Pawn (Ironclad Bodyguards 1)

by Molly Joseph

  She was making him say it again, when he’d already said it to his mother. Forgive me. He had only done what he thought best. She believed him, that he hadn’t known Zeke would die. She sniped and poked at him because there was no one else to snipe and poke at in her anger.

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “Forgive me.” She did stroke his hair now, the springy, thick texture of it curling dark against his nape. Arab hair. Anyone could look at it and know. Or not know. “I love you,” she told him. “I love you as Sam or Salim. Both of you are in my heart.”

  He drew in a breath and hugged her harder. “Gracie...”

  “I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to be nice right now. I feel so angry, but I’m not angry at you.”

  He leaned back and sighed. “At least you’re feeling something.”

  She studied his face, the crinkled tension lines around his mouth. “What are you feeling?” she asked. “Is it hard to be home?”

  He was still a moment, then gave a faint shake of his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to feel. I feel guilty and tired and…untrustworthy. I’ve been a bad bodyguard, and a terrible son.”

  “You’re not a bad bodyguard. You kept me safe,” she said. “Even in Dubai, when things went crazy.”

  He touched her shoulder, the tender, lingering bruise. “Did I really keep you safe? Someone hurt you, and you’re having nightmares again.”

  “It could have been so much worse.” Her heart ached at the pain in his eyes. “I love you, Sam. Even if I died in Dubai, I would have died loving you.”

  He made a choking sound. “Don’t say shit like that. Jesus.”

  “Your mother loves you too. She forgives you. She doesn’t think you’re a terrible son. Your brother and sister forgive you. We all love you. Things will get better soon, don’t you think?”

  “I hope so,” he said, taking her hand. “But you shouldn’t have to be the strong one. That’s my job. If I don’t lose my job,” he added on a rueful note.

  “If Liam fires you, then I’ll hire you.”

  “I’m not taking any more of your money.”

  “Maybe I can pay you in other ways,” she said, staring at his lips. She wasn’t joking, but he chuckled and shook his head.

  “I love you, Grace. Do you know that?” He tilted her face up and kissed her once, twice, then a third time, hard enough for her to feel it in her toes. “I love you, damn it. I adore you. You always make me smile.”

  “You make me smile too. You make me feel happy. And wonderful.” She reached for his shoulders, and then decided it would be better to crawl into his lap. They might both feel a little lost right now, but they had each other. She had his strength and his kindness, and his beautiful brown-green eyes. “About that payment issue…” she said, running a hand over his abs.

  “You little harlot. We’re in my mother’s living room.”

  “There are places to go. She made up a room for me.”

  “Yes, and I’m expected to sleep on the couch.”

  She shook her head and slid her fingers lower. “Oh, no. I don’t think you should sleep on the couch. You put in enough couch time in Helsinki.”

  His breathing changed, his eyes darkening by the moment. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Before long, she convinced him to sneak down the hallway to the guest room. He laid her back on the bed and climbed on top of her, so the mattress groaned and squeaked under their combined weight. With a muffled curse he pulled her down beside it instead, onto the floor.

  “My mother doesn’t approve of premarital sex,” he said between kisses. “We have to be quiet.”

  “I’ll try,” Grace promised.

  They tugged at each other’s clothes, undoing waistbands and pushing up shirts until they were skin to skin. She stroked his cock, measuring the thick, heavy length of it, waiting impatiently when he left her to get a condom from his luggage. Thank you, Mem. At least they had condoms now. She wanted him to get crazy with her, to fuck her rough and hard so she could feel something besides anger and sadness.

  He seemed to be at the same emotional tenor. He pulled her legs apart and surged inside her, snapping his hips, pumping deep. The carpet scratched her ass, and her back where he didn’t cradle her. She didn’t care. At least you’re feeling something.

  “God. Oh, God!” she gasped as he drove into her. He covered her mouth with his hand, gave her a warning shake of his head. Quiet. They had to be quiet as long as they were in this house. She slid her body along his, drinking in his scent and closeness. He shoved fingers into her mouth and she sucked them so she wouldn’t scream from the pleasure, the fullness of his invasion. His lips were parted, his expression intense.

  Her orgasm was building, ripening, expanding just like her feelings for Sam. Her limbs shook as the heat between her legs reached a fever pitch. He pounded her hard, filling her with his cock, his fingers, everything. She started crying, not because she was sad, but because this was that much. “Everything,” she whispered behind Sam’s hand. “I want everything.”

  He gave her everything and she clung to him as she came, her fingers twisting hard in his hair. She hurt him that way because she couldn’t scream, and he hissed and jammed himself inside her until she shuddered with completion.

  He silenced her cries with hotly intense kisses, but she still yanked on his hair because she felt tumultuous, and ecstatic, and too filled up for words.

  Chapter Fifteen: After Dubai

  “Chess, like music, like love, has the power to make people happy.” —Siegbert Tarrasch

  Sam sprawled on top of a rock near the beach house, sunbathing and watching Grace on the shore. She was hard to miss, picking through the sand in her Marie Antoinette gown, with her voluminous skirts blowing in the breeze.

  The World Chess Championship match was set to continue next week in Copenhagen, as a nod to the Danish Embassy for their assistance in Dubai. In the meantime, Grace and her seconds had actually convened in the Bahamas, on a private island owned by one of Grace’s very wealthy and influential supporters. They were here to mourn, to wait, to plan more strategies. Always more strategies. They had not had so much as a flyover the entire two weeks they’d been here. The frenzy and fear of Dubai seemed a lifetime away from this paradise.

  This was after Dubai, the after Dubai he and Grace had waited for, but it wasn’t really after Dubai. Now it had become after Copenhagen, because they were still in this thing, this perfect storm of achievement and misery.

  Grace turned from the waves to seek him out. He lifted his arm and waved.

  “She looks for shells again, eh?”

  Renzo stood a few yards behind him, squinting at Grace. Like all of them, he sported a deeper tan than usual.

  “Yes, I think that’s what she’s doing,” said Sam. “She’s been making piles of them on the beach.”

  The Argentinian sighed. “She’s trying to forget her pressures. Forget chess. Forget Al Raji. This would have been over by now if they had held the match in Copenhagen to begin with. Now we must wait.”

  Renzo’s wife had come with him this time. They cooked in the kitchen together, and Sam understood why. It was something they could share, something besides Renzo’s preoccupation with the match. It was their escape. What was Grace’s escape? The seashells? The dress? His cock? She certainly enjoyed his cock. Did she really love him, or was he only the distraction she needed to turn her mind off every night?

  “What will you do?” asked Renzo.

  Sam turned to him. “Do about what?”

  “What will you do, you and Grace, when all this is done? After she has won? What will you do together?”

  Liam had asked him the same question at Zeke’s funeral. What will you do now?

  “I don’t know,” Sam said, a little defensively. “It depends on what she wants.”

  Grace tripped on her dress and stumbled sideways. Then she saw a sandpiper and went running after it, arms waving.

  “I’m not s
ure she knows what she wants,” said Renzo. “She plays chess because she’s good at it, but I don’t know if it makes her happy. Or rather, if competition makes her happy. It seems to me it’s the art of the game that compels her. The possibilities. Not the winning.”

  “She says chess is like music to her,” said Sam.

  “Music, yes. For me, it is art. For Krishna, meditation.” He grimaced. “For Fredrik, power and self-aggrandizement.”

  “What is it for Al Raji?”

  “Mathematics.” Renzo chuckled. “And he is very good at working the formulas. It’s fascinating, how one game can be so many things to so many people.”

  For Sam, chess was Grace. But Grace wasn’t chess. She was so much more. She was deep thoughts and shy smiles, and uninhibited sexual surrender. He knew what he wanted, what he needed to be happy. He hoped she felt the same. “I think I’ll go down and see what she’s up to,” he told Renzo.

  “Don’t be long. It’s dinner soon,” he said, heading back to the house.

  They’d have barbeque today, Sam could smell it. He ran down to the beach in the endless effort to maintain his physique, now that Renzo and his wife had taken up residence in the kitchen. No windowless rooms and sandwiches here. There was sand to run on, fresh sea air, tons of food, and a whole lot of tumbling around in bed with the Marie-Antoinette wannabe wading along the eddies.

  She turned when she heard him approach. She wasn’t wearing her glasses. They’d gotten scratched up with sand by the second day, so she’d thrown them out. “I don’t mind if everything looks soft here,” she said. “I want to feel soft for a while.” With her short, disheveled hair sticking out in the sea breeze, she looked nothing like Marie Antoinette, and everything like the complicated woman he’d fallen in love with.

  “Want to go for a swim?” he asked.

  “No.” She was convinced there were sharks in the water. There probably were.

  “Want to walk down the beach with me?”

  “Okay.”

  He took her hand and they set off. The sun was setting. They probably looked like some clichéd destination-wedding couple, the shirtless groom and full-skirted bride walking into the sunset.

  “Do you want to get married?” he asked.

  “Um, maybe.” Her fingers twitched against his palm. “This is kind of a busy time for me.”

  “I don’t mean you and me, right now,” he said. “I mean, do you want to get married in general? Is it something you want to do in your life?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked back out at the water. “I never really thought about it.”

  “What do you think you’re going to do after Copenhagen?” he pressed. “Do you have any plans?”

  “I guess I’ll have to go on a bunch of talk shows. Do interviews. That kind of stuff.”

  “Probably. I think people would enjoy that.”

  “I’ll play in some more tournaments. I’ll have to maintain my rating if I want to keep competing. I have to keep playing the new people coming up through the ranks.”

  “It’s probably good for you to keep playing.” Her skirt blew against him, tickling his legs. “Do you want to have kids?”

  She made a face. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about this stuff. Why are you asking?”

  “I’m just curious. I know you’re interested in all kinds of things. I just wondered if marriage and family was one of them. I know you didn’t have the best family life growing up, before Zeke came into your life.”

  She was quiet a moment. “No, I didn’t. It was like not having a family at all. You have a really great family, though. They really love you.”

  Yes, and he had left them for years, ashamed of his Arab roots. His white father had left too, when Sam was five years old, married a white woman and had white kids, which had made young Salim despise his Syrian heritage even more.

  “I want to spend time with my family again,” he said. “And I want to have a family of my own, so I can do things better. Try to do things better, anyway.”

  “You want to have kids?”

  “Yes, I think so. Someday. If I find the right woman to settle down with.”

  She turned to look at him, and he smiled. She was adorable. Genius-level adorable, yet clueless enough to miss the fact that he was talking about her.

  “Are we going to stay together?” he asked, because she needed him to be really, really literal sometimes. “Will we stay together after Copenhagen? Like, as a couple? I need to know.”

  “Why?”

  Because I adore you. Because you pick up shells on the beach in a wedding dress. Because I lose my heart when I make love to you every night. “Because I have really strong feelings for you, Gracie. I love you. So if you’re going to head out on your own after Copenhagen, I need to prepare myself for that.”

  She turned to him and put her palms against his cheeks, and kissed him. She tasted like candy, like the salt water taffy their benefactor helicoptered in three times a week with the other food and groceries. “I want to be a couple,” she said when she pulled away. “I don’t want to be away from you, ever. But I have to play chess first. I have to beat Al Raji.”

  “You beat him once. You know you can outthink him. All you need to do in Copenhagen is show up and do what you do. I think the rest of this is noise.”

  “What do you mean, noise?”

  “Noise. Distraction. Fretting and worrying about everything.”

  She broke away from him, irritated. “I’m worrying because this is important. I need to win that title in Copenhagen.”

  “For who? For yourself? For women in the Middle East? For all the nerds on the chess forums? For the United States government? For Zeke?”

  She stalked away from him, scaling a sand dune. “Yes. And because I hate Al Raji.”

  “You don’t hate him. You don’t even know him.” Sam frowned at her as she regarded him from the top of the dune. “You know, most people wear bathing suits on the beach.”

  “Because they lack imagination. Al Raji lacks imagination.”

  “What about me, Grace? Do I lack imagination?”

  “Sometimes,” she said with a sassy look.

  He ran up the dune and tackled her before she could skitter away. “I think you lack imagination sometimes,” he said, collecting her flailing arms. “I’ve thought about marrying you in this dress.”

  “It wouldn’t fit you,” she said, squirming under him.

  “You know what I mean.” He pinned her wrists to the sand. “I’ve imagined all kinds of things as far as you’re concerned. I’ve thought about what it would be like to be married to you, to sleep beside you every night, and make breakfast with you in the morning. I’ve thought about what our children would look like, if they’d be blond or dark haired, and whether they’d be good at chess.”

  She went still underneath him. Yes, I love you. Yes, I think about crazy things. Sometimes I’m as crazy as you.

  “Do you know what?” she said. She blinked, her blue eyes as deep as the sea. “I think I sort of fell in love with you at the beginning. The very first day.”

  “Me, too. I felt drawn to you from the start. I’d never felt that way about anyone else.”

  “Weird, huh?”

  “Very.”

  “You’re getting sand in my panties,” she said, straining against his grip.

  “You deserve it, for wearing panties in the Bahamas.” He stuck his hand under her skirts and wrestled the panties off, and tossed them into the surf, a peace offering for the sharks.

  “You threw my underwear in the water,” she said, scowling at him.

  “You ruined the wedding dress I bought you,” he pointed out. “Which is just as bad.”

  “I can get the dress cleaned. I’ll never get my panties back.”

  He held her down and kissed her. Candy and sand, and a little bit of crazy. He’d become addicted to her taste.

  “Hey, you lovebirds. It’s time for dinner,” yelled Renzo from the back dec
k.

  Sam broke the kiss and gazed down at her. “No matter what happens in Copenhagen, I want us to be together afterward,” he said. “I don’t want there to be a question. Not the slightest doubt in your mind.”

  “What if you get tired of me?” she asked. There was a little tremble to her lips.

  “That’s never going to happen,” he assured her. “I have a lot more imagination than that.”

  Chapter Sixteen: The Match, Again

  Trending on Twitter: #WorldChampionshipMatch #GoGraceGo

  It was a shock to leave their tropical paradise and return to the real world. Grace had become used to warm sun and peaceful security. Now she was in Copenhagen, back amidst the media and the State Department agents, and the silent, sterile hotel hallways. Something was different now, though. When she walked down those silent, sterile hallways, Sam openly held her hand.

  This venue was different too, more secure. There were no spectators at the match, only cameras recording each move and sending it out across the planet. She won the first two games easily, putting her up 3-0, counting the game in Dubai. Al Raji won a game on the third day, and the next two games ended in draws, so it was 4-2. Grace was still up by two games, and she thought she had the next game in the bag, when Al Raji came back to win it. Then, to her chagrin, he won the game after that, tying them up at 4-4.

  That was tough for her. She freaked out after he won the second game in a row. She blamed Fredrik, she blamed the delay after Dubai, she blamed the noise from the photographers, she blamed the strength of the Danish coffee. Maybe all those things were true. Or maybe the chess player everyone called “The Mathematician” had only been crunching her numbers, studying her style and coming up with the perfect formula to shut her down.

  Sam stayed with her while she paced and cried herself out, then he gave her a tough pep talk and a thorough fucking. It didn’t help. She thought this would be easy, that she could waltz in here and vanquish her enemy. Her enemy had turned out to be a lot more resilient than she realized. The next two games were excruciating, mental and psychological battles that ended in draws. That put them at 5-5, so either of them could win it with a victory.