One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard

by Cara Colter

  “She said looks are deceiving,” he told Sophie. Discussing sexiness with her, in any context, was not in the job description.

  Sophie turned it over in her hands, not looking convinced about the support issue, but looking enchanted all the same. Did she not own any sexy underwear? Did she have to act like she had never seen lace on a bra before?

  “It’s so soft,” she said.

  What did that mean? The one she wore was hard? He did not need to be thinking about what the one she wore was like! Thinking those kinds of thoughts would be worse than sneaking a peek!

  “Ask her what her measurement is,” the saleslady instructed him.

  He would not!

  “She should try one on.”

  He stared at the woman. He opened his mouth. Not a single, solitary sound came out.

  “Tell her she won’t believe it. It will make her feel like a woman in a way nothing ever has before.”

  It seemed to him that was a rather remarkable claim. He was not jealous of underwear. He simply was not. He wouldn’t allow it.

  “What?” Sophie asked him. She had a mischievous glint in her eye. She was enjoying his discomfort. Immensely. He’d had enough.

  “She says she’s closing. You need to come back another time.” But that begged the question, with whom would she come back? Henderson? Ricky?

  To the salesclerk he said, “Could you give her a catalog? She says it is highly personal. She’d rather order online.”

  The saleslady eyed him suspiciously, because Sophie’s one word—What?—obviously did not amount to what he was saying it did. Still, his reputation helped him out, because she did not question him, but went and got a catalog and pressed it into Sophie’s hands.

  “Tell her there’s a section in the back she must see. Our new line. Pleasure enhancers.”

  She had quite the twinkle in her eye. It occurred to him the clerk, while being more subtle about it, was enjoying his discomfort at least as much as Sophie.

  “I would not deliberately embarrass a person by publicly discussing something so private,” he said evenly, a lesson he hoped she would hear.

  She was not the least contrite. What was it about him and difficult women tonight?

  “Americans aren’t usually so inhibited,” she said, lifting a shoulder.

  To his great relief they were back out in the night in seconds. The air felt cold on his cheeks, which made him realize they must have been burning.

  “I heard the word Americans. What did she say?”

  “It was an honor to have a visitor from so far away.” He was unaccustomed to lying and wouldn’t meet Sophie’s eyes. Lying got a man into trouble, anyway. For instance, he had told her this shop was closing, and now if he didn’t want her to know that was a lie, they would have to return to the pathway to the castle by way of Honeysuckle Lane.

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.

  And so his relief at getting her out of the shop was short-lived. They entered the warmth and light of the bakery and he was impossibly aware of Sophie. The counter girls greeted her as if she was a long-lost friend, and he saw her warmth and friendliness as she returned the greeting, calling one girl by name.

  It was a reminder Sophie, despite the new layer of sophistication, was a wholesome, small-town girl at heart. She was not a person anyone should be having terrible renegade thoughts about what would make her feel like a woman in a way nothing had before.

  “Go find a seat,” he said to her. “I’ll order.”

  “But you don’t know what I want,” she said.

  That was true. He did not. Not in any of the multitude of ways that could be taken.

  “What do you want, then?” Did his voice have a snap to it he hadn’t intended? She wasn’t being unreasonable. He was.

  She told him and went and found a seat. He placed the order and went to the table. He put a steaming-hot tea in front of her, and one at his place at the table. He slid into the seat across from her. Sophie ignored him completely, pouring over her new catalog.

  Don’t look at her, he ordered himself.

  He’d been in the military for all of his adult life. For thirteen years. He was a man who knew how to obey orders. So, he looked over her shoulder, out the window and saw evening fog moving in, watched people moving down the streets, and in and out of shops.

  And then he glanced at her, and the order he’d given himself was gone like that fog outside would be if sunlight hit it.

  She had removed her little red riding hood thingy. He looked at the way her hair fell forward over her face, and at the slight gloss on her lips, the thickness of her lashes, the way her sweater hugged the part of herself that he was newly and uncomfortably aware of.

  She looked up suddenly, turned the magazine to him, just as scones, fresh from the oven, were set on the table in front of them.

  “What do you think of this one?”

  He stared at the picture she had turned toward him. It felt like the worst kind of sin that he could imagine her in that. He was a professional. He was a professional protector and she was the principal, in other words, his job, his mission. The one he would not sneak peeks at if she was stark naked!

  “Um...” He picked up a scone, heaped a small mountain of clotted cream on it and shoved the entire thing in his mouth. He thought he was going to choke on his scone, that’s what he thought of that one.

  Despite the fact he had barely swallowed his first scone, was in danger of choking on it, and snorting cream out his nose, he picked up another and bit into it, as well.

  She waited patiently.

  “It’s very nice,” he managed to choke out, finally.

  “Red or black?” Sophie smiled sweetly at him.

  But he was revising his assumption she was wholesome. It was possible she was the devil herself.

  “Are you trying to make me uncomfortable?” he asked.

  “I’m just having a bit of fun.”

  Obviously, she was way too much for Henderson. Any ideas he had of returning the guardsman to his protection duty were evaporating.

  She turned the catalog back to herself, and flipped through the pages.

  “Oh,” she said, her eyes suddenly widening.

  Lancaster braced himself.

  But she closed the catalog abruptly and put it in that ridiculous oversize bag that he suddenly felt grateful for.

  “So, Lancaster,” she said, her voice a touch squeaky, “tell me what you do for fun.”

  Nothing to do with women’s underwear, he retorted in his mind, but not out loud, because he had a reputation to uphold and they were in a public place.

  And possibly he could not say it without the tiniest bit of regret.

  For some reason, he tried to think of ways he had fun, as if it was a test question that he was about to fail.

  While she waited for an answer, she took a bite of her scone, and there was a little dot of cream clinging to her lip. After a moment, she removed it with the tip of her tongue.

  It made him think of fun in a terrible new light.

  “I don’t have fun,” he told her grimly, amazed that he hadn’t given her that totally honest answer instantly.

  “That’s ridiculous. Everyone has fun.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “There’s a poster on the wall over there. The local pub is hosting a band coming from Ireland that plays spoons. I don’t even know what that is for sure, but it has to be fun.”

  For a moment, he was transported to the warmth of a kitchen, shouted laughter, the rat-tat-tat percussion of the spoons, like a horse trotting across a wooden bridge, voices raised in song, a baby bouncing on his knee, clapping chubby hands together.

  “We should go,” she suggested.

  We. She was going dangerous places. Far more dan
gerous than she knew.

  “Come on,” he said, scraping back his chair. “I want to show you something.”

  She looked at the one nibble she had left of her scone, and looked as if she was going to argue—naturally—but then she didn’t. She got up and had to put her hands way over her head to get the red thingy back on. A gentleman might have offered to help her. But he doubted there was a man on the planet who would be thinking gentlemanly thoughts after witnessing that catlike stretch.

  He turned from her and she practically had to run to follow him out the door.

  He turned deliberately toward the darkness in his heart that would lead him straight to Honeysuckle Lane. He would stop only briefly at that gaping hole where his life once had unfolded in normal things: a woman who waited eagerly for him, who had made him—so undeserving of the honor—the center of her life.

  He wouldn’t stop long enough to see a little boy in a hand-knitted jumper crawling across a swept stone floor toward him, calling out his one and only word.

  “Da.”

  He would stop only long enough to make Sophie understand where the fun had stopped for him.

  He would use it as a reminder to himself that once he had been a man who had everything, including fun. He had not treasured his life being crowded with small pleasures nearly enough when he had it. And he did not deserve to have it again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SOPHIE HAD TO scramble to keep up with Lancaster’s long strides. They followed the main street out of the village square and headed down the route that she normally took.

  “Of all the paths I’ve taken so far, this is my favorite street in the village,” she told him—his back really—still scampering to keep up. “It’s like something out of a storybook.”

  Lancaster stopped so abruptly that she very nearly crashed into him. He turned slowly and looked at her.

  “Not all storybooks have happy endings, Sophie.”

  She was going to tell him to stop being such a sober-sided spoilsport all the time, but something in both his tone and his eyes stopped her. His gaze rested on her, somber, for a long time. Long enough that she felt a shiver go down her spine as he turned from her and faced a side yard of one of the houses.

  Like the houses on either side of it, the garden was adorable. Enclosed in a low stacked-stone fence, the flower beds had been cleaned for the year, and the long-since-finished blooms cut off the shrubs, but even in the evening light, the fall color was resplendent. That beautiful autumn smell was in the air: wood smoke curling out of chimneys, crushed leaves, damp soil.

  “This is where it used to be,” he said, his voice low and pained.

  For a moment, she didn’t know what he was talking about. But when she looked at him, she felt a wave of his pain wash over her. It wasn’t in his features. They were carefully schooled to show nothing at all. But there was something in his tone, his eyes, the subtle heave of his shoulders that spoke of a burden almost too great to bear, even for a man as colossally strong as Lancaster.

  It occurred to her, now, that it wasn’t a yard at all. It was where a little cottage had once stood, an arm’s length from its neighbors.

  “It’s a wonder the whole street didn’t go up,” he said softly, his eyes moving to the thatched roofs that she had always admired as unbelievably charming.

  He didn’t have to say anything else. He had told her this story, once. He had been off the island on a training course. The cottages—at the time she had only imagined them, and she had not imagined anything quite so charming as this—still had the traditional open hearth and chimney in them. The ensuing investigation determined a child’s toy had been left too close.

  He didn’t have to say anything tonight. Not about the fire. Not about his loss. She knew the message he was giving her. This was where the fun had ended for Lancaster. A man like him, who gave himself so completely, who had such a strong sense of honor and duty, might never recover from what he would see—forever—as his greatest failure.

  It would make no difference to him that he wasn’t there. That the incident had been totally out of his control—out of anyone’s control.

  That’s what he was telling her.

  In a way, it was a warning to her, and she knew that. But in another way, he was also trusting her with something of himself that he kept hidden, guarded from the world and the well-meaning sympathy of the neighbors.

  She could see their love for Lancaster and his family in this beautiful garden. Far back, under a tree whose branches drooped under the weight of gold and red leaves nearly the same color as Lancaster’s hair, she saw a bench. It had a stone angel beside it, a winged mother who held a babe.

  This wasn’t a side yard to one of the cottages. Maybe she should have seen that before. These little cottages had no side yards. It was a small park. A memorial.

  The sadness that gripped her was so strong, she might have wept. Except that to weep would soothe something in her. And there was something larger in her that asked what she could do to soothe him.

  She suspected many had tried. But this place he was in was deep and dark and treacherous and she knew it was a place words could not touch. It would take amazing bravery to enter that space with him, and yet Sophie, who had never thought of herself as brave, entered unhesitatingly.

  She slipped her hand into his, she connected with his agony, she accepted part of his burden as her own.

  Sophie had known Lancaster for four years. She had longed for something from him that she could not quite define.

  This was the closest she had come: a moment of deep, inexplicable connection.

  She thought he would feel it, too, and slip his hand out of hers immediately, but no, he accepted her hand as if he had waited for its small comfort for a long, long time. His hand was warm in hers, the strength that had been so sorely tested pulsing through it.

  She was not sure anything had ever felt so right, or so pure, as standing there on a foggy street holding the hand of a man who was watching his ghosts.

  Finally, he took a breath. It was long and shuddering. He let go of her hand, and turned away. They made their way silently back up the steep climb to the castle.

  He did not remind her she had claimed to have a donkey in her purse. The lightness was gone from both of them. She did not speak to him at all. Sophie felt no desire to break the silence between them. The silence was a communion that felt nearly sacred.

  He saw her to the door. “Please don’t go to the hot springs tonight,” he said, his voice a rasp of weariness.

  “I won’t,” she promised him. He turned to go.

  She laid her arm ever so lightly on the back of his, and he turned back to her. She drank in the squareness of his chin, the silk of his fog-dampened hair, the depth of those green, green eyes. He did not pull away from her touch, but waited, returning her gaze, until reluctantly she took her hand away from his arm.

  She watched him walk toward the darkness, watched with an aching heart, the power in that stride, his great sense of his confidence in being able to control the world. He had shown her his greatest failure.

  It occurred to Sophie that ever since she had met him, she had seen Lancaster through the lens of herself. How he made her feel and how she wanted to feel.

  But now she saw what he had possibly seen all along.

  That was how a child viewed the world, seeing the world and everything in it, including people, as toys to bring them pleasure. Even her engagement had felt like an attempt to create a picture that brought her a sense of comfort, safety, belonging.

  Is that why her fiancé had told her it was over? That he felt her heart wasn’t in it? Because he had seen that what she called love was just an effort to make a fairy tale out of reality?

  Lancaster had to have known all along, from the first time she had met him when she was eighteen and become totally and unreasonably
infatuated, that her romantic view was going to meet the obstacle of reality, and be crushed.

  But in this moment, it did not feel as if the reality of his sorrow was crushing her. Her heart felt both so bruised and so wide open.

  And standing watching the mist swallow him whole, she had an epiphany.

  What if she added a mission to her stay on Havenhurst? What if it wasn’t just about helping Maddie, who didn’t really seem to need her help very much, anyway? What if she was able to give a gift to Lancaster that he was sorely missing?

  She thought of his laughter earlier, and how she had known what a rare thing that was. She went to bed and mulled over her plan.

  * * *

  The next morning she called him, using that ancient rotary dial phone in the nursery that went directly to him.

  “I’ve decided I want to go to that Irish band thing at the pub.”

  Her announcement was greeted with silence.

  “Spoons?” she reminded him.

  “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you might want to come with me. I think me, and a few drinks, is more than poor Ricky can handle.”

  That should make him remember the last time he’d been with her, at the christening. He wouldn’t want her inhibition unleashed on one of his guards, she was fairly certain of that. It was a mark of her commitment to this mission that she would deliberately turn his thoughts in the direction of one of her most humiliating moments.

  That night came back to her. It had been absolutely magical being part of the beautiful occasion of Ryan’s christening with Maddie and Edward. The connection of the prince and princess had been so strong, their love for one another shimmering in the air. Lancaster and Sophie had been connected, also, made a couple, by the grave honor that had been bestowed on them.

  Godparents. They had spoken vows over that baby that had been so like marriage vows: that they would be there for him together as long as Ryan needed them.

  Sophie, looking at Lancaster as he held that baby so tenderly, and yet with such fierceness, had already been drunk on the feeling of knowing him. Knowing herself. Knowing what she wanted. And needed.