Bodyguard

by Suzanne Brockmann

  And George knew it, too. The son of a bitch was grinning at him, damn him.

  Harry would’ve turned away, but Allie stopped him with a hand on his arm.

  Her perfectly manicured fingernails had been bitten and torn, some down all the way to the quick. She’d been playing it cool for the past few days, but in truth she was a seething bundle of anxiety. As he looked down at her, she quickly pulled her hand back, hiding it behind her.

  “I didn’t call Michael,” she told him.

  Her eyes were very, very blue. Michael. It took him a few extra seconds to realize she was talking about Trotta. “I know,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He hated the perfume she was wearing. Whatever she wore to bed at night—he wasn’t sure what it was exactly, she had so many different lotions and potions all lined up on a shelf in the bathroom—but whatever it was smelled so delicately sweet, it seemed a crime for her to cover it up with this other, fancier, stronger scent. He turned to George. “Let’s get moving. Asshole.”

  George laughed and keyed his radio. “Okay, team, we’re finally coming out.”

  The food market was a Super Stop and Shop. It seemed oddly out of place in the quaint little town that was filled with antique shops and farm stands. Standing inside of the mega-store, with its well-lit, wide aisles, its attached Blockbuster Video, bank, bookstore, flower shop, and goodness knows what all else, Alessandra might as well have been back on suburban Long Island instead of out here on the edge of nowhere.

  It was something of a disappointment. If she was going to live in Cow’s Bowels, New York, she wanted the complete small town package. She wanted a Fourth of July parade, a country fair with an oxen pull and a pie-eating contest, and she wanted a little, homey mom-and-pop supermarket, run by Mr. Whipple himself.

  Instead, she had the isolation of living a million miles from her nearest neighbor, combined with the isolation of an efficient but completely impersonal supermarket chain. It was, without a doubt, the complete worst of both worlds.

  It felt odd to be out here, under the bright fluorescent lights after spending so many days all but locked in her room. It was odd, too, doing her shopping while trailed by both George and Harry.

  Harry was still on edge. Alessandra suspected he wouldn’t begin to relax until they were back inside the little house. Her little house. Her ugly little house. It wouldn’t be long until Harry and the other agents left, and she’d be on her own in her ugly little house, pretending to be Barbara Conway for the rest of her pathetic little life.

  Of course, after the agents left, she could call Michael and get this mess straightened out. No one would be there to stop her. Not George, not Harry. Harry would have moved on to the next case. He would be focusing all his seething passion and intensity on some other mob boss, in his never-ending quest to find unattainable absolution.

  He was standing at the end of the international foods aisle, his suit as rumpled as ever, his hair in dire need of a cut.

  The odd attraction that she’d thought simmered between them wasn’t real. It was completely her own, totally one-sided. Harry had made that more than clear.

  She smiled at the irony. She was used to men falling around her, smitten, littering her path, as far as she could see. But the one man who was completely unaffected by her beauty was the one man she couldn’t stop thinking about.

  George held up a package of gourmet pasta. “Have you tried this?” he asked. “Lemon pepper linguine. It’s wonderful.”

  She shook her head.

  He began loading the cart with enough to feed a small army. “I’ll make it tonight and—oh, shit!”

  He grabbed her, pushing her down to the linoleum-tiled floor with one hand as he pulled over a display rack in front of them with the other.

  There was a sound, sharp and deafeningly loud, and George swore again, falling hard against her.

  Something had spilled. Alessandra could feel it, warm and wet against her.

  But then she heard Harry shouting, heard more of those same deafening noises, and she realized what was happening. Guns were being fired. That was no jar of spaghetti sauce that had broken and spilled on the floor, soaking through the knees of her jeans. The wetness was from George’s blood. He’d been shot.

  She heard herself screaming, heard George cursing, heard more of those gunshots—a whole lot more, in rapid succession. The store seemed to explode around her and she screamed again and again as George fired back.

  She was the target. The men who were shooting—and it sounded as if there were at least a dozen of them—were trying to hit her. She was in mortal danger, and it was very likely that she was going to die surrounded by a mound of gourmet pasta. Dear Lord, she didn’t want to die!

  The world was moving in fast motion. From the corner of her eye she could see Harry, both hands wrapped around his gun, firing at whoever was shooting at them. George was shooting, too, but he was distracted by his wound.

  The bullet that had struck him in the thigh was bleeding unlike anything Alessandra had ever seen in her life. Blood was pulsing out of him with every beat of his heart, draining his life away right before her eyes. The bullet must’ve hit an artery.

  He was still cursing, but his speech was starting to slur. When she looked into his eyes, she could see death reflected there. He didn’t want to die, either.

  She was shaking, tears of fear blurring her vision. She raised her head, looking for help, but a bullet smashed into the rack that shielded them, and she knew help wasn’t coming. At least not soon enough for George.

  Apply pressure to a wound. Pressure stopped the bleeding. She’d taken a first-aid class back in high school, and although she’d usually let schoolwork slide, she’d liked this class. She’d paid attention, thank goodness.

  She had nothing to use as a bandage, nothing sterile, nothing to hold against the awful hole in George’s leg, but she covered it with her hands anyway, praying this would help.

  It didn’t. His blood seeped between her fingers.

  He was struggling with his tie, trying to get it off, and she remembered. Tourniquet. If she could tie off George’s leg between the wound and his heart, that might keep him from bleeding to death.

  She tried to help him with the tie. Her fingers left bright red smears on his crisp white collar as she fumbled in her haste to pull it free.

  “Get out of the store! Get out of here!” Harry was shouting at her as he fired his gun, and she realized he was holding the gunmen off, pushing them toward the rear of the store and giving her a clear route to run to the front doors. “Go!” he shouted at her. “Goddamn it, Allie, go!”

  She wanted to go. She wanted to run like a frightened rabbit to safety. But she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t just leave George to die.

  And he would die without her. He was already too weak even to hold his gun. “Go,” he whispered.

  “No!” Sobbing, she wrapped the tie around his thigh. Knotting it, she pulled it tight—tight enough to make him cry out with pain.

  “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! But I’ve got to pull it even tighter!” George didn’t answer and she yanked harder, chanting a litany beneath the sound of guns being fired, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry …”

  It still wasn’t enough.

  In the back of her mind, she’d thought she might be able to tie the tourniquet and then scramble to safety, but she wasn’t strong enough to tie it tightly enough, and it had only slightly slowed his bleeding. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, wadded it up, and pressed it against the wound.

  “Don’t die,” she ordered him. “Goddamn you, George, don’t you die!”

  “Allie!”

  Harry’s hoarse shout made her lift her head, and something else, some sixth sense made her look up toward the ceiling.

  And there, way up on top of the shelf separating the aisle, at a vantage point that left her completely exposed, was Ivo.

  Ivo, with the pale eyes and hair, with the Slavic features and lilting Eastern Europ
ean accent. Ivo, Michael Trotta’s right-hand man.

  She could hear Harry shouting, but his words no longer had any meaning.

  Ivo was holding one of those enormous Dirty Harry-style guns, the kind with a barrel the size of a cannon. That barrel was cold and blank and very, very deadly looking. Alessandra could see the same emptiness in Ivo’s eyes, and she knew in that split second before he aimed the gun at her forehead, that he was going to kill her.

  This was no mistake. There was no miscommunication here. Michael Trotta had told Ivo to kill her, and he was going to do just that, no questions asked.

  There was nowhere to run, nothing to hide behind.

  Alessandra could do nothing but sit there helplessly and wait to die.

  Nine

  HARRY’S CLIP JAMMED.

  Of all the fucking bad times for his clip to jam, this had to take the cake.

  Some six and a half feet tall, six and a half feet wide gorilla had somehow gotten past him and was on top of the shelves about to permanently mess up Alessandra’s makeup by putting a bullet hole in her forehead.

  Moving at a dead run, Harry threw his gun—useless piece of crap—at the King of the Apes and it bounced off of Kong’s arm, distracting him for several brief seconds.

  But several seconds were all Harry needed. He launched into the air for a perfect intercept just as the gorilla fired a double burst.

  Both rounds caught him square in the chest, hundreds of pounds of energy pushing him back and down, on top of Alessandra, on top of George, on top of George’s semiautomatic.

  He couldn’t breathe, he could barely see, his ears were roaring from the tidal wave of pain, but his fingers closed around George’s Beretta. He raised his arm and squeezed off a shot and King Kong disappeared.

  And just like that, it was over.

  At least for now.

  Alessandra didn’t know it, though. She was sobbing as she tore at his jacket, one hand still holding her T-shirt against George’s leg. She was covered in blood, her nose bright red from crying, her makeup completely smeared. With her T-shirt off, she knelt above him now like a horror movie survivor, in tight black pants and a black bra made of lace that didn’t quite conceal her lush dark nipples, blood streaking her smooth, pale skin like some kind of sick body paint.

  She ripped the buttons off his shirt in her haste to see how badly he’d been injured and stopped short, confusion on her face, as she came up against his body armor.

  Harry pushed himself onto his elbows. “Man down!” he wheezed as backup finally stormed into the supermarket. “I need an ambulance for my partner, and I need it now!”

  Christ, George had lost more blood than Harry had thought humanly possible. It was slick on the floor around them and he winced as he skidded slightly in it. The pain in his chest was unmistakable. At least one of his ribs was broken. But he’d take a broken rib any day over the alternative—having to clean Alessandra’s brains up off the floor.

  He took over for her with George, keeping her already saturated T-shirt tight against his partner’s wound.

  “Come on, George,” Harry muttered, lifting his eyelids, checking his eyes. He wasn’t looking good. “Stay with me, buddy.”

  But then George stirred and his lips moved. “Tell Nic—”

  “Tell her yourself,” Harry rasped, refusing to perform any kind of last rites. “What do I look like, some kind of fucking messenger service?” He looked up at Alessandra. “Be ready to flag down the paramedics. And find me McFall.”

  She was shaking and crying, but she wiped her tears away with the backs of her arms as she looked around. Over twenty agents were combing the place. The parking lot outside the big front windows was filled with cars parked at haphazard angles, some with lights still spinning in their front windshields.

  Alessandra waved over Christine McFall, who took one look at George and started to shout, “Where’s that ambulance?”

  “Chris, there’s still another shooter.” A hoarse whisper was the loudest Harry could manage. His chest still felt squeezed, as if someone had thrown him a touchdown pass with an anvil. “He’s built, dark blond hair, looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bigger brother. Check the next aisle over—carefully. I got off a shot, but I don’t think I hit him.”

  Chris nodded, her clear voice ringing out over the chaos as she gave out orders.

  And then the paramedics arrived. Harry moved aside, pulling Alessandra back and out of the way as they swarmed over George.

  “His name’s Ivo,” she whispered.

  Harry turned to look at her more closely. “That shooter?”

  She nodded.

  “You knew him?”

  She nodded again, fresh tears flooding her eyes, her lower lip trembling like a child’s. She was still shaking, her arms folded across her chest. She hugged herself as if she were cold.

  No doubt she was cold—she wasn’t wearing a shirt.

  It hurt like hell to take off his jacket, but Harry did it anyway, draping it over her narrow shoulders. She pulled it more tightly around herself and sank down onto the floor as if her knees couldn’t hold her up another minute longer.

  She was crying again. And from the state of her mascara, it seemed pretty obvious that she’d started crying close to when the shooting had begun.

  And yet, when push came to shove, she’d refused to leave George. Harry had seen big, strong men panic and knock aside women and children in their haste to get to cover when shots were fired. But Alessandra had stayed calm enough to tie a tourniquet around George’s leg. She could have run away, but instead she risked her life for a man she barely even knew. She was either really stupid or really brave. And Harry had already discovered that she wasn’t really stupid.

  If George survived—Harry was praying hard that he would—it would be solely because of Alessandra.

  Harry gingerly lowered himself to the floor next to her, leaning back against a shelf filled with bags of rice, as George was wheeled out of the store. “Tell me about your little friend Ivo. Do you know his last name?”

  She shook her head. “He brought me to Michael Trotta’s office. He rode in the back of the limousine with me on the way home. He answered the phone at the number Michael gave me to call when I found the money.” She looked at Harry. “Why does he want to kill me? I gave it back. All of it.”

  She was trying not to cry, trying to keep her sobs from shaking her body. It was a losing battle.

  Harry could sympathize. He was fighting a losing battle of his own. It seemed stupid as hell to fight, so he gave up completely and put his arm around her. She crumbled against him, holding him just a little too tightly. But he didn’t mind the pain in his side. No, he didn’t mind at all.

  There were definitely worse things than losing this kind of battle.

  “I hate to break it to you,” he said, “but this time a pair of sunglasses isn’t going to cut it. People are probably going to know you’ve been crying.”

  “I thought you were dead,” she told him, her voice muffled, her face buried in his shirt. “When those bullets hit you, I thought … I thought …”

  “Yeah, I know,” Harry said, stroking her hair. His heart was in his throat. Was it possible she really cared that much? “I know you pretty well by now, Al. You thought, ‘Oh, fuck, the dumb son of a bitch is dead. Now who are they going to send to annoy the crap out of me?’ ”

  She lifted her face to look up at him, laughing tremulously through her tears—and that was it. He was toast. Completely. Utterly. Charred to a crisp. It was the red nose that did him in. Must’ve been some wonderful yet long-forgotten childhood incident with a clown that had put its stamp upon him forever. Whatever its origin, he couldn’t stop himself from leaning forward and covering her mouth with his own.

  He’d meant to take no more than a gentle taste of her deliciously soft lips. But as soon as his mouth touched hers, he knew that wasn’t going to be enough. Not for him. And not for Alessandra.

  She kissed him hu
ngrily and he deepened it, sweeping his tongue into her welcoming mouth. She tasted like salty tears and bitter fear, but beneath it, she was pure sweet fire. She took his breath away with her eagerness, with her need. With her desire.

  He pulled her closer, the pleasure of her body next to his definitely worth the raw pain in his ribs, and his hand slipped beneath the edge of the jacket she wore draped around her shoulders. Her skin was as soft as he remembered, as silky and smooth as a baby’s.

  It was sheer perfection, and he came into contact with sheer perfection so infrequently in his life, it jarred him back to earth.

  What in God’s name was he doing? It would have been insane enough to kiss her in the privacy of the house, let alone out here in freaking public.

  He pulled away from her, but God, it was quite possibly one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

  “I’m sorry,” he managed to say. Sorry that he had to stop. Sorry that he couldn’t take off her clothes and get it going with her right then and there. He wisely let her make her own interpretation.

  “No,” she said. “I … I’m …” She looked as confused as he felt. How could they both have had such bad lapses in judgment at exactly the same moment?

  “Bad timing,” he said. Bad timing, bad thinking, bad call, bad everything but sex. Good sex. If they had been able to keep going it would have been very, very, very good sex. Except afterward, all of the collective bads would’ve reared up and bit him on the ass. He was on the job, for christsake. He was supposed to protect Alessandra, and last time he checked, there was nothing in the rule book that talked about doing that with any amount of efficiency while in a horizontal position, without any clothes on.

  She reached up to push her hair back with a shaking hand. “You probably want to go make sure George is okay.”

  “I want to get you to safety first. Get a vest on you. Get you into a room with a lot of guards near the doors and windows.” Lots and lots of guards. So many that he wouldn’t have to be alone with her again. Not that the crowd had stopped him two minutes ago.