Bulletproof (Unknown Identities #1)

by Black, Regan

  She crossed the kitchen and drove the knife back into its place in the block. “Whatever. You’re here now, you can take over security while I find something for us to eat.”

  She wouldn’t quite look him in the eye. Had her source given her something else on him? “An equitable division of labor?”

  That earned him a direct, irritated glare. He shouldn’t be happy about it, but he was. He was far more comfortable when she had that fire and flash in her eyes.

  “Probably not.” She leaned back against the counter and pushed her hands through her damp hair. The move raised the hem of her baggy sweatshirt and revealed a tempting sliver of her toned belly. “You haven’t tasted my cooking yet.”

  “Thinking of poisoning me?”

  “No. Not you.” She looked him up and down, her gaze lingering on his torn shirt. “Not yet anyway.”

  Something was off, but he couldn’t pin it down. He jerked his chin toward the laptop. “Where did you get that?”

  “It’s an old one, but it beats typing on the tablet.”

  He didn’t like the way she studied him. “You’ve found something.”

  With another frown, she yanked open the freezer door, turning her back to him again. When she pushed up on her toes, he realized her feet were bare. He ground his teeth together so hard they should have cracked. His palms heated, eager to cup her hips and skate up under that sweatshirt and over that pale skin, so he shoved his hands in his pockets.

  She wasn’t for him.

  “Chicken soup!” She whirled around, her eyes sparkling. “We won’t starve after all.”

  “Good to know.” He almost admitted he didn’t need to eat as often as most men, that he preferred the booze that kept him content.

  “You have no idea. My grandmother made everything from scratch. Usually with ingredients from her garden. I’ve only mastered the soup.”

  “She sounds great.” He couldn’t quite keep the resentment out of his voice. “Did she keep a liquor cabinet stocked too?”

  “Of course. Check the front room.”

  Even with the heavy drapes drawn for her safety, it was all too traditional, too normal, he thought as he entered the formally decorated room. Clearly designed for entertaining, things were perfectly in place, down to the pristine upholstery, side tables polished to a glossy gleam, and the tasseled throw pillows. A wharf rat would feel more at home here than he did.

  He crossed to the liquor cabinet and looked over the decanters until he spied the soft golden glow of what he hoped was tequila.

  Removing the stopper, he poured two fingers into a glass and sniffed. Amelia’s grandmother either knew her liquor, or followed the advice of someone who did.

  The tequila slid down his throat and into his system, easing the lingering sharp edges of their fucked up adventure.

  “Better?”

  John braced for the inevitable and impossible punch of attraction before he turned around. “Better,” he agreed, raising his glass. “Want one?”

  “No.” Her brow furrowed as if she was surprised by her answer. Tapping her temple, she said, “I want a clear head.”

  She had a point. He set the glass aside. “So you did find something. Besides the soup.”

  “Come on.”

  Following her back to the kitchen, he kept his eyes on her head rather than the gentle sway of her ass. He’d guarded other attractive women. His kill list included a model who’d walked into her lover’s room at the wrong moment.

  None of them had affected John like this reporter. He dug deep, grabbing for the hatred he typically felt for reporters, holding them all collectively responsible for the exposure that landed him in that Mexican prison. But no amount of logic, no replay of the brutality and god-awful memories inside that hellhole would force Amelia into that box.

  As she slid into the chair in front of the laptop, he noted a stock pot on the stove, the burner set on low, presumably to reheat the frozen soup.

  “I learned a few tricks from my first contact, including how to identify and back track IP and email addresses.”

  “Impressive.”

  “My real talent is in my search and interview skills.”

  “Not the writing?”

  She flicked a hand. “Got to have something compelling to write about. What my contact taught me makes it easier for me to determine what’s fabricated and what’s authentic online.”

  John withheld comment, his instincts humming like he was too close to a live wire. His expertise centered around searches and resolutions of a more direct and physical nature.

  Her blue eyes shifted from the screen to him. “Where did you get all those wounds?”

  “Here and there. I’m not your story.”

  Her lips pursed. “I’m starting to think you are.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “I’m a bodyguard. Take my word for it, I’ve got no connection to the senator.”

  She sighed as her long fingers flitted quietly over the keys. “Senator Larimore sits on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee as well as the Homeland Security committee.”

  Neither of which had much to do with John’s current career in construction. He waited out the nearly-electric silence, afraid to guess at what she thought she’d found. He’d taken care of and eliminated important political figures on North American soil, but he’d never been tasked with assassinating a US politician.

  “His daughter was a scientist.”

  The warming soup scented the air, but John suddenly wished for another belt of tequila. He had too much training and far too much experience to allow her to see his uneasiness.

  She turned the laptop, giving him a clear view of the picture she’d found.

  Christ. Dressed all in black, dark aviator sunglasses shading his eyes, a man who looked remarkably like him – who probably was him – guided a tall blond woman toward a waiting town car. “That could be any one of a thousand men.” Gabriel groomed them all to that kind of anonymity.

  She snorted. “You don’t have a better argument?”

  Well, not when she’d blindsided him. Why would anyone post that photo online or anywhere else? It served no purpose that John could see. So what if he’d been protecting a woman during a congressional hearing? It had been another job arranged by Gabriel. Another promise of freedom yanked away at the last second even though he’d succeeded. If memory served, that successful post in D.C. had been his last job before an overzealous reporter blew his mission and landed him in the Mexican prison.

  “Christ,” he said aloud this time.

  “So you do remember her?”

  “No.” Shit. He was a monster. Would it have been such a challenge to remember the clients he’d kept alive? But he had no real memory of the woman in the picture. It had been his habit to purge the information as soon as a job finished. He couldn’t bear to recall the people who were free while he remained trapped.

  His other assignments however... he rubbed at his scarred wrists, a tally of all the lives he’d ended. As the last man to see them alive, he felt obligated to remember them.

  Shrugging a shoulder he leaned back, tipping the chair on two legs and balancing perfectly. He knew she studied body language and they both knew it wasn’t the kind of move a tense man could achieve.

  “That’s not me,” he said with a careless nod at the laptop screen. “That guy doesn’t have this scar.” He pointed to the faint line just under his jaw.

  The look she leveled on him oozed disbelief. “So what? That injury could have come after this picture was taken.”

  And it had. He’d misjudged the shank during a prison fight, but he wasn’t about to admit the error. “You’re entitled to an opinion. Whether you’re right or wrong, that picture can’t possibly have anything to do with your current story.”

  “You’re the one who’s wrong.” She turned the laptop back. “That’s Senator Larimore’s daughter and I’m sure that’s you serving as her bodyguard.”

  He applied the sto
ny non-expression that had kept hardened criminals at bay in an edgy, rowdy prison yard, but Amelia wasn’t cowed.

  She reached over and brushed the scar under his beard with the velvety soft pad of her thumb. His chair hit the floor with a telling thud. Her lips tipped up at one corner. “Protest a little more why don’t you?” she dared.

  With an irritated growl, he went on the offensive rather than deny it again. “How do I know you didn’t find that picture before you hired me? Maybe you photoshopped it before you noticed my scar. Maybe you even put it up on whatever site that is in order to get something from me.” Which put her in the same class as Gabriel and the rest of John’s superiors.

  She stared at him for what felt like an eternity. “Oh, I want something from you all right.”

  Good God, she’d all but hummed the words, her voice confirming the raw need he saw in her eyes. His cock went hard, wanting something from her. Right now.

  As if she didn’t know or didn’t care about the strain she was putting on his zipper, she went right back to business. “First, I want your protection while I break open this hornet’s nest.”

  “That’s why I’m here.” He spread his hands wide. “I haven’t let you down yet.”

  She slid him a quick look, both brows climbing toward her red hairline. “Then I want the truth about you.”

  “Easy enough. What you see is what you get. The name’s John Noble. I’m a bodyguard. End of story.”

  “Hardly.”

  “That’s all I’m willing to tell you.”

  “Then your clients are lucky people.” She wagged a finger in the direction of his chest. “You’ve certainly stepped in front of a lot of bullets for them. I hope they tipped well.”

  “Will you?”

  She rolled her eyes and he chuckled.

  “It’s the nature of the job,” he said, silently willing her to drop the subject. If she used her new-found skills to uproot his past, Gabriel would shut her down in a hurry. Permanently.

  “Senator Larimore is a madman –”

  “Because he goes snooping through private information?” He could tell her about far worse crimes. “You’re doing the same thing right now.”

  She gave him the hairy eyeball, but he could see the grin trying to break free. “No. It’s different.” Her shoulders slumped and her hands fell to her lap. “You can’t lump my research for a story into the same category as the senator’s crimes. I don’t expose or kill the people who don’t cooperate or agree with me.”

  He wanted to give her some kind of reassurance, but all he had to offer was his protection. As far as he knew, any one of his assigned targets could have been a threat to Larimore or anyone else Gabriel deemed worthy of assisting. From day one of training, they’d pounded the message home: it wasn’t his job to judge. His only job was to carry out the assignment.

  Big deal. So, he’d kept Larimore’s daughter alive. Give him a gold star. That was the easy part of his job. If he got really lucky, Gabriel would order him to take out the senator, saving Amelia’s life in the long term, because he just couldn’t see an influential man going down easy. Not that one anyway. Larimore had a reputation for getting what he wanted, no matter the cost to those around him.

  “She’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman you are protecting in this photo.” She pointed to the screen again. “Larimore’s daughter.”

  He stared at her, certain she was simply trying to get a rise out of him. A rise of a less physical nature.

  “She died last week.”

  “No chance it’s a coincidence?” He wanted to feel something, anything, if only to appease her, but he was empty inside. He’d kept the senator’s daughter alive when it was his job, now his job was protecting Amelia. His world was that black and white.

  That eyebrow dipped low again. “You believe in those?”

  “I’ve created a few,” he muttered, pushing away from the table to check the soup. One of them had to do be reasonable.

  “I knew it.” She picked up a pen and drummed it against the notepad. “You’re more than a bodyguard. Those scars are the story.”

  She had no idea. “I’m whatever I need to be to get the job done,” he said. “End of story.”

  “How did you get started? Were you military?”

  He pulled a wooden spoon from the tool carousel on the counter and poked at the block of ice that might eventually be soup.

  “I didn’t have a lot of options and I needed work.” He refused to humiliate himself with the whole truth here in her grandmother’s kitchen where wholesome values radiated from every surface.

  “Understandable.”

  “How did she die?”

  When Amelia didn’t answer right away, he risked direct eye contact, holding her gaze until she relented. “Car accident,” she said.

  “On the way to or from work?”

  “From. How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. Is she married?”

  “Was,” she corrected. “Eleven years.”

  So the scientist daughter had been married when he’d been assigned to keep her alive. He didn’t remember any sign of a husband, but not all marriages were as close as books and movies suggested.

  “Why are you trying to connect an accident with the Senator’s privacy violations? Did your source suggest it?”

  “Not in so many words. He, or she, gave me the breadcrumbs to follow. Most of the reports are mere snippets buried by someone powerful.”

  “Someone who knows how to manipulate the media.”

  “Definitely,” she agreed. “The daughter frequently spoke out against her father’s liberal policies on scientific research.”

  “Seems counterproductive for a scientist.”

  “I thought so too. The two had a strange and strained relationship, it seems.”

  The air in the warm kitchen suddenly chilled. “Families disagree,” he managed to say. He didn’t like the odd emphasis she’d put on ‘research’. “That doesn’t mean he had his daughter killed.”

  “The only reports I’ve found say she turned her back on the program and sold out. They claim her last act was a security breach and she shared a file that explained results and predictions of various genetic mutations and chemical enhancements.”

  “She sent it to the senator?”

  “No. She sent it to the FBI.”

  “Your contact told you all of this?”

  “Breadcrumbs,” she repeated. “It all falls together when you look at the senator’s political career and his pet projects. I may not be able to prove he killed his daughter and ruined her professional reputation. Not yet anyway, but that side story reinforces the things I can expose. The things I’ve verified and connected to him directly.

  “What you’re implying is risky.” No wonder the threats had turned to attempts on her life.

  He already knew how he would have killed the scientist, he had a good idea who Gabriel might have assigned to handle it. It took all of John’s will not to ask more questions. Chances were she didn’t know the details he needed and the less he encouraged her, the better chance she’d survive.

  There had been others recruited, under the guise of being saved, by Gabriel and the unnamed project or business conglomerate he represented. Just because John had been trained to specific tasks and yes, experimented on, in near isolation toward the end of his training didn’t mean he’d forgotten the men who’d been with him in the barracks at the beginning.

  Their numbers had decreased steadily through those early weeks and as candidates disappeared...

  He didn’t realize he’d swayed, disturbed by those dark memories, until he felt her surprisingly strong arm around his waist. He twisted away from her touch. “I’m good.”

  “You looked as if you were about to drop. Is it the gunshot wound? Are you feeling weak?”

  “That’s only a scratch.” He had to get out of this kitchen, away from her.

  “Then you should eat.”<
br />
  “We’ll both eat as soon as this is ready.” Without thinking, he rolled up his sleeves and turned up the heat on the soup.

  “What are those about?”

  Shit. Her eyes were on the tattoos/scars on his wrists. “Old news, Amelia,” he warned. “Go ahead and work on your real story. Pin down Larimore with his own information highway.”

  “The sooner I’m done, the sooner you can go, is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And what if that doesn’t work for me?”

  He turned on her then, resentful that she didn’t so much as flinch when he stepped in close. If the way she licked her lips was any indication, she was more turned on than intimidated.

  God help him.

  He held up his wrists. “This is just lingering proof of my habit of making bad choices. That mug shot? That was real even if the name was wrong.

  “You hired a bodyguard. Not a source. Not a gigolo.” Once more he let his gaze cruise over her body, not bothering to hide the dark desire he felt for her. “When your story’s out and the world knows your face, you won’t need me or want me around anymore.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “I don’t remember guarding the daughter,” he snapped.

  “Okay. But you did it.”

  He went back to the damn soup. “Even if I did, that doesn’t make me part of your Larimore story.” Except knowing Gabriel, recalling how the bastard insisted John was the right man for this job, he was starting to wonder about complications he hadn’t foreseen.

  “Okay. Relax.”

  Her voice was too gentle, a tone someone might use to keep a mental patient from doing something rash.

  Finally the soup was simmering. “Where are the bowls and spoons?”

  She gave him some space, scrounged around a bit, then set two bowls next to the stove top. “Here.”

  He ladled soup into each bowl and carried them back to the table where she had napkins and spoons waiting. To his relief, she closed the laptop and slid it aside. He didn’t want to dwell on the grim possibilities of his past and present colliding.

  “Does it ever bother you if the people you’re protecting are doing bad things?”