by Christa Wick
Lust slammed low into my gut next, which is why I turned my attention to the day clothes she would put on after her shower tomorrow morning.
That's when the anger started to boil up inside me.
The clothes were cheap. Not dollar store cheap, but still. Amanda Long went around dressed in expensive, tailored outfits, shit she'd purchased at the kind of stores that populated Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue. Every last piece of the nicer outfits in Lacey's closet had been purchased by Austin since the start of her visit six months ago.
Suppressing a growl, I checked the bedroom's patio door then headed for the adjacent bedroom, the one I'd been sleeping in every night since the live-in aide was fired. When I emerged, I heard the sound of water running in a metal sink and dishes being moved around.
So much for thinking she'd stay put when I told her to.
I stopped at the threshold to the kitchen for a moment's guilty pleasure of watching her. She had pulled her long, blond hair into a pony tail. Thick curls wound around one another, reminding me how easy it would be to fist a handful of them and rein her in for a slow, deep kiss.
"Everything secure?" she asked.
Caught, I flinched.
"Yes," I answered, my gaze searching the surfaces around her to see which one might have given my presence away with a change in shadows or a flicker of light that was just enough to be noticeable despite her near blindness. Nothing suggested itself as the culprit. I decided she had to have heard me despite the quiet walk I had after eight years in the Army and another four in private security.
She turned, one hand reaching for the edge of the kitchen island while the other held a colander of washed vegetables. She placed the food next to the cutting board. The graceful way she moved distracted me from the fact that her fingers were inching up the butcher's block to grab a paring knife.
"Let me," I suggested, trying to keep the anxiety out of my voice.
I had a moment's sympathy for Lacey's mother—how she must have had to harden herself against the constant worry of injury to her daughter. Then I remembered that Amanda was, by my personal observations and all accounts other than Lacey's, a greedy bitch who paid the hired help a bonus for spying on her daughter.
"Not a chance," she answered. "I need something to focus on or I just might go crazy."
Right—the doctor's visit. I had no idea what the man might have said in the exam room because I wasn't invited in beyond a quick look to make sure there was no second entrance. But in the four months I had been guarding Lacey, she had made five other trips to specialists for consultations. Each time, she was tense the day before and worse after the visit as the afternoon turned to evening and then night.
The first three times I had to knock on her door to make sure she was safe and alone because I could hear pacing and low murmurs as she talked to herself.
I hated that she had only two options—continue with her degrading vision for however many years until she was completely blind or risk losing her sight all at once with a surgery that had less than a fifty percent chance of successfully restoring her vision. Her window of opportunity was closing fast, too. If she didn't have the surgery within the next year, none of the specialists consulted expected it to be successful.
Metal collided sharply with glass as she made her first slice through the carrot she had pulled from the colander. Using the flat of the knife, she pushed the end piece with its withering leaves off to one corner of the cutting board.
"Are you sure you won't let me do this," I asked before she positioned the knife for its next cut.
"Positive," she answered, an impish grin turning her chin sharp and pushing the lips into a pout that made me forget, for a second, about the knife in her hand.
She made her next cut, my heart beating in slow motion until the slice was complete. I stopped myself before I could say something stupid—like how I was surprised her mother didn't have a head full of gray hairs from Lacey using sharp objects. Amanda Long couldn't be bothered to worry over her only child. She had staff to take the girl to the hospital in the event of an accident and a stylist to make sure the nonexistent maternal worries left no evidence on the woman's scalp.
"Do we still have boiled eggs?" Lacey asked, her knife hovering above the tomato she was about to dissect.
"Yes," I answered, my gaze never leaving her hands.
"Could you peel a few?"
"Certainly."
She smiled and I felt like I had won the lottery.
Shoot me, shoot me now. This wasn't lust, or at least it wasn't merely lust. There was affection and admiration mixed in with whatever I was feeling. I didn't like it, not one bit. It wasn't professional or practical. Never mind what her family would say.
I moved to the refrigerator for eggs. My phone buzzed with an incoming text. I swiped the screen and noted the temporary access code to review the security playback. That reminded me that I still hadn't turned the cameras off now that we were securely inside. A few more swipes and taps on my screen and the electronic eyes of the house were shuttered until we left again.
I returned the phone to my pocket and opened the refrigerator door.
"How many do you want peeled?"
"Three." The sharp tapping of her dicing the tomato muted Lacey's words.
Grabbing the eggs, I turned around and kept my eyes off the cutting board and her vulnerable fingers so I wouldn't have an anxiety attack. Her knife clattered to the counter. Immediately, I looked for blood but there wasn't any. She hadn't cut herself, just stopped abruptly.
I looked at her face, saw the tears lining up along the rim of her eyes.
"Want me to finish?" I asked softly.
She gave a short nod, her throat bobbing but no words issuing. I wanted to take her into my arms, tell her everything was going to be okay, whatever she decided. But I knew I had no right to hold her or make any promises. She was Austin's kin, not mine.
I was just the hired help. Here to protect her.
Falling in love was never supposed to be part of the job.
3
I finished preparing dinner for us and we ate in silence. Afterward, I quickly cleared the dishes and put them in the washer before she could insist on helping me clean up.
By the time I left the kitchen to rejoin her, I found her still sitting at the dining room table.
Swallowing a string of curse words, I stepped behind her chair and waited for her to tell me what she needed.
Wanting to stroke her hair, I wrapped my hands around the wooden finials of the old, ornate chair instead. Truthfully, I didn't know if I could do it again—go through another trip to the specialist with her. It was hard enough when the aide was still with us. The woman's presence had kept me in check, made me choke my tongue so that I didn't offer Lacey a shoulder to cry on.
In that way, I think the aide inadvertently kept Lacey in check, too, kept her from feeling sorry for herself. Lacey was too proud to let the depression come out in the cold presence of her mother's employee.
Usually, she just kept her chin up, a determined smile on her soft lips—at least until she retreated to her room to pace and mumble to herself through the night.
This time, it was clear she needed someone.
"Do you want me to call Austin?" I asked.
He was her family, her only real family. He knew what she was going through and I had confided to him how hard these visits were on her. Wherever the hell he was at that moment, it was the wrong place to be.
"No," she whispered. "He's at some charity event—for rescue horses, I think. With Gina..."
I frowned at the mention of the woman I knew would one day be Austin Long's wife. I had no quarrel with her, even though she could be a bit prickly on the few occasions we were alone together. I'd probably given her enough cause to find me irritating, but she was always kind and engaging around Lacey. Still, she was a distraction in Austin's life at a time I felt he should have been looking more carefully after his cousin instead of following
her mother's game book and handing her off to the help.
"Let's get you into the living room." My hands slid down the sides of the chair and waited for her signal that it was okay to pull it away from the table.
She didn't move, just drew a ragged breath in. The sound killed me, made me drop to my knees next to her. I placed one hand lightly atop her forearm while the other gripped my knee hard, the fingertips digging deep and painful.
"Lace, you can't keep doing this to yourself."
You can't keep doing this to me, I thought a second later, hating that I was a selfish bastard.
"Let me call Austin."
I don't know how I kept my voice calm. Training, I guess, but it felt like all those years of learning to be the best, to always be in control, couldn't stand against the threat of another round of tears from a twenty-two-year-old woman.
"No!" She shook her head so hard that the blond curls bounced against my cheek. She turned her head to face away from me, shielding her expression. "I'm sorry. I don't want to be a bother to anyone. I'll go to my room."
"You will not," I said, an unfamiliar heat injecting my voice.
She tensed beneath my hand. I wanted to kick myself, but enough was enough. She shouldn't be going through the pain by herself. The indecision over whether to get the surgery was like a stab wound from an ice pick. The weapon might make only a small hole, but it would strike deep and eventually bleed her dry. Even after the time passed for the surgery to have had any chance of success, she would still be bleeding over the question of whether she should have had it done.
"If you won't talk to Austin," I said, gaining my feet. "Then you're going to talk to me."
Her shoulders had started to tremble. They stilled. I watched her draw a long, quiet breath in and then she held it. I didn't know what that meant, what she was thinking. Had I frightened her? Had I overstepped the bounds of a relationship defined only by an employment contract?
I didn't care anymore. She wouldn't willingly let me help her in this any more than she would let me cut up the salad we had for dinner. If she was going to move forward in her decision, I would have to push her.
Pushing was something I was good at. Pushing new recruits through training, pushing opposing forces out of cities and valleys.
I wrapped one hand around her elbow, my grip firm. My other hand fastened around the side of the chair as I ordered her to stand.
"I mean it," I said when she didn't move. "Stand now or I will rip you out of that seat and carry you to the couch slung over my back like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum."
She stood, her movements jerky. The hard edge to my voice had sliced away the careful precision with which she usually moved through life. Part of me felt like a bastard, the other part recognized her standing as progress, no matter how minor.
"We're going to the couch," I said, counting off three one hundreds inside my head to give her time to prepare for the first step away from the table. I took a side step, my hand gently tugging at her. She shifted, her feet sliding reluctantly.
At the rate she was moving, it would be morning before we reached the couch.
"Stop," I said, my voice straining to convey a patience I didn't feel. "I'm picking you up. Bend your knees a little for me."
Surprising me, she complied. I leaned down, felt the weight of her body sagging against me as she lost the will to stand. I scooped her up. Her arms circled my shoulders and she buried her face against my chest.
I knew I was one hell of a bastard, but for the second time that night, I felt like I had won the lottery.
I placed Lacey on the couch, intentionally crowding her up against the armrest so she couldn't wiggle away after I sat down next to her. Pulling her back into my arms, I coaxed her head into a position that had her face sheltering against my neck. I stroked her hair, trying at first to think of something to say but then deciding to let her just take comfort in my arms for a time.
Eventually, she adjusted her position so that her cheek was softly against my chest. She brought one hand up and placed it next to her face, the open palm resting over my heart. She spoke first and I knew what the words would be as soon as I heard the small intake of air that powered them.
"I'm sorry, I..."
"Don't say that," I reprimanded lightly. "You are the last person on earth who needs to apologize to anyone."
She shook her head and I scolded her a second time.
"You better not be disagreeing with me, baby girl."
Pushing her cheek harder against my chest, she closed her hand into a fist and drew it to her lips. I wrapped my hand around the fist and pulled it up to my mouth. I was deep into dangerous territory, but I'd been there before. My lips brushed her knuckles and then I pressed a firm kiss against them.
The tension in her body doubled. Sighing, I released her hand and felt her place it against her face again.
"Lace, walk me through why you cannot decide whether you should get the surgery."
"Duh," she whispered and I had to chuckle.
"You could wind up completely blind," I answered for her. "But you're almost there and heading that way fast, aren't you?"
"Yes," she answered and dug a little deeper against me. "But the post-surgery blindness is most likely irreversible. New techniques might extend the window of chance or even make it possible to reverse the blindness if it occurred from the natural decline..."
I waited for her to trail off.
"That's a whole lot of 'likely' and 'might' and 'possible.'" I said. "Might it also be possible or likely that new techniques could also reverse the post-surgery blindness?"
Her shoulders sagged at my question and I knew she was holding back.
"What else is bothering you about the surgery, baby? Is it the possible pain or the recovery period, or—" A small flash of understanding offered a specific fear that might be driving her indecision. "You think you'll be entirely on your own after the surgery, that you'll have to go back to that mother of yours totally blind, don't you?"
The only hint I had that I was on the right track was Lacey fisting my shirt.
"If Austin knew you were thinking that he plans on kicking you to the curb, he would spank that bottom of yours straight to Sunday," I teased, hoping to ease her tension. "Do you want me to talk to him about it?"
"No!" She grabbed my shirt tighter, her body vibrating like a violin string. "Please, can we just stop discussing this?"
"Can you please just answer my question?" I shot back, my frustration growing. I knew how to talk to soldiers about their problems, which more often than not could be solved by a boot to their ass and the order to suck it up and move on.
Lacey didn't need tough love. She had spent most of her childhood with her vision disappearing more each day and then her father had died when she was fourteen. That, as I understood it, was when things really became hard for her.
But she would never admit it. She'd just apologize for being a bother and offer to go to her room.
I bit at my lip before I could say something I would regret her hearing. Telling her she'd been raised by a bitch would only result in Lacey sticking up for the woman. And that would set me off completely.
"Okay," I breathed out as I decided on a different plan of attack. "Let's say you have the surgery and the worst that can happen does. Then what?"
"I tell Austin I don't want to go back to my mother and I ask him for help," she answered, her voice cracking on the last word.
"Good, but you're going to ask him tomorrow, not after the surgery. If you don't ask him on your own, I'm going to have to tattle on you. Understand?"
Feeling her nod against my chest, I pulled back the tiniest bit and planted a kiss on her forehead, my sudden relief making me reckless.
"He'll say 'yes,' just like he said he would cover all the medical costs, so there won't be any obstacles left," I said, trying to move on quickly with the hope that she wouldn't notice the absolute lapse in my professionalism with that kiss. "Meaning
you have no reason not to call the doctor this week and schedule the surgery."
The room was so quiet that I heard her swallow.
I had missed something. Her indecision had more than one factor.
"What else is holding you back, Lace?"
No way in hell could I have imagined the answer she gave me…
4
"You are,” she whispered. “You’re my reason for not going through with the surgery.”
I shook my head, forgetting for the moment that the motion would probably go unnoticed.
I pulled back and moved far enough down the couch that we no longer shared the same cushion. I knew my reaction could only hurt her, but I needed space to figure out the right thing to say so I wouldn't unknowingly hurt her even more.
Crap, for one crazy second, I wished I was back in the Middle East with an opponent I could use weapons to defend myself against instead of facing a young woman I could break with one careless word.
"That's no kind of reason, Lace."
Make that five careless words...
She drew a deep breath in and for the first time in four months I heard a sharp edge to her sweet voice. “It’s the only reason that really matters to me, Wake. If it turns out that I lose my vision permanently, I’ll miss what little I can see of you."
This was a fucked-up kind of crazy.
"Lacey, you cannot mean that." I put a stern hand on her shoulder as I fought the urge to shake some sense into her lovely head. "And even if you think you mean it, I'm not going to be here forever. The risk level around Austin will go down and I'll be off somewhere else. Maybe even out of the country. I'm no reason for you to not have the surgery."
Fat tears welled in her blue eyes.
