What the Lady Wants

by Nika Rhone

  “Doyle!” The accompanying tug on his chest hair drew a pained grunt from him but served its purpose of dragging his attention back to the question at hand. “It’s a simple question. Yes or no?”

  It should have been a simple question. But it wasn’t. There were things at play that Thea wasn’t aware of, dangerous things. Things he had to protect her from. Because if he lost her, if anything at all were to happen to her, he’d be gutted. Devastated. Destroyed.

  Then again, what better way to protect her than from right by her side the entire night? Not to mention the fact if he was counted as a guest, he’d be able to get a second man inside the venue without Rogers being able to bitch about it.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t have to sound so enthusiastic.” Thea tweaked his chest hair again to emphasize her displeasure.

  Doyle laughed. He twined the fingers of his free hand with hers, saving himself from any further retribution. “Yes, Thea, I would love to be your date to Amelia’s party.” He punctuated his acceptance by dragging her hand to his mouth and kissing her palm, then turned the gesture carnal by catching the web of her fingers with his teeth and nipping just a bit before laving the sting away with his tongue.

  Thea made a sound low in her throat in response. His dick stirred again, and he had to fight the urge to just roll her underneath him and risk more brain cells dissolving by slipping into the warm welcome of her body for a second go.

  “I want you again, too,” she murmured in his ear, indicating that she hadn’t missed the tent he was making in the sheets. “But you have work, and I have to get dressed and decide whether or not to ruin my best friend’s day or not.”

  “What? Why?”

  Thea sighed, her warm breath tickling across his chest. “If you knew something, something that could make someone really upset, something bad, would you tell them or would you keep it to yourself?”

  For a split second Doyle had the panicked thought that Thea somehow found out about the letters, but he dismissed the idea when he connected the question to her first comment about ruining her friend’s day.

  “I guess it would depend on whether or not the something was dangerous or not.” His conscience tweaked, hard, but he ignored it.

  “Dangerous, no. Potentially devastating, probably.”

  “Devasting how? Emotional, financial, social?”

  “Definitely emotional.” She groaned and snuggled deeper into his side, her hand still entwined with his on his chest. “I know I should tell her. I just don’t want to. Mellie is under so much pressure already, what with the party this week, and the wedding, and dealing with the dragons. I’d really hate to dump something else on her head right now, but…”

  “But she might hate it more if you kept it from her?”

  “Yeah.” Thea used the hand trapped between them to pinch his side. “Why do men have to be such jerks?”

  “Ouch.” Giving her ass a retaliatory swat, he scowled. “Why do I get punished for something her idiot fiancé did?”

  “Sorry.” She kissed his shoulder in apology. “Charles is a sneaky bastard and a shit.”

  “Well, he is a budding politician.” Doyle endured another pinch, this one deserved. “What did he do?”

  He listened while Thea sketched out what she’d learned from Charles’s personal assistant about the reason for the last-minute dinner that had kept Amelia from attending the club as planned. A part of him understood why Charles—or, more likely, his father—had wanted the club vetted. Platinum was popular, but it wasn’t exactly mainstream, and politicians were always conscious of things that might come back and bite them in the ass later on in their careers, especially in this day and age of camera phones and instant media streaming. Once something was out there, it was out there forever.

  But the other part of him, the part that knew the three friends and how they watched each other’s backs in the tricky and sometimes nasty social world they lived in, knew that both Thea and Lillian would see the tactic as a gross betrayal of trust on Charles’s part. Doyle also understood Thea’s hesitance in clueing their friend in to the facts.

  Amelia Westlake was the one the other two looked out for the most, their weakest link if he had to put a term to it, although Thea would probably punch him if she ever heard him say it out loud. No one wanted to bear bad news to the ones they loved and protected.

  He should know.

  When she was done talking, Thea lay in his embrace, absently running her thumb over and over his, until finally she said, “I don’t know what to do, Doyle.”

  “Then ask yourself, if the situation was reversed, would you want Amelia or Lillian to tell you?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.” There wasn’t any hesitation in her answer. “It might hurt to hear, but I’d rather know the facts than flounder around in the dark believing in something that everyone else knew wasn’t the truth.” Turning her head, she pressed a kiss to his chest. “Thanks.”

  This time, his conscience didn’t just tweak, it kicked him straight in the gut. “I didn’t say anything you wouldn’t have figured out on your own anyway.”

  “Still, it was nice to have you to talk it over with. I like this.” She raised herself up on her elbow so she could look down at his face. “I really like this. All of this. You, me, the talking…”

  “The sex.” He gave her a teasing leer.

  “Oh, yeah, the sex absolutely rocked,” she agreed with a grin, but it faded to something just a bit uncertain that made his heart hurt. “You’re not going to change your mind, are you? I mean, I’m almost afraid that once we leave this room, you’ll start having doubts and regrets, and then things will get all kinds of weird between us again and—” Her words were muffled under the two fingers he placed over her mouth.

  “Not going to change my mind.” He stated it as firmly as he could without sounding pissed, because he was a little. Did she really think he’d take her to bed and then just decide he didn’t want her anymore? “Not going to have doubts. And the only weirdness is going to be when your parents come home in three days, and I have to tell your father that we’re seeing each other.”

  He watched her eyes widen almost comically and answered her unspoken denial. “Yeah, I do. He’s your dad and my boss. He needs to know how things stand between us.” Definitely not a conversation he was going to enjoy, but there was no way around it.

  “But…”

  “Like he wouldn’t figure it out on his own if we spent more than five minutes together in a room with him?” The man hadn’t made his millions by being unobservant. And Thea was his only child. His little girl. His baby.

  Oh, yeah, he would really hate having that conversation. The only thing worse would be having to defend his inadequacies to the man in front of Thea.

  Thea sighed and sank back down at his side. “I guess you’re right. But shouldn’t I be the one to tell him? I mean, he is my father.”

  “No, I’ll talk to him. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s what men are supposed to do. You get to tell your mother.”

  “That won’t be a problem. She’s always liked you. It’s Lillian I don’t want to tell. She’s going to gloat that her plan worked.”

  A few things clicked into place. “Ah, so I have her to thank for the new jogging clothes and that teeny, tiny bikini you were almost wearing?”

  She preened just a bit. “Liked it, did you?”

  “Liked? I damn near swallowed my tongue, woman!” He smiled when she giggled. “You’ll have to burn it, though, because if anyone else ever saw you wearing it, I’d have to kill them.” And he meant it. Just the thought of anyone else on his security team wandering by the pool and seeing Thea wearing that scrap of material she laughingly called a bathing suit made him want to do murder. Yesterday, he would have called it protectiveness. Today, he knew it for what it really was.

  Possessiveness.

  Funny how the thought didn’t freak him out the way he thought it would. Thea was his, to have and protect and
keep all other male eyes the hell off of. Period.

  “What if I promise to only wear it for you?” Thea batted her eyes in exaggerated coyness.

  His temperature rose several degrees at the thought. “That would be acceptable.”

  She laughed and then groaned. Patting his chest, she said, “As much as I’d rather spend the rest of the day just like this, we really do have to get up now. I have some bad news to give, and, if I don’t go do it now, I just may chicken out again.”

  There it was. His crossroads. His gut clenched, and Doyle reached a decision, one he still wasn’t one hundred percent sure was the right one, but given the conversation of the last half hour, he knew it was the only one he could live with.

  Curling his arm around her, he pulled Thea back to his side as she started to rise and held her there, ignoring her surprised look and focusing on the ceiling as he spoke.

  “Before you go, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Someone was stalking her.

  The thought rolled around and around in Thea’s brain as she drove on autopilot along the familiar roads to the Westlake estate. Someone was watching her, maybe following her, definitely fantasizing about her…

  Her gaze jerked to the rearview mirror. The sight of the familiar dark blue sedan didn’t give her the measure of comfort she expected. Maybe she should have asked Daryl to ride with her. Or she could have ridden with him. Or she could have just stayed at home, safely locked behind the estate’s walls and watched over by the elaborate surveillance system she’d always hated knowing was there in the past. Never before had she been so grateful for those cameras’ intrusive presence.

  Common sense told her to stay where it was safe. Sheer stubbornness had made her leave. No one, not even some psychotic freak, was forcing her to cower under the covers for the rest of her life.

  Of course, being brave had been easy while she’d still been inside the gates. Out in the big, wide world, she found that she wasn’t quite as sanguine about facing her fears. At least now she understood why she’d been saddled with the extra security details for the past month.

  A flash of anger helped burn the fear away for a few seconds. Damn her father for insisting on keeping such a huge secret from her!

  Not that she didn’t understand his motivation. Her father’s love for her and her mother sometimes bordered on the obsessive. Hadn’t she had to move over a thousand miles away to attend college just to get a breath of free air? So she really shouldn’t be surprised that he would insist on keeping her in the dark and wrapped up in cotton for her own good.

  But to lie to her? And to make Doyle lie as well? For God’s sake, she had a right to know that she wasn’t just in some vague danger from a few overpaid executives with a grudge, but rather the direct target of a deranged, and evidently very smart, very determined, lunatic.

  She felt a twinge of regret over the way she’d blown up at Doyle when he told her the truth. Lying was her one real hot button. After all of the crap she’d gone through with Dave’s lying and cheating, she had zero tolerance, and Doyle knew it.

  To his credit, he hadn’t offered up any excuses. He laid out the facts and then let her have her say. Which she had. Loudly.

  In her own defense, though, she realized that she was venting her anger on the wrong person, and wrangled her temper under control pretty fast. No matter what she and Doyle were to each other, at the end of the day, he still worked for her father and was bound by his orders, as annoying and wrong as they might be.

  No, Doyle didn’t deserve her wrath. That prize belonged to her father. And oh, was she going to have it out with him when he got home. How could he think he was protecting her by leaving her in the dark about someone wanting to hurt her?

  Anger was replaced by the hollow ache that had started in the pit of her stomach when she’d first understood the full implication of the situation. Someone actually wanted to hurt her. Who? Someone she knew? A total stranger? Someone she talked to every day, or someone she’d never spoken a single word to except in their twisted mind? The danger could come from anywhere, anytime. No one, no place was really safe.

  All of Doyle’s paranoia about Nick now made perfect sense. Thea shuddered, but she knew in her heart that it wasn’t him. Seth, on the other hand, hit all of the points on the creepy stalker checklist, including the fact that he’d somehow gotten her private phone number despite both Peter and Lillian swearing up and down that they hadn’t given it to him. Judging by the fire in Doyle’s eyes when she told him about Seth, he agreed.

  Thinking she might be able to help figure out who was doing this to her, she insisted on seeing the letters for herself. That had been a mistake.

  The first few letters Doyle showed her were like the one she’d gotten in the mail and given to him weeks ago—creepy, but almost innocent. Saw you, liked you, want to be with you. Middle school stuff.

  By the third, though, things got a little less innocent and a lot more personal. Scary personal. Intimately so. By the fifth, she hadn’t been able to get through the whole thing before she dropped the photocopy to the table and walked out of the room, wanting nothing more than to go take another shower. A hot one. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any brain bleach for her to use to cleanse the horrific images from her mind.

  Doyle refused to show her the rest of the letters. Not that she wanted to see them after that. She just couldn’t imagine how they could possibly be any worse than the ones she’d already seen, but if the look on Doyle’s face was any indication, they must have been.

  Although what could be more horrific than having some maniac’s initials branded into the flesh of her inner thighs as proof of her acceptance of his total possession and ownership, she didn’t want to know.

  She tried to push the memories away and concentrated instead on negotiating the turn into the ornate wrought iron gates that opened before her. If she didn’t stop thinking about it, she just might have to pull over before she reached the house, and she was pretty sure Mrs. Westlake wouldn’t appreciate her puking in her rose garden.

  She parked on the side of the garage behind Amelia’s Mercedes hybrid but didn’t move to get out even after shutting off the engine. She leaned her head on the steering wheel and tried to corral her emotions.

  God, what a day.

  First the very public confrontation with Margo, and then the amazing hour of passion with Doyle, and then finding out she’d been fixated on by some sicko with a perverted sense of courtship. Now she had to go tell her friend that the intimate dinner she’d been so excited about had been just one more manipulation by the politically ambitious idiot she was engaged to.

  At this rate, she would have to start borrowing Mellie’s antacids.

  Okay. Enough. She pushed thoughts of the letters into a cramped little corner of her brain and hoped they would stay there. One crisis at a time was all she could deal with and right now was the time for Amelia’s.

  Royce, the Westlake’s very proper butler, informed her that Amelia was in the family dining room having a light luncheon, giving a conspirator’s wink as she passed him a large plastic baggie of Rosa’s homemade contraband from her tote. Oliver hadn’t been the only member of the household to resent Monsieur Le Chef’s hissy fit and Mrs. Westlake’s resultant goody ban.

  Royce and the twice-widowed housekeeper, Mrs. Massey, were particularly fond of Rosa’s baking, and, if Thea wasn’t mistaken, of each other as well. Since both of them had run interference between Amelia and her mother on more than one occasion, she was more than happy to return a favor.

  She also knew the value of a peace offering, hence the second baggie of gooey oatmeal-chocolate chip yumminess in her tote for Oliver. She had a feeling that after their tiff the night before, he wasn’t going to be as accommodating as he’d been in the past when she asked for a favor. But she’d gotten Doyle to agree to be her date, and she wasn’t wasting a second getting the seating arrangements squared a
way to secure his place at her side.

  Even though it was what her bodyguards always did when she went to visit one of her friends, Thea still felt a rush of panic when Daryl gave her a nod and turned down the short hallway that led to the security office situated at the front of the house. She fought it down, inch by inch, reminding herself that she was just as safe inside the Westlake’s home as she was in her own. Probably safer.

  Too bad logic didn’t mix well with panic.

  Knowing the longer she stood there, the more of an idiot she looked like, Thea forced herself to move. As she approached the dining room, voices sounded through the doorway. Amelia and her mother.

  Thea groaned. She so didn’t want to deal with the woman at the moment, and she definitely couldn’t tell Amelia what she needed to tell her while her mother was there. She wondered if it was too late to escape back out the front door, and then had another, less-craven thought. If the dragon was occupied here, it might be the perfect opportunity to catch Oliver alone.

  Backtracking, she hurried down the corridor to the small office the mothers had usurped as their own. Darn. It was empty. But the door stood ajar and the light was on, indicating that whoever had been inside had only just left and expected to return soon. Thea hesitated on the threshold. No Oliver, so there was no reason for her to go inside. Still…it was forbidden territory. Sacrosanct. Totally off-limits to everyone but the dragons and their minion.

  The lure was just too great.

  Giving a swift look both ways down the hall, she slipped inside. The room was larger than expected, easily twice as big as the room she set up as a temporary office at home. The faint aroma of Coco Noir lingered in the air, letting her know that Mrs. Westlake had been there and might very well come back at any moment. Thea’s heart picked up a few beats at the implied risk, but to be honest, after finding out she had a deranged admirer stalking her, the threat of the dragon’s wrath really didn’t measure up.

  Two desks flanked the right and left walls, one with a computer that had a swirly screen saver slowly rotating through the colors of the rainbow in random, abstract patterns. Next to the computer was an open can of Red Bull energy drink, the recycle bin beside the desk already half-full of the slender blue-and-silver cans. Good. That meant Oliver was around somewhere.