The Accidental Bodyguard

by Ann Major

  His fist slammed into her jaw.

  Someone was stuffing something that tasted of sour sweat and dust into her mouth, and she was strangling on the wretchedly thick cloth.

  As Chandra tried to turn her head she realized she was lying on hard, clammy concrete in some dank, dark place that smelled of mildew and mold. Her hands were bound so tightly behind her, the muscles in her arms were cramping.

  But it wasn’t her discomfort that brought her sharply to consciousness. It was Lucas’s low-pitched whisper near her ear.

  “Chandra.”

  She opened her eyes.

  Lucas’s dear, white, strained face hovered inches over hers. At first she thought she was dreaming. Then she saw the blood all over his chest.

  He was alive.

  He finished gagging her and eased her head gently against the concrete.

  “Nice work, counselor. As always.”

  Lucas’s gray eyes were cold and dark and utterly soulless as he slowly got up.

  Hal giggled. “May you rest in peace, dear Bethany.” He turned off the light.

  And Chandra realized she was in the tunnel under the house that would be permanently sealed with concrete tomorrow.

  And Lucas was walking away.

  With Hal.

  They were going to bury her alive.

  Something small and awful with lots of disgusting legs scuttled across her lips. She tried to scream, but the gag choked off all sound.

  Dear God.

  Suddenly the darkness was a living thing, a suffocating force pressing down upon her. She began to writhe and twist so hard and fast that soon she couldn’t breathe.

  She lay back, exhausted, her heart hammering, as she forced herself to take slow, measured breaths.

  Lucas was one of them.

  She had dreamed it. She had known it all along.

  Only she hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  Until now.

  Nameless, paralyzing horror swelled inside her when she heard Hal chuckle again. Then he shut the big door with a ringing clang that echoed endlessly in that hollow chasm.

  But the silence afterward was far more chilling.

  Eleven

  Lucas stumbled out of the garage.

  The breeze had died to a whisper. The night sky was steamy purple and so hotly aglow it seemed to burn with a fever.

  Or was it just Lucas who was burning up because a bullet had passed through him? Because he had helped lock Chandra in a hellish place that terrified her?

  “Move it, counselor. You may be half dead already, but I want to do you over by the pool.”

  The searing pain in his right shoulder blocked all feeling in his other nerves. Lucas couldn’t feel his legs as he moved slowly forward, holding the blood-soaked towel against the bullet wound to staunch the flow. He walked with the listless gait of a zombie. Maybe it was the loss of blood that made him feel so numb, but he didn’t think so.

  What had really gotten him was the look of utter despair in Chandra’s eyes when she’d become convinced that he was a brute and a killer.

  “Get down on your knees, counselor. I’ll let you say a prayer before you die.”

  Lucas’s eyes narrowed. His heart convulsed with hate.

  “I’m gonna do you like that crazy serial killer said he would, so everybody will think he shot you. Then I’ll wait up for your kids and do them, too.”

  The boys.

  Fresh hatred flooded Lucas. All his fear was gone. He had to save Chandra. He would die or he would kill.

  “I said kneel, counselor.”

  Lucas sagged weakly beside a wrought-iron lawn chair.

  “Put your head down on the ground and your hands on the back of your head.”

  Lucas felt his life slow to a beat as he lowered his head to the damp grass. Another beat.

  He was going to die.

  If he didn’t do something fast.

  Now.

  But even before his left hand closed like a vise around the leg of the lawn chair and he slung the heavy piece of furniture straight at Hal, Hal had screamed in pain. The gun jumped a fraction of a second before it went off, causing the bullet to plow into the grass an inch away from Lucas’s face.

  The bastard was rubbing his hand and moaning in pain. He had missed.

  The revolver and a horseshoe clattered onto the concrete apron by the pool.

  Peppin had flung the horseshoe with deadly precision. He raced forward and kicked the gun and horseshoe into the pool.

  Hal was lunging for the gun like a madman when Lucas tackled him and hurled him hard against the concrete.

  Hal’s skull cracked. Too stunned to move for a second or two, he just lay there. When he finally opened his eyes, Lucas attacked him like a demon, his balled fists pounding his jaw and stomach relentlessly.

  Both boys dived into the pool for the gun.

  Peppin burst to the surface with the gun and Montague with the horseshoe. Lucas had his hands around Hal’s throat and was squeezing the life out of him.

  “Go ahead. Kill him, Dad!”

  “Yeah! Go for it!”

  Peppin’s and Montague’s blood lust and cheering penetrated Lucas’s crazed brain, and he suddenly realized that the large brown hands on that thick throat were his own.

  In a daze Lucas jerked them away and stared at the unconscious Hal like a man awakening from a dream.

  Then Montague said, “Dad, you’re bleeding.”

  “He shot me.”

  Then Peppin asked, “Where’s Chandra?”

  Oh, God. “The tunnel!” Lucas whispered.

  She was lying as still and rigid as a corpse when she heard the first muffled sounds.

  Then the door banged open, and she heard Peppin and Montague fighting over who got to go in first.

  Lucas’s deep, husky voice boomed inside the tunnel.

  “Chandra, we’ve come back!”

  The light was turned on.

  “I get to untie her.”

  “No, I do.”

  “I threw the horseshoe.”

  “Metal mouth! Stupid!”

  “Nerd!”

  And the boys were there, hovering over her, squabbling exactly as they had when she’d regained consciousness in their closet.

  They loosened her gag and eased it away from her mouth.

  “My two darling angels.”

  The boys beamed.

  She hugged them and tried to smile. But she wept instead.

  When Lucas hesitantly knelt beside her, her beautiful face whitened and became filled with distress. She flinched and began to tremble. “Please! Please! Don’t let him touch me!”

  “But I love you,” Lucas whispered, frantic to make her understand. “I would never hurt you. Never.”

  “Liar,” she whispered, clutching the boys. “You already have.” She began to weep again. “Get him away from me!” That was the last thing he heard, because he fainted.

  Nobody believed her.

  Not the boys.

  Not the police.

  Even after she was out of the tunnel, Chandra was still scared.

  Within minutes after Peppin called the police, Lucas’s house was part madhouse, part war zone. Ambulances and police cars littered his driveway, their colored lights twisting and blinking as the boys raced excitedly from one cop to the next, bragging more each time they retold the night’s adventure.

  Chandra and Lucas and the two bodyguards and Hal were all lying on gurneys, about to be put in separate ambulances. The boys, with Lucas’s and Chandra’s help, were trying to explain everything.

  A surge of fear flowed through Chandra every time Lucas came near her or tried again to tell her he loved her. She would beg the police to keep him away from her.

  “No,” she kept saying to him, forcing herself to ignore the silent agony in his eyes. “Stay away from me.” And to anyone in a uniform who would listen, she said, “Why won’t you believe me? I tell you, he was one of them.”

  Twelve


  Lucas’s firm occupied the top two floors of a downtown office building and commanded the city’s finest views of the sparkling bay. Despite the oppressive heat, the office felt as crisply cool as an alpine summer day.

  Usually the elegant suite was as quiet as a bank vault or a hallowed sanctuary. Usually legal aids and lawyers and their clients spoke between these marble walls in the same hushed, reverent voices they might use at a funeral.

  Not today.

  Excited adolescent shouts from the aluminumwalled elevator could be heard even before the chrome doors burst open and the Broderick boys exploded into the huge reception area like a matched pair of rowdy volcanoes, each zooming straight for Lucas’s office.

  Not that Lucas’s legal secretary, who knew how cranky Lucas had been of late, didn’t try to halt them.

  “You can’t go in there!” she snapped primly in that no-nonsense tone most people wisely obeyed. “He’s with a—”

  They brushed past her and kicked his door open. Lucas’s dark face looked thin and worn as his head snapped up; Not that he hadn’t heard them coming.

  He still felt a little weak. He hadn’t fully recovered from the bullet wound.

  His silver eyes narrowed explosively.

  “Dad!” Peppin waved a torn piece of paper like a tattered banner. “Chandra finally wrote to us. She invited us to Mexico.”

  “That’s nice,” Lucas said in a dull, lost tone. “I’m very happy for you. She won’t give me the time of day.”

  “You’ve gotta quit being so sulky and stubborn just because she sent a few of your old letters back.”

  “Me—sulky and stubborn? She sent all my letters back! And all my flowers! She won’t take my calls! She had me stopped at the border and arrested when I tried—I spent a night in jail with half a dozen drunks. Do you remember that? Do you? A guy punched me. And I started hemorrhaging again.”

  No woman, not even Joan, had ever made him feel so low. So unwanted. So abandoned. So utterly bereft and alone.

  “You’ve gotta go down there again and be nice and bring her back. We’ll help you,” Peppin said.

  A big leather chair swiveled. Then a man’s sharp boom of laughter from the depths of the chair made both boys jump. “Chandra had you thrown into jail? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  For the first time the boys grew aware of the dangerous and powerful-looking man with the jet black hair seated in the big leather chair in front of their father’s desk.

  “Don’t tell anybody. I’m not especially proud of that night,” Lucas grumbled. “It would be the last straw with my partners.”

  The boys stood stock-still and went mute as they registered the charismatic stranger’s presence.

  “Hello, guys,” the man said, eyeing them, and then Lucas, expectantly.

  “Boys, this is Mr. Rafe Steele.” Lucas introduced everybody grumpily.

  Peppin let out a war whoop.

  Montague whispered in awe, “Chandra’s friend! You’re the bodyguard. Do you really know Jo Jo and his heavy metal band?”

  Rafe nodded and flashed them a warm smile. “I was his personal bodyguard till I got smart and walked off the job. He’s a jerk. Hey—but it sounds like the three of you were accidental bodyguards…for Chandra. I owe you.”

  “We love her. We’ve gotta get her back, Mr. Steele. Will you help us?”

  “Funny, I was just telling your father the same thing. But he wouldn’t listen, even though I can vouch for the fact that this past month Chandra’s been miserable without the three of you.”

  The boys rushed closer, no longer afraid of the big, tough-looking stranger in their father’s chair.

  “Dad, you’ve gotta let Rafe do something. And fast. Before we lose her forever.”

  “No! And that’s final! Consider her lost. She left.” He hesitated. “Look, I don’t like it any better than you do, but she’s made up her mind. I was a bastard to her. And she hates me.”

  But Rafe countered, “No, she doesn’t. She’s made peace with her family—even Holly. If she can forgive them and compromise with them, she can damn sure forgive you.”

  “I said no.” Lucas’s low voice was lethal.

  “What if I told you she was pregnant?”

  Lucas’s gray eyes lit up as if a match had been struck.

  Watching those eyes blaze and his face whiten as the news sank in, the boys smiled at each other and then slapped their right hands together.

  Lucas’s lips thinned at their burst of unwelcome applause, but he neither lashed out at them nor objected when Rafe said, “Hear me out, guys. I have a plan.”

  Chandra hadn’t found a suitable replacement for her driver, dear, sweet, Miguel Santos, and never had she missed anybody more than she missed him. She had some sort of stomach virus, which lowered her energy level to zero, and she was doing his job and hers, as well.

  Which was good, in a way. Because she was too tired and too overworked and too ill to think or to mourn—

  No. She wouldn’t let herself think of them.

  For an instant she saw Lucas’s fierce beloved dark face. She saw his gray eyes, which had been glazed with pain in the hospital when she’d told him goodbye. He had looked so downcast. So utterly rejected, with his chest bandaged and his right arm in a sling.

  No. She wouldn’t let herself think of him. Because the agony of that loss and betrayal was still so keen and raw it scared her.

  Sweat streamed from under Chandra’s Stetson as she turned the steering wheel of the huge truck, which was heavily loaded with roof panels. She shifted, panting as she ground the gears inexpertly, and the heavy vehicle clumsily weaved into the barrio where two of her church groups had houses under construction.

  Hal was being held in jail without bond. He had confessed to planting drugs in her van and then later in one of her houses. He had stolen her bloody T-shirt from the hospital and mailed it to the police. Stinky had admitted that he had lied when he’d said Hal had been with them the night of the wreck. The government had halted its investigation of her operation. She had been completely exonerated, and all her backers had regained their confidence in her. And the serial killer who had threatened Lucas had been caught and was behind bars, as well.

  Even so, ever since she’d returned to Mexico, she’d had too much to do. She was depressed and stressed to the max.

  For one thing, it was hot. A sweltering one hundred and fifteen degrees in the scant shade of a mesquite tree, to be exact. Today the cab felt like an oven.

  Maybe that was the reason for the trouble at site four.

  Rafe had said that three of the volunteers were real troublemakers.

  Which was odd. Usually people who signed on to help with their church group were willing to endure great physical hardship for the single week it took to build a house. Trouble-prone teenagers often worked even harder than their adult chaperones. Rafe and Cathy had said they were at their wits’ end with this particular trio, and they’d asked her to personally drop by and try to say a few words to inspire them.

  The barrio street was unpaved and deeply rutted, and brown dust churned from behind the truck’s big black wheels. Dozens of small children in dirty, ragged clothes raced from their hovels into the street, braving the dust and the flies to grin brightly and wave at her, for she was a much-beloved figure in this neighborhood. She smiled and waved back. But not for long. With only one hand on the wheel, the truck lurched sharply to the right, rattling violently and nearly hitting a cactus plant.

  The truck didn’t have power steering, and since the seat couldn’t be moved, she could barely reach the worn clutch pedal even when she sat as far forward as possible. So it took all her strength and all her concentration just to drive.

  Except for the summer heat and the constant oppression of poverty, worse now because of the long drought and recent political corruption in Mexico City, Piedras Negras was a nice town—as Mexican border towns go. Flat, pale ranchland, parched bonewhite by the drought, and the sluggish brow
n Rio Grande girded the city. But the blue sky was roomy, and the desolate location made for less prostitution and crime, so the town seemed more like the rural towns in the interior.

  Thick dust coated the vine growing on the barbed wire fence surrounding the building site. The walls of site three were ten feet high, which was why Chandra was bringing that group roof panels.

  She frowned when she saw site four, where the walls had only two layers of concrete blocks, and they seemed to already be slanting inward.

  Oh, dear.

  This was trouble.

  If the church group didn’t finish by Saturday, and there was no way they could short of a miracle, Chandra would fall behind schedule and build one less house. Which meant one of the deserving families in the barrio who had won her lottery would not have a house until next year.

  Chandra pulled the emergency brake up, then banged on her door and cried out to the job foreman that she needed a strong man to open the door or she couldn’t get out. She’d bought the truck used. It was so old and battered the doors could only be opened from the outside, and only by a very husky individual.

  When two men who had been laying a third row of cinder blocks set their forty-pound blocks down and rushed toward her, the foreman grabbed them by their shoulders and ordered them to keep working.

  Chandra felt confusion and irritation.

  Until the foreman sent a skinny, familiar-looking boy who had been mixing thick white mortar in a tub over to the far corner of the building site. With dawning horror she watched the lanky messenger pull off his surgical mask and lean over a tall man who was reclining as lazily as a Spanish conquistador in the hammock.

  The tall man’s face was covered by a cowboy hat, his lean, line-backer’s frame stretched full length under the shade of a fluttering tarp. Chandra couldn’t help but feel disgust when she noted the dozen or so church women with their sunburned cheeks and noses slaving under the blazing mid-morning sun.

  The man shot up, his gray eyes instantly piercingly alert as he tipped his wide-brimmed hat toward her. When he recognized her, he grinned in startled surprise and pleasure. He shot upright. Then his long strides carried him swiftly toward Chandra.