Seduction in Session (The Perfect Gentlemen 2)

Her father moved to her bedside, his eyes softening the minute he looked down at her. “Hey, muffin. How are you feeling?”

“A little embarrassed that you called me muffin.” She licked at her ridiculously dry lips. “Connor protected me. He got me out of the way of that bullet and took the brunt of the crowd as they ran away. Am I in the emergency room?”

“Yes.” Her father took her hand. “Your mother is going to cut her trip to San Francisco short.”

Her mom was visiting friends. They were supposed to go on a tour of wine country. She never got to do anything for herself. “No. I’m fine. I’m sure it’s just a bump.”

“You have a knot on your head and the doctor says I’m supposed to watch you overnight, but other than that they’re releasing you as soon as you’re awake and feel strong enough to walk,” Connor explained.

“You’ll come back home, and I’ll have a security detail for you in a few hours.” Her father pulled out his phone.

If she let him dial those numbers, any freedom she had would be chucked right out the window. “Dad, no. I’m not going to Arlington. I’m going to my place and it’s all right because I already hired a bodyguard.”

Connor’s eyebrow lifted in a quizzical stare. She shrugged because there was no way she wasn’t going to hire him now.

Her father shook his head. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. I don’t know who this man is and I don’t trust him. For all I know, you hired him off Craigslist and he’s a serial killer. Maybe he set up the whole scenario to con a job out of you. Have you thought of that?”

She came by her conspiracy-theory tendencies honestly. Her dad could come up with some whoppers. “Dad, he didn’t set anything up. I wouldn’t hire someone off the Internet.”

Connor cleared his throat. “Really?”

He had a way of making her feel dumb. “It’s not the same. You came with a reference.”

“From a man you met on the Internet,” Connor replied in that annoyingly hot, arrogant way of his.

“Are you kidding me?” Her father was suddenly standing next to Connor, and she had the distinct sense that she was being ganged up on.

“Niall is a friend. He’s an activist in California and I’ve been speaking to him for weeks. He’s a good guy.”

Connor shook his head at her dad. “He actually is a decent guy, but there’s no way for her to know it. She’s never talked to him in person.”

“We Skype almost every day.”

“Every day for a couple of weeks but you’re only messaging. For all you know he’s some creepy old dude looking to add to his harem of stolen brides.”

Her dad turned, fully engaging Connor. “She always does this. She’s far too trusting and I swear it’s going to get her killed one day. When she turned eighteen, do you know what she did? She hopped a bus to Guatemala with a bunch of hippies to pray to some hippie deity and smoke god only knows what in the middle of the rain forest.”

“We were building sanitation systems for poor villages.” She sighed and kind of wished her concussion had been worse so she didn’t have to sit through a recitation of her sins.

Her father gritted his teeth. “She left a note.”

“Because there was no way you would have let me go,” she pointed out.

Connor stared down at her. “Of course he wouldn’t have let you go. You’re the daughter of a senator of the United States of America. You’re a high-value target to many South American groups.”

Her father nodded. “That’s what I explained to her. Kidnapping important people is big business in that part of the world, but did she listen?”

“I also didn’t get kidnapped because I didn’t run around with a sign that said, ‘Hey, Daddy’s got cash. Please kidnap me.’ I’m not an idiot. I know how to blend in.”

“You couldn’t blend in if you tried.” Connor’s deep rumble made her wonder exactly what he meant by that.

She sat up and found her head surprisingly clear. “It doesn’t matter what either one of you thinks. I’m going home. I have work to do.”

Natalia Kuilikov was going to be a big story—if she could find out what had happened to the woman. Lara had come across a lead but she hadn’t been able to act on it for a few days. She definitely didn’t intend to be locked in her father’s Arlington mansion with a bunch of Secret Service wannabes on her twenty-four seven.

“You’re supposed to rest. And if you don’t think I can force you to come home with me, you’re wrong.” Her dad’s cell phone was right back in his hand, almost a bigger threat than that gun had been.

“Sir, if you force her to go with you, I think she’ll run at the first opportunity. If you want to ruin what seems to be a perfectly fine relationship with your daughter, this is the way to do it,” Connor pointed out.

There was the voice of reason. “Yeah, what he said.”

Her father flushed, his cheeks going red. It was what he did when anyone backed him into a corner. “What the hell am I supposed to do? Someone took a shot at her. I can’t let that go.”

“I’m going to look into it. The cops are already checking all the cameras in a three-block radius. We’ll figure out where he came from and where he’s going. If we can get a plate number, we’ll find this guy. But I think it’s for the best that we keep the incident out of the papers. The last thing Lara needs is a bunch of media attention,” Connor explained.

Her father huffed as though he hadn’t even thought about it. He turned to her. “If they start checking into your background . . .”

Connor finished for him. “They’ll very likely put together enough to out her as an infamous blogger.”

Her father’s jaw dropped. “He knows?”

“Of course I know,” Connor replied simply. “I told you. I’m her security. I need to know everything. And in this case, one bodyguard is likely better than a whole team. No one will question what I’m doing with her. We’ll say I’m her new boyfriend. She can’t hide behind that if she’s got three dudes in suits with communication devices in their ears. I’m easy to explain away, and I have the flexibility to protect her and work with the police to figure out who tried to kill her.”

“Boyfriend?” It made her a little antsy. “Couldn’t we say you’re my cousin or something?”

“No.” No explanation. Just no.

“Or you could be my life coach.”

“No.”

Fine. He didn’t really look like a life coach. Maybe a personal trainer. She started to give him that option.

He simply looked down. “Whatever you’re going to say, the answer is no. Now, if you’re feeling up to it, go and get dressed. I want us gone before the press figures out where we are.”

“I wondered why you took her to this place.” Her father was looking at Connor with something like respect in his eyes. “There were closer hospitals.”