They way he saw it; his damn ego had outgrown his common sense. Money and power did that. He’d been a giant fool. And in doing so, gave a crazy woman the upper hand. Knowing that his foolishness put Rhiann in danger only made him feel worse.
In the midst of his reverie, his phone buzzed. Roman. Thank god because he wasn’t exactly a patient man at the moment. Waiting to hear from him with an update had been torture.
Done.
Liam quickly began texting back. Is she okay?
Okay? Yes. Happy? No.
Will she talk to me?
Get real.
Tell her to turn her cell phone on.
Boss-nobody’s going to tell this Wilde woman what to do. Plus-my presence here is tenuous. Best not to push our luck.
Good point, Liam thought. BTW lunch was interesting. Uncomfortable. Kim thinks she won.
That’s what we wanted. How was my girl Jill? Haven’t had a chance to check email yet. Too busy pleading for your life [U owe me one]
Jill? Oh, jeez. Chuckling, Liam wrote: Is she British?
Nope. Midwestern gal.
In that case, she was fantastic-English accent and all. Played her part beautifully although the tongue kiss and crotch grab was a bit edgy.
Was Walsh impressed? [wish I could have seen her face]
Think she swallowed her tongue-esp after introducing as my girlfriend. BTW-Jill Munroe? Really? U watching Charlie’s Angels reruns again?
Was her suggestion. Thought you’d get a laugh. Did she give you the heads up?
Yes. Perfect timing, too.
How’d the crotch grab go? LOL
Asshole. She came back empty-handed.
With me out of the picture, Gary is leaving a breadcrumb trail to distract Walsh. He mentioned she’s time/date stamping everything she does. Covering her tracks. Been thinking and—Houston . . . we have a mole. She has to have help. Someone in legal perhaps? That would explain her knowledge of the Ward issue.
Gardner reports she has a secret boy toy as well.
Going to pull in old friend. Surveillance expert. Ex-Special Forces based in southwest. While she’s watching Gary watch her, he’ll find out what she’s really up to.
Name?
Cameron Justice. I’ll send you his info. Gotta go. Your lady is rattling pots and pans in the kitchen. Better make sure she doesn’t plan to poison me. Need a laugh?
If it involves Rhiann—yes.
She called Walsh . . . Cuntzilla of the Razor Claws Clan. Priceless. Can see why she keeps you on your toes. You fuck this up with her and I’ll personally slap your stupid face.
Understood. And Roman?
Yeah.
Send me a picture. If I can’t talk to her, I need to see that she’s all right.
Jesus. You want me to pass her a fucking note in study hall, too?
Fuck off.
Slamming a big pot on the stovetop with a loud bang, Rhiann muttered aloud, “And on top of everything else, now I have to cook for a roommate playing the part of the bodyguard. Who the hell does this happen to?”
Making as much racket as possible, she set about throwing together a quick meal while Roman settled in a guest room. He completely startled her by appearing in the kitchen with his hands raised in mock surrender.
“Whoa, Miss Wilde. Those pots ‘n’ pans do you wrong? All the noise suggests cruel and unusual treatment.”
Deciding the less chitchat, the better, she shrugged inwardly. “Chicken piccata okay with you, Mr. Bishop?”
“You do not have to cook,” he offered somewhat drily. “Do you have a favorite restaurant?”
Rhiann hesitated a moment before snapping, “I may not know a lot about being a bodyguard, but I do know a little bit about avoiding crazy drama. I’m being watched or so you say.”
The skeptical look she tossed at him spoke to her fears more than her sense.
“So it seems to me that being out in public is asking for trouble.”
He glanced away briefly then met her accusing frown head on. “Actually, being seen with me is part of the plan.”
“Do you hear yourself when you speak?” she said with a frustrated grunt. “There’s a plan? That involves me? Do I get any say in this or is my part in BPG’s internal bullshit limited to assault and injury?” she taunted with a wave of her arm brace.
He didn’t flinch so much as tense. She eyed him warily and didn’t discount that with his size and imposing physical presence if he wanted to intimidate her or snap her in half like a twig—he could. Perfect hired gun material.
“Cards on the table?” he asked.
Feeling decidedly uncomfortable but needing to know, she nodded.
“She’s got someone helping her. Maybe more than one someone. We’re not sure. Putting up roadblocks to detour her away from you is our only option until we know who else is involved. To that end, we’ve put some things in motion to throw her off.”
Rhiann’s head jerked back. Put some things in motion? What in the hell did that mean?
The only thing that kept her from going across the kitchen island at him was the way he gentled his tone when he told her the rest. At least he knew she was coming to the end of her rope.
“Mr. Ashforth is uh . . . that is to say, he’s got a girlfriend who . . .”
The ringing in her head was so loud that Rhi had to press her hands against her ears to disrupt the sound.
In a frantic, high-pitched wail, she yelled, “A whaaaat? A girlfriend?” Unable to take anymore, she turned quickly and ran to the little bathroom behind the kitchen where she tossed up her cookies in rather spectacular fashion.
Heaving into the toilet as tears blurred her vision, she heard Roman mutter, “Shit,” behind her although she really didn’t care. This was the last straw. Enough was enough.
The searing reality that she’d given her heart to a man who was capable of such despicable bed-hopping crushed her soul. Oh, my god. She still loved him. Always had. Always would despite knowing that he’d never been upfront or honest with her for a single second. He was right all those years ago. She knew nothing about him. Not really. Liam Ashforth was a closed book—even to her—and why she imagined being the exception to that rule only showed what an idiot she was.
A damp cloth appeared over her shoulder that she accepted gratefully. Pressing it to her face, Rhiann inhaled choppily and turned misery filled eyes on her protector.
“Thank you,” she mumbled—privately wishing there hadn’t been a witness to her downfall moment.
“Miss Wilde,” he said gently, leading her into the dining area where she could sit. “Rhiann.” She couldn’t look at him, not even when he used her given name.
“You two are a fucking mess,” he muttered. Pulling up a chair close by, he took her hands in his and rubbed until she felt sensation return.
“The girlfriend is a ruse, Rhiann. To throw your antagonist off. That’s all. And I’ll let you in on a little secret if you swear not to spill the beans just yet.”
Was it wrong to feel hopeful? Probably. It was not like she hadn’t been down this road before, but she gave him a small crooked smirk.
“Pinky swear,” she whispered.
“The girlfriend?” He chuckled wickedly. “Known her for years and in all that time, she’s been as gay as the days are long.”
Rhiann sat there, resting on the back of the chair, the damp cloth still clutched in her hands as she considered what Roman had told her.
“When you say gay—does that mean what I think it means?”
“I mean full-on lipstick lesbian. She’s a knockout, too. Had to be in order for this charade to be believable.”
“Are you sure? I mean . . . she’s got va-jay-jay fever for real? Not lesbian-adjacent. Right?”
He grinned. “Vajayjay fever. Good one. And no, not lesbian-adjacent. If it helps any, she’s a card-carrying badass with some serious undercover cred. This isn’t her first rodeo. She’ll keep him safe—which is what matters.”
“While you’re here keeping me safe.”
“Exactly.”
Pondering these new facts, she suddenly looked up and asked, “Wait a minute. Does that mean you are currently playing the role of my . . . boyfriend? Is that what you meant by a plan to throw Kim off?”
He was laughing and before she knew it, Rhiann was laughing, too.
THREE DAYS PASSED WHILE LIAM went about his normal business so anyone paying attention would see nothing out of the ordinary. To all appearances, it seemed as though his trip to London had not only ended with him securing a complicated multi-national deal that would feather BPG’s cap, he also managed to hook up with a hot new girlfriend.
Thinking of Jill, once they were alone after their initial meeting, he’d thought to ask, “How real does this have to look?”
As cool as could be, she told him succinctly, “As real as a relationship with one of the country’s most prominent businessman has to look.”
And what had that meant? Now that Kim was effectively on notice that there was a new pair of Louboutin’s in town, Jill immediately took up residence in his home. She dropped by the office for what had to look like noontime booty calls—with Mrs. Gardner being in cahoots, of course—went public every night for dinners on the town, and with a devilish laugh, had even taken his credit card out for a mega-spin at a bunch of high-end stores.
The necessary PDAs with his faux-girlfriend, however, were making his conscience itchy. What would Rhiann make of it? Having her nose rubbed in a newspaper clipping of him embracing Kim had been bad enough but wasn’t he now just adding salt to the wound? It didn’t matter to him that the bit of playacting was a weapon in the arsenal employed to keep her safe. It just didn’t seem right.
At night, once the daily charade was over, they retired to his penthouse where, as she was doing right this second, Jill went into professional beast mode: scouring his web footprint for clues and doing invasive background checks to just about anyone who he came in contact with.
Gary, who was acting as his security chief now that Roman and he had their very public falling out, was also playing his part without fault. Diligently working off radar, he’d followed up on Roman’s belief that there was a mole at BPG and found that Kim had indeed been manipulating a young dumbass in the legal department.
Confidential documents related to Liam’s connection to Adam Ward were compromised, as was a bunch of internal information that would prove embarrassing if made public.
Everyone now suspected that the people Kim was exploiting for her own twisted reasons—and there seemed to be several—were who broke into Rhiann’s apartment.
Acting like none of this was happening so as not to arouse Kim’s suspicions was more difficult than Liam imagined it would be. Mostly, he wanted to cunt punt the bitch and even that crude reference was tame compared to the dark thoughts he privately entertained.
“Liam,” Jill announced as she came up behind him.
Putting his drink down, he swiveled on the sofa and looked at her expectantly, having picked up on the gruff tones of her voice.
“Problem?”
“You could say that.”
Liam scowled at the dark look on her face and waited for her to elaborate as she moved to stand in front of him.
Gripping an iPad in her hands, she studied the screen and swiped her fingers a couple of times, saying, “The good news is she’s unraveling and getting sloppy.”
Generally, when someone started with good news, that meant serious shit would be bringing up the rear. He wasn’t wrong.
Holding the tablet out to him, she offered an apologetic half smile and asked, “This look familiar?”
Taking the tablet, he glanced at the screen, jumped to his feet and hollered, “Jesus fucking Christ!”
Jill removing it from his hands with a hiss circumvented the temptation to hulk out and smash the damn thing into a million pieces.
“That’s what I thought.”
Running his hands through his hair, Liam paced back and forth, his breathing fast and heavy.
“Where did you get that?” he barked after a good few minutes had passed.
“Marjorie emailed me the image, and she got it from Shayne.”
Hearing Shayne’s name mentioned, he growled, “Are we sure no one knows about her link to my secretary?” The real fear that the young girl was in jeopardy, if her part in what was going down came to light, grabbed him by the throat.
“Nobody. Not even personnel, at either BPG or Passion, have made the connection. Marjorie didn’t want to subject you or Shayne to accusations of nepotism so she was careful not to rock the boat. Since it was just an internship and not a paid position, the details didn’t rise further than the department she was assigned to.”
Well, at least there was that. But what he just saw on Jill’s tablet got him worked up on so many different levels that he didn’t know which one to deal with first.
A picture of Rhiann taken by him, that fateful night when he’d rescued her, was making the rounds at Passion. And a flattering photo it was not. If he hadn’t immediately recognized the .jpeg as something he himself had taken, Liam might have missed how dangerous its release was. But remember he did and that made it all the worse.
That night in his apartment, Rhiann had whipped a digital camera out of her bag to snap a picture of him working on his Shelby model. As he recalled, what began innocently did not end that way. Fuck.
“You carry a camera around with you?” he’d asked, shocked by her actions.
Shrugging, Rhiann smirked and deadpanned, “Frat party. Pimps and Hos. Of course, I had a camera. So did everyone else!”
Shaking his head, he marveled at how fucking dumb kids were these days. Digital technology made it possible to record every imaginable inappropriate, dangerous, and sometimes illegal activity of the modern day college student. The instant gratification of .jpegs, without having to get a roll of film developed, just made the whole carrying a camera thing dicey at best. He was pretty sure that one day those photos would come back to haunt them. Idiots.
Snatching the camera, she’d tried to grab it back, but he slapped her hand away and grinned. “What goes around comes around, little girl,” he taunted. “Turnabout’s fair play, now strike me a pose and then I’ll give it back to you.”
Rhiann had giggled playfully and stuck her thumb in her mouth like a toddler. With an air of naughty innocence, she’d stood pigeon-toed, sucking her thumb, and twirled a lock of her gorgeous brown hair around a finger. She looked like the most fuckable schoolgirl on the planet.
It had actually been a hilarious interlude with Liam as the photographer. His inner pervert posed his guileless human mannequin in a variety of poses that were one hundred percent wrong. In every way. When he persuaded her to bend over the table and look more closely at his car model, he’d crouched low and snapped away at an angle that offered an up skirt peek of her white panties.
The thumb-in-mouth pose was the one making the rounds. He ground his teeth together and clenched his jaw knowing it was likely all over the fucking internet by now.
Where had that fucking picture come from? Surely not Rhiann.
He found it incredibly hard to speak for a long moment. “I’m going to fucking destroy that bitch,” he ground out. “Does Roman know? Has he told Rhiann?”
“Bishop knows. I sent him the .jpeg. He’s going to ask Rhiann about it and will let me know what he finds out.”
His mind firing on all cylinders, a thousand thoughts ran rampant inside him.
“What did you mean by she’s getting sloppy? Can you trace the release of Rhiann’s private photo back to her?”
Jill’s eyes narrowed—her mouth tense and grim. “So the photo was in her possession? Is that what you’re saying? You didn’t have a copy stashed somewhere?”
Liam held her piercing gaze and responded with certainty. “Her camera. Her photo.”
Jill crossed the living room. He could see her face reflected in the wind
ows that she stared through. She looked businesslike and fierce. He could practically hear the gears clicking in her head.
“I’m sending someone to Rhiann’s apartment in the morning. Will you be available to answer questions if I need you?”
“Why?”
“Why would you need to answer questions or why is someone going to her apartment?”
Both,” he told her. “And just so you know, I have zero information about her living space.”
“Yeah,” she shrugged like that nugget of information was neither here nor there. “But you know her and that’s what matters. Did you know that Rhiann kept a set of keys to her home in her desk at the magazine?”
He just looked at her blankly.
“Well, she did. And when she talked to the security guy at Passion, she neglected to divulge that fact.”
Feeling like he should defend Rhiann, he muttered, “I’m sure it was an oversight. She was probably rattled and just forgot.”
Squeezing the back of his neck, Liam rolled a shoulder and massaged the tension building there.
“Don’t worry, Liam. I know she’s the victim in all this. Luckily, that assistant of hers, Juan, knows quite a bit about her habits and let the info about the key slip. It’s no longer on her desk and since she didn’t go back to the Passion offices after the accident in the studio—she couldn’t have taken it.”
“How do you plan to get in without a key?”
She chuckle-smirked and glanced away. “Just leave that part to me.”
“Okay, Princess, let’s see. You owe me $180 for landing on Baltic Avenue. Bet you’re bummed about those three houses, huh?”
“Ooooh, you just wait. I’ve got all the railroads now, buster, and you’ve been pretty consistent about landing on at least one of them each time around the board!”
“How much money you got there?” Roman asked as he peeked at her stash and grinned. “I knew I shouldn’t let you play the banker. How do I know you’re not slipping a hundred into your pile every so often?”
“Wah, wah,” Rhiann cried with glee. “It sucks having your butt handed to you by a girl, hmm?”
Wilde Heart (Wilde Women Book 2) Page 27
