Protection for Hire (28 page)

When Tessa heard the doorbell ring, she knew she had exactly thirty seconds to figure out how to forgive Charles.

Instead, she smoothed her hand over her hair and tried to
not look so tired sitting up against her pillows. She wanted to see him, and she didn’t want to see him. But she also had no choice but to see him.

He entered her bedroom cautiously. Probably wondering if she would greet him with a lamp chucked at his head. “Hi.” His serious blue-green eyes seemed to glow as they studied her face.

She was caught for a long moment, then she looked away. “Hi.” An awkward pause. “Thanks for coming.”

He nodded, coming a few steps into the room. He dug his left hand into his pants pocket, while the right dangled at his side, immobilized by a cast that left his uninjured fingers free.

“Can you, uh, drive?” What an inane question.

“Yeah. I shift with my three good fingers.”

“Oh.” She swallowed.
Just get on with it.
“Sit down?” She gestured to a chair set close to the bed. It was both too close to her and yet not close enough.

“Uncle Teruo called on me today.” She focused on his knees. Rather nice knees, encased in dark olive slacks. “He wants me to …” She swallowed. “He wants me to hire you to be on retainer for my protection agency.”

There was a moment his expression didn’t shift. Then his eyebrows rose. “Uh … Why me?”

“Because you protected Elizabeth. He wants someone who will be loyal to his client. And Uncle Teruo knows I’d never agree to a yakuza lawyer.”

Charles rested his arms on his knees and stared at his hands. “Is this what you really want to do?”

“No.” She studied the coverlet on her bed. “But Uncle Teruo has been after me to work for him again, and doesn’t understand why I won’t. He said that if I hire you, he’ll stop bugging me about returning to my old position with him.”

He had also said, “You can protect yourself on the streets, but you cannot protect yourself in the courtroom, or with the press. If you insist on doing this bodyguard business, it would make me feel better to know you have help.”

But why did that help have to come in the form of this handsome man?

“Tessa, I’m sorry for what I did.”

“I don’t want to —”

“Seven years ago, I thought those extra years on your sentence would bring justice for Laura Starling’s grieving family.”

She didn’t often think about them, even though they believed she had killed their daughter. Charles had believed she’d killed Laura. Tessa herself had made sure people believed she’d killed Laura.

So why did his betrayal hurt her so much? Her eye fell on her Bible sitting on her nightstand, and the paper crane tucked inside.
Oh, Aunty. I miss you.

But Vivian Britton had taken Aunt Kayoko’s place in the past few weeks, had made Tessa feel loved and cherished. Shouldn’t she be able to forgive her son?

And despite her hurt, she was drawn to him. His humor, the way he treated her, the way he trusted her. She looked up and discovered him staring at her.

She breathed, and it was like breathing in his essence as she breathed in the hint of his cologne, his musk, that whiff of sage. Who was she kidding? She wanted him with her, in her life. Him and his wonderful mother and his adventurous brother.

She rested back against the pillows, her injury throbbing with pain. And yet it somehow seemed to hurt her a bit less than before. “Will you draw up a contract for me? And how should I pay you?”

“When you use my services, I’ll send a bill.”

“And is your firm going to be okay with this?”

He shrugged. “You’re a paying client. Also, right now, they’re not likely to object to any clients I take on.”

“Right.” Not after the embarrassment of Manchester Greer and Stillwater. “So I’m your client now?” She held out a hand.

“You’re my client now.” He shook it.

She had intended it to be professional, impersonal. But his touch made the room spin round and round, with the focal point their two clasped hands. His thumb caressed her knuckles, and her skin tingled, shivered.

Sure. She was his client, nothing more.

She was such a liar.

Her breath came in soft gasps, but he noticed and immediately let go of her hand. “Are you okay? Do you need your mom?”

“I’m fine,” she said breathlessly.

He frowned. “I’d better let you get your rest.”

“Sure.” Maybe it had been a good thing she’d been shot. Maybe it had been a bad thing she’d been shot. She hadn’t quite decided yet.

As he headed toward the door, she said, “I’ll, uh … I guess I’ll call you if I need you.” She had to think of a reason to call him.

Charles, my dog is in need of legal advice.
Except she didn’t have a dog.

Charles, I have another client whose husband wants to kill her.
Cliché?

Charles, I really only just want to breathe your air.
Creepy?

He gave her one burning look. “Yeah. If you need me.”

She needed him to come back here and kiss her senseless, is what she needed. She bit her lip to keep from saying it out loud.

“Bye.” And then he was gone.

But, she knew, not for good.

Read an excerpt from book 2 in the Protection for Hire series. Coming soon!

T
essa reached to her nightstand and got her laptop, a gift from Elizabeth St. Amant to her
favorite
bodyguard. She’d been using Mom’s computer, and Charles’s computer when she had been at his house, and it was nice having her own now. She fired up her email program — not that she really had that much email. Most days she opened all the spam just to feel like somebody wanted to chat with her.

Oh, there was a new spam email. Subject line: From dad. Haha, good one. She had to open it just to see. It was probably selling pharmaceuticals to enhance the production of belly button lint.

Dear Tamazon …

The room suddenly shrank. And yet it also expanded. She had that weird out-of-body experience that she usually only felt if she’d been up for too long playing Bejeweled Blitz and her brain was fritzing.

The only one who had ever called her Tamazon was her father. When they played together, she always pretended to be one of the mythical Amazons, and “Tess the Amazon” had been slurred into Tamazon by her childish tongue.

Sure — if he really had been watching her, he’d know she just got out of prison. Yup, beautiful and confident ex-convict.

Something inside her grew colder than sub-zero. No one except Fred, Ichiro, and Uncle Teruo knew about that. She’d been alone when she cleaned the knife and planted it in the dumpster. She’d been alone when she was arrested.

How would he know this?

What in the world did that mean? What was up with all this
Fringe/X-Files
vague, mysterious junk that never failed to drive her nuts?

Her emotions were like
shabu-shabu
— a mix of a dozen different meats and vegetables combining to create a unique broth. And her feelings were unique, all right. She couldn’t decide if her anger was frustrated-anger or disgusted-anger or contemptuous-anger or hysterical-anger.

But definitely anger. That he would dare to write to her now. That he would dare to try to show his affection in words and phrases. That he would dare hint at something more important that had kept him away for so long.

He was twenty years too late.

Dear Tamazon …

The girl who played with that man was dead. She died the day he left without a word or note.

But more than likely, this wasn’t her father, and she didn’t want to get sucked into it anyway.

She clicked “Delete.”

If her father did have a good reason for walking out on them, then he could make the effort to find a way to talk to her, face to face, not with a postal mailbox and an email address that self-destructs in fifteen seconds. She didn’t intend to go out of her way to make it easy for him.

But this email was just a hoax … right?

CAMY TANG
grew up in Hawaii but she now lives in San Jose, California, with her engineer husband and rambunctious mutt, Snickers. She was a biologist researcher, but these days she is surgically attached to her computer, writing full-time. In her spare time, she is a staff worker for her church youth group, and she leads one of the worship teams for Sunday service. She won the Carol Book of the Year award in the Debut Author category with her novel Sushi for One? Follow Camy online at www.camytang.com.

Visit www.egmont.co.uk/AndyStanton for further information on your favourite Egmont author.

Also by Camy Tang

The Sushi Series

Sushi for One?

Only Uni

Single Sashimi

ZONDERVAN

Protection for Hire
Copyright © 2011 by Camy Tang

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Zondervan.

EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-310-41276-2

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Requests for information should be addressed to:
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tang, Camy.

     Protection for hire : a novel / Camy Tang.

          p.   cm. — (Protection for hire series)

Summary: “First she served as a mob enforcer. Then she found Christ in prison. Now, Tessa Lancaster is protecting an heiress whose spouse seeks to kill her. In this action-packed read, Tessa and a handsome Southern lawyer discover the reality of being made new in Christ” — Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978-0-310-32033-3 (pbk.)

1. Bodyguards — Fiction. 2. Ex-convicts — Fiction. 3. Heiresses — Fiction. I. Title. PS3620.A6845P76 2011

         813′.6 — dc22       2011024797

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published in association with the Books & Such Literary Agency, 52 Mission Circle, Suite 122, PMB 170, Santa Rosa, CA 95409-5370, www.booksandsuch.com.

Cover design: Jeff Gifford
Cover photography: IStockphoto
^®
Interior design: Katherine Lloyd, The DESK

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