The Hero Was Handsome (Triple Threat Book 3)

by Kristen Casey

  “…mentioned what she was wearing,” Red finished for her, unable to keep silent any longer.

  Suddenly, Tate had a good idea why his buddy was taking the steps he was. The thought of some crackpot watching Lyla had Tate steamed, too, and he’d only met the woman a little while ago. He couldn’t imagine how much worse he’d feel if the fucker managed to lay hands on her.

  “What makes you think the person is going to up their game for the book tour? Maybe they can’t follow Lyla out of town. Maybe they’re just some house-bound looney-tune with too much time on their hands and not enough meds.”

  Red stared Tate down. “Lyla is not some chess piece we’re moving around on a game board, dipshit. She’s a very prominent mystery author that I lured to Red Devil using highly refined and specialized business world techniques.”

  “He pays really well,” Lyla interjected.

  “Lyla is also my future wife’s friend,” Red barked back, “And, therefore, my friend. Ergo…”

  Tate had never much cared for mathematics—he was more of a history buff, himself. But even he could follow the simple A+B=C equation being presented to him now.

  “Ergo, you are now my friend,” Tate informed Lyla. “And no friend of mine is going to be out swinging in the wind for a sociopath on her upcoming book tour.”

  Lyla groaned and slumped back in her plush armchair. “Oh, for the love of—the fix is in, isn’t it? You two really aren’t going to let this go?”

  Tate scoffed, “Do we look like the kind of guys who would let a threat to our friends go?”

  “Jesus,” Lyla muttered.

  In her slim black jeans and slinky polka-dotted blouse, she looked like a model straight out of the pages of Hot for Teacher Weekly. And Tate had to commend his friend Red on his taste in office furniture—the dark leather of the chair Lyla was perched on highlighted her looks perfectly. It made Tate want to grab a scotch and then her.

  Probably not in that order, though.

  “So, am I hired?” he wondered.

  He might not have experience, but Tate could ask around and probably look up the rest of what he needed to know. He had heart and he had drive, and he had quite a few weeks of involuntary leave left that he wanted to spend productively.

  Red set his big hands carefully on the sides of his pristine desk blotter. “I’ll call you later and let you know.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” After all that bickering with Lyla, his buddy was pulling back now? “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, I am now going to get Ms. Lawson’s thoughts on the subject before she and I make a final decision on whether you are a good fit for the position.” There was no wiggle room in that statement—only the sky-high brick wall of Red MacLellan’s indomitable will.

  Fuck if Tate hadn’t found himself here a time or two before. And he’d learned that if he couldn’t scale the wall, he had to find a way around it. His gaze swung to Lyla’s, but she was focused on her hands, knitted together in her lap. He couldn’t read a thing there.

  What was more, her profile was a smooth, impossibly-pretty mask and gave him absolutely nothing to go on.

  Tate forced himself not to chew out Red in front in Lyla. He simply said, “I look forward to hearing from you,” and got to his feet.

  Then, because he couldn’t quite help himself—this was Red, for crying out loud—he clicked his heels together and snapped off the world’s most sarcastic salute before he stalked out of that posh office door.

  Behind him, Tate heard Lyla giggle, and he grinned. Score one for the good guys.

  TWO

  ONCE TATE WAS gone, Red asked Lyla, “Well, what do you think?”

  “He’s definitely…militaristic,” she said.

  Even lounging in his chair like he was bored in geometry class, Tate Monroe had had the unmistakable bearing of a soldier.

  Lyla had no doubt that if Red’s assistant Wayne had suddenly decided to stage a coup, Tate would’ve been up and over that freighter-sized desk in a heartbeat, wielding Red’s fountain pen like a deadly weapon to put down the insurgency.

  He’d been kind of breathtaking, come to think of it. Lyla only wished she’d been able to meet the man under different circumstances. At one of their group’s happy hours, for instance, instead of discussing her…situation.

  “I hope you’ll pardon my French,” Red said, “But I didn’t pick Tate for his charm, dubious as it is—he’s just the most tenacious fucker I know. If we hire him, he will stick to you like glue or die trying.”

  “Yes, but the question remains,” Lyla countered. “Is that really necessary?”

  “You know that I think so.” Red leaned way back in his desk chair and contemplated her. “Lyla…we don’t know what we’re dealing with here. I told you before that Tate is an old friend, but I have to be clear about this—he’s as loyal as they come. I chose him, instead of some professional we don’t know, because I know we can trust him implicitly. Injured or not, Tate is clever and resourceful, and he’s got a sixth sense about trouble like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

  Red sighed heavily, then added, “We’re in the dark about how serious this thing is. I think Tate’s exactly what we need.”

  This thing. Her situation. So many ways to say what Lyla refused to give a name to. Because, once she labeled it, once she put on her writer hat and assigned words to the amorphous entity out in the world that had her in its sights, then the ghost became real. It took on substance as an actual human, with actual malicious intent.

  She shied away from the thought. “Then that’s good, right?”

  “It is,” Red agreed. “But before we go ahead, I need you to be one-thousand-percent sure you’re on board. Once we put this bone between Tate’s teeth, those jaws are going to clamp down like a bulldog’s and not let go until you’re safe or he’s dead in the ground.”

  “I mean, when you put it like that…do we really want to put this on his plate? If Tate’s going to take it so seriously? Because I’m reasonably sure my superfan is only some lonely person with nothing better to do. Eventually, they’ll get tired of me and move on to someone more interesting, and Tate will have wasted all his leave on me.”

  Lyla thought about the cops she and Red had talked to. They’d had no qualms whatsoever about using nouns—they’d called the person hounding her a stalker without one second thought.

  She wrote about people like that all the time in her mysteries, but somehow the term had never seemed quite so chilling before. Except, who was she kidding? Lyla wrote about stalkers and their ilk precisely because they were chilling.

  Even the word sent tremors down the spine. Stalk—like a predator hunting prey.

  Red wrenched her attention back to him. “Are you positive about that?” he demanded. “If you were so sure this was nothing to worry about, why bring it to me in the first place? Why agree to go to the cops?”

  Because Lyla was good and scared, that was why—and her boss knew it.

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Red went on, looking at her face. “At some point, you have to acknowledge the seriousness of this. And, if we hire Tate, you’ll have to trust him. I can’t have you two battling about whether he’s being too heavy-handed or whatever. You have to let him do his job.”

  “Heavy-handed?” Lyla snorted. “Come on. He seemed nice.”

  Red rolled his eyes and countered, “Don’t be fooled. Tate is bossy as shit. He’s a complete prick when he doesn’t get his way.”

  Lyla raised her eyebrows at him. Whether he was her boss or not, Red had to see the irony in that statement.

  He chuckled, seeing her point immediately. “Why do you think we’re such good friends?”

  ONCE THEY’D FINALIZED the details of the arrangement, Red walked Lyla out—but they both stopped short when they hit the elegant waiting area outside his office.

  Tate was still there, sitting on the loveseat in his impeccable navy-blue blazer, leafing through an old issue of City
Style.

  “Oh,” Lyla blurted out, as she took in her future bodyguard’s attributes once more—all the way from his sandy-blond hair down to his perfectly-shined shoes.

  “You’re still here,” Red announced.

  Tate put down the magazine and got slowly to his feet. “I am.”

  “And you are here because…” Lyla’s boss trailed off with a perplexed frown.

  “You clearly forgot we were going to have lunch,” Tate replied.

  Red nodded and kept nodding, as if that announcement didn’t quite clear things up. “Yes. That did slip my mind. Completely.”

  Tate shrugged and leveled a boyish smile at Lyla. “Busy guy,” he told her.

  Something wasn’t adding up. Lyla glanced at Red’s assistant, Wayne, whose fingers had flown into sudden activity on his computer keyboard, and whose face now bore a distinctly panicked expression that hadn’t been there moments before.

  “I should get going,” Lyla said into the pregnant pause that descended on the room. She gestured vaguely toward the elevators to underline the sentiment, but didn’t move quite yet.

  Red nodded again, but he didn’t take his laser-like gaze off Tate.

  “You should join us,” Tate told Lyla cheerfully.

  If Red’s eyebrows could’ve shot any higher, they’d be on the ceiling. “Yes. That’s true,” he agreed warily.

  Lyla rolled her eyes at their antics. “It’s obviously not even a little true. You two go on and figure out—” She waved her hands between them, “—whatever this is. We can all talk later.”

  “Can’t wait,” Tate said, leaning forward to shake her hand another time.

  His grip was strong and firm, but not crushing, and Lyla’s appreciation of him ratcheted up another notch.

  Her dad had given her plenty of pointers over the years on how to evaluate the males of the species, and a man’s handshake was right up there at the top of the list. Tate’s was perfect.

  Lyla smiled at them once more and walked away, but not quickly enough, it seemed. She’d barely rounded the corner when she heard Red murmur, “What the fuck was that all about?”

  She froze in place.

  “Sorry, dude. I think I stood up too fast before,” Tate grumbled. “I’m tight now, though. I’ll get out of your hair. Don’t worry about lunch.”

  “No, it’s fine. If you can hang out for another fifteen minutes or so, I think it’s actually doable. Are you up to it?”

  “Yeah, sure. Sounds good.”

  Just like that, Lyla remembered the one distinctive thing she knew about Tate Monroe—four months earlier, he’d been flown from the Middle East to Landstuhl, Germany, with a combat injury and he still hadn’t been cleared to return to active duty. That was why he was available to act as her bodyguard in the first place.

  Lyla had been there on the evening Red and their friend Luca had gotten the news. In fact, she still had a silly cartoon that Luca’s fiancée had drawn that night, stuck to her fridge with a Red Devil magnet.

  She had no idea why Tate had captured her imagination back then, but suspected it was because all the stories his friends had told about him had made quite an impression. That was months ago, though.

  Tate looked like he was in perfect health, now. In fact, more than perfect health. The man was a specimen, for sure—an exemplary prototype of the classic, red-blooded American male.

  Sadly, that was exactly the kind of guy that seemed to be in somewhat short supply here in Manhattan. Lyla had no trouble meeting metrosexuals and hipsters. But strapping hunks from some farm in the middle of the country were decidedly thin on the ground. Unfortunately, those were the kind of men that just happened to be Lyla’s weakness.

  She was going to have to be very, very careful if this was going to work the way it was supposed to. Given her body’s all over reaction to sitting three feet away from Tate, going on a road trip could end up being a ridiculous test of willpower. Her recent dry spell when it came to dating was only going to make the problem worse.

  Just her luck.

  ON HER WAY home from Red’s office in the financial district, Lyla stopped in at the Trident Publishing building to check in with the PR department there. They were making progress on the new Red Devil imprint swag she was going to be carting to her signings and readings, and assured her everything would be done in plenty of time.

  From there, it was only a short walk to the print shop she normally used for her own materials. Lyla picked up part of her order—a variety of bookmarks and postcards showcasing some of her backlist titles—and confirmed when the rest of the stuff was going to be done.

  All routine and unremarkable tasks. For good measure, she picked up her dry cleaning at the end of the block, then headed home.

  In the lobby, Lyla spent a few minutes with her building’s longtime doorman, Joe, hearing about how his grandkids did in their soccer games over the weekend. She got her mail and managed to dodge what would undoubtedly have been a drawn-out conversation with Mrs. Meecham from 4B.

  By the time she reached the elevators, everything in Lyla’s world seemed so ridiculously normal that the very idea of having to be saddled with a bodyguard for the foreseeable future seemed like total nonsense.

  She didn’t need an off-duty soldier trailing along with her on this publicity tour. Lyla was perfectly capable of driving herself to all the events, and it wasn’t like she was going to be alone that much, anyway.

  During the days, she’d be interacting with fans or on the road, and in the evenings, she’d be locked safely in hotel rooms, surrounded on all sides by hotel employees and other guests.

  How hard could it possibly be to stay safe in those conditions? Lyla had lived in the city for years. She knew perfectly well how to stay alert and aware of her surroundings.

  By the time the elevator reached her floor, she’d all but decided to call Red back and tell him she wouldn’t be needing Tate’s services after all. He’d been kind to offer, but she was going to pass this time.

  On her way down the hall, Lyla thought about how it had been weeks since her superfan had contacted her, anyway. As she’d predicted, they had no doubt gotten bored with her, and moved on to their next obsession. Good riddance, too.

  But as she approached her door, Lyla’s steps slowed and then came to a faltering stop. Her drycleaning drooped in her hand, and the box from the printer nearly slipped to the floor.

  There was a dirty, dog-eared envelope taped to the center of her front door, a ragged “D” scrawled so awkwardly on the face of it, that it was almost certain the writer had altered their handwriting on purpose.

  Lyla shifted the box she was holding to one arm and ripped the note free with trembling fingers. She glanced nervously around, but the hallway was still empty.

  The only sound was Mrs. Meecham’s television, still broadcasting her usual late-afternoon soap operas at top volume, even though the woman herself had gone on a little jaunt to the lobby.

  Lyla fumbled her key a few times before she was able to fit it into the lock and get herself inside her apartment. She piled her dry cleaning, printing, and mail-stuffed purse on her dinner table and tried to calm her galloping pulse.

  She forced herself to take a couple of deep breaths as she stared at the envelope in her hands.

  She shouldn’t open it. Lyla should just call the police.

  Except—what if it was nothing? What if it was only a note from the super, or a message from the doorman? Joe hadn’t mentioned anything just now, but he’d been so excited by the grandkid discussion, he could’ve simply forgotten.

  Lyla must be letting all of Red’s nonsense go to her head. So, she turned the envelope over, slid a finger under the flap, and pulled the note free.

  Oh, no. Like something out of a bad movie, the paper was a messy hodge-podge of glued-on letters and words.

  You silly fool, it read. Do you really think that leaving town will keep you safe from me?

  I can always find you. I’m going to b
e there.

  I’m going to be everywhere you are until you learn your lesson.

  Lyla pulled out the chair next to her and collapsed into it. She dropped the letter on the table and kept a wary eye on it while she pulled her purse close and dug through it for her phone.

  It took a little effort to find the NYPD detective’s business card among all the rewards cards and coupons tucked into her wallet, but within a few minutes the receptionist at the station had patched her through to the guy’s voicemail, and Lyla had left a message letting him know what had happened.

  She debated making her second call for another minute or two, but in the end, Lyla knew she had no choice now. It was time to face facts.

  Her boss answered on the third ring, “This is Red.”

  “Red, hi. It’s Lyla.”

  “Well, that didn’t take long. What’s up?”

  Lyla tried to make her mouth say the words, she really did. But for some reason, all the ones she was supposed to say got stuck in her throat when she looked down at that letter once more.

  “Lyla? What’s going on? You okay?”

  She blinked and sprang from the chair, backing away from the offending missive so she could think straight. “I’m, uh…I’m fine. But I got another letter. When I got home. It was on my front door.”

  “Did you call the cops?” Red barked.

  “Of course. I left a message for Detective Scarletti. I’m sure he’ll—”

  “Hold that thought. I’m sending you Tate’s contact info right now. Text him your address so he can find you.”

  “Red…”

  Her phone dinged with an incoming text, and sure enough, there was Tate’s contact.

  “Lyla, we hired Tate to do this job, so let him do it, okay? He’s not far away, and he’ll get to you soon. Just tell him where you are.”

  The thought of having all six-foot-two, two-hundred pounds of Tate keeping her safe was definitely appealing at the moment. Lyla was scared to even peek behind her bathroom door, much less spend the rest of the night here alone.