Guardian Knight

by Aarti V Raman

  Moreover, she was free to date and be with whomever she chose. And she had always liked Sebastian Delgado. From the first minute she’d met him. He remembered that stroll around The Sea Princess very clearly.

  “I think he wants all this over with so that he can ask her out,” Jared speculated.” Not that she isn’t sexy as all hell. I mean, did you see that dress she came in, but, what. What is it, Lucas?” He asked Lucas who was making throat-cutting gestures behind Brand’s back.

  Brand sat completely motionless while he absorbed this fresh information. He tried to curb the urge to kick Jared’s glistening, white teeth in.

  “Brand,” Lucas began quickly. “Don’t we have to do some talking about what our next step is going to be?”

  .

  “Oh, I know what our next step is Luke.” Brand murmured as he stood up, fluidly, despite the pain in his thigh.

  This wound and all others had been treated by Jared, as soon as they’d boarded the helicopter. He was the only member of his group with any medical experience, having trained with the Red Cross at one time.

  “What, Brand?”

  “I am going to kill Geraldo De La Hoya. But not before finding out who he is working with to drain San Magellan.”

  Lucas and Jared were left to ponder the utter truth of this reply while Brand stalked out and upwards seeking an unaware Akira.

  Thirty-Eight

  It was amazing what a hot shower and a clean change of clothes could do for a person. Akira felt so much better after just drying her hair. The sting from the cut had totally faded now, and she’d dressed it herself after her shower with the first aid kit she’d found in another drawer in the enormous bathroom.

  In fact, if things were different, she’d be tempted to live the rest of her life in this bathroom.

  She wondered where Brand was, since he’d disappeared on her an hour ago.

  Not that she was keeping tabs on him or anything, she told herself, but it would’ve been nice to have someone else to talk to while scrubbing Amazon dirt from your fingernails. And she was getting to know such different startling aspects of his personality; she didn’t want their time together to end just now.

  Her stomach gave a loud growl again, and she grinned ruefully.

  Basic needs. They had to be met.

  Maybe there was a phone here that would lead to room service and a really big breakfast. Her mouth watered as she imagined the bisi bela bhaath her mother cooked up on the rare occasion when she deigned to enter the kitchen for Sunday brunch. And coffee…like gallons of coffee.

  She was still thinking dreamily about life-giving coffee, when the door to the bathroom swung open from a side she hadn’t been aware of, and Brand came in, all glowering and determined.

  Something she didn’t register at first.

  She only saw that he was showered, clean and smelling like a sexy, sexy man. Dressed in his trademark grey tee-shirt and black pants, his hair wet and curling at the ends, even his face, with the rapidly fading bruise, was appealing. His hands were stuck inside his pants pockets, and she thought that strange.

  Brandon Rice wasn’t a man who didn’t know what to do with his hands.

  “Nice of you to show up, I was just going to start looking for you. I’m so hungry I could eat a burro.” Akira smiled, sticking her own hands in the deep pockets of the robe that engulfed her and moved towards him.

  “I want to know everything, Akira,” he said quietly. So quietly she had to strain her ears to hear him.

  She stopped dead in the middle of the room, bewildered. “Everything about what?”

  ~~~~~~

  It was a reasonable question, he supposed, but he couldn’t think of a reasonable explanation right now.

  So he followed impulse and moved towards her. Stalked her.

  He watched with deep pleasure as the confusion in her changeable brown eyes turned into concern, and then into annoyance. He could handle her irritation. He was good at provoking it, keeping it fed. It was the other stuff he wasn’t so good at.

  “Brand, wait…” Was all she got out, before he hauled her up on his chest and kissed the breath out of her.

  Just because he felt like it. And if that made him a chauvinist then so be it.

  For a second, she was unresponsive, shocked out of her wits at his sudden display of sexual aggression, but then she gave as well as she got.

  His hands were under the robe, running restlessly over her back, cupping her full breasts, and she was tangling her fingers in his wet hair, tugging him closer. Changing the angle of the kiss, so that it went deeper, into intimacy and uncharted territory.

  They broke for breath in the same second.

  Akira stared at him for a full second, eyes liquid with desire and pleasure and mouth red and wet from his kiss.

  And, for the first time in his life, Brand felt the stirrings of gentleness under the passion. He didn’t know what to do with either emotion.

  “If I ask you nicely will you do that again?” She chuckled low.

  Brand closed his eyes before he could find the strength to slip her from him.

  But she still didn’t let go.

  Akira wound her arms around his waist, and smiled impishly at him. “I told you my mouth is talented.” Her robe gaped open.

  Brand struggled not to look at it. And take what was inside not because it was offered; but because it was his. “Yeah, you did. Now use it for talking.” He straightened the edges of the robe and pulled the sash at her waist.

  Akira frowned at his intense concentration of the task. “Brandon, while I love playing sexy games as much as the next woman, I really would like to know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  She stepped back from him, her eyes cool and logical again; saw past him to the opened door and to a huge bedroom.

  And it was huge. All in white, white carpeting and a white bed, and a huge window that covered one wall and opened onto a stunning panorama of the Guajira Peninsula. A beautiful bedroom that belonged on a magazine cover, if he thought about it.

  She turned from the door and pinned him with a cold glare. “This is not a resort. There are no other guests, hardly anybody else except your crew, and I can't find an in-house phone or a room service menu. Where are we, Brand? And this time, I want to know everything.”

  Akira folded her arms under her now tightly belted robe and scowled.

  Brand felt the first stirrings of alarm. “Akira.”

  “You tell me everything right now. Or, I swear to God, I am going to find a phone somewhere around here and call Amnesty International. I’ll turn myself in if that’s what it takes.” There was no fire in her words. Just cold, deadly purpose and he believed her.

  “You’ll turn yourself in? For what?” Brand knew he was being contrary trying to bait her, but he didn’t want to involve her further if he could help it.

  Not if it could be prevented.

  “Flying out of a country illegally for one,” she said evenly, holding up one finger. “Being accessory to a mercenary-slash-militia operation for another.” The second finger went up. “Stealing valuable political documents from another country, shall I go on?” Akira flipped him the bird on that question and he didn’t exactly blame her.

  Brand looked down at his feet, then straight at her. “Can I trust you?”

  For a second she looked incredulously at him.

  ~~~~~

  Then, Akira gave a short harsh laugh. “I know what you think of me, my work. That I’m a constant irritant mixed with doses of quixotic stupidity.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from spilling into her voice, her very heart. “But I always believed you credited me with intelligence and loyalty, Brand.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brand began. “That was a mistake --”

  She held up a hand. A quick, warding-off gesture. “I get it, I really do. You’re involved in something top-secret and dangerous up to your neck and you don’t want me finding out about it. Or worse, reporting it. How about you save me
the headache and yourself the regret and just tell me what’s going on, Brandon?”

  Brand slowly nodded his head. “How much did you find out about Mantisse Corp, before yesterday?”

  “Not a lot,” she admitted, hating the sense of failure that came with it. “Just the regular website history. Corporate mumbo-jumbo. The daughter companies, NERVU included, were all clean when I checked. It’s frustrating, to say the least.”

  She followed him to the big white room, with its panoramic view and sat down on the single rocking chair that was placed at the foot of the bed.

  Brand raised one eyebrow at the obvious distant gesture, but sat down next to her on the edge of the bed. “And?”

  “I ran database checks on all the Directors and the companies too for news hits. Nothing shady, nothing suspicious. I even checked trading history on a couple of the listed companies in the Corporation. Not a lot of profit, but no steady loss either. They seemed to be doing okay. Why, did you find something that I couldn’t?” She was back in investigative mode again.

  Her sense of betrayal would just have to take a backseat while she cracked the story of her life.

  “Lucas’s working on it, and even he doesn’t seem very enthusiastic.”

  Akira shrugged. “Like I said, there’s not much that’s not on the surface.”

  He sighed. She wasn’t going to let this one go. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “Anything else, Brandon?”

  “You were right. This isn’t a resort. It’s a house...” Brand conceded, while he took one of her hands in both of her own. “A safe house. My safe house.”

  She was suspicious as much at the gesture as at the volte-face. “And you didn’t tell me this before because you didn’t trust me,” she concluded. Tugging her hand back towards her lap.

  He breathed noisily through his teeth and brought it back towards him. And since he was at least seventy pounds heavier than her, she couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  “You are such a contrary woman,” he began in exasperation.

  That did it. “And you’re sweetness and roses yourself aren’t you, you jerk?”

  ~~~~~

  Akira sprang up, the force of her anger lending her strength and momentum. She was pacing before he could close his mouth. Her eyes were shooting flames at him.

  “We had sex.” She stated.

  Not wanting to aggravate the situation he nodded. Once.

  “We had sex, engaged in intimacy. Maybe not personal, maybe not everlasting, but it meant something to me. And, FYI, I do not sleep with men I don’t trust. So the fact that you don’t, but still did, speaks volumes...” She broke off and took a deep breath.

  “This is not about that. No.” Akira shook her head as he opened his mouth, cutting him off.

  “No, I can't make this about last night. And I won't. We’ve been through some deep shit together. I got shot at, like, three times since I’ve known you. And not once, not once, did I ever have a problem with your handling of situations or your apparent dislike of my profession because I thought its basis was in logic.”

  She thumped her chest once. Hard. “You didn’t know me. You didn’t know my professionalism or my dedication to my job.”

  Brand closed his mouth again. Wisely.

  She stopped to face him. “But you do now, Brand. You know I am as good at my job as you are at yours. And the fact that you don’t trust that, trust me, makes me angry. And it makes me sad. Not at you, because of course, you’re a jackass, but at me. Because I should have known better. And I trusted you anyway.” Her speech ended as violently as it had begun.

  Akira sat down on the bed, spent.

  He tugged her to him and kissed her fingers. Softly. Romantically.

  That got her attention.

  “Now,” Brand said clearly. “Would you just listen, before you hang me again?”

  “I’m listening.” She answered, searching his impenetrable black eyes cautiously. “But I can't promise not to hang you.”

  He nodded, wearily. “Fair enough. Man, talking to you is like being under fire from three different directions. And, before you take offence at that, it was an observation and a compliment.”

  Curbing her impatience, Akira shut her mouth and let him do the talking for once.

  ~~~~~

  “Now, we have a couple of misunderstandings to clear up before I fill you in on what’s going on.”

  She cocked a brow at that.

  “First, you’re wrong in thinking that I don’t trust you. Okay, I did ask you if I could right now, but it was largely rhetorical and mostly stupid on my part. I didn’t mean it. I trust you, Akira. With my life. With my secrets,” Brand said so simply, she had to believe him.

  She was touched, and it showed even though she struggled to keep her face impassive. It showed in the clenching of her fingers on her lap.

  “Next, your abilities as a reporter are a constant irritant for me, I admit that. But only because you’re so damn good at it, Akira. Only because you’ve uncovered things you weren’t supposed to. Finding the stringer in Paris, going through public property records was ingenious. And you’re dedicated. Dogmatic, I would say, so help me god if you ever say that I don’t respect your job.”

  “I --”

  “I’m not finished,” Brand said mildly, his eyes hot now, and his hand busy as he hauled her closer to him. Right onto his lap.

  This time, she didn’t resist. She went willingly.

  “Now about last night… you do yourself a great disservice by implying what you did about me. About us. The fact is, you’re an incredibly beautiful, passionate woman and when I am around you I lose my head. Or at least I’m in danger of losing my head, which amounts to the same thing.” Brand spoke matter-of-factly.

  Akira smiled. Widely. Innocently. “Really?”

  “Really what?”

  “You think I’m beautiful?”

  He stared at her. That delicate nose, the small perfectly shaped lips that could blister him like no one ever had when she spoke, the softness of her skin, and the new bandage on her cheek.

  There was strength and fragility in this woman in corners that he was afraid of finding.

  Did she not know? How could she not know how gone he was over her?

  Brand touched the hurt cheek now. “How’s it?”

  “I think it might leave a scar,” she admitted in a small voice.

  “War wounds. Every soldier should have them,” he said in a solemn voice, his eyes twinkling devilishly.

  “But not on my face.” Akira grimaced.

  He shook his head. “Vanity, thy name is woman.”

  “Hey.” She shoved at his shoulders now, and then held on when his hands tightened deliciously on her back. “What happened to me being an incredibly beautiful and passionate woman?”

  “There are other adjectives too. I didn’t add them.”

  She laid her head on his shoulder, bundled in his arms like a child in the huge robe.

  “Brandon,” she said a moment later, while she got hard evidence that she could apply certain adjectives to him right now too.

  “Yeah?”

  He was a hair’s breath away from kissing her; she could see the intent in his eyes. And for all her talks on intimacy, she was scared gutless about what he could take from her. What she would give him.

  “We still have to talk. About Geraldo and the corporation and that memo and what that man spoke about. Something about a master.”

  Reality crashed back into his brain.

  His hands tightened on her again, but this time it was fear. Fear, because unknowingly and deliberately he’d involved her in something way out of her league. And, with their latest stunt, the stakes had just been raised sky-high.

  But she was resourceful and she kept her head in situations. Maybe, this might still turn out alright for them all.

  He nodded. “Alright, I’ll fill you in on everything so far. But we go down for breakfast first. I don’t know about you woma
n, but wild, impulsive, jungle sex makes a man famished for sustenance.” He mock-growled at her and his heart warmed at the way her eyes danced at him.

  Akira chuckled. “Let’s put in some real work, cowboy, and we’ll see what we can do to top that wild, impulsive, jungle sex, yeah?”

  Brand laughed, as she’d intended he would.

  But he also thought, My God, I can't lose her.