Bodyguard (37 page)

“No. But it’s close,” he admitted. “I know that’s really screwed up, but …” He’d been running so long with anger and revenge as his fuel, he couldn’t just shut it off. He wanted Trotta. He burned to bring the bastard down.

But Allie didn’t condemn him. She just kept letting him hold her hand. “So what are you going to do?” she asked again.

“I’m good at what I do,” he told her. “I hate it, though, working for the Bureau. But I’m good at it, I know it, so it’s really hard to think about quitting. Isn’t that fucked up?”

“No,” she said.

“Yeah, it is.” He was the one who finally pulled his hand free. “I suck at relationships. I always have. So what am I thinking about doing? Quitting the thing I know I’m good at to go do the thing I’ve never really gotten right.”

“You don’t suck at relationships—”

“I do. Look at my track record. Sonya. Christ. My entire marriage was a joke. You know, I didn’t know if Em was even my kid until after she was born and we ran paternity tests. Sonya told me it was my fault she started sleeping around—that she was looking for the kind of connection I didn’t give her.”

Allie was quiet, just letting him talk.

“I don’t know what she wanted,” he told her, his anger keeping his tears at bay. “I mean, I honestly don’t have a fucking clue what it was I didn’t give her, and that scares me to death because it means I’m just going to keep on making the same mistake over and over again with anybody I ever try to have any kind of relationship with, you know? Kevin was the only person I could ever just be with, the only person I didn’t have to work at being around.”

It had been that way with Allie, too, but he didn’t dare say that aloud.

“Maybe it was her fault,” she said softly. “Maybe all this time you’ve been great at relationships, and Sonya was the one with the problems. Or maybe it was something
in between. Part your fault, part hers. It sure seems as if it was at least part hers, because in my experience, the way to strengthen a relationship is not to jump in bed with someone else.”

“I feel like I’m unraveling,” Harry said. He’d never talked about any of this with anyone ever before.

“You once told me maybe it was time to get rid of Alessandra Lamont. Well, maybe it’s time to let Harry O’Dell unravel a little bit.”

He shook his head. He wasn’t sure he could do this.

“What do you want to do?” she asked him. “What do you really want, Harry? It’s your life, your choice. Either stay or go. But if you’re going, please, do me a favor and leave now.”

Harry looked at her, sitting there across from him. Her hair drooped in her eyes, and she wasn’t wearing even the least little bit of makeup. Her T-shirt hid her body, and her jeans came from the bargain bin at Target.

She didn’t want him to leave. He could tell from the I-don’t-care angle to chin that she did, in fact, care.

What did he want? He wanted her to care, that much he knew.

“I want to stay,” he said, and the sheer truth of his words unraveled him a whole lot more. “Please.” His voice shook like a four-year-old’s. “Can I stay?”

“I think he’s finally sleeping now,” Allie told Marge. “He took a shower and shaved, and I made him something to eat. He wanted to go right over there tonight and talk to Shaun, but I told him I didn’t think you were leaving for Denver tomorrow until about noon. I don’t think he’s slept in more than a week, and frankly, he looks awful. I told him I was afraid he’d scare Shaun to death. He has a better chance of looking human in the morning.”

Marge was silent for a moment on the other end of the phone.

“We talked for about five hours,” Allie told her. “He knows Shaun needs more than an apology, and he seems open to doing whatever it takes. If you know any counselors, maybe someone over at the college, that Shaun might be comfortable going to with Harry …?”

She and Harry had talked for a long time about all the different ways he could rebuild his relationship with his kids, but they’d both completely skirted the issue of exactly what his remaining in Hardy would mean to the two of them.

“I can’t promise that Shaun is going to greet him with open arms,” Marge finally said. “But I will make sure he’s home in the morning. Bless you, Allie. Can you get Harry over here by ten?”

“I’m not responsible for this,” Allie told her new friend. “Harry will be there because he wants to be there. And … brace yourself, Marge, because he’s planning to move in.”

“Oh, thank God.” Marge’s voice was thick with tears. “And thank you. You may not think you’re responsible, but you’re a good friend to him.”

A good friend. As Allie hung up the phone, she knew she had to take care not to be too good a friend to Harry. He was asleep in her bed, and—for her own sake—she had to camp tonight on the couch. She would not climb in with him. She couldn’t risk hurting herself that way again.

She took Harry’s clothes from the washing machine in the kitchen and put them in the dryer.

She put on her pajamas in the bathroom, scrubbed her face, and brushed her teeth.

Then she went into the bedroom to get an extra blanket from the closet and to take one of the pillows from
the bed. She moved quietly, even though he’d been completely exhausted and she didn’t think anything would disturb him.

She was wrong.

He stirred, rolling over, as if he’d been forcing himself to stay at least half awake, listening for her, waiting for her.

“Allie, can I hold you?”

His words from just last night echoed in her head. Is that smart? Again, the answer was a resounding no. But sometimes the right thing to do wasn’t smart.

She slipped into the bed beside him, needing to feel his arms around her as much as he needed to hold her.

As he held her close, she heard him sigh.

And without another word, Harry slept.

And Allie lay in the dark and loved him, even though she knew it wasn’t the smartest thing to do.

C
HRIST, HE SHOULDN’T
still be here.

Harry’s face was buried in Allie’s hair, his legs intertwined with hers, his arms still tightly wrapped around her as the morning light brightened her bedroom walls.

What the hell was he doing here?

But then he remembered. He’d come to her last night, a complete wreck. She’d brought him inside, fed him and cleaned him up, and let him rant and rave for hours and hours.

She’d listened, asked questions, and helped him sort through his options, helped him make a battle plan for the beginning of the rest of his life.

She’d done all that for him—including climb into bed with him when he’d asked. She done it even though she didn’t owe him anything—except maybe a big kick in the pants.

She stirred, turning toward him as she opened her eyes then froze, as if he were the last person in the world she’d expect to find in her bed ever again.

“Hi,” he said. A brilliant opening. Witty, yet concise.

She was wearing those silly flannel pajamas she seemed to like so much, but his hand had slipped between the top and the bottom to rest against the smoothness of her back. At this proximity, the freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose were so adorable his heart nearly
stopped, the blue of her eyes the closest thing to perfection he’d ever seen.

She gazed into his eyes for a long moment, searching, then shook her head slightly. “Harry, I don’t want—”

He kissed her, unwilling to hear what it was she didn’t want. She resisted for all of one one-hundredth of a second before she melted against him. And when he deepened the kiss, she was right there with him.

It was wrong of him to do this, wrong of him to rid her of all that flannel so he could feel the smoothness of her skin against him. It was wrong of him to touch her the way he was touching her, to kiss her harder, deeper, to settle between her legs and to enter her with one smooth thrust as she raised her hips, inviting him to do just that.

He pulled out right away. What was he doing? When it came to this woman, he was completely out of control. “Condom,” he said.

“Top drawer,” she answered.

If there was a Guinness World Speed Record for that sort of thing, he would have broken it, no question.

Still, she pulled him back to her as if he’d taken ten years instead of ten seconds, and within moments she had him exactly where he’d been before sanity had taken over. She began to move beneath him, slowly, languorously. It was delicious, the perfect sleepy pace for the early-morning hour. He moved with her, pushing himself hard and deep, but still so slowly, inside her, and her arms tightened around him.

“Yes,” she whispered.

One thing about Allie, when it came to sex, she knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t shy about getting it. Still, he’d cut her off before. She’d been about to speak.

“What don’t you want?” Harry asked, lifting his head to look down at her. “Tell me what you were going to say.”

Her eyes were half closed, and she made a soft sound of pleasure as he slowly filled her again.

“I was going to say I don’t want to make love to you right now,” she told him. She smiled crookedly. “I think it’s safe to assume I wasn’t being quite honest.”

He hesitated. “Are you sure, Al? Because …”

Because what? Because he cared more about her than he’d let her believe? Because this wasn’t just mindless sex, it was making love—it had been right from the start. He’d just been too damn blind to see.

He was in love with this woman, completely, hopelessly in love with her.

He’d sat there last night, talking about staying in town, talking about how hard it was for him to give up his hunt for Michael Trotta, talking about the best way to regain Shaun and Emily’s trust and love. But he’d been too chicken to bring up his feelings for Allie. Too scared to ask what he could do to regain her trust and maybe, dear God, gain her love. Too afraid to tell her that he loved her, afraid to mention marriage, afraid she’d look at him again with that pity in her eyes.

So he’d said nothing at all.

Allie pressed him even more deeply inside of her and he felt like crying, it was so good. “Kiss me, Harry,” she murmured.

He did, as sweetly and as tenderly as he possibly could, hoping she’d know from his kiss just how much he truly loved her.

Shaun stopped short as he went into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” Harry said.

Out of all the people he expected to see sitting at the kitchen table, his father was probably one hundred and forty-two on the list.

His knee-jerk reaction was to turn around and walk out of the room. Go back upstairs.

Instead, he went to the cabinet and opened it, pretending he was taking his time to choose between Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Frosted Flakes, when in truth he never had anything but Cheerios for breakfast. “Who let you in?” he asked, his back still turned.

He heard Harry shift in his seat. “Actually, I have a key.” He cleared his throat. “Which is good, seeing as how I’m going to be moving in.”

“Here?” Shaun turned to face him.

“Yeah.” Harry had obviously made an effort to clean himself up before coming over. His hair was freshly cut, his chin clean shaven, his jeans slightly stiff from the wash.

“You’re going to live here?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean … when you’re in town?”

“Yeah.”

Shaun turned back to the cereal. Of course that’s what he’d meant. And of course, Harry was in town only once a year. “Yeah, right.”

“Which is going to be all the time from now on,” Harry added, “seeing as how I’m going to be faxing my boss a letter of resignation on Monday.”

All the time. Hope raced through him, but Shaun ruthlessly crushed it back. If he’d learned anything over the past two years, it was that hope only made the disappointment hurt worse.

He took down the Cheerios from the cabinet, his movements jerky as he opened the box and poured some into a bowl. “You’re quitting your job, and that’s supposed to just make it all better? You move back, and we’re one big happy family? Just like that, you’re den
dad for Em’s Brownie troop, and oh, hey, maybe you could help coach my baseball team.”

“I will if that’s what you want.”

Shaun slammed his bowl onto the table and the Cheerios went flying. “No, Dad, it’s not what I want because I don’t have a goddamn baseball team. Kevin was into baseball. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not Kevin. I’m a dancer. I happen to love to dance.” He took the milk from the fridge and poured some into his bowl, sloshing it over the side. “And no, before you even ask, just because I’m a dancer doesn’t mean I’m gay, all right?” He sat down at the table and began shoveling cereal into his mouth.

“Slow down,” Harry said. “That’s a good way to get a stomachache. I know you’re a dancer, and I guess I assumed that since you’re only fourteen, questions about your sexual preferences wouldn’t really be an issue yet. But maybe I’m wrong—I’m the first to admit I’m way out of touch.”

Shaun snorted. “Understatement of the year.”

Harry cleared his throat, as if maybe this wasn’t as easy for him as he was pretending. “I understand you’ve got an audition down in Denver today for a summer dance troupe.”