish buggies around Grass Creek every day. He’d never been to the Amish community itself. But if there was one thing Colt knew from ten years as an FBI agent, it was that anyone, even an Amish girl with red braids and a bonnet, was capable of anything. Colt had arrested men who looked like bad guys in action movies and he’d arrested the most angelic-looking women who you’d never suspect of a thing.

Guard up, always. That was Colt’s motto. It had to be.

His guard hadn’t been up on his last case. He needed this vacation to clear his head, to forget what had happened. But there was something he’d never forget: that one of those angelic-looking women had managed to con him and betray him and it would never, ever happen again.

“I wouldn’t ask you to drive out there, Colt,” Harlan said. “But Jones and Cametti just left on the gun-running case, and I’ve got that damn fund-raiser dinner I can’t get out of, and since your vacation technically doesn’t start until you leave tonight, I can ask you while you’re still here and not feel that guilty.”

Colt laughed. “No problem, Harlan. I’ll have Sparkles at your house in a couple hours.” A drive out to all that farmland and fresh air was probably just what he needed. A perfect start to R & R.

“Appreciate it, Colt. Thank you.”

He’d drive to the Amish village, flash his badge around and ask about a red-haired girl who’d been to town today, recover the guinea pig and drop him off at Harlan’s, and then he’d pack his bags and throw a dart at the world map hanging in his living room. Where it landed was where he’d go to forget that disaster of a last case...and remember.

* * *

As Jordan Lapp’s buggy came around the curve in the road, Anna Miller glanced up from the calf she was bottle-feeding in the barn of her farmhouse and sent up a prayer: Please, please, please do not be here to propose.

She was twenty-four. And unmarried. Spinster age for an Amish woman. Over the past five years, she’d turned down ten potential suitors and the eight marriage proposals that had come anyway. Some of those proposals were more about her being the right age and not married. Some of the men had truly liked her. One had loved her, and she’d broken his heart, which had broken hers.

Anna had always hoped that the undeniable fact that she was “different” would make her unappealing to the men of her community. It hadn’t. She was outspoken. She talked too much about what she read in novels and nonfiction. She didn’t understand why cooking and laundry were “women’s work.” She wore overalls instead of dresses to do her barn chores and paint the handcrafted furniture their community produced. Orphaned when her mother passed away two years ago, she lived alone, unusual for the Amish, but her onkel Eli preferred she live in her family home and not with him and her aenti Kate because Anna was a “bad influence” on their eight-year-old daughter, Sadie.

Her matchmaking onkel had promised a few of her would-be suitors a horse or furniture to sell if they would propose to Anna. The man was a well-meaning busybody, but Anna knew he was operating more out of love for his wife, who worried about Anna incessantly, than out of a need to control his niece. All the proposals had been turned down, infuriating her uncle, irritating her aunt and earning an “unacceptable” respect from her young cousin, Sadie.

“Cousin Anna is her own woman,” Sadie had said with pride in her voice over lunch one afternoon, her new favorite novel, Anne of Green Gables, on the table beside her sandwich.

Sadie’s mother had raised an eyebrow but had said nothing, which was telling. Anna was her own woman. Consequence: Anna was also alone. Sadie’s mother would allow her young daughter to see for herself how Anna’s choices affected her. Anna admired that about her aunt, even if Kate was making a point. Of course, Sadie was being raised Amish and attended church and followed the Ordnung, the rules of behavior. But Sadie read widely, just as Anna always had. Her cousin’s heart—and head—would guide her, just as Anna’s had.

Jordan emerged from the buggy. Uh-oh: he was in his church clothes, a black jacket and pants, a black straw hat. He stopped in front of her, patted the calf, and smiled nervously. “Anna, here’s the thing. The past couple of months, I’ve sent my brother and a cousin to ask you if you’d date me. You told them no. So I’m going against tradition here to cut to the chase. Will you marry me?” He pulled a miniature wooden clock from his jacket pocket. He likely made the clock himself, for this very purpose. The Amish did not propose with diamond rings.

Her heart plummeted. She liked Jordan. He was kind and had beautiful blue eyes. She hated to hurt his feelings or his pride or even deny him whatever it was her onkel may have promised him. “Jordan, you’re a very gut man, but I’m sorry that I must turn down your kind proposal. I’m not looking to marry.”

Jordan frowned. “What else is there? Are you just going to nurse the sick calves and paint furniture until you’re old? Who will love you? Care for you? You’ll have no children.”

She did want children. She also wanted a husband. She just wasn’t so sure she could commit to an Amish man, which meant committing to being Amish, to living here for the rest of her life. There was a big world out there. Or even just the town of Grass Creek—a world of difference from their Amish village.

“I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “I’m sorry, Jordan. Were I looking to marry, you would make a wonderful husband.”

He sighed. “Well, if you change your mind by day’s end, let me know. Otherwise I’ll date Abigail. She speaks her mind as you do. I like that.”

She smiled. Good for him. “I won’t change my mind. Go date Abigail.” Her friend from childhood had a crush on Jordan and would be very happy to date him with the unspoken intention of marriage. That was how it worked in the Amish community. You liked who you liked and if you started dating it was because you planned to become engaged.

“You won’t tell her I proposed to you?” he asked.

“Of course not.”

He nodded, put the clock back in his pocket, and left.

Anna watched his buggy round the bend and heard a twig snap on the other side of the barn. Someone had been eavesdropping.

“Anna Miller, your mother would not approve.”

Drat. Her aenti was here. And apparently had heard the entire exchange.

The calf’s bottle empty, Anna stood up just as Kate Miller rounded the barn with a basket in her hand. Her dear aenti often brought Anna lunch when she made the afternoon meal for her family.

“Chicken soup, sourdough bread and strawberry preserves,” Kate said, handing over the basket. She frowned at the sight of Anna in her denim overalls and baseball cap, paint stain on one thigh. Kate wore the traditional calf-length modest dress and a black bonnet, which symbolized that she was married. Single women in their village wore white bonnets. Anna’s baseball cap was blue.

“Thank you, Aenti,” Anna said, the aroma of the soup and fresh-baked bread making her stomach growl.

“Is Sadie here?” Kate asked. “She ran off after we returned from Grass Creek but I didn’t see her as I walked over.”

Anna glanced out the barn doors for a sight of her young cousin. “I haven’t seen her, either. Shall I send her home if I do?”

Her aenti nodded. “I have some sewing chores for her.”

It was no wonder her cousin had run off for a little freedom while she could get it. Anna’s aunt believed that idle hands made for a wayward mind, so she tried to keep the eight-year-old occupied with chores so that young Sadie wouldn’t be able to spend too much time with her cousin Anna.

“Anna, I try to understand you,” Kate said. “But it’s been two years since your mamm passed. You won’t date anyone. You turn down good marriage proposals that come anyway. You are meant to be a wife and mother, Anna—if you are Amish.”

If. If. If. Anna had not yet been baptized in the faith.

“I don’t want to make you feel bad, Anna. But you’re setting a terrible example for the kinder. There are only eleven families in our village and lots of kinder. Including your very impressionable cousin. Sadie said just this morning that she wants to be just like cousin Anna when she grows up. Imagine if your onkel had heard that!”

Sadie would likely not be allowed to go to Anna’s house anymore at all.

Her aenti lifted her chin. “I think you should leave, Anna.”

Anna gasped. “What?”

“Take your long-put-off rumspringa,” Kate said. “You didn’t have the chance when it was customary. Discover once and for all if you want to be Amish or not.” With that, her aunt turned and headed back up the road to her home, a quarter mile away.

Her rumspringa. All during her childhood, Anna had watched the boys and girls of her village reach fourteen, fifteen or sixteen and have their rumspringa, the time when Amish teenagers could experience life as an “Englisher” with no consequences for their behavior and choices, to a degree, of course, and then commit—or not—to their Amish faith. It was then that they would be baptized into the faith, committing to the Amish lifestyle and Ordnung. As a girl, Anna had lived for that time to come, anticipating, waiting, dreaming. Whenever she’d gotten a chance to go into Grass Creek, she’d watch the Englishers—so named for the language they spoke, as opposed to the Pennsylvania Dutch of the Amish—studying how they dressed, the shoes they wore, the jewelry, all forbidden to the Amish, that decorated their necks and wrists and ears. Earlier this afternoon, when Anna had gone to Grass Creek with her family to deliver new furniture to their market stall, a woman approached wearing bright red lipstick and long dangling silver earrings, and Anna had been mesmerized by the glamour—the very opposite of plain, as Amish were supposed to be.

She’d rarely been in cars, except for taxis and ambulances. She’d never listened to music through the earphones she saw so many people wearing, never held a cell phone or looked up anything on the internet. She’d never seen Gilmore Girls or Casablanca or The Simpsons, shows and movies she only knew about through magazines she’d flipped through in town and books, which were her lifeline, along with people watching and listening. There was a great big world out there. And during her rumspringa she’d get to experience it all.

But then her dear daed had been killed in a freak farm accident when Anna was fifteen, so she’d put off her rumspringa. She was an only child, rare in the Amish world, but her parents hadn’t been blessed with other children. Two years later, just as Anna was ready to take off her head covering and use, for the first time, the internet via the Grass Creek library’s community computers, her beloved mamm got sick. Cancer. Anna had cared for her frail mother for five years before she passed. Anna was so grief-stricken, so lost without her mamm, that she’d retreated into herself, taking care of the sickly calves, painting the furniture the men of the community had built. And turned down guy after guy, proposal after proposal. Now she was twenty-four and still here. One foot out. One foot in. And not moving. But always wondering. Dreaming.

“My own rumspringa was a disappointment,” her mother had once told her. “There is almost too much choice, too much technology, too much out there. Here it is quiet and peaceful and you use only what you truly need. It’s a good way to experience the meaning of life, Anna.”

Anna’s heart squeezed with the thought of her mother, but just then she saw a pair of red pigtails fly past the barn. Spending time with her whirlwind of a cousin always lifted Anna’s mood. The girl was probably hiding from her mamm for a bit.

Anna was about to enter the barn to find Sadie when a black SUV came down the road, a man behind the wheel. Anna’s house was the first one from the main road, so perhaps he wanted to inquire about furniture or horse training or just gawk at the “plain people.” The man parked the car and got out and looked around, his gaze landing on hers.

She sucked in a breath. He was tall, over six feet, with a broad chest and narrow hips. He wore a long-sleeved button-down shirt and charcoal pants, and was clean-shaven, with a bit of five-o’clock shadow. His thick dark hair was swept back like the movie stars whose photos she saw on posters at the theater in Grass Creek. And his eyes were green. He was the most handsome man she’d ever seen. And she’d seen her share of Englishers in town.

He was carrying something in his right hand. She peered more closely to see what it was. A wallet? No—it was a badge.

She froze. Police? What would an officer of the law want with their community?