Illusion (Billionaire in Disguise 2)

“Wait a second. Are you telling me my former COO who tried to shoot me dead has fled the country?” he asked.

“No, but I am telling you that not having him on the radar yet is weird. We overlooked him because of predisposed biases on both sides, but now that we know it’s him, we can’t put anything past him. If this was something in the making, a plan of some sort that he hatched, then we have to consider that he had resources to use if he were to get caught.”

“Then, what are your working theories?” he asked.

“I just told them to you. Things don’t add up. The attack in the garage. The hospital stay. How friendly he was with me. Every interaction I’ve had with him is suspicious now that we know he was the one pulling the strings. But then we have something else to consider.”

“And what would that be?”

“That Jacob was another pawn in this game.”

Derek looked at me with a blank stare. He ran his hand through his hair, taking a step back to the bed. He sat down with his hands in his lap as his mind began to spin, and I worried about what that revelation would do to his paranoid frame of mind. It was my job to keep him afloat on working theories, but with the slow switch in our relationship, I felt a growing need to volley these things off him that I would normally speak with John about first.

“You think someone else is doing this? Like they threatened Jacob or something?” Derek asked.

“I think it’s odd for someone like Jacob to want to kill both of us. When I went down in your office, he was reloading. The sounds of the gun. The fiddling around. He was loading himself up for a second round. He was desperate and had every intention of killing both of us. Why?”

“Because killing me got him his seat, and killing you got you out of his way? You could’ve overpowered him in a second. Hell, you did that night,” he said.

“That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to theorize that he was talking with someone else running the show. Someone else who’d bribed him or threatened him and wanted you to step away from your company. I get hired, I follow you around, and it’s only a matter of time before they want me dead too. Remember, Jacob was someone under the assumption that I was your girlfriend. He never knew I was your bodyguard.”

“Holy shit, you’re right.”

“So why would he elect to kill some feeble woman on your arm?” I asked.

Derek buried his face in his hands and heaved a heavy sigh. The relaxed, open, happy man in Hawaii was gone and had quickly been replaced with the man I’d met. The high-strung, close-minded, overworked businessman who was having a hard time understanding anything going on around him.

“So what do we do now?” he asked. “Where do we go from here?”

“We continue doing what we’ve been doing. Until Jacob is caught and until you feel safe again, we stay. Continue our surveillance. Monitoring his accounts. You keep on with your company, rebuilding businesses and turning them around. John and I will keep providing protection, and I’ll stay on your heels. We keep you safe until this is wrapped up.”

“And what if this doesn’t wrap up? Hm? What if it never stops?”

I slid my hand into Derek’s, slowly prying it from his face. I laced our fingers together, trying to draw on the last of the Hawaiian warmth from his skin. He turned his eyes toward mine, and I saw how desperate he was, how tired he was of this already, and how anxious he was to get back to his life.

“It will,” I said. “Because I’m the one running this show. It always gets resolved with me. My track record shows that.”

“Your track record shows no one gets killed with you,” he said.

“That, too, but I’ve never had a case I couldn't wrap up. Ever. Remember our conversation about scorekeeping? What’s my ideal number?”

“Zero,” he said with a sigh.

“Exactly. And that’s not changing with you, so get some rest. Prepare yourself to go back to work. You have a company that needs you and a facade you need to keep up. Your media presence isn’t exactly fantastic, so that mask you keep on is going to be important now more than ever.”

“I know,” he said as he straightened his back. “I know.”

“Promise me one thing, Derek.”

“What can I promise the most beautiful woman in the world?”

“Remember to take showers. You really stink if you don’t.”

We laughed on the edge of my bed, trying to push the stress away with the joy we were trying to recreate. Derek released my hand, slid it behind my body, and then rubbed my back to try and soothe me. He knew I felt the way he did. He knew the stress was mounting on my shoulders again as well. Not only were we trying to save his life, but now we were trying to conceal a budding relationship from the team so no one tried to remove me from my post. Derek was right. The emotions I felt whenever I was with him made me better at what I did. They made me want to help him more, and they motivated me more than ever to figure out where the hell this son of a bitch was.

It made me hungry for justice, and that was fuel I was going to need for the ride ahead.

“I should finish unpacking,” Derek said as he stood.