by Angela Evans
“Hi, Michael!” the oldest boy, Connor, called from beside his mother.
“Hi, Mr. Michael.” The younger boy, Lucas, was more shy and called his greeting from just behind Leslie’s leg.
Leslie’s look of confusion was impossible to miss. She glanced first at one son, then at the other before turning an accusing look in his direction. He’d noticed how she’d protectively gathered the boys to her as he approached. He wondered at the reason for her mother hen tendencies. Was it just that the boys were a handful, or was it somehow connected to their father?
“Hi, guys.” He once again stooped down to their level so he didn’t tower over them. At a handful of inches over six foot, he towered over a lot of adults, but he’d found that with kids, his height could transform him from a protector into a giant who terrified them. “Are you being good and listening to your mom like we talked about?”
“I am, but he’s not.” The little guy ratted his older brother out without batting an eyelash, forcing Michael to hold back a chuckle.
“Well, maybe you could help her out and pick up all your beach stuff? Looks to me like it’s time to go.”
The boys scampered off to do exactly as he’d asked while Leslie continued to stare at him in confusion and more than a little suspicion. Michael got the impression she was resisting the urge to swoop her children up and away.
“I met the boys earlier at the bridal consult. I went out to investigate movement and found them playing with toy trucks on the patio,” he explained.
“Ugh, I thought I had been successful at hiding them during the appointment.” Her cheeks turned an adorable shade of pink before she buried her face in her hands. “Usually they stay with my mother when I have to work, but she went on vacation with some friends, and the backup sitter flaked on me.”
“It’s fine. Nobody saw them but me. Frankly, I don’t think anyone would have had any problem with them being there.”
She looked skeptical and stopped just short of rolling her beautiful brown eyes. “Dani Gwendolyn would be thrilled to have me dragging my two unruly hooligans through her wedding planning?”
“Dani is too focused on Dani to even notice if there are kids there or not.”
Her laugh was as spontaneous as it was musical. Her face transformed from tense and guarded into relaxed and beaming. In that moment, Michael knew he’d jump through fire to make her laugh and smile again.
“She is so beautiful, and talented, who could blame her for being a little self-centered, right? I felt myself grinning like a fool the whole time I was talking to her, it was embarrassing. Please don’t tell her I said that!”
“Don’t worry your secret is safe with me as long as you never let it slip that I said anything negative about one of our clients.”
He couldn’t help but flirt with her. Earlier today, her hair had been hanging loose around her shoulders, but now she had it piled up in some loose bun on top of her head. Little wisps were spilling out, giving her a halo. Her swimsuit was modest, but he was fighting to keep his eyes on her face and not let them wander across her bare skin.
“Do you have a lot of celebrity clients?” she asked.
“Celebrities, politicians, businessmen, we have all types of clients. They each present their own set of challenges, but the universal thing they have in common is their ego.” He smiled.
“Your boss must think a lot of you to give you a job like this one.” She gestured toward the resort as if to indicate the celebrity wedding.
“Well, the boss is me, so I give myself the jobs.”
Behind them, the boys had finished gathering up their toys and were trying to stuff them into the beach bag on top of everything else. Michael couldn’t help but think they were going to end up bringing home half the sand on Barefoot Bay.
“Oh, wow. So does that mean you give yourself the cushiest jobs or the hardest jobs?” she asked with a grin.
“I give myself the jobs that I know need to be done by the best in the business.” He didn’t consider his attitude arrogant; he knew he was good at his job. It was why he’d built his business up to be one of the most respected in the world, and it was exactly why clients like Dani hired him to handle their security. He crossed over to the boys and picked up their beach bag.
“Oh, thank you.” Leslie reached for their things, but Michael held them back out of her reach.
“I’ve got them. Lead on.” He indicated she should point the way to her car.
Leslie gathered her boys by grabbing their tiny hands before she headed toward the parking lot. “Were you coming to find me for something, or did you just happen to be on the beach?”
“I was just enjoying the beach, but since I saw you, I figured I’d let you know that Dani is heading back to New York tomorrow and won’t be here until the day before the wedding.” He placed her beach gear in the trunk and closed it while she ushered her kids into the backseat as they continued to quietly protest having to leave.
“Oh, that’s going to be a challenge, isn’t it?” she mumbled almost to herself.
“What is?”
“Oh, normally we have a couple of consultations with the bride before we make the cake. We do things by video chat or telephone calls most of the time and we exchange a lot of emails, but this is just a different set of challenges.”
“If it makes you feel any better, security is about the same. Normally I’d have everything nailed down backward and forward by now, but with Dani, that’s never how it seems to work. She likes life to be spontaneous.”
“She didn’t even give me a way to get ahold of her.”
Leslie’s frustration was visible and provided the perfect opening to slip her his business card.
* * *
“One month and a bride who is basically unreachable until she shows back up for the wedding?” Leslie was mostly talking to herself.
“We’ll just have to make it work,” Amelia said for about the twentieth time that day.
Her best friend, Amelia Dexter, knew the score as well as Leslie did. Amelia owned the bakery contracted to make Barefoot Bride’s first celebrity wedding client’s cake. The bride had made one appearance in Barefoot Bay, during which she spent most of her time on the phone, and wouldn’t return until the day before the wedding.
Amelia was bent over sketches for the cake, which she was supposed to email to Dani by the end of the day for final approval. Both women had noticed, with a raised eyebrow, that their instructions didn’t specify when Dani would respond to their email.
“We always make it work, and this is too big of an opportunity to fall on our faces.”
Amelia stretched and arched her back to relieve the pain from leaning over her pregnant belly to sketch.
Leslie absently fingered the business card from Dani’s bodyguard, wondering why she hadn’t added it to the file that held everything else related to the wedding. He was a distraction she didn’t have time for right now, but there she was, daydreaming about him when she should be working. He had been nice to her, but the way he’d been with her boys had made her heart flutter.
Oh, who was she kidding—the heart fluttering had more to do with the breadth of his shoulders and the size of his pecs. She wasn’t the kind to go fawning after the bodybuilder type, but his muscles looked like the kind earned through hard work rather than lifting dumbbells.
“Are you daydreaming about Michael Duncan, the hunky bodyguard, by any chance?” Her friend knew her too well. Leslie groaned in frustration, both with Amalia for trying to play matchmaker and herself for indulging in the fantasies that had been distracting her all afternoon.
“I won’t insult your intelligence by lying. I’ll just say that he’s a distraction I do not have time for right now.” Leslie set the card down with determination and returned to the work in front of her.
“The way I see it, you’ve got nothing but time for a distraction. You work like a dog. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but you need something more than work and taking care
of the boys.” Amelia had fallen head over heels in love with her husband while on vacation in Barefoot Bay almost a year ago, and ever since, she had done everything she could to pull Leslie over to the “hopelessly in love” side of life.
“I appreciate your concern, but I’m here to tell you that what you and Dex have is the exception, not the rule. I don’t have it in me to go through that heartache again. I have my boys, and they’re all the men I need in my life.”
Love wasn’t for Leslie. She’d gone down that road once and knew that happily ever after wasn’t the same in real life as it was in the romance novels her mother read by the dozens. In real life, someone had to be the adult and make sure the bills got paid. She’d been that someone in her brief marriage, while her husband had been out chasing fairy tales, determined to never grow up. The night a police officer had come to her door to tell her that her husband had died in a stupid street racing accident, her world had fallen apart.
Falling in love was the biggest mistake she’d ever made. But she had slowly built her life back up, and she didn’t intend to ever make that mistake again.
“I know that your marriage wasn’t the kind women dream about, but you did love each other and you got two great boys out of it. Next time, I just want you to be swept off your feet and get the magic.” Her friend gave Leslie’s arm a squeeze as she walked by to greet the customer who had just walked in the door.
Amelia’s belly had dropped in the last few days. It wouldn’t be long now before her friend became a mother. The thought made Leslie smile wistfully as she remembered her own early days of motherhood. She’d been much younger, and she hadn’t had the amazing support she knew Dex would provide.
She stared at the business card propped up on the corner of her desk and wondered if what Amelia had described was possible for her. Amelia and Dex made each other happy in a way that made Leslie feel envious, then guilty, every time she was around them. She wanted that for her friend and she wanted that for her boys—someday far down their roads—but she wasn’t sure she believed it was in the cards for her.
“Call him,” Amelia singsonged as she came back into the office.
“I don’t need to call him. I don’t have any security questions or concerns about the wedding. I’m not even sure why he gave me his card.”
“He gave you his card because he wants you to call him.”
“Why?”
“Oh, honey, you are not that dense.” She wiggled her eyebrows.
* * *
Michael tossed his bag on the bed in his room at Barefoot Bay Resort & Spa. This was his second visit to the resort, and he hoped to tie up all his loose ends on this trip so things would roll smoothly when he returned before the actual wedding. The happy couple would arrive the day before the wedding and leave right after the ceremony for their honeymoon on an island in the Mediterranean.
Whenever he did security at a location like this, he coordinated with the security staff at the resort, but he always assumed that the resort staff was merely a backup. Some people considered him a control freak, but that was why his clients didn’t blink an eye when he sent them the bill for his services. It was also why more and more high-end clients were seeking him out.
For this particular case, he was the team lead. Dani’s fiancé, Baxter Shelter, had his own security, but it basically amounted to a handful of guys he knew from before he was famous. They looked impressive—bodybuilders and former football players—but in Michael’s opinion, they didn’t know a damn thing about personal security. That wasn’t too surprising. Michael had come to realize that female celebrities took personal security a lot more seriously than male celebrities did. In Baxter’s case, he was as tall as Michael and had gone to college on a football scholarship, so he didn’t think he needed someone to watch his back.
But Michael knew that it was all a numbers game. Once you got so famous that a certain number of people knew your name, there would always be a percentage of those people who were dangerous. The more famous you got, the more you had to worry about security and how close you let people get to you.
Most celebrities were in denial of that fact, but they all came around once they had that one encounter with a fan who scared them. Once that happened—and it always did—they took security seriously. For Dani, that had happened when she came home from a tour to find a fan in her house. The man had concocted a whole delusional fantasy where he and Dani were in a relationship and had moved into her house while it was empty. After that, she hired full-time security and moved into a house where Michael had set up the security himself.
Crossing the room to the desk against the far wall, he opened the file folder his assistant had put together containing all the background checks on everyone even remotely connected to the wedding. One by one, he reviewed each and every person’s information, looking for any possible red flags. The resort security staff had already completed checks on their own employees, but Michael didn’t trust anyone’s information but his own. Plus, there were a lot of people who would participate in this three-ring circus of a wedding who weren’t directly employed by the resort.
He flipped over the report in his hand and picked up the next one in the stack. Leslie Manning. He read her name and immediately pictured her with her hair slightly mussed from a day at the beach as she tried to wrestle her unruly kids. He pictured her flustered and rushing into the meeting at Barefoot Brides. He’d been picturing her a lot in the week since he’d met her. Something about her triggered his protective streak.
The file had answered the question about where was the man in her family picture. Leslie Manning was a widow and barely over thirty years old. He flipped up the small photo of her that was neatly paper clipped to the top left corner of the report as he read what he’d already memorized. Feeling a little voyeuristic, he set the report aside. He wanted to know more about her, but he wanted to learn it from her, not from a background check he’d run without her knowledge. He was protective, not a stalker.
He made notes on a pad about things he wanted to check before Dani and Baxter arrived. The first stop was to find the resort owner, Lacey, and confirm details with her.
Leaving his room, he headed downstairs to ask at the front desk where he could find the owner of the resort. As the elevator doors slid open into the luxurious lobby, he spotted Leslie immediately. She wasn’t flustered, or frazzled, or rushing anywhere. Her hair hung down past her shoulders in loose waves that his fingers itched to run through. Her slender frame was highlighted by the cinched waist of her floral dress, and the skirt floated just above her knees. Pink heels matched the flowers in the print and highlighted her tanned skin. This was a completely different picture than she’d painted before, and he found himself intrigued.
Who was he kidding? He was more than intrigued, and it had started from the first moment he’d laid eyes on her. This latest piece of the puzzle just made him itch to dig deeper and reveal more layers. Which woman was the real Leslie?
She stood with her back to him, completely unaware he was near, so he took advantage of the moment to watch her. She leaned against the front desk, her elbow on the counter top, completely animated in her conversation with the woman working there. Her hands fluttered around as she described something then tossed her head back, laughing with her hand to her throat. Her face was flushed, and she practically glowed from the inside out.
His heart kicked, and he stepped forward without intending to, or even realizing that he’d moved. As soon as he did, she turned and spotted him. Her smile didn’t fade, and unless he imagined it, the pink on her cheeks got just a little bit brighter when she saw him.
“Oh, hi.” She smiled, and his dick acted as if she’d stroked him through his shorts. Not a good sign. Not good at all.
“Hi, I was headed to Lacey’s office. Can you point me?” he asked, trying to act as though he wasn’t having a battle of wills with his crotch.
Asking for directions was a ruse to engage her in conversation and hopefu
lly get a little of her time. He had the schematics for the sprawling resort memorized down to the smallest detail. He could have found his way to the office blindfolded if he had to.
The lobby wasn’t crowded by any stretch, but there were at least a dozen people in the large, brightly lit area. Tropical plants decorated the room, and a few seating areas had been set up in strategic places for guests to wait. He barely glanced at anyone but Leslie, though he did manage to register an oddly dressed woman sitting on a loveseat near the entrance to the spa. He only noticed her because while everyone else in Barefoot Bay was dressed for Florida weather, the woman was covered from head to toe in a loose-fitting gray shirt and slacks. Even her hair was on the gray side of blond.
Leslie said good-bye to the young blonde working behind the reception desk before turning with her purse on her shoulder. “I’ll do you one better. I’m headed there too, so I’ll take you.”
He couldn’t help himself—he smiled at her. Her smile made him want to smile. He couldn’t remember a time he’d stood and grinned at another person for no reason other than it felt right.
“Can I ask you something?” she asked, one hand on her purse as if she didn’t quite know what to do with her hands.
Did he make her nervous? He was used to that. His size, his scowl, his business, all combined to make people feel a certain degree of discomfort around him, but for some reason, he didn’t want her to feel that way. He wanted her to feel comfortable around him. Yet another surprise and inconsistency.
“Sure.” He held open a door so she could pass through in front of him.
“How do you work with celebrities all the time and not get star struck? It’s all I can do not to totally fangirl when I talk to Dani.” She blushed adorably. “Even though Dani’s nothing like I expected her to be from television, I kept getting tongue-tied just trying to talk to her.”
