Seducing the Bodyguard (16 page)

“You’re the glue,” she said. “I know you wish you didn’t have to be, and honestly if it weren’t for your star there I don’t think you would have to be here this much, but you do what you have to do for your show, for your art. You’re too passionate about the operas you create to let one fall apart.”

“You like my operas.”

She shrugged. “I don’t like opera at all,” she stated and he gasped. “Don’t take it personally. It’s just not my scene. I’ve seen a lot of them, and I do have to say your opera is the best I have experienced so far.”

“Your passion impresses me. You love what you create and what you do here. I think that’s amazing. You have talent, Harrison, but you also have heart.”

“Thank you,” he rubbed his hand up and down her arm. “We should get back out there.” He knew they should because if they didn’t he just might strip her and take her right there in that dressing room. The woman’s beauty in mind, body, and spirit, was driving him mad with an unyielding desire for her.

Chapter Eleven

“
H
arrison,” she tried to settle him down just a little…or a lot given the fact that he was nearly ripping her clothes off her body. Staying on set had taken more time than either of them had expected. Latricia had showed up, complicating things further with her constant need for explanations on things they had clearly already discussed. And on top of that, the diva in the dressing room continued to be the diva on stage. She thought Harrison would be too exhausted to move by the time they left the theater. It was nearly ten, they had a show going on tomorrow, and he needed rest. Yet he hadn’t even let her get out the elevator before he started kissing her, touching her, and practically undressing her. Now that they were in the room he seemed to be less concerned with appropriate displays of affection in front of the hall cameras and more concerned with getting her out of her clothes.

“Harrison,” she pushed against his chest. “I still have work to do. I have to check the place out,” she said between his kisses. When he stepped back briefly to pull his shirt out of the waistband of his pants she took the opportunity to expertly evade him so that she could do the job she was hired to do. “Settle down. We’ll get to it. I promise,” she smiled as she walked toward the main sitting room.

The glimpse of movement out her peripheral caught her attention in time to avoid being struck in the head with a baseball bat. She ducked and dodged the next swing before rounding her body behind the man, catching his arm and snapping the bone in a way that assured it would never heal appropriately. One more move and she had him on his knees. A swift second later she had the blade pulled out of the clip holding her hair up and poised to claim the life of the man who had just attacked her.

“Valencia! No!”

She looked up briefly; ready to still kill the man on the floor. She was a Mishoto. They didn’t leave an enemy behind. Enemies could always come back to haunt and harm and that couldn’t be allowed.

“What the hell is wrong with you? You can’t just kill people. I thought you were…I don’t know what you are.” He shook his head. His words made her angry. He knew who she was and what she did and he had given her every indication that he could live with it—clearly he couldn’t.

She knocked the man out with a swift blow to his head before putting herself at measurable ease. “Call it in,” she said. “I’m sure the cops will get here before he wakes up.”

“You can’t just kill,” he said more firmly.

“Fine. I’ll call it in.” And that’s exactly what she did. She called in the police, she handled the reports when they got there and all the while she felt her heart breaking once again knowing what she thought she could have had was gone. It wasn’t so much the way he looked at her, although that didn’t help. It was what he said. When the officer in charge said that his “girlfriend” had broke the guys arm and the bone was sticking out, Harrison had said, with no level of uncertainty in his voice. “She’s my bodyguard.” A man who was so afraid to show weakness by having a bodyguard had just officially went on the record as having one and she knew what that meant. She didn’t have any doubt about where they stood.

It was the first time he had admitted to anybody that she was his bodyguard. All those prior times she was the girlfriend, but this time, this time she wasn’t. That one delegation of position was enough to tell her that the brief time she had spent as his real girlfriend was over. He hadn’t said as much in words. He hadn’t said, “we’re done. We’re no longer dating for real or for play.” He had simply reminded her of her place in his life. He had reminded her that she was nothing more than the bodyguard. Well, she mused; at least they had resolved to that before she slept with him.

“The guy says the woman hired him over the Internet. He never met her, doesn’t know her name or anything useful. We’ll investigate of course. But there’s something else he said that troubles me. He said she thought taking out the girlfriend…um…bodyguard would remind you of your promise to her.” He flipped his notes open and read it word for word.

“Did you say that to this woman?”

“Hell no! That’s a line from my opera. It’s the line that Balentine sings to Modiva in my opera. That’s a line, a song from a fictional show.” He shook his head. Valencia watched him, but she kept her distance instead of comforting him. She would never forget her place in his world again. She shouldn’t have for even the few seconds that she had and she vowed it would never, ever happen again. She was the bodyguard; he was the client—that was all there was to it.

“What sick person would…” his voice trailed off as he looked at her.

“Well now that the word is out that I’m the bodyguard I won’t have to worry about another attack aimed at me. Makes my job easier not playing the girlfriend any longer,” she said with assurance. There could be no mistake in her words.

“Valencia—”

“Although I suppose it doesn’t make your job easier, Detective. The opera has made the rounds across the U.S., Italy and then a second round through the States so you have a lot of potential crackpot obsessed women to weed through. Please let me know about whatever progress you make.”

“Will do,” he said. “I’m sure it will help you do your job easier at least.”

“The sooner this is over, the better.” The sooner this mess was done and over with she could get home, away from Harrison and the heartbreak she had allowed him to deliver. This was her fault because she should have never, in a million years, let her guard down. Darryl had been her last—that was her promise to herself and if she hadn’t broken her promise for this man then she wouldn’t be suffering right now. The thing is, she had hoped that maybe things could be different now. Things weren’t different. He had gave her promises that she would be his woman and he her man, but in the course of the night he had disowned her. He had relinquished her to being just the “bodyguard,” never anything more. She shook her head at herself. This was her fault and she would never, ever, let her guard down again. The walls of her fortress were back up and she wouldn’t allow anybody to ever break them down again.

“Bodyguard,” Dianna beamed. “The woman Harrison Sinclair has been parading around as his girlfriend is actually his bodyguard, Lorelei. Isn’t this great?”

“Um…why?”

“Because that means the guy who died in his hotel room might not have just accidently died. There’s a story here. I can smell it,” she grinned.

“Okay, maybe it wasn’t murder. Maybe it was just an accident. But who cares. Accidents don’t sale papers or get my name higher up on the list of in-demand reporters. I’m going to tell it like it is…or how I think it is.”

“That would be sensationalizing.”

“And? It’s not as if papers don’t do that all the time. Imagine this,” she put her hand up in the air as if placing words on a billboard. “World Famous Harrison Sinclair Stalked by a Mad Woman.” She giggled. “What do you think?”

“I do. Or more like my unnamed sources do.” She slapped her hands together and rubbed them feverishly. “I’m going to write a story that’s made for television,” she jumped up and did a happy dance, shaking her butt and waving her arms in the air.

“Who said anything about prison? I just want you to follow him around for a while. You can make it look like somebody is stalking him. I’ll get a few, not so informative, photos of the rental car you’ll be driving and I can build a story from there.”

“No,” she snapped. “You’re insane and I’m not going to the funny farm with you.” Lorelei grabbed her papers off the desk and abruptly stood up. “You need drugs, Dianna. This job is totally warping your brain.” She marched out the dining room, dropping pieces of her term paper along the way.

“Whether you know it or not, little sis,” Dianna mumbled as she picked up a few pieces of the term paper. “You’re going to help me.” And she knew exactly how her unwilling sister was going to become an accomplice to her scheme. By tomorrow’s morning edition she was going to have a scoop winning story on the front page of her paper. Her bosses would certainly take her more seriously with what she was going to deliver. She didn’t get the scoop for today’s paper, but tomorrow, now that was going to be all hers. And she had the entire day to piece it together.

Harrison knew he had screwed up, but the look in Valencia’s eyes when that man attacked told him she had no issues killing. He had heard her words before. She was an assassin for the government at one point; of course she had no issues with killing. But this was different somehow. This was seeing her nearly do it. If he hadn’t yelled for her to stop she would have killed that man. Hearing about it and seeing it were different things, and in a split second he saw Valencia in a way he hadn’t seen her previously. Shock didn’t begin to describe what he felt.

Then the detective told him about what Grant Fisher, the man who attacked them, had said. Then the note came early that morning telling him he had to understand what this mad woman had done and he once again was forced to realize that attack was meant for Valencia not him. That attack was because of him. She could have been killed because of him and yet somehow he was angry at her for being who she had been all along.

He resolved himself to make a statement early the next morning, declaring Valencia his bodyguard, not his girlfriend, and at least giving her some measure of safety. He didn’t want some lunatic killing Valencia because of him, because of some promise she thought he made in an opera he wrote for nobody in particular. It was fiction, fantasy, not reality and unfortunately there was some woman out there who couldn’t deal with it.

When he made his statement he had the feeling he was driving the knife deeper into Valencia’s heart. She kept her expression neutral as she had before, but he had learned recently the changes happened in her eyes. The light was gone, the sparkle; it was gone, and he had done that to her. He told himself he had to fix things. He wasn’t sure they could be together. He wasn’t sure exactly what he thought of her at this point, but he was sure that he didn’t want to be just another man who caused her pain.

He cancelled his schedule, deciding not to go to rehearsals today because he needed some time, he needed a lot of time, to figure things out. He tried talking to Valencia, but every time he tried to talk about what happened she pulled him back to business only. Maybe he deserved that, but he didn’t want it. He wanted to grab her and shake some sense into her but he realized the action alone would just get him the beat down of his life.

To make matters worse, Latricia showed up when he was about to force Valencia to talk to him about what he had said. He needed, no, they needed, this conversation, but they wouldn’t soon be having it. For the first time since she became his bodyguard, Valencia left him alone. “You don’t seem to be in any real danger,” she had said as she took one of the chairs from the table toward the door.

“Valencia,” he had called her name to stop her when Latricia smiled and purred out, “we could use a couple hours of alone time, baby.” The tone in her voice and the look on Valencia’s face told him the appearance of the current situation was not good. Valencia was sure to hate him and Latricia thought she was about to spend a couple hours in his bed. He had no intentions of bedding Latricia, but right now Valencia thought the worst of him. She thought he would do it. He could see it in her eyes. And when she went out the door, leaving him alone with Latricia he knew Valencia had already deemed what they had to be over. He didn’t exactly want over. He just wanted some time. Maybe after he had some time to think about things he might want over, but maybe…maybe he wouldn’t. She had to give him time. He needed her to give him time.