Valerie Parv - The Baron and The Bodyguard

“He fired you?”

She shook her head. “He wanted me to stay. I was the one who quit.”

“Didn’t take to royal life, huh?”

“The baron hired me for a specific assignment. When the danger to him was past, I had no reason to stay.” She didn’t tell the doctor that Mathiaz had given her the one reason guaranteed to make her run like a rabbit. He had begun to care about her.

The doctor’s expression showed he had his own suspicions. “I got the impression that the two of you…”

She didn’t let him finish. “We set out to create that impression as a cover. Mathiaz thought that being seen with increased security would alarm the public. Running my own defense academy, I have the skills but I’m not actually a bodyguard, so he suggested I pose as his girlfriend while keeping him from harm.”

The doctor looked at her as if he didn’t quite believe her, but decided to let it go. “Then talk to him about yourself.”

“He already knows my background. He had palace security check me out before I came aboard.”

“I don’t mean the facts, I mean you, your interests, your passions. You do have passions, don’t you?”

She kept her face averted. What would the doctor say if she admitted that one of her passions had been Mathiaz himself? “Climbing and adventure training,” she said instead.

The doctor made a skeptical noise. “I’ve heard you took two American teenagers to ride the Nuee Trail, but I’ve never heard having a death wish described as a passion before.”

“Depends how much you care about what you’re doing. Those boys were tough street kids. A judge gave them the choice of undertaking one of my adventure training courses to straighten themselves out, or going to jail.”

“I’d take jail.”

She knew the doctor didn’t mean it. As court physician, Alain Pascale was known for his gruff manner, but also for his willingness to do anything he could to help his patients. “Anyway, I didn’t take them out solo. The court supplied a supervisor who complained all the way up and down the mountain. The boys acted tough but they were only sixteen and seventeen,” she told him.

“The age when Carramer males traditionally ride the Nuee Trail,” the doctor mused. “They considered it a rite of passage for hundreds of years.”

“As well as being one of the toughest endurance rides in the world,” she pointed out. “When those boys finished the course, they were different people.” She had also been different, too, in love with an island kingdom called Carramer. She had returned to America long enough to resign from her job as a personal trainer, said a tearful goodbye to her parents and older sister and moved to Carramer. When suitable premises in Valmont came up for rent, she had leased it and spent the next three years establishing her own fitness business. Guarding Mathiaz had seemed like an interesting change of pace at the time.

The doctor patted her shoulder. “Now you know what to talk to the baron about.”

“This feels weird,” she said to the still form in the bed after the doctor had gone. “While I worked for you, we talked so much, but I managed to tell you very little about myself.”

He had asked, she remembered, but she hadn’t wanted to let him get too close. She still wasn’t prepared to tell him the most significant details of her life. He might be unconscious but she preferred to keep some secrets.

“There isn’t much to tell,” she began awkwardly. “Compared to your royal family, mine isn’t the least bit glamorous. Mom and Dad have a berry farm in Orange County, California, and my sister, Debbie, runs a store selling their produce and local handicrafts when she isn’t taking care of her husband and their three children. She’s much better suited to that life than me, although I never thought I’d end up on an island in the middle of the South Pacific.”

She lapsed into silence. Once she had thought of training as a kindergarten teacher. She enjoyed working with children, the reason she’d volunteered to help the street kids in her spare time. Switching her degree from education to science, with a major in sport and exercise had been an impulsive choice. The right one, as things turned out. At twenty-seven, she was still a teacher of sorts, and exercise was a universal skill, as useful in Carramer as in Orange County.

“I’m supposed to talk to you about passion. How’s that for irony?” she asked Mathiaz’s unmoving form. She felt a pang as she said the word. Mathiaz had been a passionate man—was a passionate man, she amended the thought firmly. They had agreed to act in public as if there was a romance between them. Holding hands, exchanging looks, all in the name of keeping him safe.

When had they stopped acting?

The first time he kissed her, she remembered. Two months after she started working for him, she had accompanied him to a trade dinner. Hardly a forum for passion. In the back of the limousine, returning to Château Valmont, they had laughed about how boring the chief delegate’s speech had been. Letting Mathiaz kiss her had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

He’d kissed her again as they shared a nightcap at his villa in the royal compound. Talked long into the night. Talked some more the next day. Kissed again. She had told herself she was acting a part, while recognizing the lie for what it was.

She should have left after the man threatening Mathiaz was caught, but she’d agreed to stay for another month, telling herself she needed the pay check. The truth was, she needed Mathiaz. And she didn’t want to need any man.

Unconscious, he was no threat to her peace of mind, she told herself. When she had agreed to Dr. Pascale’s request to help Mathiaz, she hadn’t counted on the strength of her own feelings at being so close to him. She dragged a hand through her hair. When she’d walked into the room, found him tangled in tubes and medical monitors, her heart had almost stopped.

She’d taken his hand without thinking, unprepared for the electric jolt that arced through her. His fingers had closed around hers so strongly that she had to remind herself he was unconscious. He’d felt as if he was holding on to her. According to Dr. Pascale, he possibly was.

She cleared her throat. “Dr. Pascale asked me what’s my passion? Being strong, having answers. Only this time I don’t have any. He thinks I can help you by talking to you. But you have to do your part. You have to wake up.”

The man on the bed stirred, his fingers flexing. With a sigh she slid her hand into his, and he seemed to settle. She wished she could say the same for herself, but the pulse at her throat fluttered like a trapped bird, and she could feel her heart hammering. She told herself she was scared for Mathiaz, but knew some of her discomfort was for herself. For the pleasure she felt at his touch and didn’t want to feel. Could you turn off feelings by wanting to? In the ten months since she’d left him, she’d tried with everything in her. Thought she had succeeded. Knew she was kidding herself the moment she walked into his hospital room.

She still cared about him, and it scared the life out of her.

She untangled her fingers from his and straightened. “I’m sorry, Mathiaz, but I can’t do this anymore. I have to go.” His eyelids began to quiver.

Mathiaz had no idea how long he drifted, dreaming of the woman called Jacinta. Gradually he became aware that she was calling to him more and more urgently. He grasped her hand because the gesture seemed natural. How warm and soft she felt, but she wasn’t, he knew. How did he know that?

This time he was able to force his eyes open, and saw a vision bending over him. Jacinta. A head sculpted by Michelangelo was capped with shining blond hair, neat except for a few stray wisps curling across her forehead and around her ears. The effect suggested an abandoned nature kept under firm control, but not quite. His blurred gaze gave him an imperfect view of her unusual gray blue eyes, enough to see that they glistened, as if she was trying not to cry.