Bodyguard (28 page)

And he knew. Right at that moment. Right when her lips brushed his, he realized he was in serious, serious trouble. Whatever had just happened here had been way, way more meaningful than the casual, everyday scenario in which the vacationing FBI agent did the nasty thing with the former chief eyewitness, simply to relieve boredom.

“Congratulations,” Allie said, kissing him again.

“What? Why?”

She smiled up at him again, touching the side of his face. “I don’t know—it just seemed like the right thing to say after three years of celibacy. Too bad we don’t have a bottle of champagne to open.” Her smile turned warmer. “I would make a toast. Something like ‘Here’s to it not taking another three years before you get some again.’ ”

Harry laughed as he rolled off her and pulled her into his arms.

“Just in case it’s not blatantly obvious,” Alessandra said as she snuggled against him, sighing as he ran his fingers up and down the smoothness of her bare back, “I’m in favor of you not waiting another three years.”

Back away. Back away. Distant alarm bells started sounding in Harry’s head. She was getting too close. She was assuming this was the beginning of an ongoing relationship. And God knows that would only be trouble.

She lifted her head and gave him another of her killer smiles. “In fact, I’m in favor of not even waiting three hours.”

Harry kissed her. What was he supposed to do? After she said something like that, something that made his
hair stand on end with anticipation? Was he really supposed to not kiss her?

“You know what’s funny?” she asked, propping her head up on one elbow to look at him.

He shook his head, losing himself in the calm blue ocean of her eyes.

“Since this mess started, I’ve resigned myself to never having as good a life as I had before—you know, huge house, three cars, lots of money. I thought I was going to have to work hard to keep myself from making comparisons and always having things come up short.” She touched the side of his face. “But all of a sudden, I’m in the best place I’ve ever been in my entire life.”

Her words should have made him leap up and out of that bed and start running for the mountains. Those bells in his head should have been shaking his brains loose with the noise of their alarm. Instead they were nearly drowned out by the sound of his heartbeat, by the roar of the blood rushing through his body. And instead of wanting to run away, he wanted to kiss her again.

So he did.

He was assuredly in big trouble, but trouble had never tasted quite so sweet.

“He doesn’t know where his partner is.” Kim closed her eyes, trying to keep her voice even, almost matter-of-fact as she stood in the cool night air at the pay phone four blocks from George’s apartment. “If you want, I’ll stay close to him, but I think—”

“I’m not paying you to think.” Michael Trotta’s normally smooth voice was tight. “Just stick like glue to Faulkner. Become permanently joined at the hips. Use that vacuum cleaner you’ve got for a mouth on him, day and night, if you have to. Sooner or later, he’s going to
find out where O’Dell has Alessandra hidden, and I want you to be on top of him when he does.”

With a click, Michael hung up the phone.

Kim was sweating. She’d soaked the underarms of her favorite silk blouse just from talking on the phone with him. She stood for a long moment, the phone still tucked against her ear, regaining her equilibrium.

Who was this woman that Michael was looking for? And why on earth was he so bound and determined to find her?

Kim had seen her photo in a file on George’s desk. Alessandra Lamont was one of those beautiful, icy, frigid blondes. She was the type of woman Michael would really enjoy being seen with, never mind that she was someone else’s wife. Never mind that she probably gave head with all the enthusiasm of a dead hamster.

Her husband had swiped a million dollars out from under Trotta’s nose. Had he done that because he knew his wife was doing the mob boss? Was that what this was about? Jealousy and revenge?

Michael had had the husband killed, Kim had no doubt about that. Had that hit really been about the money, or had Michael simply grabbed an opportunity to have the blonde all for himself?

But now this Alessandra had run off with George’s partner, perhaps triggering yet another round of jealousy and revenge.

Kim knew Michael well enough to know that running away was never an option. No one could ever run far enough. No one could hide forever.

Kim finally hung up the phone, fixing her hair as she headed back toward George’s apartment. She had to remember to stop at the market and pick up some Häagen-Dazs ice cream. That was the excuse she’d given George
for going out in the first place in the middle of the night. It would look very strange if she returned without it.

Her life was a mess, no question about it. She often wished she could be someone else, just magically take on their existence, their life. But today she was very glad she was Kim Monahan and not Alessandra Lamont.

Whoever she had been to Michael, wherever she was hiding, whatever the reason he wanted to find her, Alessandra Lamont was as good as dead.

“A
LLIE?
Y
OU STILL
awake?”

Alessandra smiled. It was bizarre. She was starting to really like when Harry called her that. “Yes.”

She was lying nestled against him, his hand cupped possessively on her breast, his leg thrown across hers.

“I’ve been thinking.” His voice was rough from the lateness of the hour, and his breath was warm on the back of her neck.

Lord, all he had to do was breathe on her and she wanted him again. She could feel the tip of her breast tightening beneath his hand.

But it wasn’t just her. The relentless attraction was mutual. She could feel the weight of his growing arousal against her leg. He shifted slightly, as if to try to hide it, but there was no way she could have missed it.

Harry took his hand from her breast and pulled his leg back onto his own side of the bed, shifting so that he was sitting up and not touching her at all.

She turned toward him, missing his warmth.

“I know this is a little bit after the fact,” he told her. He’d turned on the bathroom light earlier and left the door open a crack so that it wasn’t pitch-dark in the room. But the way he was sitting, his face was completely in shadow. “And I probably should have said this before we … um, did what we did …”

“Made love,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, shifting slightly. “See, well, that’s kind of what we need to talk about because the words that popped into my head were ‘fucked our brains out,’ and there’s a big difference between those two definitions of the same event. Made love implies … certain promises that the other doesn’t. I really don’t want you to get the wrong idea about what’s happening here. I can’t make you any promises, Allie. And I’m sorry, I really should have told you that while we still had our clothes on.”

He took a deep breath, and she just waited for him to continue. “I feel bad about saying this to you now, you know? But it wasn’t an intentional oversight, I swear. I like you, I really like you—far too much to disrespect you that way. I just … I’ve wanted you for so long, and suddenly there you were, giving yourself to me. I wasn’t thinking about what expectations you might have. I wasn’t thinking at all.”

He didn’t love her. Harry was telling her he didn’t love her, and Alessandra nearly laughed out loud.

Too many men had said those words to her. I love you. They’d used it to try to lure her into their arms for an hour or a night or even longer. She’d heard it so often, starting back when she was a young teenager, it hadn’t taken her long to know it meant nothing. They loved the way she looked. They loved the idea of being seen with someone as beautiful as she had been. Even though they said the words, they didn’t love her.

But in her entire life, no man, not even Griffin to whom she’d been married for seven very long years, had ever told her that he liked her.

Until now.

Harry really liked her. It had nothing to do with the
way she looked—how could it, the way she looked now? He liked her. He liked Allie, the person she was inside.

Her heart had never felt so full.

And she had never felt so uncertain and afraid. Had she found this potentially wonderful relationship with this impossibly honest, painfully attractive, down-to-earth man, only to have it taken away from her right away?

“I’ve known from the start that you’ve got to go back to New York sooner or later, so I guess my only expectations were that we’d end up in bed again during the week or so you stayed in town,” she said, choosing her words carefully. She pulled the blanket up so that it covered her breasts, aware that he was looking at her, aware that she was not hidden by the shadows. “But if you don’t want that—”

“Whoa,” Harry interrupted. “That’s not what I said. I’ll be in your bed every night as long as I’m here, if you’ll let me. I just didn’t want you to, you know, start choosing the china pattern, because that’s not where this is heading.”

“Harry, believe me, I don’t want to marry you.” She didn’t want to marry anybody. At least not within the next few years or so. It would be insane to get involved in a permanent relationship at this stage of her life. She didn’t even really have an identity yet. She was smack at the start of discovering who she really was, who she was going to be for the rest of her life. She needed to learn about herself before she could be effective as half a couple. Didn’t she? And on top of that, she was in hiding.

“I just spent seven years married,” she continued. “And as much as I like you, too, I have a feeling our relationship would be a little bit too much like the one I just got out of. As tempting as it is to be taken care of, I don’t want to be someone’s possession again.”

Harry was quiet for a moment. “Well, I’m a little insulted
you think being with me would be anything like it was with Griffin. But it’s stupid to feel insulted because it’s a moot point, right? We’re not going to go past this.” He gestured to where they were on the bed.

“Maybe we shouldn’t make any rules about what we are or aren’t going to do,” Alessandra said, still carefully. “Maybe we can just play it by ear. I like being with you—you make me laugh, and you’re great in bed. And you said you like me, too, so …” She felt a flush of warmth as she said the words aloud. He liked her. “So let’s spend the next week … Well, you can call it whatever you want to, I still prefer ‘making love.’ ”

“No promises,” Harry said again.

There was a lot she wouldn’t promise him. She wouldn’t promise that she wouldn’t do something very foolish and fall in love with him. She wouldn’t promise she wouldn’t try to make him fall in love with her, too. Real love. True love. The kind that starts out as liking and grows from respect.

She loved that Harry respected her, nearly as much as she loved the fact that he liked her.

“I’ll only make you one promise,” she said as she straddled him, the sheet sliding off her. “And that’s that I intend to let you sleep very little over the next week or so.”

Harry laughed and pulled her up against him. “That’s the kind of promise I can live with.” Then he kissed her long and hard on the mouth.

“What the hell is this?” Kim stood in the dining-room doorway, holding her fake-fur coat closed, staring at the feast on the table.

“Wow, you got home fast.” George smiled, spreading his hands. “I figured since I can’t take you out to dinner, I’d get dinner to come to us.”

“Dinner?” Kim said. “This is about dinner? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, George!” She stormed down the hall toward the bedroom.

It wasn’t the response he’d expected. He’d imagined she’d be surprised in a positive way, pleased that he’d gone to such lengths to make her happy. He slipped his crutches under his arms and followed her.

“It’s Italian. From La Venitia. You love La Venitia.”

She whirled to face him, and he realized that beneath her coat she was wearing only a red velvet thong and matching heels.

“You scared me to death. I get off stage, and Carol’s standing there with a message that you called, that you needed me to get home quick, that it was urgent. Urgent, George! I’m having a heart attack, thinking you fell, thinking your stitches somehow opened up and you were bleeding to death, thinking something awful might’ve happened. I call you back, and the line’s freakin’ busy. I don’t even bother to change. I just grab my coat and run. I couldn’t find a cab—I ran all the way here.” She pulled off her coat and threw it onto the bed. Her bare breasts were covered with the body glitter she wore to dance, and they sparkled with each ragged breath she took. She sat down, pulling off her shoes. “Now I’m sweating like a pig and I’ve got blisters on my heels the size of donuts.”

George sat next to her on the bed, laying his crutches on the floor beside him. “Oh, God, babe. I’m so sorry. I had no idea you would be worried. I just wanted you to get home quick, while the food was still hot.”

He reached down and took her foot into his hands. She’d only exaggerated a little bit about the blisters. While the skin hadn’t broken, her heels looked red and sore.