by Dana Marton
She didn’t want to talk strategy with him. She wanted his arms around her so badly that she ached with it. She was still fuzzy from sleep. She didn’t have it in her to fight him, so she simply nodded.
She had a glass of juice in the kitchen then jumped off the barstool when she noticed the time. Her yoga instructor would arrive any minute. She washed her face and changed, and by the time she was coming out of the bedroom again, Ilona was there.
Nash checked her out thoroughly, including her bag. Then he insisted that they leave the door to the meditation room at the end of the long hall half-open.
“Everything okay?” Ilona asked as they were getting ready to start. “What’s up with Mr. Hot-’n’-Protective out there?” She was twenty-two with the body of a—well, a yoga instructor. Dave and Mike got a lot of mileage out of flirting with her.
“Don’t mind Nash. New security.” Kayla stretched.
“Believe me, I don’t mind him at all.” Ilona’s eyes twinkled as she gave a small laugh. “Sadly, I think he’s only got eyes for you. All right, deep breath in,” she started. And for the next hour, they went through their regular poses while Kayla wondered if Ilona could be right.
Was that pitiful? She did want Nash to have eyes only for her. But she was realistic enough to realize that at best he wanted only a quick, hot affair. And she wanted him so much that she’d take whatever he had to offer.
By the time Ilona left, Dave and Mike had gone off somewhere, and only Nash was left, sitting in the kitchen. Kayla was sweaty so she didn’t stop to chat. She let Nash walk Ilona out while she hopped in the shower.
Then she was ready to see about dinner. When she was in residence, dinner was delivered from her favorite restaurant down the road every night at seven for her and her staff. She liked cooking, often put breakfast together for herself and Greg during the week and even lunch on the weekends. But during the week she usually ate lunch at company headquarters where she worked, more often than not having a lunchtime meeting. And her evenings were usually busy with social engagements. There was little time left for dinner preparations.
Dave usually called in how many people they had on any given night. TJ, the manager at the restaurant, knew what she liked and he kept the menu varied.
Except there was no sign of dinner tonight and no sign of Dave. Or Mike for that matter. Two strange men sat in her kitchen with Nash. She watched them for a second, staying in the cover of the potted palms. Friends of Nash, that was obvious from the familiar way they were talking, understanding each other from halfwords and looks. They were built like Nash, too, bringing some serious testosterone overload to the room. One had multiple scars crossing his left eyebrow. Another sported a nose that had been flattened pretty badly at one point.
In size alone, they were smaller than Mike and Dave, but looked ten times as tough and menacing. These were no gentlemen bodyguards who would put on a tux to take her to events. They looked like they’d been born in combat boots and were damned determined to die in them. She wasn’t sure if she was comfortable with these two in her home. And frankly, she didn’t think it terribly professional for Nash to bring his friends by for a visit while on the job.
She wanted fewer people in the apartment with them tonight, not more. She was going to ask him into her room after dinner to discuss his role on her team. And if he kissed her again…She didn’t plan on putting up too much resistance.
Just thinking of him kissing her sent tingles through her body. She wanted him. He wanted her. For once, she wasn’t going to overcomplicate things.
“Hi.” She stepped into view at last.
Nobody seemed surprised by her sudden appearance, almost as if they’d known that she’d been standing back there. Creepy.
“Hey.” Nash turned to her. “Meet you new bodyguards. Mo and Joey.”
It took her a minute to comprehend what he was saying. This was really bad. She’d known she was going to regret that “carte blanche” comment. Mike and Dave were absolutely going to hate this. She hated it. Lust gave way to outrage. Of all the underhanded…
Keep calm. There had to be some sort of an explanation, a compromise they could come to.
“Where are Mike and Dave?” She needed to prepare them before they met Nash’s men.
“They’re gone,” Nash said easily. “I fired them.”
NASH SAT calmly while Kayla yelled at him, completely flying off the handle. Pretty much what he’d expected.
“You can’t fire them. They’re my people! You had no right whatsoever.” Her face was turning an interesting shade of red.
Couldn’t say it made her less attractive. He didn’t mind a bit of fire in a woman.
“They were clueless. They were looking for some phantom outside enemy. They were more of a liability than a help. I need people I can trust backing me up. Mo and Joey are up to the task.”
Mike and Dave hadn’t been bad. He’d especially appreciated Mike’s help with that elevator. But they weren’t Mo and Joey. And he needed Mo and Joey. For Kayla, nothing less would do. He wasn’t about to take any chances with her life.
For all he cared, Mike and Dave could have stayed on, but they’d already proven that they didn’t take orders well. Getting used to him had taken them days. Nash didn’t have days now. He didn’t have the time to deal with friction and possible insubordination, not when the attacks on Kayla were intensifying.
Threatening her dog was one thing. But someone had been in her bedroom in Vegas. Then the John Doe the police still hadn’t identified had tried to kill her in that elevator. And every instinct Nash had said it wasn’t over yet.
“You—” She took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes, looking as though she was about to send him to hell. Then she changed her mind, spun on her heels, strode back to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her so hard it reverberated throughout the penthouse.
A moment of silence passed after that as the three men exchanged a look over the kitchen counter.
“She hates your guts,” Joey remarked, not the least perturbed by this display of feminine emotion. He had a known weakness for temperamental women.
Nash shot him a warning, proprietary look.
Joey gave a lopsided smile. “You like the girl.”
Mo’s half-missing eyebrow went up. “You’re so doomed, man.”
Joey stood, playing off him. “We should go. He’s going down. I don’t want to be witness to that carnage.”
“Sit down,” Nash snapped at him. “I don’t like her. Where are we? Kindergarten?”
Now Mo stood, and the barstool he’d been sitting on sighed with relief. The man was built like a tank. “Can’t be working with you on a job if we’re not going to be honest,” he said, deadpan.
Nash raised a hand in capitulation. “Quit busting my chops. She’s okay. I kinda like her. I guess.”
At that, the two gave identical grins.
He itched to knock their heads together over the counter, but that would have led to a brawl and a destroyed penthouse apartment. Not the way to get back into Kayla’s or Welkins’s good graces, so, instead, he opened the folder that had been sitting in front of him on the counter. “Can we move on to business? We do have a killer to catch.”
SHE WAS TIRED and furious and not entirely sure how to handle the situation. She called both Mike and Dave. They were mad beyond reason, but neither seemed inclined to come back and tackle the men in her kitchen. And after a couple of moments Kayla understood that once again she had overestimated her relationships. They weren’t her best friends. They’d been her hired bodyguards. They would have given their life for her while they’d been on her payroll. But now that their employment had ended, they were moving on to their next assignment. One where they wouldn’t have to fight three ex-commando human tanks just to get started.
On some level, she understood. But on another level she was hurt and felt betrayed by those men. She had thought they were part of her core team. The team she could trust through thick a
nd thin.
Her father had been big on the whole core-team thing. To him, it had meant the family: his wife, his sons and his daughter. He was big on not trusting anyone beyond that, not even his own brother. He viewed Uncle Al more as competition. He hadn’t been crazy about sharing the company’s leadership with him. William Landon had been too much of an alpha male to share something like that.
Which meant that Uncle Al hadn’t been a big part of Kayla’s childhood. But they’d grown much closer since her father’s death. He’d become a replacement father figure of sorts. He’d never remarried after his wife had run off with that bodyguard. Maybe he had his own trust issues, Kayla thought for the first time. Was her whole family struggling with that?
Her stomach growled. But she no longer felt like eating. It was past eight anyway. She would watch a movie in her room and go to bed. She couldn’t face Nash Wilder again tonight or she might murder him.
Her dreams were dark and disjointed. In one of them, Nash loomed large and dark, scaring her spitless. He held a gun on Greg. Her uncle stood in the background.
She woke gasping for air in the middle of the night, turned on the light on the nightstand. She was alone in the room, save for Tsini, who raised her head for only a minute before going back to sleep.
Kayla took a drink from the water bottle she always kept by the bed, then leaned against the headboard. Her headache was back full-force and then some. She reached for the bottle of aspirin, her gaze falling on the piece of paper Dave had given her, the one with the protective circle. And immediately she was furious at Nash all over again. How dare he mess with her staff?
He’d considered her people suspects from the get-go. She should have fired him then and there. She should have trusted her staff more than she trusted him.
In her dream, he was going to kill Greg. And she just knew she would have been next.
But why would he be her enemy? What would he gain by that?
Her head pounded harder.
He could be someone’s hired man. The hired-man theory had been his from the beginning. Maybe it was a situation he was more than familiar with?
Then she remembered how in the dream, her uncle had been there.
Her uncle had told her to hire someone from this particular agency. Then Nash had been sent.
Her uncle had told her to take a break from work.
Her father had never fully trusted Al. Had there been a reason for that? Her uncle was leading the corporation. But he didn’t own enough shares to control it. Kayla and Greg were also major shareholders. The three of them were each other’s beneficiaries. If Kayla and Greg were gone, Al would become majority shareholder with the ability to control the company.
She hated that those thoughts would even come into her head. Hated the fact that Nash had made her paranoid. Odd, though, that he would try to get her to be suspicious of everyone close to her, but never her uncle. Did that mean anything?
If her uncle wanted to take over everything, nobody but Kayla could stand in his way. Certainly not Greg. Uncle Al already controlled Greg’s trust fund.
Enough things clicked to make her sit up straight. But then she hesitated.
It couldn’t be. No way it could be Al. What about the picture someone had sent to her? But if Al could buy Nash, he could buy someone on that camera crew to take the picture. Nash had been the only one who seemed to recall clearly that none of the camera crew had been in the den, thereby neatly transferring all suspicion to her people.
Al could have sent the threats to Tsini—he was a cat person, never cared for dogs in the first place—just so he could talk her into hiring extra help, someone who was his man.
Still, she could barely wrap her mind around the idea. Her brain cells were having a bongo-drum festival in her head. She was aware that it was the middle of the night, she’d just woken from a nightmare and she wasn’t thinking straight. She was also aware that Al was out of the country, due back tomorrow. He lived in a historic brick townhouse just across the park. And she had a key and the code to the security system.
She had no one to ask for help. If she wanted to find out the truth, she needed to get over there and look around. Three murders and an attempted murder had to have left some kind of trail.
Tonight was her only chance to search through her uncle’s place.
The first step was to find a way around Nash. The thought that they’d kissed, that she’d been in that shower with him, one irresponsible moment away from having sex…She’d made a few bad judgment calls in her youth, but she’d thought she’d become smarter since.
She would be this time.
“Don’t trust anyone,” Greg had told her before they left for Vegas. A lot of people thought Greg was dumb, but not her. Sometimes, Greg saw things nobody else did.
She poured her water on the nearest potted plant, then walked out of her bedroom with the empty bottle.
Mo was sitting in the darkest corner of her living room. Joey was in the kitchen, on the one barstool from which he had a clear view of the front door. They didn’t look like the kind of men she would want to mess with.
And what did that say about how out of control her life was? She was surrounded by men she was scared of. That would have to change.
Her hands trembled. She made a point of steadying them. These men could have killed her and Greg twenty times by now. Nash could have, too, for that matter. What were they waiting for?
Maybe a chance to make it look like an accident.
But then how did the elevator crash fit into their plan? Nash had been on that elevator with her. Maybe he’d made a mistake. Or maybe getting off just in time was part of his plan. He could have set it up that way to make sure that later, when he did take her out, nobody could suspect him.
But then who was the guy Nash had chased? Maybe some poor innocent who’d gotten pushed to his death.
Her head pounded. She couldn’t make heads or tails of the events of the last couple of days, but she couldn’t get past the feeling that there was something here she wasn’t seeing yet, that she was in danger.
She tossed the empty water bottle in the recycling bin and grabbed a full one from the pantry. “Where’s Nash?” she asked on her way back, her mind buzzing with a thousand thoughts, each wilder than the one before.
“Checking on something,” Joey said. His answer was pretty vague.
“When will he be back?”
The man shrugged.
Her heart picked up speed. Nash is gone, was all she could think. An advantage she needed to grab.
“Could I talk to both of you for a minute?” She remained standing as Mo lumbered out of the living room, giving her a what-now? look.
The two men loomed large in the dim light, beyond intimidating. She was well aware that either one of them could snap her like a twig without breaking a sweat. She inched toward the knife block and pulled her spine straight when she got there. She’d faced down rabid paparazzi, managed problem employees at work and successfully ran her part of the Landon empire. She couldn’t back down now. She wouldn’t.
“I thought about this. I’m sure you guys are great, but the fact is, Nash hired you without consulting with me first. I was happy with my own men. I was used to them. We worked together like a team. I’m going to ask them back. You’re relieved of duty. You’ll get your pay for the full week.”
She stood strong and tall, just like her father always had. Wouldn’t blink, wouldn’t look away. That was the Landon blood in her. William Landon had been a formidable man, and his only daughter had inherited more of that than he’d ever realized.
Mo and Joey exchanged an unreadable glance.
“I want you to leave.”
“Not till Nash gets back,” Mo said.
She gave him a strained smile. “See, that’s kind of my problem with Nash. I am the boss here. When I say somebody is hired, they’re hired. When I say they go, they go. This is my home.” She paused for effect.
They still didn’t s
eem impressed.
“Let me spell it out. I thank you for your hard work, but if you’re not out of here in the next five minutes, I’ll consider you trespassers and I’m calling the police.”
Mo sat on the barstool next to Joey, tilted his head, gave her a look that might have been meant to seem patient. “Listen, Nash wouldn’t like it if we left.”
“I’m not terribly concerned over Nash’s happiness. You can call him and explain later.”
“He doesn’t have his cell on when he’s—” Joey started, but Mo fixed him with a glare, and he snapped his mouth shut without finishing.
“I really don’t care. You need to leave.”
“When Nash gets back,” Mo said.
She stood there for another thirty seconds, trying to figure out what to do. She had to get them out of her home. No way was she going to leave them with Greg while she went across the park to her uncle’s place. And she didn’t want them following her either. She looked between the two men. Obviously, they didn’t take her seriously.
“Okay. Time’s up.” She marched over to the security system and pushed the silent alarm button. She was prepared to have the security company haul these guys out when they got here.
Mo stood, his half-mangled eyebrow up all the way to his hairline. “What did you do that for?” He clucked his tongue as he picked up his black duffel bag from the foyer, giving her a dirty look.
Joey was right behind him. “Nash isn’t going to be happy about this.”
She punched in the security code so she could open the door for them. She didn’t want the full alarm going off and waking Greg. “I’ll worry about that later when I have some time to spare. Right now, I’d like to get back to bed.”
She closed the door behind them with a smile, locked it then called the security firm to call off the alarm. She dressed and checked in on Greg. She hated leaving him alone. But there had never been a single threat directed at him. And if she succeeded tonight in finding some proof against their uncle, solid proof that she could take to the police, then they would both be safe at last, safe for good. She had to take this chance.
