The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (25 page)

She was pretty insistent—and she
was right.
 
It wouldn’t be nice for me
to show up—it was just something a daughter should do to support her dad.

“Well, then, I guess I could come,”
I said, hoping my voice was still even a little bit enthusiastic.
 
I glanced out across the now empty
seating.
 
Layne had obviously taken me
up on my offer to go see a movie.
 
She’d
come back here afterward, though, wondering where I was.
 
I’d have to text her so she didn’t think I’d
been kidnapped or something.
 
“I just
have to get my violin and my bag,” I told her, straightening.
 
“Oh,” I said then, realizing that Layne had
the car.
 
I grimaced again—at this
point, it just sounded like I was coming up with a million excuses not to go,
which wasn’t really true.
 
It just
seemed that there were a million little things that were stacked up against my
going.
 
“I don’t have a ride, I’m afraid
I—” I began, but again, she cut me off as smoothly as a knife.

“My dear girl, I came in a limo big
enough for the both of us, I assure you,” she said, her eyes glittering.
 
It was an almost classless thing to say, but
when people have enough money, even classless things sound a little classy to
them.
 
I bit my lip and sighed again,
nodding.

“All right, just let me get my
things,” I told her, hobbling back across the stage toward my violin.

Magdalena waited patiently at the
edge of the stage, examining her nails while I gathered up my violin, placed it
in its case, then grabbed my crutches and my purse.
 

I air-kissed Tracy on the way past
her.
 
“Good luck on your date tonight!”
I told her, squeezing her arm.

“Thanks.
 
God, I’m nervous,” she said, fanning herself with a stack of her
sheet music.
 
She leaned a little closer
to me with a grimace.
 
“The way Phyllis
was describing this guy—I mean, he might be really nice.
 
Possibly, this could
actually
be a
good date, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

“Don’t worry,” I promised her with
a small grin.
 
“You’re going to be
fine.
 
And get your hopes up.
 
I mean…isn’t that what life’s for?”

She gave me a funny sort of luck as
I grinned sidelong at her and shrugged.
 
“I’m going to be spending the rest of my evening at a birthday party for
my father,” I told her, then.
 
“So maybe
it’s good that we took that rain check for drinks.
 
Maybe tomorrow, yeah?”

“On a Monday night?
 
God, you’re killing me,” she grinned and
winked.
 
“And yeah, I’ll
probably—hopefully—have a lot to talk about with the date.”
 
She wrinkled her nose again, but she looked
so genuinely
hopeful.
”

I grinned.
 
“A lot of good, surely.”

“Yeah, I like that.
 
Positive.”
 
She grinned at me, and then I was hobbling away from her.
 
I met Magdalena at the edge of the stage
stairs.

In the back of my mind, I’d tried
to figure out things to talk about with Magdalena on the limo ride over
to…well, wherever the party was being held.
 
But I really didn’t have much of a head for dull, pointless conversation
and couldn’t think of a single subject that would be good fodder for discussion
with someone I hardly knew.
 
I seriously
hoped that Magdalena could carry the entire conversation and was still the
talker I thought I remembered her being.
 

And she was.

Once we were seated in her limo,
which had waited, parked illegally out front with a very bored looking driver
thumbing through his phone and leaning—actually
leaning—
against the post
that warned people not to park there since it was a fire lane, Magdalena
launched into a soliloquy about how her various stocks were doing, and how my
father and her had a little rivalry going on about something-something probably
stock-related, and my eyes had glazed over before we’d reached the first
traffic light.

I was tired.
 
Actually, that’s not an accurate word:
 
I was
exhausted
.
 
And I was frustrated.
 
I wanted to sit down with Layne and
understand why, exactly, she thought we couldn’t be together.
 
But we were both too stubborn, it
seemed.
 
She wouldn’t discuss it, and I
wouldn’t let it go that we needed to discuss it.
 
My mind looped over the terrible recent events.
 
I thought about the repairwoman who had
been…about to do what?
 
I wasn’t
certain.
 
Had she been after me?
 
And where, exactly, do you hire a hit woman
these days?
 
Who is willing to dress up
as a repairwoman?
 

My mind wandered to the kiss in
Dogtown.
 
It wandered to the kiss that
morning in my kitchen.
 
It wandered to
Layne’s flashing eyes, her arrogant smile, the way her hands felt, fingers
curling around my waist…

Layne.
 
I snapped to attention somewhat guiltily and cleared my throat as
I pulled my phone out of my purse.
 
“I’m
sorry, Ms. Harrington, I have to text my…my friend,” I said with a slight
grimace as I’d tried to find a word for her.
 
“She was supposed to pick me up after the concert,” I explained, holding
up my cell phone, “and she’s probably worried about me.”

“But of course,” said Magdalena,
her smile deepening.

But as I unlocked my phone to send
a message, the screen was already lit with a text from Layne.
 
I frowned a little as I brought it up.
 

ran into a friend going to bar
to catch up left car for you see you tonight

I blinked and read the text a few more times, just
to be sure, feeling a little lightheaded.
 
Layne had left me to drive the car back by myself.
 
I took a deep breath.
 
Well, I’d wanted more autonomy.
 
And I was the one who had told her to go see
a movie.
 
To leave for the
afternoon.
 
She didn’t have to be around
me all the time.
 
And anyway, I was
going to this party, so she wouldn’t have been able to be “on duty”
anyway.
 
It would have been too obvious
that she was my bodyguard if I’d brought her to the party, because I certainly
couldn’t bring her as my date considering the disaster of that morning.

But still, even with all of these
perfectly logical bits swirling in my head, there was a thick twist of
foreboding in my gut.
 
Maybe Layne
hadn’t really run into a friend—maybe she was just sick of me asking her to
disclose secrets she wasn’t comfortable telling.
 
Either way, to simply leave the car for me to make my own way
home wasn’t very Layne-like.
 
Something
was up.
 
Something having to do with not
wanting to be around me, probably.
 
My
heart flip-flopped in me as I read the text again, and then slowly, carefully,
I locked the screen and slid the phone back into my purse.

Also, Layne always used punctuation
and capital letters when she texted me.
 
Maybe she was already a little drunk?
 
Either way, it wasn’t like her at all.

I frowned and tried to stifle a
sigh.

“Trouble in paradise?” Magdalena,
seated across from me, practically purred.

I glanced at her, brows furrowed,
but her smile remained firmly in place, and she crossed her legs, leaning back
against the plush leather seats of her limo with a deepening smile.
 

“No,” I said, clearing my
throat.
 
The word sounded weak, even to
me.
 

“Ah,” said Magdalena, nodding
knowingly, but not remotely looking convinced.
 
“You just…you looked
distressed
is all.”

I took a deep breath and let it out
slowly and steadily, resting my suddenly damp palms flat against my
thighs.
 
“No,” I repeated.
 
I carefully slid a mask of a smile on,
realizing it was probably as fake-looking as could be, but not really caring
anymore.
 
“So,” I said, clearing my
throat and desperate to take the focus off of me.
 
“Where is this party being held?”

“At my mansion,” said Magdalena
with a shrug, carefully rolling her shoulder and letting a perfect wave of
white-blonde hair fall behind her against the seat.
 
She glanced out the tinted side window, her blood-red lips
pursed.
 
“Your father hasn’t been by in
a while, and I think my new remodel will really impress him and can’t wait to
show it off.”

My brows furrowed at that, putting
together in my head what very little I knew about this party, but what she’d
already told me.
 
“But…”
 
I began, biting my lip.
 
“Did you say that Jerry was throwing the
party?”
 

Actually, now that I thought about
it, hadn’t she said she was unaware of the party until that morning?

“Oh, well, you know Jerry,” she
chuckled smoothly, her grin deepening.
 
“His head’s just full of stuffing!
 
So very scattered.
 
I mean, seriously,
if the party wasn’t at my place, it’d never happen.”

“Ah,” I said, leaning back in my
seat, too.
 

I don’t know why, but the hairs on
the back of my neck were standing to attention, my skin felt a little cold, and
I had begun to feel overall…uneasy.

Not that Magdalena Harrington would
inspire comfort on even her best days.
 
She was the kind of woman who had obviously fought, tooth and nail, for
everything she’d built in her probably vast empire of stocks and whatever else
it was that she’d built her money on—though she’d been going through her entire
roster of dividends that year since we sat down in the limo, my eyes had glazed
over on the first few words.
 
It was
because of the hardness to her facial expressions.
 
Don’t get me wrong, she was absolutely gorgeous, and she had a beautiful
face—she was utterly beautiful in the kind of way that most women would envy to
be, a flawless, almost perfect sort of beauty that you see in a magazine, but
not usually in real life.
 
But even with
her beauty, her eyes glinted with hard edges, and her smile was one of the
fakest I’d ever seen.
 
Her legs were
made almost entirely of muscle and sinew.
 
She must have a great personal trainer.

Her outfit was impeccable.
 
There wasn’t a hair on her head out of
place.
 
She didn’t strike me as the type
of woman who lazed around the table on Sunday morning with the paper and still in
her pajamas.
 
She struck me as the type
of woman who wore a power suit one hundred percent of the time, lived in the
office, ate protein bars out of her desk and took odd but complete satisfaction
out of giving someone a terrible performance review, eating them up in a few
perfectly placed savage words.

As if she knew I was considering
her, Magdalena’s eyes blinked slowly at me, and her smile deepened as she
uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way in one easy motion, lounging
further back in her seat as she tapped her red fingernails on her skirt,
plucking away an invisible speck from the fabric.
 
“So tell me, Elizabeth,” she murmured, her words low and velvety
as her lips curled, “how is that new bodyguard of yours working out for you?”

I went a little cold almost
instantly—how could she possibly know I had a bodyguard?—but she tilted her
head to the side, reached out and with freezing fingers, patted my knee
slowly.
 
“Don’t look so shocked, dear.
 
Your father found Layne O’Connell through
me, after all,” she chuckled.
 
“And I
realize you want to keep it all hush hush.
 
But don’t worry.”
 
She leaned
forward a little, the smile not wavering a millimeter.
 
“Your secret’s safe with me,” she told me in
a stage whisper.

“Oh.
 
Ah…”
 
I trailed off, trying
to compute the fact that this meant Layne probably knew Magdalena.
 
They didn’t really strike me as compatible
people.
 
“How do you know Layne?” I
asked then, my curiosity getting the better of me.

“I knew her father,” said
Magdalena, glancing down at her nails again with a small frown, as if she’d
just noticed that her blood-red nail polish had a tiny chip on her pinkie
nail.
 
“Temperamental fellow, which
Layne takes after quite a bit.
 
Moody.
 
Aggressive.
 
Perfect bodyguard material, though, if you
ask me,” she said, her head to the side when she glanced back up to me.
 
“Once she decides that you’re worth
protecting…”
 
She trailed off, raising
her brows.
 
“Well.
 
I think she’d stop at nothing to keep you
safe.
 
Good musculature, very
strong.
 
Yes, I think she’s great
bodyguard material.”