The Last Thing You See (3 page)

I couldn’t get Nick out of my mind. Even if I had
wanted
to, it didn’t help that the attack was all anybody was talking about, not only in interviews but everywhere else I went too.  It was probably too much to hope for that hospital security was keeping the reporters away from him, but I hoped so anyway.

Everybody kept asking me about how much of an ordeal it was, and if I was scared.  I probably should have been frightened, my attacker was still out there after all, but I wasn’t.

The image of the man coming at me with that cup
did
flash through my dreams a couple of times, but then I saw Nick and those eyes of his.  The cool blue of them calmed me and I felt safe again.

I also had an interesting idea.  A cunning plan to get to know him better and if things got a little physical, then so be it.  Maybe there was a place in my life where he might fit in, maybe he was the missing piece of my puzzle.

I couldn’t get away the next day, it was too hectic, but the day after was a different story.  My brother had driven and accompanied me to an interview on a radio show and when I asked if I could maybe drop him off somewhere and take the car, he said he could get some friends to meet up for lunch.  Wheels ahoy.

When I arrived back in Nick’s room at the hospital, I was happy to see him without the oxygen mask, but I would have been lying to say I was glad for the hospital gown he was now wearing under the sheets.  A goofy grin forced its way on to my face when he looked at me. Damn, he was hot.

“I’m back!”

“Hi, Harper.”  His voice was croaky but sounded mostly pain-free.

“It talks!”

“Getting there.  Thanks for visiting again, you didn’t have to do that.  I don’t know what I was thinking, you must be really busy,” he said.

“Who, me?  Nah.  Besides, what’s more important than visiting my favorite human shield?”

“Well, when you put it like that…”

“Seriously though, it’s good to see you getting better so quickly.  I don’t know if I could have lived with myself if, well, you know.”

“Well, like I said, it’s not your fault some guy went nuts.”

Nick paused to take a sip of his water and I glanced around the room, seeing that the only real splash of color was still the bouquet my mom sent, though it was already showing signs of wilting.

“Still only allowing the very highest quality visitors through?  Or doesn’t your family like to give flowers?” I asked.

One side of his mouth rose in a rueful smirk.  “There’s just nobody that would want to visit me, really.  My parents are gone and I’m an only child.  My buddy from the Marines, the one who got me the security job, he dropped by, but that’s about it.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“It’s OK, it happened a while ago now.”

“No special someone?” I asked.

The way Nick’s face dropped, I felt like if I hadn’t managed to get my foot
all
the way into my mouth with the question about his family, I’d got that sucker down to the ankle with this one.  I saw his jaw muscles working as he clenched them and stared down at the water bottle in his hand in tight-lipped silence for a few seconds.

“No,” he finally forced out.

“So, when are you likely to get out of this place?” I asked, desperate to change the subject.

“Today, actually.  They say they’ve observed enough, I’ll get a prescription for some kind of cream or ointment or something and I’m good to go.”

“That’s great!  Will you be able to work now?”

“Well, I’m not sure.  I’ll have to check with my buddy, but maybe not.  I can probably stand around as a deterrent, but if something happens, I might not be as effective as I should be and that’s likely to be a problem.”

“Are you going to be OK for money?”

“Yeah, I’ve got enough tucked away, this was just a temp job anyway while I was passing through.  You don’t have to feel like you need to pay for anything, if that’s what you mean,” he said.

“Well, that’s not
quite
what I meant, but I did have an idea yesterday.  If you can’t do your other work, you probably won’t be able to do this right away either
but
, how about a job?”

“What?  Like as a bodyguard?”

“No.  I need some help with one of my movies.”

“Princess Sundancer needs some new dance moves?”

I laughed.  “No, it’s the sequel for Dark Fox, I need to do some hand-to-hand combat training because this one is going to be a lot more physical.  I figured with you having been in the army…”

“Marines.”

“Sorry, yeah, Marines.  I figured you might be able to help with my training.  What do you say?”

“Um…”

“Like a couple of hours a week, starting in two or three weeks?”

Nick clasped his hands together in front of his mouth and let out a little ‘hmm’, his eyes looking first down and to the left and then back up to me as he pondered.  His brows furrowed in worry about something before I heard him sigh and his hands went back to his lap.

“Please?” I asked.

“That actually sounds really interesting.  I’ve trained a few people in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu before, and a couple hours a week I could easily fit around the other job, if I’m even working it again by then.  I mean, it’d definitely take the financial edge off the time I’m away now.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Yeah.”

“Thank you!”

“Shouldn’t I be thanking
you
?” he asked.  “I’m the one that just got a job, aren’t I?”

Maybe he
had
just gotten a job, but I still owed him a hell of a lot more than he owed me.  I walked around to the side of his bed and stuck out my hand, which he shook after a moment.  The warmth of him spread up my arm and I felt like I was glowing.

Orson drove the car and I went over my notes.  Every time I went out promoting a movie it felt like the questions were all the same.  In a way, that was a good thing. It was easier to prepare for.

What was it like to work with a director like Christian Vicario?  What was it like to work on screen with an actor like Lucas Collins?  How are you the same or different to your character, Pandora?  Variations of these questions were a given.

Now, even though technically I was promoting Pandora Rising, there were going to be a lot of questions about the attack, and about Nick too.  Who was this man who came out of nowhere?  What’s his story?

People expected me to have the answers, but I didn’t.  All I had was a vague idea of what I
wanted
his story to be, and that wasn’t something for me to be talking about on national television.

The thought of him was making it difficult to concentrate on the pieces of paper in front of me.  I’d looked up some video clips of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and some of those positions looked pretty intimate, to say the least.  If I was having trouble now, how could I possibly focus when he was between my legs?

“So,” Orson interrupted an inappropriate thought, “Mom told me you went to see that guy in the hospital.”

“Nick.  Yeah, I did.  What did she say?”

“Well, you know Mom, it’s not what she said but how she said it.”

“And how was that?”

“She said this interview we’re going to now is one that had to be rescheduled because you blew it off the other day, and she’s raving about your reputation and how Jay and Maria won’t schedule you again and blah, blah, blah,” he said.

“Oh, come on.  How can she be so heartless?  Has she forgotten what he did already?”

“She’s not heartless, you know she’s got your best interests in mind.  She’s just very… driven.”

I sighed.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I know, but it was the right thing to do.”

“What was he like, really?  You know, behind the things you’ve been saying in the interviews.  He looked like a drug lord’s enforcer on vacation.”

“He did, didn’t he?  He really doesn’t seem like that at all though.  I don’t know much more than what I’ve been saying to the press.  Let’s see… um… he’s ex-military, only child, working security for Jeremy Holt, you know, that guy down the street?”

“The billionaire?”

“Yeah.”

“Trust you to call Jeremy Holt ‘that guy down the street’,” he said.

“Well, he is.  Nick seems like a really good guy, Orson.  He’s got a sense of humor, even though I get the impression he’s been through some bad stuff with the Marines.  There’s something about him.”

Orson gave me a sideways look before returning his eyes to the road and indicating a lane change.  We were almost at the studio now.

“There’s something about him?  He’s a really good guy?  This is from the girl who described the most eligible bachelor in Hollywood as boring?”

“Lucas wanted a trophy more than a girlfriend, and he never would have loved me as much as he loved himself.  I bet he’d sleep with a full-length mirror if not for the danger of circumcision.”

Orson shook his head, at a loss for words apparently.

“No, you’re right,” I continued, “he’d never be that rough with himself.  I can’t believe Mom organized for us to go to the Fans Choice Awards together.  It feels like an arranged marriage.”

“Mom knows what she’s doing.  It’s good PR, rumors of a co-star romance and all that, not like being seen with somebody who looks like they’d steal the silverware.  Besides, it’s just one date, you’ll get over it, right?  Just like Mom will get over this one little thank-you-meeting you had with this Nick guy.”

Orson pulled around the back of the studio and parked near where a small crowd of people were being restrained behind some red rope barriers by the studio’s security.  They weren’t there specifically for me, but they knew this show interviewed a lot of so-called big names so the group was always small and changed from day-to-day.

“Yeah.  About that.  I’ve actually seen him twice now.  And, don’t tell Mom, but I’ve kinda offered him a job.”

Orson looked at me as if I’d grown a third arm from the middle of my forehead.  From the crowd, I saw a few people pointing and whispering to each other, trying to make out who had just arrived.

“What job?” he asked.

“Some hand-to-hand combat training to help for Dark Fox Two.”

“Mom is going to be shittin’ kittens, Harper.  Don’t worry about
me
not telling her.  All I want to know is when
you’ll
tell her so I can be out of the blast radius.  Las Vegas ought to be far enough.”

“Any excuse, eh?  I don’t know, I’m working up to it.  Maybe it’s time Mom
did
push out a litter though, she’s going too far with her micro-management lately.”

Orson held up his hands. “You didn’t tell me this, I’m not listening, I’ll be at the MGM Grand for an unrelated reason.  I tell you what though, if you were looking for a way to get under her skin, you definitely found it.  You ready to do this interview or what?”

I shrugged and opened my door, stepping out onto a red carpet that the studio rolled out whenever it wasn’t raining.  Orson walked around the car and one of the security guys joined us to help usher me in.

“Harper!”

I looked over and saw a girl with a camera take a photo from behind the barrier.  With my brother and the studio security guy flanking me, I walked along the barrier and did a bit of meet-and-greet with anybody there who wanted to have a quick chat, photo, or autograph.

“Ms. Bayliss, they’re saying they really want to get you into make-up now,” said the security guy with his finger gently touching his earpiece.

“OK.  Bye everybody!” I waved.

A discordant cheering of farewells rang out from the more enthusiastic of the fans.  I waved and smiled until I was escorted through the door.  There’d be a lot more people waiting when I came out.

I stepped off the bus and looked both ways to get my bearings before setting off in the direction of the high rise where Holt had his offices and where my friend, Johnny, always started his day bright and early.  He’d be settling down to breakfast at his desk soon.

As I walked, my mind wandered back to what had happened over the last few days.  Harper Bayliss.  The woman I saved from the acid was Harper Bayliss.  She came to the hospital and held my hand.  The guys back in the corps would have shot me for being a liar if I walked in and told them that, aside from the fact that it had been in the news of course.

There was something she stirred in me, something that was fighting to fly to her like she was a magnet.  I’d felt it when I first opened my eyes and seen her there, but managed to fight it down.

I told myself to just give her some time, enough rope to hang herself with.  I thought I’d see that there was nothing much behind her beauty.  She was a smoking hot girl that had coasted on her good looks her whole life.  She was probably a bitch.

As far as I could tell, I was dead wrong.  The concern for me that I’d seen on her face was real.  The way she conducted herself was so classy, considering she must be getting pulled in a million different directions at once.

All the doctors and nurses that checked in on me, at a suspiciously frequent rate while Harper was there, who wanted autographs or something else. She just gave and gave like she’d never run out of giving.  The video she’d made for that doctor’s daughter was awesome.

People were drawn to her like nothing I’d ever seen before.  She said the hospital was like a sanctuary compared to some places.  It was all perspective, I supposed.

She made me laugh.  Of course that ended in a coughing fit where I thought a lung was going to come up, but she did it.  Then she was standing next to me again, hand on my shoulder, with her perfect skin touching some of those ugly scars.  Not the worst of them, though.

I didn’t know what made me ask her to come back.  I promised myself it wasn’t just the fact that when she sat down and put her feet up on my bed in those short-shorts, her legs seemed to go on forever.

By the time she was halfway through her second visit, her voice sounding like music to my ears, I managed to put my finger on it and my heart sank.  It was Christie, she
really
reminded me of Christie.

If Harper had gone to our school, and in the same year as us, she and Christie would have been best friends.  Christie didn’t have friends anymore though.

The loss hit me anew and put a damper on anything Harper might have been stirring in me.  I told myself it was simple, that Harper was a blindingly sexy woman and I was still a living man so I wasn’t immune to her allure, but there was just no getting over some things.  That’s all there was to it.

I’d work with her, I’d be professional, nothing else.  Besides, what did I think would happen?  Even in an ideal world where I was open to the possibility, somebody like Harper wouldn’t look at me the way Christie used to.  Nobody could.

The skyscraper, commonly known as the Holt Tower, was owned by Jeremy Holt, but most of the floors were leased out to other companies.  It may have been the hub of everything he did, but his empire was grown by buying smaller businesses and making them bigger rather than growing in one spot.  As such, his employees and operations were all over the world.

That was all induction-stuff my buddy Johnny took me through when he got me the job.  He left the corps a couple of years before I did because of an injury, but he was smart enough to coordinate a security team like nobody’s business, so his role was all about driving the desk these days.

When I knocked on the door and got the go ahead to come in, I saw him eating a greasy breakfast with steaming coffee in a Styrofoam cup.  He wiped off his hands when he saw me and forced the last mouthful down.

“Hey, you’re out!  The hit man was supposed to get you while you were in a weakened state!  Come in, come in, take a seat.”

I shook his hand and sat down in one of the two seats on the opposite side of his desk while he turned down the volume on the flat screen mounted on his wall.  Some breakfast show was listing where to expect delays due to breakdowns.

“So, speak up.  How are you?”

“I’m good, man, I’m good.  My throat’s still a little sore, skin’s still pretty damn tender, but no change in the doctors’ opinions.  No lasting damage beyond scarring,” I said.

“That’s good, I mean scars, what’s the difference right?”

“Yeah.  Sure.”

“And Harper Bayliss,” Johnny gave an appreciative whistle and leaned forward as if he was going to divulge a state secret.  “I know you couldn’t talk back at the hospital, but the guys are dying to know.  Is she anywhere near as hot in real life as she is on TV?”

I leaned forward too.  “She’s all that and more.”  There was no need to get overly deep and meaningful with Johnny.

“Ah, you lucky bastard.”

“Lucky?  Man, there’s got to be a better way than that.”  We both leaned back again.

“Yeah, like being a movie star.  I heard she’s doin’ that guy in her new flick.  What’s his name?”

“I don’t know.  She came to see me again you know, in the hospital,” I said.

“Oh yeah?  She must be
really
thankful, you’ve gotta use that to your advantage.”

“I’m going to be seeing a bit more of her…”

“There you go!”

“Not like that, man, not like that.  It’s actually something I wanted to talk to you about,” I said.

“Me?  What do I know about dating movie stars?”

I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and took a deep breath.  Sometimes it was hard work talking to the guys from the corps.  When the chips were down, they knew how to switch to business mode and kick ass, but damned if they weren’t still in high school the rest of the time.

“Once again, not dating.  She had a job offer for me, doing some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu training, starting in a few weeks.  It’s not a lot of time, but I wanted to check with you to sort out what hours you might need me for around then so I can work around it,” I said.

“A few weeks?”  Johnny sucked some air in with a hiss, “Not gonna lie to you, man, there’s probably not gonna be a lot of hours for you.  I mostly needed you around to look tough while he was hosting some important clients over the past few weeks, but they’re gone now.”

“Ah.  I see.”

“But hey, you know I’ll work you into the rotation where I can, and there’s a bright side.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have all the free time you need to work your magic on Harper.”

I shook my head.  “You sure you won’t need me?  A few more breakfasts like that and you’ll be trapped in this office.”

Johnny gave me the ol’ stink eye.  “Still kick your ass,
Corporal
.  Besides, it wouldn’t matter if I did.  Watch this.”

Johnny, who had outranked me as
Sergeant
John Hocker for all of one month before his career-ending injury, tapped at some keys on his keyboard and clicked on something with his mouse.  The video on the wall-mounted screen changed to something obviously taken from a security camera, the display changing to a different camera every ten seconds or so.

“It’s all connected,” he said, waving his hands mysteriously as if there was some magic involved.  “I can run it all from here.”

“Pretty neat.  This is all live?”

Johnny sipped his coffee and cleared away the remains of his breakfast.  “Yep, this is.  Got enough storage for footage going back six months though.  Let me tell you, that’d make for a boring movie night.”

The screen changed to the image of a car stopped in front of a gate that I recognized as being located at the Holt household.  The driver was talking to the guard about something.

“Check this out, we just got this new toy.” He clicked the mouse and a little label popped up over the car with a picture of an hourglass in it, indicating that something was loading.

After about a second, the label filled up with a driver’s license style picture of Jeremy Holt’s driver, Stan, along with his full name and address and details of his vehicle.  As we watched, another car drove by, a similar label attached to it appearing to float along.

“How does a civilian security system have access to this kind of thing?” I asked.

“One of Holt’s companies designed the software, and we’re testing it.  Pretty good stuff, huh?”

“It’s a fantastic command center, sir.”

“That’s more like it.”

Johnny tapped a few keys, clicked the mouse, and the display changed back to the breakfast show, but my heart nearly jumped into my throat when Harper’s face came on screen in high definition.  In the background behind her was a promotional image of some movie called Pandora Rising.

“There’s your girl,” said Johnny, bringing up the volume.

“Not my girl,” I muttered to deaf ears.

“Not so much at the time,” Harper was saying to the hosts of the show, “I thought it was a hot drink or something at first, which would have been bad, but after it sunk in that it was acid…
acid
… and I, you know, processed what it did to the man who jumped in the way.  Yeah.  It was scary.”

“Have you spoken to this man since?” asked the hostess, who I guessed was probably Maria rather than Jay, if the logo at the bottom of the screen was anything to go by.

“Yes, I have.  The good news is that he’s going to be OK.”

“Wow, that’s a relief.  How do you even think of what to say to somebody who did that?” asked Jay.

“Yeah, I know.  It was a humbling experience.  I mean, here I am, just a girl who pretends to be fictional characters for a living.  Today I’m a princess, tomorrow I’m a superhero.  Then I meet a real superhero.”

Harper took a shuddering breath and her eyes looked all glassy as she put a hand to her upper chest, swallowed and blinked a few times.  She inhaled deeply and let it out slowly before continuing.

“Sorry.  He’s… just… he’s just my hero.  And he was a hero before he saved me too, he was in the Marines, you know.  I’m so grateful.  I can’t even…”  Harper threw her hands up in defeat.

“Well, so are we,” said Maria, “and so are all your fans.  Thanks for coming in, Harper, always so nice to see you.” She turned to the camera.  “Pandora Rising, starring Harper Bayliss and Lucas Collins, opens in theatres across the country next Friday.  Make sure you go see it.  Here’s an exclusive clip.”

“Lucas Collins, that’s the guy,” said Johnny.