Jennifer Greene - The Billionaire’s Handler

“Right.” Maguire didn’t snort. He just thought about it. “If her family has any type of medical financial need, take care of it. Or call me. Otherwise nothing gets removed from her place except for old food in her refrigerator. Her bills and personal business-any crises there?”

“No. I canceled a dentist appointment for next week. And she has a hair appointment next Thursday.”

“Hair.” For the first time Maguire looked up, alarmed. “You know how women are about hair.”

“Not exactly, sir.”

“Nothing puts women in a bad mood faster than a bad-hair day. I don’t even know what a bad-hair day is, exactly, but if that’s a source of stress, we have to fix it.”

“How, sir?” Henry asked.

“Damned if I know.” Maguire dived into the next stack of files. “Any men calling her?” he asked casually.

“Yes, sir, I told you-”

“I mean besides dentists and drugstores and insurance salesmen. The other kind of men. Boyfriends. Relationships.”

“I don’t think so.” Abruptly Henry tugged on an ear. “Mr. Cochran, I don’t recall you asking me to notice or collect information on anything regarding boyfriends. I wasn’t looking for that. It never crossed my mind that you wanted me to.”

“I didn’t. And of course I didn’t ask you. It’s none of my business. It just occurred to me-a little late-that I should have considered whether or not she had a man in her life. You’ve seen her. Hard to believe there aren’t man friends in that picture. And if it were my woman who disappeared from sight, I’d have raised hell and the National Guard and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and the BBC-”

“I get your drift, sir. Possibly there just aren’t any personal relationships in her life right now.”

“Maybe.” Maguire kept thumbing through documents. “In the meantime, I have a new list of things for you to do. Some of these are going to be fun.”

“Fun,” Henry repeated, and tugged on his ear again.

“Fun,” Maguire repeated. “I need a 1953 MG Mark IV TD here seven days from now.”

“Seven days?”

“Red.”

“Oh, that’ll make it easier.”

“Then I need you to locate a tree house. Not a kid’s tree house. The kind of tree house where adults could live. I don’t care where in the world. I just need one.”

“That must be on your list of ‘more fun’ things for me to do, I suspect.” Henry inked that in his Moleskine notepad, never blinked.

“Smile, Henry. Where else could you possibly work, where you had a job with this kind of diversity?”

“Nowhere, sir. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

“All right. Now…I’ll be reachable most of next week, but primarily through my laptop. I can call you back, but I won’t have a cell phone turned on, until I’m specifically looking for messages, so connection via the internet will be more predictable. I’ll be in Europe for the next four or five days-I’m not sure of the exact stretch of time. It depends on what she’s physically up for. To start off, I want to keep her away from disruptive noise as much as I can.”

“But she can’t hear, sir.”

“Oh, yeah, she can. She hears too much. That’s the core of the problem, Henry. The point, however, is that I can’t give you a complete schedule of where I’ll be. I need to see how the next week goes with her. For her. Then some type of pattern should emerge.”

“You don’t need me for that week?”

“I need you all week. But for projects. I’ll catch a ride on the Cochran business jet.”

For the first time, Henry’s face showed expression. “You know I can fly that-”

“Yes. I know you love flying anything. But I really need someone that I can completely trust on this-someone who can keep their mouth buttoned. You’re one of the few in the universe. This is going to take some major finagling to pull off.”

“Personally, I think it takes a man who’s out of his mind, sir.”

“Yeah, that, too. You know, I’m surprised the sister didn’t threaten to sue-”

“She did, Mr. Cochran.” Henry looked alarmed. “Didn’t I already tell you that?

“You’d have gotten around to it. And there’ll be more problems like that, for darn sure. Don’t let it get your liver in an uproar.”

“I don’t drink, sir. My liver is almost never in an uproar. On the other hand-” Henry suddenly shot to an upright posture, looking in the doorway.

And there was Carolina, carrying a paperback, a blanket draped over her shoulders, barefoot, looking like a waif.

A waif.

Not a femme fatale. Not a cocky confident woman who knew her way around men and valued her own allure.

A damn waif.

Yet his pulse started slamming as if an alarm just went off.

Considering that her entire life had turned into a massive, uncontrollable disaster, Carolina couldn’t believe how well she’d slept.

It was almost noon before she opened her eyes-and then she had to shake the clock, certain it had to be broken.

For the first time in weeks, though, she woke up charged-maybe not ready to climb mountains-but definitely in a hustle to yank on clothes and rush downstairs.

Halfway down the steps, she spotted Maguire sitting at the big table. One look, and her heart caught on a snag of emotion. Everything he’d told her last night had echoed in dreams, wild dreams, good dreams, all with the same underlying theme. She wasn’t the only kidnappee. Maguire had had his soul kidnapped a long time ago, was stuck with an unpaid ransom just as she was. She had huge things she wanted to say to him today, huge things she wanted to do.

But abruptly she realized he wasn’t alone. Another man was standing at the kitchen counter-Henry, she thought his name was. He was the man who’d piloted the jet, but also who just seemed a critical employee for Maguire, from everything she’d sensed and seen so far. When she called out a cheerful “Hello!” though, his cheeks flushed like a boy’s.

Henry might be ultra-shy, but Maguire surged out of his chair as if jet-shot and jogged toward her. “Carolina! I was afraid you’d gone into a coma. You have to be starved. Or thirsty. Hell, I forgot, you lost your hearing again. Wait two shakes until I grab the netbook-”

She didn’t sway because of dizziness or illness or anything like that. She was just stepping toward him, trying to make an instinctive calming gesture, when she seemed to trip over…nothing. Air. Her own feet. A speck of dust.

You’d have thought she’d started a fire. Maguire shouted something to Henry, grabbed her, swept her into his arms and started chugging with her up the stairs.

“Maguire-” Whether she could hear him or not, she was pretty sure there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Right then, though, he wasn’t listening to her or anyone else. He was too busy having a fit and a half.

He charged with her into the bedroom, laid her on the bed as if she were breakable china, put a hand on her forehead while he was scooping covers over her at the same time. At the rate he was going, she was going to be smothered, either from excess heat or the weight of covers. It was pretty darn obvious he thought she was weak and sick and traumatized.

Hell’s bells, maybe she was all three of those things, but the hysterical-deafness thing was getting beyond exasperating. At that precise moment, all Carolina wanted to do was communicate-that she was okay, that she wasn’t in some new state of trauma, she’d just clumsily tripped over her own feet.

She didn’t set out to kiss him. It was just…a kiss seemed a way to halt him in his tracks.

It worked beautifully.

Sort of.

All she did was frame his face in her hands, lift up and press her lips against his for a couple of seconds. That was all it took for Maguire to go from manic-energy machine to statue-still.