Keeping Watch: Heart of the Night\Accidental Bodyguard (32 page)

His mouth paused in its drifting caress, and after a long moment he lifted his head again. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.

“That the debutantes of Atlanta must have been feeling very deprived for the last few years, bless their little diamond-encrusted hearts.”

“Debutantes?” The crease she had noticed before was between the dark brows.

“I had a picture of you—” she began, and then she realized for the first time what had become of that picture and all the others.

“How could you have a picture of me?”

“From the paper’s files,” she said, not really thinking about what he had asked. Thinking about Kahler, about Kahler’s hands searching through her things, finding the folder with those pictures. Violated, she thought again. He had violated her privacy, and so he had known all along how she felt about Thorne Barrington.

“Kate?” Thorne asked.

“I had a collection of pictures. Pictures from before…before the bomb. He took them,” she whispered, feeling sick despite the fact that Kahler was dead and Thorne was holding her.

“Took them?” he repeated, and then suddenly he understood. “
Kahler
took them?”

She nodded. “He must have taken them when he put the confetti—”
Into the bed they were sharing.

“Don’t,” he whispered, and his arms tightened around her. “It’s over. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He held her, and eventually there was a relaxation of the tension that had been in her body. And then he asked, his deep voice touched with the amusement she liked to hear there, more cherished perhaps because it was rare and often unexpected. “Tell me about the debutantes.”

She laughed, remembering how many times she had looked at that picture. Envying those women because they knew him and she hadn’t. “They were all looking at you,” she said. She lifted her hand and ran her thumb along the line of his bottom lip. “Like they could eat you up with a spoon.”

“And?” He caught her thumb in his mouth, holding it.

“That was all. Just looking at you. I used to look at that picture and wonder what you were really like.”

“Now you know,” he said. He had released her thumb, but he turned his head to press a kiss into her open palm.

“Not anything like I thought you’d be,” she said. She put her hand over his cheek, the stubble rough against the smoothness of her skin.

“Disappointed?” he asked.

“No,” she said. She moved her head against the damp sheets, side to side. “No,” she said again, “I’m not disappointed.”

“I just aim to please,” he said softly. Another Southernism.

“Your aim’s pretty good. Practice make you perfect?”

She regretted the question as soon as she asked it. She had no right. No rights at all where he was concerned. She had given herself to him freely, willingly, without any vows or commitments. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to be, not the way she’d been raised, and now she knew why. It hurt too much to realize that he could go back to that life tomorrow. There was no reason now for him
not
to go back, she realized. Back to what he had been before.

He didn’t say anything. There was a code about that, too. Gentlemen never discussed their conquests, no matter how numerous they were.

Deliberately she moved her gaze away from his. She focused on his mouth, as sensuous, she now knew, as it looked.

“Kate,” he said, and she forced her eyes up.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I always knew that—”

“I love you. Don’t you know that?”

She couldn’t think of a single teasing answer. Men said that all the time. It didn’t mean anything anymore. Just something they said. But still she took a breath, so hard it was almost a sob.

“How could you not know I love you?” he asked.

“Because you never told me. And then these last weeks, I didn’t hear from you. How was I supposed—”

“You just know,” he said. “You have to know. I love you, Kate August. Maybe I’m not much of a bargain, but—”

“I guess you haven’t been reading your press. Or checking your bank balance,” she said, smiling at him, beginning to believe him, maybe because she wanted to believe so much. Or because she recognized the doubt in his voice. It was one of the things she’d liked about him from the first—that he really didn’t seem to know how attractive he was.

He didn’t say anything, and she wondered if she had gone too far. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t care about that.”

“I know,” he said.

They were quiet for a while until then he said, “Tell me about the pictures.”

She laughed. “I’ll bet that’s a real ego trip. To know I obsessed about you. Drooled over your pictures.”

“Considering what I
thought
you thought about me.”

“Now you know better.”

“What exactly do I know?” he asked, the dark eyes smiling at her.

“That I love you. That I’ve loved you for a very long time, even before I knew you. That’s why I came to find you.”

“Into the darkness,” he said softly.

She put her mouth against his, which turned, fitting over hers. Meant to fit. It seemed she had always known that.

Bless their little deprived hearts,
she thought again, and then she smiled.

Accidental Bodyguard

Julie Miller

Prologue

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.

—William Shakespeare

King Richard III

Faith Monroe slipped her key into the lock of her office door and halted as the reinforced steel barrier drifted open with barely a nudge.

What the heck?
She glanced over each shoulder up and down the corridor. She was alone, right?

Seven in the morning wasn’t all that early in her experience. The security guard at the front desk, Danny Novotny, had teased her about keeping farm girl hours, and beating everyone else to work. She was just interested in beating Saint Louis’s rush hour traffic.

So who else was in here?

Her initial confusion became a cautious suspicion. Her boss might have worked through the night, but the 10:00 p.m. or 6:00 a.m. security check would have either locked him in or locked up after he’d gone. Logic, if not the unsettled feeling in her gut, told her something was wrong.

“Hello?” She pushed the door open the rest of the way. “Dr. Rutherford?”

The sterile glass-and-steel architecture of the Eclipse Building had always seemed cold and uninviting to Faith. Its ultramodern design left her doubly chilled in the pall of silence that swallowed up the traces of her Ozark accent.

What was going on? Faith twisted her mouth into a frown and stepped inside. Eclipse Labs was a company that preached security at every staff meeting. An open door like this was cause for a reprimand in someone’s file. Probably hers. Not an auspicious beginning to her fledgling career.

Even if it wasn’t her fault. She didn’t make mistakes like this.

She’d locked that door yesterday evening. “Dr. Rutherford? It’s Faith. Are you okay?”

Sometimes she relished the quiet, like when she watched the peaceful sunrise over the river on her uncle’s farm. But this was too quiet. The charged air filled her with the sense of something or someone holding its breath and waiting. Waiting for the chance to exhale and break the false calm. She hated that kind of watching, creeping silence, and all the monsters and villains and nightmares her imagination could fill it with.

Her skin shattered with goose bumps as her imagination tried to kick in. But she was stronger than that. She flipped on the light switch and looked around.

Everything looked normal. Her desk was tidy, the chair pushed in. Her lab coat hung over the back of the chair. But something wasn’t right. Was something missing? Out of place?

The blinds had been pulled along the glass partition that divided her office from Chief Design Engineer William Rutherford’s. But the door to his office stood wide-open, giving her a glimpse of indistinguishable shadows inside. Another open door. Faith’s pulse quickened in her veins.

“Dr. Rutherford?” She hastened through the doorway, reaching for the lamp on his desk. The toe of her shoe collided with something hard and unyielding. “Ow!”

Too small to be one of the guest chairs. Feeling her way around the obstacle, Faith leaned across the cluttered desktop and switched on the lamp, flooding the room with light.

And plunging her into the middle of chaos.

“Dr. Rutherford? William!”

Her boss had been hired at the think tank for his brain, not his neatness. But as she spun around, stumbling over the broken humidor that had once sat atop his desk, crushing scattered papers beneath her feet, she knew this was more than an aging absentminded professor’s mess.

Every desk drawer had been pulled out and tossed onto the floor. Every file cabinet had been jimmied open, their contents spilled around the room. His sketch table had been turned over. And his computer—her gaze swept the room once more—the hard drive tower was completely gone.

“William?” Faith hitched the long strap of her purse over her neck and shoulder, freeing her hands to climb over the debris toward the reinforced stainless steel door that led from the office into Rutherford’s private lab. If anything had happened to that dear, sweet…

The earsplitting screech of metal colliding against metal shot through her eardrums. The sound ended in a muffled thud on the opposite side of the door. “Doctor!”

Faith snatched at the door handle, but the damn thing was locked. She pounded against it. “Dr. Rutherford, answer me.”

Silence.

“Hell.” With a fumbling sense of urgency, Faith tugged at her ID card which was around her neck. But the cord snagged on a button, then twisted in the collar of her blouse. Spurred on by the chainlike rattle of dragging metal from inside the lab, she gave up trying to free herself and leaned over and swiped the card through the automated lock that sealed the door. “Doctor?”

Why didn’t he answer?

Faith shut off the panic that clouded her mind and tried to recall the code numbers she needed to punch in. She hit the keypad. Four. Three. No.

A frustrated curse growled in her throat. She hit Clear and swiped the card again. “Three. Four. K. Zero—”

The latch clicked and the door swung open, shoving her back into the room. “Faith?”

“Dr. Rutherford. What’s going—?” The portly, balding man staggered through the doorway and lunged for her. “Doctor?”

A flash of bright crimson blurred before her eyes as he hugged her and collapsed, dragging them both to the floor. “Faith—” His words came on a ragged, wheezing gasp. “Listen—”

A fit of coughing seized him, but it was a shallow, pitiful sound that told her he was barely able to breathe. She pulled herself up to a sitting position and cradled his head and shoulders in her lap. “Shh. Don’t try to talk.” She pulled her cell phone from her purse. “I’ll call security.”

“No—” With a startling burst of energy he snatched her wrist and jerked her hand down to his chest. “No…” He tried to catch a breath. “Don’t trust…security.”

A gooey, gel-like substance stuck to her skin as his fingers weakened and fell away. Faith gasped and struggled to take a breath of her own.

“Oh, God.” The red stuff was blood. The front of his white lab coat was soaked in it. Her first aid skills dated back to her Girl Scout days, but she pushed aside his coat and the sticky front of his shirt to check his wound. “Don’t talk.”

“No, you must—”

“Shh.” She urged him to conserve the energy that was quickly draining from his body. Her fingertips slid inside an oozing crevice that felt like raw meat. “Oh, God. William.”

He’d been stabbed. Cut through the belly more than once.

Faith felt her own blood rushing toward her feet, leaving her light-headed. She breathed in deeply, willing herself to stay calm and lucid. She looked down into the inventor’s wan brown eyes and stroked his clammy forehead to reassure him. She gently pulled free of his token grip on her wrist and punched three numbers on her phone. “You need to let me call an ambulance.”

His head bobbed from side to side. “Too late—” He squeezed her hand in a trembling fist and disconnected the call. “He’s here.”

“Who? Who’s here?” Since help wasn’t coming, she pressed her hand against the worst of the wounds and tried to staunch the bleeding herself. But he’d already lost so much blood. “Who did this to you?”

“Copperhead.” He puffed out the word on a strangled breath.

“This is no snake bite.”

“No—” Oh, damn, why couldn’t she understand? The man was killing himself trying to communicate with her. With shaky, stiff-jointed fingers he pulled a white handkerchief from the pocket of his lab coat and pushed it into her palm. “Take—”

“What is it?” A souvenir of her three brief months as his assistant? She clutched it tight. “What should I—”

A crash of glass and metal exploded from the interior of the lab complex. Faith jumped in her skin. “Oh, God.”

“Searching…won’t find—”

The Eclipse Building was constructed in the shape of a wheel, and whoever had trashed this office was moving inward, toward the most securely designed rooms at the hub of the complex. But searching for what? The design for a newer, better toaster? Hardly worth stabbing a man. But she was too new to the design team to be privy to its innermost secrets. She could only shudder with fearful anticipation as the sounds of unimpeded destruction continued.

She stuffed the handkerchief into the front pocket of her navy slacks. “Doctor, what’s going on?”

With a massive heave of determination, he snaked his bloody hand up around her neck and pulled her ear down to his mouth. He sputtered and wheezed against her temple. “Dar…n…Fry.”

“What and fries?” She frowned and shook her head, not understanding his guttural whisper.

He grew heavy in her arms. She adjusted him in her lap, supporting his head and watching every nuance of his expression to help her comprehend his cryptic message. He took a breath and steeled his body for one last, life-draining effort. “Darien.”

A name. She repeated it. “Darien.”