Susan May Warren - Mission - Out Of Control

She stared at her juice, suddenly seeing again her so-called rescuer’s disgust.

Her father sighed, turned back toward the window. “So, you need money.”

She fought for her voice. “I’m good for it—you know that. I just…well, we put a lot into this tour already and I can’t back out. I was hoping…”

She winced. Okay, really, she felt sixteen, and begging for the car keys. How did she ever talk herself into believing this was a good idea?

But to her surprise, he began to nod, a gleam in his eye, something she’d seen too many times when he knew he had her cornered. Oh, no… “I think we can work something out.”

“Really?” She hated how she nearly lunged at his words.

He got up from the desk and walked over to the door. “I predicted that you would be averse to my suggestion to cancel, so I was prepared with a counteroffer. Which, I think, might be a win for both of us. Veronica, you can go to Europe on my dime, on one condition.”

Her stomach tightened with a sick feeling. “What?”

He opened the door. “Come in, please.” Then he backed away, wearing a smile that she’d seen on his campaign posters. “I’d like you to meet your new bodyguard.”

Her father’s henchman stepped up to the door, six-foot-plus of solid muscle, now dressed in a pedestrian suit, his dark, curly hair combed and tidy, his familiar, unforgiving eyes on her, looking serious, powerful and made of stone.

She let a groan escape. “Oh, no.” See? Solid proof that, cosmically, she would never get on God’s good side.

“Brody Wickham,” he said, holding out his hand. He smiled, looking nothing like the scowler she’d met in the dark alley outside the D.C. club. Then—and frankly, she should have expected his sarcasm—he asked, “Have we met?”

“Have we met?” Her words, repeated back to him, came out almost like a whisper, her big hazel-green eyes gulping him in as she slipped her hand in his. It took him a second—as her fingers closed around his hand—to realize that she was mocking him. “Very funny,” she said without a smile.

He stared at the girl, short brown hair in tight ringlets around her head, a slim black dress, a cultured strand of pearls at her neck, and tried to place her.

“Uh…I’m serious. You father said we’d met, but I don’t remember…” He slipped his hand from hers, casting a look at Senator Wagner. “Sir?”

Senator Wagner embodied everything Brody’s father had described—serious, a Harvard lawyer, a three-term senator with a hearty knowledge of foreign policy. He exuded the same aura of power that Brody once had while commanding his squad. Only now, a strange expression played on the senator’s face.

“You don’t recognize the woman you rescued the other night, Mr. Wickham?”

Brody turned back to his newest client, peering at her even as she stepped back from him. And then, he saw it. The slight hesitation, coupled with the hint of frown not unlike the one the crazy pink-haired rock star displayed right before she’d left her handprint on his cheek.

“Vonya? Seriously?” Oh, no.

“You’re kidding me, right?” She looked first at Brody, then her father, and he couldn’t figure out whom she might be talking to. “You want him to be my bodyguard?”

“That’s right. You two already know each other, and I did a background check. Mr. Wickham here works for an international security firm out of Prague. He’s a former Green Beret, and he’s got the experience I’m looking for—”

“You’re looking for? What about me? Do I have any say in this?” She stared back at Brody but his instincts told him to just keep his mouth shut. Not that she would let him speak. “Vonya” had begun to materialize via the sarcastic, exasperated tone. “You’re holding me hostage. No wait—this is blackmail.” But as she turned to her father, Vonya morphed back into this strange, almost breakable woman with pleading eyes. “Listen, I will have a bodyguard. But I want to pick him—especially if he’s going to shadow all my concerts.”

“Not just during your concerts, Veronica, but every moment, 24/7. I’m not letting General Mubar—or even last year’s crazy stalker, if we really have to go there—find you in the halls of the hostels you and your crew insisted on staying in last time.”

“Nonprofit housing, Father, and everything I do to help them goes to help the homeless in Europe. It was part of the tour hype, and where I got my first fans. I can’t desert them. I’m just as safe there as I would be in a Hyatt. What is he going to do? Sit outside my door as I sleep?”

“If I have to,” Brody said. But to start out, he’d just affix a security system onto her accommodations, and if anyone went in or out, he’d know. A room next door, or across the hall, would be just fine.

And there would be no youth hostels on this pleasure cruise. At least he and the senator agreed on that much.

Even if, right now, everything inside him screamed to turn and run from this room, this mansion, and back to his parents’ humble ranch home on the verge of being owned by the bank.

And it happened to be precisely that thought—his parents, homeless, after feeding nine children and working their fingers to the bone—that kept him rooted to the floor.

It was bad enough that Derek planned on joining the military rather than pursuing his basketball scholarship. Who turned down a partial ride to Duke?

Their conversation while they’d been playing a little one-on-one in the driveway—the one that ended with him nearly shouting at his brother—rushed back to him. “Over my dead body.” He hadn’t been sure where his anger came from, but with everything inside him, and more, he knew his brother wasn’t giving up Duke to throw his future away in the military.

Derek had stared at him, an openmouthed gape that Brody probably could have predicted. It wasn’t like he’d ever dissed the military before.

And, up until a year ago, he wouldn’t have stood in his brother’s way. But the days of fighting his fellow man had vanished. Now, wars were fought against grade-schoolers with guns and idealistic teenagers with bombs strapped to their bodies. In the villages and homes of innocent women and toddlers. No way would he let his brother be caught in the middle of that.

A guy simply didn’t heal from those kinds of wounds. “No way,” he’d said.

“You love the military. What’s your deal?”

“Join ROTC, become an officer. But no, you’re not joining up to be a grunt.”

“It’s not up to you,” Derek said, reaching for the ball.

And the only thing that saved them both had been Senator Wagner on the other end of the cell phone, rescuing Brody from losing it at his brother and saving their financial hide at the same time.

Talk about his instincts misfiring.

“You didn’t tell me that your daughter was ‘Vonya,’ Senator, when you asked me to protect her.” Indeed, Brody had imagined some cultural princess who needed her bags carried as she sashayed down the Champs-Élysées. Maybe he’d done the math too quickly—a hundred grand would keep his brother out of the military, at least in the short term, and give him a head start on his future. The kid could change the world, maybe, someday. And paying off his parents’ loan could ease Brody’s pain at seeing his father struggling to move around the house, trying to recover from his stroke.

“What did you think? I did mention a musical tour.”

Violins. Beethoven. A gig with a snooty cellist, perhaps. It was possible—right now, Veronica looked like she could wield a cello while being a spokeswoman for the Daughters of the American Revolution, or perhaps standing next to her father on the campaign trail.