The Socialite and the Bodyguard (13 page)

Her uncle lived in one of a dozen historic redbrick townhouses that lined the street. They were small, cold and hideously expensive. And you couldn’t ever do anything to them without obtaining a bucketload of permits from the Historical Council. She’d never understood why her uncle liked living here.

She stopped on the front stoop to catch her breath. All the lights were off. She didn’t expect anybody to be here. Margaret Miller, his housekeeper, had gone to visit family in Minnesota, taking advantage of his absence.

She slid the key into the lock and got in without trouble. The alarm wasn’t even on. Her first thought was that she needed to tell Al to be more careful, then she realized that she couldn’t very well tell the man that she’d been breaking in while he’d been gone.

She shook her head at the absurdity of the situation. Then she couldn’t move all of a sudden. The house was dark and quiet around her. Her uncle’s house. Uncle Al’s. What in the hell was she doing here?

She had no idea beyond that she was desperate. She needed to figure out what was going on, who was after her. It
couldn’t
be Uncle Al. But she moved forward anyway, so frightened now that she was becoming unreasonable.

Then she was at the office at last, at Al’s desk. None of his drawers were locked, not even his filing cabinets. His laptop was gone. He had taken that on his trip.

She rifled through his in-box first, but didn’t find anything unusual. Mostly his personal business, life-insurance papers, letters from charity boards he was on and the like. His drawers held more of the same. The file cabinets stored various receipts and tax documents.

The longer she searched the stupider she felt. What had she expected? A copy of a check with
Payment for Elevator Incident
stamped on the back?

A picture on the shelf caught her eye. Greg and Lance and herself when they were little with Uncle Al. The photo had been taken at a rare family get-together. Al was looking at the three kids in the picture with such love and maybe even longing in his eyes. Did he ever wish he’d had his own children?

For a moment, she sank onto the leather couch by the wall. And the next second, tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t believe she was here. She couldn’t imagine what her uncle would say. He had been on her side since her parents’ death, had given nothing but love to her and Greg. Guilt filled her to the brim, and as she blinked back her tears she felt ashamed of herself.

She was the one breaking in. If someone was untrustworthy in her family, it was her.

She locked the house back up behind her, but left the security off, the way she’d found it.

The wind had picked up while she’d been inside. The trees and bushes made more noise in the park. Every snapping branch made her jump. The path seemed twice as long as it had on her way here. She stumbled on a shoelace that had come untied. She didn’t dare stop to tie it.

Especially not when she heard footsteps crunch on the gravel behind her. This time, the noise wasn’t in her imagination. Definite footsteps. Gathering speed.

She was all alone, no one to hear her call for help. She broke into a run, shoelaces be damned. By the time she passed the fountain, she realized that someone was moving in the bushes, too, to her right. There were two of them after her. She ran faster.

Stumbled.

A hand shot out of the bushes before she could regain her balance. She was yanked off the path roughly, branches scraping against her face, her throat too tight to scream, her body too numb with shock to fight back.

She was frozen in shock for about a split second, which worked just fine for Nash. Then pepper spray hit him in the face before he knocked the spray can to the ground. He blinked furiously to let the tears flush his burning eyes even as he put his left hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t scream. His right gripped his gun while holding her tight against him at the same time. Her heart beat wildly against his bicep.

“Nash,” he said, giving his identity.

But, instead of calming, she fought harder. He had to put her in a full restraining hold. Just in time.

A second later a man dressed all in black came around the bend, moving forward at a good clip. Nash tried to get a good look at him, not an easy task with his eyes burning like hell. He didn’t let Kayla go when the guy passed. He waited until Mo appeared, moving considerably more quietly than the bastard he followed. He nodded to Nash in the bushes without breaking his stride.

Nash waited a minute or two after they disappeared before dragging Kayla deeper into the bushes, taking them out of hearing distance of anyone else who might walk the path this late at night. Then he wiped his eyes as best he could and blew his nose a couple of times. Cleared his throat as quietly as he could and spat some of the pepper spray into the bushes.

“What are you doing here?” To her credit, she kept her voice at a whisper as she pulled away from him, shaking.

“Keeping you alive,” he snapped, halfway to a heart attack from thinking of all the trouble she could have gotten into. If he hadn’t been inside her uncle’s house, doing his own recon when she’d arrived, she would most likely be dead by now. “What in the hell were you doing going through your uncle’s papers in the middle of the night?”

She bolted.

He grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her hard against him. “I want an answer. Now.”

She looked as though she was ready to break down.

He didn’t care. “When I was told I’d be working for you, I thought you were nothing but an empty-headed beauty who lived off her parents’ money. But somewhere along the way, I managed to convince myself that you were more. That you actually had a brain.” He knew he was being too tough on her, but he could have strangled her. She’d gotten rid of the men he’d brought in to protect her, then sneaked out in the middle of the night. Was she completely crazy?

She opened her mouth, but a gunshot interrupted whatever she was about to say.

She almost jumped out of her skin. “Why are
you
here? Do you work for my uncle? I don’t know if I can trust you.” Her words were as desperate as the look on her face.

“Yeah, I got that from Mo and Joey.” He’d turned on his phone and called them the second Kayla had stepped out of her uncle’s house. Sure didn’t expect to see her there. He’d been surprised at first, then angry as hell that she would risk her life like that.

He let her go and gave her a little room, but not so much that he couldn’t grab her again if necessary.

“Who’s shooting? Who was the guy in black?” She wrapped her arms around herself as she glanced furtively at the ground.

Better not be looking for the damned pepper spray. He still couldn’t see straight. His throat burned as if he’d drunk liquid fire. “He followed you from the moment you stepped outside your uncle’s house. Mo will know more when he gets back.”

“Where’s Joey?”

“Stayed behind to guard Greg while Mo followed you across the park to make sure nothing happened to you.”

His vision was clearing enough now that he caught her look of surprise, mixed with guilt. “I fired them.”

“And in a couple of minutes you can thank them for being good sports about it and not taking you seriously.” He took her hand and pulled her back toward the path, keeping in front of her as he heard Mo coming their way. They’d worked together in the past enough for him to recognize his gait. He came alone.

But the news was worse than that.

“Bastard shot me.” Mo pressed his palm against the side of his leg.

Kayla made a strangled noise behind Nash.

Mo paid her little attention. “Damn scratch.” He gave a disgusted huff. “Ducked it just fine but it ricocheted off a rock and hit me. Not my night. Threw me off stride for a second. Bastard got away. Someone in an old Jeep picked him up. No license plate.”

Nash swore under his breath, but regrouped fast. “Don’t let her go anywhere.” He walked to the fountain, ducked his head under the surface of the water and swooshed it around a couple of times before coming up to shake droplets out of his hair. His eyes burned a little less. “Let’s get her home. Keep your eyes open.”

Mo’s bushy eyebrow went up as he took in Nash’s appearance, but he didn’t ask any questions. He was a man of few words. Right now, Nash appreciated that about the man more than ever.

They were back at her place in twenty minutes.

“Everything okay, Miss Landon?” the doorman asked as he came out from behind the desk.

Mo moved so the blood on his leg would be out of the doorman’s view. Nash gave the guy a bleary grin. “Great party.” He pointed at his head. “I’d better go before I drip beer on your carpet.”

The doorman didn’t comment, but his expression said,
crazy Americans
.

They made it up in the elevator without running into anyone else. Kayla went straight to her bedroom once they were inside her apartment. Nash walked in after her.

“I want you to leave.” She looked out of sorts and exhausted, still scared.

She could be dead
, he thought, and squelched any sympathy that might have influenced him. “We need to talk.” He turned and locked the door behind them.

The way her eyes went wide with fear hit him like a sledge hammer in the middle of his chest. He didn’t usually mind if people were scared of him. It was a plus in his line of work, in fact. But he wanted something else from Kayla. He pulled his gun. She stepped back, her eyes darting from side to side.

“Take it easy.” He grabbed the Beretta by the barrel and held it out toward her. “Here. You take this if it makes you feel better.” He had to be losing his mind here. She had him tied up in knots. Did he need her trust this badly?

The answer was fast and simple: yes, he did.

After a moment of hesitation, she stepped forward and watched him carefully as she grabbed the gun. “How about others?”

“Other what?”

“Weapons. I don’t think you’d go around without a backup.”

Sharp as anything. Definitely. He reached for the ankle holster and the smaller handgun he kept there. He put it on the nightstand.

She sighed, sounding and looking tired. “You probably have a knife, too, don’t you?”

For a moment he thought about denying it. But this whole exercise was about getting her to trust him, so he pulled the switchblade from his pocket and set that down, too.

“Is that everything?” she asked.

“Want to strip-search me?” he countered. He could have warmed to the idea in a hurry.

She shook her head, decidedly not looking as if she was up to the task.

Too bad.

He stepped back. “Mind if I use your bathroom for a sec?”

“Go ahead.”

He walked in there, without any sudden movements, and washed his face again, rinsed his mouth and eyes a couple of times.

“How are you doing?” he asked her when he came back.

“I don’t know what to think anymore,” she admitted as she sank onto her bed.

He sat on her reading chaise to make himself look smaller, less threatening. He leaned back. If he looked relaxed, maybe she’d relax a little, too. “You lost your parents and your brother and now someone is out to kill you. That’s a lot to deal with.”

She nodded, holding his gun in a white-knuckled grip.

Thank God Welkins couldn’t see him now. He needed to stop going around arming clients. Especially ones who were likely to shoot him.

Not that he really thought she would. She was smart and reasonable. She was just scared.

But even though he was pretty sure she wasn’t going to shoot him, he still hated staring down the business end of a gun. And he hated even more the idea of her thinking that he would harm her.

“Good job with the pepper spray,” he said.

She flinched. “Sorry about that.”

“If you really think I’m out to get you, you shouldn’t be. But if you’re having second thoughts and you’re ready to hear me out, you could put the gun down for a while. Just to be polite and all that.”

She hesitated way too long before she laid the Beretta on her lap.

“Want to walk me through your thought process here?”

She tucked her hair behind her ears, bit her full lower lip. She looked lost and fragile for the first time since he met her. It took effort to stay still instead of crossing the room and scooping her into his arms. In which case, she probably would have shot him.

“You kept saying that the killer was someone close to me,” she began. “Then Dave gave me that list of everyone in my inner circle. And I had this flash of paranoia. My uncle just called. And I thought how he’d be majority shareholder of the company if Greg and I were out of the picture. And you were recommended by him. What better way to get his man inside the house?”

“Brian Welkins picked me. Your uncle doesn’t know me from Adam. He liked the agency because he heard good things about it from another client.”

“But I didn’t know all that.”

He wasn’t going to give her any flack. She couldn’t have known. “When people are out to kill you, it’s smart not to trust anyone,” he told her.

“But it’s driving me crazy.” She sounded desperate.

She didn’t say anything, but he could practically hear her thinking from across the room.

“I’ve had about a hundred opportunities by now if I wanted to hurt you.”

She stiffened. “Maybe you wanted to do it without witnesses.”

“I could have done that at the park just now.”

The truth was, he could protect her no matter how she felt about him. He’d protected all kinds of people with success. People who looked down on him, people who considered him a servant, people who resented having to be protected. It was all part of the job and he’d learned to work around it. But he wanted Kayla’s trust. How important that was to him took him by surprise.

“Sorry,” she said in a thin voice and hung her head. “I learned not to trust outsiders the hard way. But I could always trust my family. It hadn’t been the warmest and most supportive place growing up, my father was a tough man, but my family and the immediate staff always had my back. He always said not to trust outsiders. And by outsiders he meant anyone but the core team—him, Mom, Lance, Greg and me. Then in the last two years, my staff became my core team. And Uncle Al. I don’t know how to live if I have to start questioning that.”

“Give me a little more time. I’ll have this figured out,” he promised her.

For a second or two, they sat in silence.

He told himself anything he learned about her might help him figure out who was after her family. But the truth was his interest in her went beyond that. It was personal.

“Slow news day.” She gave a pained smile. “Penny Holiday, heiress to the department-store chain, was propelling herself into the limelight just when I started college. Then she got that DUI and laid low for a couple of months. The tabloids needed a replacement. Anyway, some sleazy photographer tracked me down on campus and ambushed me, took my picture as I was doing laundry. The headline read, Penny Holiday Out of Control while Popcorn Cinderella Learns to Survive without a Maid.”

He didn’t say anything. He wanted to wring the bastard’s neck, but he figured it wouldn’t change anything now. Still, the sheer satisfaction…Maybe he’d look into it when she was safe and his assignment was over.

He ignored the heavy feeling that thought brought to his chest.

“You faced an impossible choice. Nothing will bring back your parents. Nothing will bring back Lance. But you could still save Greg.” He understood. “Life is full of hellish decisions. We make them, then all we can do is live with the consequences.”

“Except I never make a mistake just once.” She leaned against the headboard. “My mistakes are forever. Every time they catch me on camera, they drag out all the old stuff again and again. And if they have nothing on me, they make something up.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, but wouldn’t look at him. “My last boyfriend posted pictures of me online after he talked me into skinny-dipping off the Landon yacht in the Mediterranean, calling me every kind of prude and chicken if I didn’t go along with him.”

He’d seen those pictures when he’d done research on her, had had a couple of restless nights because of them.

“And when he decided he liked the taste of being a media sensation, he gave an interview about me being narcissistic and whatever.”

A lifeless doll in bed,
had been the exact words, something Nash pretty much doubted. She’d come alive in his arms in the pool and in that shower afterwards. Her passion was alive and more than well. He’d never been more turned on by a woman.

He watched her as she sat on her bed, her shoulders slumping. The fight seemed to have gone out of her. He hated to see her broken.