Above and Beyond (2 page)

              Lena had wondered earlier if the candidates to be her bodyguard could possibly any worse. Ramon Sanchez seemed to be the universe’s sarcastic answer to that question. She didn’t like his stupid jerkoff face or his stupid jerkoff name. She didn’t like the way that he pretended to talk to her father like they won’t both morons. She didn’t like the way that he pretended to care what she thought when he talked to her. His suit was three sizes too big. It looked like he’d borrowed it from his dad. She couldn’t help but noticing how big his arms and chest were, even in spite of the sail he was wearing, and his eyes were easily the most beautiful thing that she’d seen all week. What a shame it was wasted on this gu.

              But all of that was extraneous. Lena could spot a coward from a mile away, and Ramon was  big pussy if she’d ever seen one. She’d never had cause to be terribly brave in her life, but she’d seen lots of men swagger in front of her father, only for their courage to break. All of them were eventually reduced to sobbing piles of useless humanity, and every sense that Lena had said that Ramon was imminently on his way to joining that fraternity.

              But she had to give him credit, he was a good pretender. He held his own against Zeus better than most, and even though he was practically shaking by the time it was her turn to talk, he hadn’t lost his mind like the others had. The worst of them had remained resolute throughout their interrogations, clearly oblivious to the truth that sat in front of them. These men
should
have been afraid but werent. Lena had met a lot of people like that, and they never seemed to get much older than twenty five.

              Lena expected to see fear in the eyes of each candidate. The absence of such was damning proof of idiocy. All the men that came before Ramon had been afraid, but they’d pretended not to be. This moron was scared shitless and didn’t even have the brains to hide it. And Zeus was eating it up. He
loved
a hireling who was afraid of the big bad boss.

She looked down her nose at Ramon’s hopeful face. He might have been attractive if he had a spine under all that muscle. Or a brain behind those pretty brown eyes.

As it was, she believed that he had neither, and as such, had no interest in speaking to him any longer than she needed to.

“Do you have any questions for the man, darling?”

She sized him up one final time, and could think of no reason to hear him speak another word.

“No.”

Zeus dismissed Ramon and Tia lead him out of the house.

“Please tell me that I don’t have to listen to any more clowns like that,” Lena said to her step-father.

“That’ the last of clowns. Now you have to pick.”

“But they were all awful!”

“Well you can pick one or I can pick one for you.”

It didn’t matter to Lena who her step-father picked. They were all the same. Loud men with big muscles and small brains. She’d be able to scare them off without too much trouble, and before too long, Zeus would see what a colossal mistake it was to make her walk around with a shadow all the time.

Lena went back to her bedroom, where she spent most of her time. The house was huge, but it all felt cold and alien. Her bedroom was the only space that felt like home. It had been her mother’s drawing room when she was alive. She used to sit here with Lena for hours and many of Lena’s fondest memories and happiest feelings had happened here.

Even the memories of Damien hadn’t dulled the warm glow of the past. Lena groaned at the thought of him, she couldn’t wait to get that loser out of her head. Of course, Damien would be a lot easier to forget if he stopped bothering her all the time. They’d been together for a little more than a year. They met at the small university where her step-father had sent her and started dating at the end of their third year.

In that time, Lena had seen a hundred sides of Damien. At first he was sweet and charming. He had
always
been charming. Things were good until they weren’t. Damien was just like all the other men that Lena knew. Proud and possessive and mortally afraid of change. He had propped himself up with lies and big talk. They had never fooled Lena, but she’d let herself pretend that they had for the sake of Damien’s pride. Eventually, the facade faded and neither of them could pretend that Damien was half as impressive as he wanted himself to be. It didn’t bother Lena, but Damien became withdrawn and quick to anger. He got worse and started to scare Lena away, and that only made him worse.

When school was over, Lena broke things off, moving back into the walls of her family’s estate instead of into the apartment that Damien’s family had given him in downtown Miami. Damien did not take it well.

Now, Lena spent much of her free time dwelling on the past, imagining things differently and wondering how the world might look.

This kept her busy most days, as it did today. The sun had nearly gone down when Tia came and knocked on her bedroom door, summoning her for dinner. On Friday nights, the family ate together, no exceptions, no excuses. Lena wordlessly followed Tia downstairs and joined her stepfather and stepbrothers at the table. Dinner was uneventful. Like most nights, the men were happy to carry all of the conversation that needed to be had, and Lena ate quietly, relatively undisturbed.

As they were finishing, the doorbell rang. Done with her meal, Lena got up to get the door herself. Nobody seemed to notice her leave the table. She walked across the dining room and into the front hallway, and undid the series of locks and latches on the front door. Standing in the doorway was a big man, with big muscles, and beautiful brown eyes.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

              Ramon hadn’t even made it back to Miami when his phone range. He had assumed that he’d blown the interview on account of how poorly Lena had responded to him. In reality, the only impression that he’d ever needed to make was on her step-father. The notion that he’d have let her daughter choose her own bodyguard was one that had never really crossed his mind.

              And Ramon had made a good impression on Zeus.

              He pulled over on the side of the narrow road that cut through the Everglades and pulled the wheel, turning around in a cloud of dust. He wasn’t sure that he was happy about the news, but he had to borrow money from Gabe for the gas to get out here, so he figured he might as well stick it out until he had some cash saved up or until the Buldova family drove him crazy. Whichever came first.

              It was nearly dark when he arrived back at the Buldova compound. He followed a henchmen to a garage behind the house and parked his decade old Honda next to a glittering red Ferrari. He followed the henchman back to the front door and rang the buzzer. The wait was agonizing. He glanced at his watch. It was about dinner time and he seriously hoped that he wasn’t interupting. Nothing made Ramon more nervous than knowing that sooner or later he was going to see what Zeus Buldova was like when he was angry. He hoped to God that it would happen later. He briefly considered making a run for it when he heard a series of clicks and clacks from the other side of the heavy wooden door. What good was that many locks when there were huge plate windows all around the house?

              One thing was sure, he had his work cut out for him if he was going to make this place safe for anyone in the family. The door swung open to reveal Lena Buldova. She did not look happy to see him.

              “What the fuck are you doing here?”
she asked.

              Before he had any chance to answer, she turned and walked away. From down the hallway, he heard her announce his presence. A moment later, Zeus was in the doorway, food in his beard and a smile on his face. He greeted Ramon in the manner of false and cautious friendliness that all career criminals know.

“Let me show you around,” he said.

Ramon followed him into the house. He’d only seen a little of it earlier, and had not gotten a proper appreciation for how big it was. The family only used about a quarter of the rooms in the house. Zeus didn’t even know what was in most of them.

“Here’s where you’ll stay when you’re on duty.”

His new chambers had previously been a cleaning closet. Judging by the smell, the change had been made only very recently. The room was cramped and the air was sharp with chemicals, but the bed was comfortable.  It was not the worst place that Ramon had ever called home, and even if it were, he would be spending fewer nights in this room than he might have thought.

              The next day started off normal enough for Lena. She slept in, layed around in bed talking to friends from school, checking Facebook and Instagram, and trying very hard not to think about Damien and the three voicemails he’d left while she slept. She got up, showered and dressed, putting lounge clothes over her swimsuit, and continued about her morning, business as usual.

              But there would be no more business as usual for Lena. Her first clue to this was when she stepped into the hall and found Ramon sitting next to her door, reading a newspaper.

              “Good morning,” he said. Lena rolled her eyes and continued down the hall to the kitchen where her breakfast was waiting for her. Ramon neatly folded his paper and followed behind her, about ten feet back. Lena pretended to ignore him as she said good morning to Michaela and Tia, hugging them both. As far as she concerned, he was not in the room when she took her plate to the dining room and sat at the huge oak table, alone, eating her bagel with jam and drinking a glass of orange juice.

              Ramon sat across from her at the table, and casually resumed his reading. A few times, Lena saw his eyes lift up from the paper and scan the room, always returning to the newspaper after a few moments. His silence and his inscrutable gaze drove her mad. She ate in a hurry and said nothing to Ramon when she got up and walked outside to the pool.

              She was uncomfortable with the idea of Ramon creeping around while she went for her swim. She didn’t like the way his eyes seemed to be cold and distant. The idea of those eyes watching her as she sunned in her bikini made her squirm. But she found to her surprise that even after she pulled her sun dress over her head and began to rub oil over her olive skin that Ramon seemed more interested in the fence and foliage around the pool than he did with her.

              It was a nice change of pace.
Nobody
, ignored her when she laid out. She’d caught both of her step-brothers, and even Zeus eying her lean body. Even Tia and Michaela seemed unable to resist it, although Lena correctly believed that their interest was out of jealousy for her youth and strength. Some privacy would be very welcome.

              On the other hand, it was aggravating. Lena put high value on her ability to command the attention of men, and if there was one man in her life that she wanted to be able to control right now, it was this new meathead. Determined to turn the tables on Ramon, she cut her time in the sun short and decided to go for a swim.

              Without her bikini.

              She dove gracefully into the sunwarmed waters and swam to the far end of the pool and back without coming up for air. She emerged at the wall almost silently, taking a calm and composed breath before kicking off into a leisurely backstroke. She took a deep breath, arched her back, and pushed her chest out so that her breasts were just barely exposed to the hot Florida air.

              At the other wall, she rolled onto her stomach and began a slow forward crawl, taking her time, making sure that when she glanced at Ramon, she did so covertly. He had his back turned to her and was inspecting the top of the fence around the pool with monklike focus.

              Lena dried and dressed herself and went inside, Ramon following closely behind. She sat down in the living room in front of the massive flat screen that hung over the fireplace. She didn’t normally care for gossip talk shows or reality TV that promoted trashy, self aggrandizing behavior, but she was desperate to find a way to make Ramon as uncomfortable as he was making her.

              He was currently walking around the living room, running his fingers along the joints of the windows and doors, looking at the fireplace, carefully inspecting the walls, and generally doing a bunch of things that Lena declared to be “weird and kind of fucked up”. When Lena looked over at him to see if her programming choices were having any effect on him, he appeared to be taking pictures of the bay windows on the front of the house. She turned up the volume, even though it was already louder than she could stand.

              Ramon walked outside and wandered around the front of the house, not letting Lena out of his sight, but apparently taking the entire facade of the building into consideration. He took pictures, considered what appeared to be irrelevant details for great lengths of time, and paced around lost in thought.

              Lena began to flip through the channels. She got caught up watching three old men make fools of themselves in a trio of exotic cars and failed to see Ramon come back inside.

              “I love this show,” Ramon said somewhere behind her.
Of course he would. Sexy cars and dumb guys making dumb jokes.
She changed the channel and flipped through three hundred more before arriving at the conclusion that television would provide her with no relief today.

              She walked upstairs to her bedroom, making a point of turning around to look Ramon in the eyes when she slammed the door in his face.