If there was one thing she had learned in her twenty-eight years, it was that men don’t stick around. Growing up, it had mostly just been her and Mama. The men who’d come and gone in their modest house in the suburbs had seemed more like visitors than anything resembling family. She supposed her father qualified as family, but he had traveled almost constantly, and besides, he’d taken a hike when she was nine years old.
Mama had often touted herself as a woman who needed a man to feel complete. “You’ll understand, baby, when you’re a little older,” she used to say. But Daisy never did quite grasp the concept. From everything she’d observed, it simply meant that a woman set herself up to spend the majority of her life feeling incomplete. For instance, her mother had married again when Daisy was eleven, but Papa Ray had already been gone by the time she turned twelve.
The summer following her sixteenth birthday, her mother was romanced right off her feet by Nick’s father, Dale Coltrane. And their life got swept up into something entirely different.
At first Daisy truly believed that her lifelong yearning for a stable family with a father who stayed and siblings she could call her own had come true. She was still a cockeyed optimist then.
She and Mama didn’t belong in the Coltranes’ world, though, and boy, did those who did ever rush to point it out. She’d never realized there were so many ways in which they could fail to measure up. The criticism was constant, but always handled with an exquisite politeness and subtleness that was difficult to defend against. That never stopped Daisy from trying, of course, which was simply another mark against her. While she railed against the snobbery, Mama desperately tried to fit in.
The sibling aspect didn’t work out quite the way Daisy had hoped, either. Mo was kind and friendly and willing to take Daisy under her wing. But she was five years older and had her own interests and friends. And Nick was mostly a muscular back that Daisy saw leaving whatever room she entered. On the rare occasions they were thrown together, he treated her like an amusing pest from a foreign country. And before Daisy had the chance to turn him into the brother she’d always wanted, their parents’ marriage had ended in unspeakable ugliness.
At first it wasn’t anything Daisy hadn’t heard before: bitter voices behind closed doors, cold silences, half-stifled weeping. But then Dale, with deliberate cruelty, took it to a depth she didn’t understand to this day: he vilified her mother in the press and destroyed her reputation. It paid to be rich and have even richer friends, she supposed, for how else could he have sold the tabloids such a patently untrue story about Mama’s alleged lurid sexual practices with the heir of the Campman Winery, who was supposed to be his good friend?
Campman’s strident denials and solicitous comforting of Mama, which had been captured by tabloid photographers, just lent credence to the stories which Dale’s testimony alone might have lacked.
By the time the marriage was over, Daisy had come to realize she was never going to be part of a Cosby-type family. She had no control over that, but she did vow that she would never repeat her mother’s mistakes. She believed that somewhere out there was a man she could depend upon one hundred percent to love her until death did them part, and at the age of seventeen, she swore to save herself for him.
So what the hell had ever possessed her to sign a contract with the very man who’d sweet-talked her into breaking that vow a mere two years after she’d made it?
The bus rattled over a set of trolley tracks and she frowned at the overcast day. Money wasn’t exactly a negligible reason when one had as little of it as she did, of course. But she had her emotional welfare to consider, too—and hard experience had taught her that Nick Coltrane was not good for her in that respect.
The bus was almost at her stop, though, and she reached up to pull the cord. She’d just have to set aside her doubts. A deal was a deal, and it was too late to back out now.
She wrestled her luggage and assorted paraphernalia off the bus, cursing her ingrained frugality. A cab ride wouldn’t have blown the budget, and it would have made a much better impression than showing up on Nick’s doorstep like the poor little match girl. She seemed to adopt that role much too easily whenever she got within breathing range of the man. Just once it would be nice to act from a position of strength. Well—next time.
Daisy looked up the almost vertical hill, adjusted everything as best she could one last time, took a deep breath, and started walking.
Several blocks later, she stopped outside a wall surrounding an enormous brick mansion. Pulling a scrap of paper from her hip pocket, she checked the scrawled numbers against the brass script on the driveway gatepost. This was the place.
Looking at its sheer size and opulence, she didn’t know whether to roll her eyes at Nick’s skewed idea of “poor” or to congratulate herself. This was exactly the sort of barn-sized dwelling she’d envisioned when she’d agreed to move in to guard his sorry butt. The gated wall was a tad ostentatious, but would make it easier to set up parameters for keeping Nick safe. Heck, if they stocked up with enough provisions they wouldn’t even have to leave the joint, which would cut down dramatically on the number of situations that would put him in danger. She rang the bell set into the post.
The speaker crackled a moment later. “Who is it?” demanded a woman’s voice.
“My name is Daisy Parker—”
“Oh! You’re Nicholas’ bodyguard!”
“His security specialist, yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t look big enough to be a bodyguard.”
Daisy frowned at the camera at the top of the post. If she had a buck for every time she’d heard that, she’d be rich enough to tell Nick to find somebody else to guard his treacherous hide. And she wasn’t even particularly little; that’s what really got to her. She was almost five-seven, but that was immaterial.
The real issue was that she wasn’t a man.
The woman seemed to be waiting for a reply, so Daisy said, “I’m taller in person.” Silence greeted her remark and she added, “I assure you I’m very good at my job, ma’am.” Still the woman didn’t respond, and Daisy finally lost patience. “Listen, lady, I can’t do my job if you won’t let me in.”
“Nicholas warned me you’d be abrupt.” The driveway gate hummed as both sides slowly swept open, revealing a drive that curved to the right. “He’s in the carriage house.”
“‘Nicholas warned me you’d be abrupt.’” Daisy mimicked sourly. Great. Five minutes in his world and already she’d been found wanting.
She repositioned her bags and stepped through the gate. And what was this about a carriage house? Sizable lots and places to park were both at such a premium in San Francisco that it seemed the height of luxury to own one’s very own on-site, multicar garage. Nick had one helluva nerve talking about budgets.
The original doors of the carriage house had been replaced with automatic garage doors, and two of them stood open, rolled up into the ceiling. Gratefully setting her gear down, Daisy peered into the dim garage. A classic Daimler was parked in one pristine bay and an older Porsche in another. The third bay stood empty, except for a chest freezer tucked in the corner. No one was around and she called out Nick’s name.
“That you, Blondie?”
The voice came from overhead, but when Daisy peered up, there was nothing to see but rafters. Then a racket sounded from outside and she walked back out onto the apron. Following the clatter of footsteps, she rounded the corner in time to see Nick hit the bottom step of an exterior wooden stairway.
He swooped down on her. “Where’s your stuff?”
Her heart lodged itself so firmly in her throat that she could only wave a hand at the heap just inside the garage. Once again, she questioned her intelligence in accepting this job. Coming face-to-face with a client didn’t usually make her heart thunder like a junior high school girl confronted with her first big crush.
Daisy straightened her spine. Dammit, she would not feel this way. She wasn’t thirteen; she was a grown
woman. She was a professional—she’d been a cop, for cripes’ sake. She snatched her custom-fitted weapons case out of Nick’s hand. “I’ll take that. You can get the rest.” Remembering his bad shoulder, she guiltily swept up her suitcase also, and left him with the lightweight plastic grocery sacks she’d stuffed full of odds and ends.
Looking around, she saw that a narrow path wound through a small, beautifully planted yard to the back door of the mansion. “Where do we go?” The back door would be her guess, but since she was on her party behavior for now, she refrained from simply barging ahead on her own.
“Up here.” His hands full, Nick used his chin to indicate the stairs that climbed the side of the carriage house. One of the bags slipped and he adjusted his grip. “Jesus, Daisy, what is all this stuff?”
Daisy looked up the stairs. Clearly there was an apartment up there that he’d been readying for her. Equally clearly, he didn’t grasp the basics of security. “I can’t protect you, Coltrane,” she growled in disgust, “if you’re in one place and I’m in another.”
Nick gave her a baffled look. “If I’m in…” A startled laugh escaped him. “You think I live in the main house? Man, you just won’t listen when I tell you I’m not rich, will you? I rent the carriage house from the owner of the place. C’mon.”
Daisy warily followed him up the stairs, and she knew she was in big, big trouble the moment she walked through the door. Instead of the massive space all decked out in cold chrome and leather that she’d expected, the place was a dollhouse. A compact, cozy, inviting little dollhouse. Her stomach took a dive right down to her toes as she peered down the short hallway into the main room.
This was awful.
The ceilings were high, the floors were gleaming hardwood, and the walls were brick. Mullioned windows overlooked the drive and the tiny yard, and compelling black and white photographs she figured for Nick’s work graced the walls. A breakfast bar defined the kitchen space at the far end of the room, and midroom, a plush maroon velvet couch and two overstuffed tapestry chairs faced a fireplace and entertainment center. Nick looked at her over his shoulder, and Daisy realized she’d stopped dead at the end of the hallway, by the only plaster wall. There were two closed doors in it that she assumed led to the bedrooms. Or perhaps to a bedroom and a bathroom.
“Where’s your, ah, darkroom?” she asked as she edged past. What she really wanted to know was where he expected her to sleep, but her nerve failed her at the last minute. That would never do. She had to start off on more dominant footing if she didn’t want to lose control of the entire situation.
“Down in the garage,” Nick said as he watched her set her suitcase on the floor and the smaller case on the antique trunk that served as a coffee table. “I just finished putting it back together after yesterday’s rampage.” She’d changed into jeans and a burnt-orange chenille sweater, and he watched her long-legged stride as she prowled around the apartment, checking this and peering into that. She stopped at the humpbacked trunk under the windows and squatted down in front of it. His eyebrows rose along with the lid she raised. “You looking for something in particular there, Blondie?”
“I just like to know what’s around me.” She scowled at him over her shoulder. “And I’ve told you before, Coltrane, don’t call me Blondie.”
“Fine, then—Daisy. Get out of my stuff. Your mother raised you better than to go poking through people’s closets.”
“She tried, but as you can see, it didn’t take. If something’s there, I’m gonna look.” She surged to her feet. “Where do you want me to sleep?”
His muscles went tight at the answer that leapt to mind, but he forced himself to relax as he turned and headed for the bedroom. He opened the door and looked back to find her right on his heels. “In here.”
She brushed past him and walked around his room, giving it the same close scrutiny she’d given everything else. She picked up his odds and ends and then set them down again. She eased open a nightstand drawer, peered inside, and then slid it shut. After giving the professional-quality punching bag that hung in one corner a left-right-left series of jabs, she sat on the side of the bed and bounced a couple of times. “Nice.” Then she looked over at him. “This is your room? And the only bedroom, I take it?”
He nodded.
“Then where do you plan to sleep, if you turn it over to me?”
“On the couch.”
She eyed the length of his legs and laughed skeptically. “Yeah, right.” She rose to her feet. “Keep your room. I’ll sleep on the couch.”
Every chivalric lesson ever drummed into his head protested the idea. “That’s not necessary.”
“Actually, it’s mandatory. For one thing, I’ll fit the couch a lot better than you. More importantly, my services aren’t going to do you a fat lot of good if hubby’s goons manage to get in here and beat the bejesus out of you while I’m sawing Z’s in the bedroom. The whole idea is for the bad guys to have to go through me in order to get to you.” She breezed past him. “C’mon, let’s go see what kinda stuff you keep in your medicine cabinet.”
Her cocky posturing rubbed him the wrong way and impulsively he reached out and grabbed her arm to tell her to can the attitude. But when her momentum swung her around and she stopped dead in front of him, he caught her scent and forgot what he’d planned to say. She smelled of laundry soap and shampoo and a faint, musky, underlying hint of woman, and he had an insane impulse to back her up against the nearest wall and sniff out the origin of each and every fragrance.
Then he got a look at her face, which was coldly furious. Hand fisted and arm cocked back from the elbow, she strained stiffly against his hold, staring first at his fingers, then at his face. “Get your hand off of me.”
He knew that was exactly what he should do, but something inside him refused to obey. “Or what?”
She reached down and brushed her fingers in warning against the fly of his jeans. “Or I’ll rip your pride and joy clean off and feed it to the first dog I see.”
It was an ego bruiser, how fast he took his hand off her, and he snarled, “Still the low-rent little street fighter we all knew and deplored, I see. I must have been crazy to think this would work.”
Daisy’s face went blank. Then she turned and without a word began gathering up her motley collection of bags.
“What are you doing?” As if any idiot couldn’t plainly see, but he had to ask anyway. He really wished he hadn’t, though, when she turned to look at him. The contempt in her eyes seared him right down to the bone.
“Getting my stuff and going home. I’ll return your retainer in the morning.”
Maybe she was right. Given their turbulent history and the close quarters, he didn’t know if he could handle having her stay here with him. Yet he liked the alternative even less. All this flip-flopping from Hiring-Her-Is-a-Sound-Plan to This-Is-the-Worst-Idea-I’ve-Ever-Had put him on edge, and a fire began to smolder deep and low in Nick’s gut. He raked a hand through his hair. “Is that it, then? You’re just gonna leave me staked out here like a sacrificial goat?”
Her bags hit the floor with a thud, and she faced him with her chin thrust forward and her hands fisted on her hips. “What do you want from me, Coltrane? Do you want me to stay, or do you want me to go?”
“I don’t know, dammit! Hiring you was an impulse—probably because Mo mentioned a while ago what you do for a living.”
“Well, if you kept your busy little hands out of married women’s pants, you wouldn’t need anyone’s services,” she said hotly.
He thrust his face down close to hers and warned, “Don’t even go there.” Pleased as punch when her mouth snapped closed, he took a large step back and straightened. For some reason it bugged the hell out of him that she believed he’d fool around with a married woman—even if he had told her so himself.
“It’s not up to you to judge me,” he said coolly. “Not if you’re willing to take my money. And as your employer, I want some information I should h
ave asked for earlier. Your little offer of a demonstration aside, Blondie, I don’t actually know squat about your qualifications.” Her fine-boned, slender build and that stubborn little chin that barely cleared the middle of his chest gave him serious reservations. “Face it, you don’t exactly look like anyone’s idea of a bodyguard.”
She made a sound of disgust deep in her throat, but her expression was neutral when she said, “Believe it or not, Coltrane, that actually works to your benefit, since people constantly underestimate me. I am nevertheless fully qualified.”
“How’s that? You go to the ITT Peterson school of Bodyguarding or something?”
Her chin rachetted another notch higher. “Oh, very cute. Insulting and inaccurate, but terribly cute. You rich boys certainly have this repartee thing down to a fine art, don’tcha?”
He raised his camera and looked at her through the viewfinder. “Your qualifications, Daisy?”
“I graduated third in my class from the police academy.”
“You were a cop?” It caught him by surprise and he lowered the camera. She and Mo had kept in loose touch, so over the years he’d heard things about her. But never once had Mo mentioned Daisy joining the police force. He lowered the camera and gave her a skeptical once-over. “Get outta here.”
“You get out of here. It’s true.”
“Where?” He’d guess Mayberry, Middle America.
“I was with the Oakland PD for four years.”
Okay, not Small Town, USA. He eyed her with interest, trying to imagine her patrolling some of the meaner streets of Oakland. “So why did you leave?”
“There’re a lot of politics involved in that sort of bureaucracy.” She hesitated and then admitted, “I wasn’t very good at playing the game.”
That tugged up a corner of his mouth. “No, I don’t imagine you were. Diplomacy never was your strong suit.”
She shrugged, acknowledging it. “And honesty isn’t always the best policy in civil service.” Then her eyes narrowed on him. “Is a background in law enforcement qualification enough to suit your royal highness?”
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