Guardian For Hire (For Hire 2)

“Hey, I want to show you something,” he said, his palm resting on the arm of the couch at her feet.

“What is it? A newspaper report? An autopsy result?” Jesus, was someone else dead? Her heart thundered and she swallowed to work up some saliva in her suddenly bone-dry mouth.

He screwed up his brows, his nostrils flaring. “What? No. Nothing like that. I want to show you the rest of the lower level. Come on.” He walked out of the room without sparing her another glance.

She trotted along after him, her book falling to the ground in her haste. The beat-up steps were cool against her bare feet, but she made quick work of them until she was eventually walking along the dark corridor beside him. “Are you about to show me your Phantom of the Opera lair?”

“What?” It was the first time he’d really focused on her, and she noted the tense cut of his jaw. He was grinding his teeth.

“Nothing. Just trying to break the tension. Will you put me out of my misery and tell me what Maddy told you? Please?” She stopped in the middle of the hall, hoping he’d stop along with her.

It worked. They faced each other, their bodies practically touching in the cramped space. “Look, what Maddy told me isn’t important. I’ll tell you when the time is right, but for now we need to focus on what’s best for you. Can you do that? Can you trust me enough to wait?”

She’d never heard him sound so intense before, and her head was nodding before she’d even given it permission to do so. There was a command in his voice that she couldn’t deny, and the rasping growl behind every word had her thinking that if he’d commanded her to strip naked in the middle of the hall, she would have done that, too. Heat rushed to her face, and she tried her best to shake away every thought other than the present. He wanted her focused? That’s what she would be. Because, for some unfathomable reason, she did trust him. After little more than a week, she trusted him more than almost anyone she knew. That thought was almost as terrifying as the car bomb.

He held her gaze for another second and turned away. They continued farther down the hall until they came to a glass-front door, and he held it open for her to pass through.

The room was huge. With gray stone walls and a matching cool dark floor. A chill went up her spine as her feet made contact with the unyielding ground. The room must have gone for a mile, long and narrow, with two large targets poised against the far wall. Where she stood, beside the door, were two small booths cased in glass, each with a pair of protective muffs resting on a Plexiglas counter.

“Oh no, no, no…” she mumbled, her brain working faster than she was able to process. A shooting range? In his house? Seriously, it was like he was about to show her where he hid his Batmobile next.

“You need to learn how to protect yourself. From whatever comes. So it won’t be enough to carry an empty clip anymore.”

“I…I don’t even know how to hold it right,” she said softly. She shook her head and her hair hit her in the face as her movements became more and more spastic. It was one thing to ask her to trust him with her life, but it was another to thrust her without warning into the mind-set of taking some else’s. “I-I can’t do this.”

“Sarabeth, please. You need to be strong, okay? Try to pull yourself together.”

She heard his words as if through a fog, but she stepped up to the shooting window all the same, running her fingers along the cool steel pistol that waited for her there.

“I don’t know…”

“It’s paper right now. Focus on the paper.” He took her icy hand and squeezed it. “You said you could trust me. Trust me enough to know I wouldn’t ask this of you if it wasn’t necessary.”

She wet her lips and straightened, nodding. “Okay.”

He started by teaching her the basics of gun care. How to hold it, how to flip the safety, where to point it, where not to point it—at him, seemed to be the biggest suggestion. It was easy enough. Nothing she hadn’t seen in movies a hundred times before.

“Good. You’re doing great. Now I’m going to teach you to aim. Normally we wouldn’t go so fast, but we’re kind of doing a speed course, so you have the basics and I feel comfortable letting you carry while you’re here.”

Because she was going to need it. She could feel the color draining from her face. “Hey, look at me.” She met his intense gaze and let his conviction calm her. “I’m going to take care of you. This is a precaution.”

“All right.”

“Now, you’re going to want to keep your feet hip-width apart, firmly planted on the ground.” He demonstrated and she followed suit. Or tried to. Somehow, despite her best efforts, her knees were shaking at the very idea at what she was about to do, paper or not.

“Not quite.” He walked behind her, his torso pressed to her back, and tapped her upper thigh, positioning her legs closer together. The touch sent a rush of heat through her thighs and the ache that was always dimly in the background whenever he was around burst into full recognition.

Just another reaction to yet another stressful situation. No big deal.

“Thanks,” she breathed, her voice huskier than she would have liked.

“Okay, now I’m going to show you how to aim.” His palms burned against her shoulders as he squared them, and his fingers trailed her arms at a torturous pace until each hand wrapped around hers, the calloused pad of his pointer resting against her own.

“The kickback is going to surprise you, so try to gear up. All right. Let’s give it a try in one—”

His body was so warm…

“Two—”

His hot spearmint breath sent tingles up her neck.

“Three—” He depressed his finger, and the force of the metal shook her, propelling her against the hard muscle of his chest. The sound wasn’t what she had expected—the cinematic glory of the action movies her ex-boyfriends had forced her to watch. No, the actual car backfiring sound was like a wake-up call to the rest of her life.

She dropped the gun, unable to control her shaking any longer. “I-I’m sorry. I can’t. This is too much—I need to know what’s happening.” She stared him down, blinking back tears.

He blanched, but his gaze held hers, firm and steady, before he nodded. “Okay. Okay, I get it. But you have to promise me that you’ll stay calm, all right?”

She did her best to give a solemn nod, but the rest of her body quaked beneath her. This was the moment. Truth and dare.

“I can do calm.”

“We have information that leads us to believe that the mob might be involved with the recent murders.”

And just like that, calm flew out the window.

Chapter Ten

Once Gavin managed to talk her out of her hysteria, she’d given herself an hour to wallow in bed. An hour to sit alone and process, but when the alarm sounding the end of her hour found her stuffed underneath the covers of her blissfully horse head–free bed in the fetal position, her whole body ached to stay there until whatever rip-off Sopranos character was after her finally showed up. The mob. The frigging mob. She’d seen The Godfather. She knew how this ended.

A knock on her door quickly followed the buzzing of her alarm, and her heart stopped mid-beat.

“Sarabeth? You okay?” Gavin’s voice was gruff. She’d been surprised when he let her run off the way she had. He hadn’t approached her door or so much as walked by since he’d told her. It was good of him, really. To let her have her space.

“I’m great.” She struggled to get the words past the ever-increasing knot in her throat.

“Good. Well, then.” There was a long pause and for a minute she wondered if he’d left. “You can have some more time, if you need it, but we do need to keep working as well. This isn’t going to be easy and I want to get you up to speed with at least the minimum…”

Because everything else had been so easy up to that point. “Yes. Okay,” she sniffed. “Give me ten more minutes.”

“You’ve got it, yeah? Right, well, I’ll be in the office. When you’re ready.” His voice was gentler than normal, and the sound had her heart turning over and over before dropping low into her stomach. His heavy footfalls sounded, then faded.

It was an effort, but she crabbed her way back up to the headboard where she proceeded to gently bang the back of her head over and over until she was absolutely certain her mind was clear. The thing that had been bouncing around in there like a ball amid all the fear and panic came back to the surface.

Her life might be ending. She’d never been to Paris. Never been married or had children. Never ran that 5k she’d been training for over the past year.

But she was still alive for now, she reminded herself. And if she only had a few days left, heck, maybe only a few more hours left, she was going to do what she wanted. There was nothing to stop her now—future repercussions might never come. No, now she was Sarabeth unleashed.

And as much as the sinking feeling in her chest made her feel strange, it was oddly freeing at the same time.

She tumbled out of the bed, shaking out her limbs and jumping up and down like a prizefighter, even throwing a few punches in the air to pick up her energy. She pawed through her clothes, but they were pretty much all the same. She hadn’t really needed a nice wardrobe when she was essentially a shut-in.

Right when she was about to give up the search as a lost cause, she got to the bottom of the stack to find her fitted uniform pants, and she pulled them on without a second thought. They’d be a hell of a job to work off later, but for now, she was determined to be the sexiest version of herself she could possibly be with what she had to work with. Moving with the speed of a woman on a mission, she pulled on the tightest T-shirt in her arsenal—the scoop-neck purple shirt that gave the slightest hint of her cleavage. It would have to do.

By the time she left her room and reached the bottom of the steps, however, she came to the stunning realization that she had not made any plans beyond dressing herself. She pivoted on the spot, her mind whirring through things she’d seen on TV shows in this sort of situation. All she could come up with were bad stripteases and big romantic gestures like holding a boom box over her head. With a mental sigh, she acknowledged that she had neither the boom box nor the balls for either option.

So if she couldn’t do any of that, what was she good for? She could do his taxes, but that hardly seemed romantic. A therapy session was out. His house was already clean…there had to be something she could do that would let him know, albeit in her clumsy, reserved way, she was trying to seduce him.

She sauntered into the kitchen and ducked low to examine each of the shelves. The resources were as sparse as the rest of the house, but there was enough to get by. A block of cheese in the refrigerator drawer and a box of macaroni in the pantry. Homemade mac and cheese. That sounded like something a man would like, right? And it should be easy enough.

She searched around in the cabinets for a long minute until she found a large saucepan. She filled it with water before setting it on the largest burner. Then she retrieved the box of pasta from the closet and dumped it into the water with a firm nod. Okay. Good start.

She was only mildly intimidated by the shining copper pans hanging from the rack over the island. Still, part of her knew they were too perfect to survive unscathed.

No matter. It didn’t look like Gavin used them much anyway, and she’d be super careful. She slid a knife through the plastic covering the cheese only to find little flecks of mold hidden by the inside label. Scrambling, she surveyed the fridge until she found individually plastic-wrapped cheese slices. That would have to be good enough.

She’d turned the heat up all the way on the burner before setting the pan on the surface. That’s what they’d always said to do in cooking shows, after all. Get the pans screaming hot. She channeled her inner Bobby Flay, but nothing else was coming to mind. It only made sense that the cheese had to melt in the pan…but given that’s she’d never so much as attempted an omelet before, it seemed easier said than done.