Peggy Nicholson - Her Bodyguard

“Mmm, ‘lo?” a drowsy voice murmured in his ear.

“Asleep already?” he said easily. “Lazy bum.”

“Dozing,” Emily insisted. “I’m lying here on the couch with Duncan on my chest.” Duncan was one of her four tomcats, the surly orange one. “And he’s emitting sleep rays. I was fighting valiantly, but—”

“Well, throw him off and go look at your computer.” Trace had scanned Gillian’s résumé into his computer, then e-mailed it to Emily an hour ago. “Got somebody I want you to check out for me.” His younger sister was not a partner in Brickhouse, God forbid, but an associate. They farmed out much of their research to her, especially anything that could be learned over the Internet.

“Rush job or in my own sweet time?” she inquired around a yawn.

“Like prontissimo. I want it yesterday.”

“So my—lemme go, you cockleburr!” On the far side of the continent, something heavy hit the floor—twenty-two pounds of cat, Trace assumed. “So my brainstorm worked?” Emily continued. She’d suggested Trace run a want ad seeking a personal assistant for Lara, because if Sarah XXX had come to Newport in May, then maybe she’d stayed.

That wouldn’t be untypical—the stalker’s life spiraling inward in tighter and tighter circles around her target as her obsession grew. And if she’d stayed, then she’d be frantically seeking some way in past Woodwind’s unbreachable walls. “So offer her a way in,” Emily had urged. “Run a want ad with the Woodwind address and see who applies.”

“I don’t know if it worked,” he said, “but it turned up a few possibles. And this is the one I want you to start on.”

“Gillian S. Mahler,” Emily murmured, reading Gillian’s résumé on her screen.

“N. Mahler,” Trace corrected absently. “The first thing I want you to check out is—”

“S,” Emily interrupted, know-it-all kid sister to the end. “That’s an S. And I’d say your Gillian’s a leftie, correct?”

“S...” Trace stared at the spiky, backhanded letter. He’d taken it for a N in running script, not an S practically lying on its back. “By God, I believe you’re right!”

“That’s significant?”

“That, duckie, might be point, set and game. Okay, in that case here’s what I need from you, and I need it as quick as you can. What does the S stand for?”

“And if it’s Sarah?”

“Then bingo! I’ve found my pigeon.”

THREE DAYS LATER, on a morning as bright as her mood, Gillian leaned out her car window to study the device that apparently controlled Woodwind’s gates. Topping a metal post at a height convenient to the driver, it was an intercom of some sort, with a keypad and a speaker. Printed below the keypad was the instruction Press * To Call. She pressed the star sign, then waited.

“Yes?” the speaker said after a moment, in a metallic imitation of Trace Sutton’s voice.

It would be him, playing gatekeeper. “It’s G-Gillian. I’m here.” Lara had called her two days ago to say she was hired, and could she please report for work on Monday. So here she was at last, with all the possessions she’d acquired in Newport packed into boxes and suitcases that filled the trunk and back seat of her car. Because along with the job came an unexpected, quite wonderful bonus: a carriage-house apartment on the Woodwind grounds. Given Gillian’s recent problems with roommates, she might have accepted the job on those terms alone. Considering that the job and the housing gave her round-the-clock access to Lara, she couldn’t have asked for a better chance to get to know her.

There was no welcoming comment from Sutton, but slowly the gates swung inward and Gillian steered her ancient Toyota up the winding driveway. At the top of the low hill, the road divided. The right fork curved off grandly to lead front-door callers to the mansion’s covered portico. The left fork wound around back, past concealing shrubbery, to the carriage house built to one side of the mansion and a bit behind it.

On the raked gravel before the carriage house, Trace Sutton stood waiting, a sardonic half smile on his face, his hands jammed into the pockets of a pair of impeccable white tennis shorts. The very picture of a gentleman of leisure.

“That’s the door to your apartment.” He indicated a human-sized entrance to the left of the five garage bays.

She parked before it and stepped out. “Good morning.”

“Is it?” he said pleasantly.

Well, it was for me till now. Why did he dislike her so? She glanced past him toward Woodwind. “Where’s Mrs. Corday?”

“She’s not up and about yet. She had a bad night.” As he spoke, he opened the rear door of her car and lifted out a box. “So meantime I’ll show you your apartment and help you get settled.”

“Oh, that’s really not necessary!” She reached for the box, but he didn’t relinquish it. “If you’d just give me the key, I’m sure I can...”

But he’d already stepped around her and started off. “Nonsense. It’s no trouble at all.”

“But—” She didn’t want him intruding on her new space or on her new-job excitement. Fuming, she grabbed a couple of smaller boxes and followed him up the covered staircase that was built on the outer wall of the carriage house, then through a door at the top of the stairs. “Oh!” The slanted ceiling was set with skylights.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”

“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.

The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.

“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”

So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.

“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.

“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.

Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.

They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”

Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.

Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.