by S. Ann Cole
“It’s Lyra. I think...I think she’s in danger.”
I ignore the brief stutter of my pulse. “Something happened?”
He nods. “A couple of weeks ago. A hit and run.”
“She okay?”
He breathes out a heavy breath. “She was in a coma for roughly thirty hours after the hit. But she didn’t sustain any major damage. Just a couple fractured ribs. Sprains, cuts, bruises. She’s much better now, though, thank God.”
“Where’d this happen?”
“Outside BAX Cinema.”
“Who was she with?”
“Her friend Holly and my stepson.”
“What were the cops’ thoughts?”
“They were unable to retrieve any security footage. And no one got the plate number.”
“You think it was deliberate?”
He rubs his forehead. “She thinks it was.”
“Why?”
A pained sigh. “She said the headlights were off the entire time. That the car was parked on the side and only swerved out when she was in the middle of the road.”
“What about the two who were with her,” I ask, “they corroborated this?”
“Both said everything happened too fast to tell.”
Interesting. “As long as no one’s able to back up her suspicions, the cops will write it off as paranoia in light of all that’s happened—shit spreads in stations. Though they won’t come straight out with it. What I’m guessing they told you is that they’ll do everything they can to find the driver, then suggested she gets therapy in the meantime. Correct?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what they said.” His frown is deep, troubled. “Are they right?”
“You wouldn’t be here if you thought they were.” I pass my knuckles under my chin as I regard him. “I’ve met your daughter, Henderson. If she said it wasn’t an accident, I believe her.”
“But how do I know for sure? She’s been so...broken.”
“She’s not broken, she’s angry.” For some reason, him calling her broken irritates me. That girl on the jet might’ve been emotional, but she wasn’t broken. She was pissed clean off and had every right to be. “Listen to me, those people did a lot of things to your daughter but breaking her isn’t one of them. I’ve extracted a number of girls over the years, and I’ve never come across a single one as tough and defiant as she was after enduring what she did. So the next time you talk to her, look closer; I guarantee what you find won’t be brokenness.”
Henderson’s gaze drops to the table. “See, this is why I wanted to talk to you specifically. Thank you for coming. I really appreciate it.”
Leaning back, I cross my arms. “Still haven’t told me why I’m here, though.”
He chuckles shakily. “Truth be told, I wasn’t quite sure when I came. But now that we’ve talked, two things.”
“Which are?”
“A bodyguard for Lyra, and an investigation into the hit and run.”
“The latter I can offer, the former I can’t. Our security department’s maxed out and no one’ll be available for at least another month. We’re in the process of vetting additional staff, but I’m very particular, so that could take a while,” I tell him. “I can give you a list of refer—”
“No, I want Red Cage on this. You’re the only ones I trust.”
“Well, I’m sorry but—”
“Please, name your price and I’ll pay it,” he says. “I have a slew of business meetings in New York and Seattle that I’ve been postponing for months now, and I can’t any longer without insulting investors. Lyly is refusing to travel along with me. She’s been at her mother’s for the past few weeks but her mother is leaving for Paris in a couple of days and Lyly doesn’t want to travel with her either. My stepson lives on our property but he works odd hours, and I just don’t feel comfortable leaving her at the house by herself.”
“But I’m betting that’s what she wants?”
A nod and a sigh. “That’s what she wants.”
I lace my fingers behind my head. “I agree that she shouldn’t be left alone, but I also can’t help right now.”
He drums his fingers on the table and regards me contemplatively. “Where are you vacationing?”
I lift a brow at him. The fuck does that matter? “Home.”
“How about the Ritz Carlton? With Lyly. All expense on me? Adjoining rooms so you can still keep an eye on her.”
He wants me to be his daughter’s bodyguard? “Nice one, Henderson. Vacationing means I won’t be doing any kind of work whatsoever, and the Ritz Carlton is not my style.”
“I know I’m being a pain in the ass, but I really need your help,” he pushes. “Name your price. Anything.”
“Truth be told, Mitch, I don’t think your ‘Lyly’ likes me very much. And personally, I think she’s a little too mouthy.”
And too beautiful. And too tempting. And a wet fucking dream.
Mitch chuckles. “Well, so far you’ve been able to read her better than I have and she isn’t even here. So I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
I massage two fingers across my forehead in an attempt to coax the dull headache away. I shift my gaze to Guy who’s sitting at the far end of the table and he shrugs. He knows what I know: Mitch Henderson won’t leave here until I give him the answer he wants. He was dogged about getting me here, and now he’s dogged about getting what he came for.
I don’t have to give in. I’ve told bigger and wealthier than him to fuck off before.
But it’s his profound, move-heaven-and-earth love for his daughter that gets me every time. He’d been the same way when I’d told him getting her back from Russia was impossible. He’d pushed and pushed and would’ve sacrificed his balls if I’d told him to.
In the end, he got his daughter back. I won’t lie and say it wasn’t rewarding. It was, hands down, the longest, most challenging, boundary-pushing job of my career. I quite literally walked through fire to get her out. The rush and thrill I had after realizing that we’d managed to pull it off was indescribable. But certainly not something I’d ever do again.
Now here he is again. The heartbroken father with pain and sorrow in his eyes.
Should I be honest, my reasons for not wanting to be around Lyra Henderson are more than I’m letting on. What I can’t tell this man is that I’m attracted to his daughter. Since the first time I saw her, which was about a year before she was taken. I’d gone to the house for a quick meeting with Mitch and saw her and her friend messing around by the pool. I’d assigned my men to guard her on many occasions prior, but that was the first time I’d seen her in person. And I’d felt something so intense and confusing that I’d left the house immediately.
When I saw her again in that penthouse in Russia, I’d felt it again. A forceful blast in my chest. It’d been hard to look at her. Not because of her predicament, but because looking at her had felt like looking at the sun. Blindingly intense. I’d had no idea what any of it meant and I still fucking don’t. To be frank, it pisses me off. She pisses me off.
Bet if her daddy knew any of this he wouldn’t be shoving his precious daughter at me so hard.
But it does give me an idea to get him off my back. I’ll offer help he can’t not refuse. “Okay.”
Mitch claps his hands in victory, but I hold a finger up to stop him.
“Like I said, I’m on vacation at home, so that’s where she’ll have to be. In my house.” I watch his face closely, but I don’t see any change there. “That said, I don’t care to have her wandering around all day long asking me a million fucking questions, so I’ll take her to Barefoot Runaway B&B in the afternoons. It’s owned and operated by family and heftily guarded and surveilled, so she’ll be safe there.” I clasp my hands on the desk. “That’s all I can offer.”
Mitch’s forehead crinkles as if he’s actually considering it. He can’t be serious. Sure, he’s a long-time client, but while he’s not a stranger to me, I’m a stranger to him. “Do you live with anyone?”<
br />
Well, fuck. He is serious. “No.”
“She will have her own room?”
“You want her to sleep in my bed, too?”
“No, no,” he says quickly. “Of course not.”
I almost laugh. Almost. “She’ll have all the space she needs.”
“Well, all right then. Accepted.”
The offer was meant to throw him. But I sorely underestimated his desperation and determination. That he’s even willing to dump his “baby girl” at a stranger’s house. A fallible, red-blooded animal like myself…who has every slope and curve of his daughter’s body memorized.
“You’re forgetting the most important part, Henderson.”
“What’s that?”
“She needs to agree to it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“What do you think about this man?”
Lyra
“ABSOLUTELY NOT!”
“Sweetheart,” Dad cajoles over the phone. “It’s just for a week or two.”
“Dad, how old am I?”
“Sixteen?”
“Nice try. I’m almost twenty-three. A grown woman. I don’t need a freaking babysitter. You can’t just decide to dump me at some man’s house.”
“It’s not babysitting,” he argues. “It’s security.”
Oh, for crying out loud. “I don’t need security, Dad!”
A pained and tired sigh drifts down the line. “He believes you, Lyly.”
“What?”
“I told him what you said, about the accident, and he believes you.”
“Well, at least someone finally does,” I mumble.
“I never said I didn’t believe you, Lyly.” A long pause. “I know this arrangement is not ideal, but I won’t be able to sleep or focus while I’m away if I don’t know for sure you’re safe. I’m behind on so much right now and investors are getting impatient. Please, Lyly, do this for me. Please.”
I bang my head back against the tufted headboard and sigh. Loudly. “You do realize that man is a cold, insensitive, unmannerly jerk, right?”
Dad snorts. “And still he’s the only one I trust to keep you safe.”
“Why, though?”
“Because he said he’d bring you home to me, and he did.”
That’s not a strong enough reason. Anyone with his skill set getting paid a bucketload of money for the job would say whatever the client needed to hear. “That doesn’t mean anything. He could’ve brought me back in a body bag.”
“Nope,” Dad says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “His exact words were, ‘I’ll get your daughter back to you unscathed’.”
“Well, that was stupidly arrogant of him,” I grumble. “Let me think about it. I’ll call you back in a few.”
“Okay, sweetheart. I love you.”
“Eh, not sure I even like you very much right now.”
He laughs as I end the call.
Mom glides into the room just then carrying a bed-tray. “Time to eat up! Veggie soup with a side of spinach-banana muffins.”
Her long, multi-colored Boho dress billows as she moves, her waist-length brown hair braided in pigtails. The woman is in her forties but looks sixteen.
Looks wise, I’m her carbon copy. Spitting image. Though I’m a little fairer, much to my dismay, because her deep, olive skin is a flawless dream.
Personality wise, however, I am one hundred percent Mitch Henderson.
As I sit up properly in bed so she can set the tray over me, I complain, “Your husband’s tripping again.”
“We never married,” she corrects, as she always does.
“You will be,” I singsong. “All roads lead back to you. We all know this.”
“Have you forgotten the part where he’s engaged to Eloise?” She straightens the tray over me. “Or is memory loss a side-effect of your coma?”
“Eh. You and I both know how that’s gonna end.”
Arching a brow at me, she sits at the side of the bed. “I do?”
“Mom, the woman argues with him at least twice a month about him not setting a date.”
“Lysandra,” she corrects, as always, and I roll my eyes.
She has an intense aversion to the words Mom, Mommy, and Mother, and has forbidden me from addressing her as such. Of course, that makes me do it all the more. I am my father’s daughter after all.
As I pick up the soup spoon, I fake a wince.
I’m ninety-five percent better than I was a month ago, and my ribs don’t hurt anymore, but I’ve been faking it with her. Anything to get more time with her.
As an artist and a curator who owns several small art galleries across the globe, Lysandra Callas is always on the move. Always traveling. More so because she has to than because she wants to.
A restless spirit lives inside her, and although I used to resent that spirit when I was a little girl who just really needed my mother and couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to be my mother, I no longer do. I’ve learned to love her in spite of it and appreciate the moments with her when I get them.
I know now that it was never because she didn’t want to be my mother, but because she couldn’t. She’d tried for me before, after my fifteenth birthday party when I threw a tantrum that she didn’t love me. She cried and told me she would stay and try her best to be the mother I needed.
And it had made me, and Dad, happy. Until around three months in when she began scratching and clawing at her skin like bugs were crawling under it. By the fifth month, she’d broken out in hives. It was bad, and I’d felt so horrible that I begged her to leave.
She told me once that stability felt like being tied to a tree over an ants nest and under a beehive.
So yes, I’ve been faking for a while, hobbling and wincing to get her to dote on me more. Stay a little bit longer. The last time she stuck around with me this long was after I came back. She was so overcome with joy and relief that I’d gotten an entire five weeks out of her, and it was glorious.
“So what was your handsome father ‘tripping’ about this time?” she asks, stealing a piece of my muffin.
Turns out Mom has some serious skills in alternative vegan recipes and has been making me a lot of tasty stuff using only the foods I can eat. Like spinach-banana muffins. I couldn’t appreciate her more.
“He wants me to stay with Torin Garza while he’s away,” I tell her.
She frowns. “I don’t understand.”
“Basically, he went to Red Cage to get a bodyguard for me, but they’re all unavailable, so he strong-armed Torin into covering me. Except that he’s on freaking vacation, which means the only way he’ll do it is if I’m at his house.”
Mom’s brows shoot up. “And Mitch agreed to this?”
“Yup.”
She chews slowly as she contemplates this. “What do you think about this man?”
“Rude,” I reply without a moment’s thought. “Very rude.”
For whatever reason, that makes her smile, and she steals another piece of muffin. “The first time I saw him, I have to admit that I stared longer than I should have.”
“Gross, Mom,” I mumble. “Also, looks is nothing if your attitude stinks.”
“Well, if he makes you uncomfortable then you—”
“He doesn’t.” The complete opposite. He makes me feel safe, warm. “He’s just...”
Not what I’d expected.
Had I thought about the man since I got off that jet? Not really. I’d chalked up my stupid attraction to him as judgment impairment brought on by trauma. Because none of it was sane. And as the months went by, the more he’d faded from my mind.
Now it all comes rushing back as if it hadn’t really left but had just been waiting around the corner.
“The whole arrangement is just weird, is all,” I finish. “The man’s practically a stranger.”
With her pointer finger, she traces the peace symbol pattern on her dress. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions, of course. But after all that’s
happened, the truth is, we’re terrified, Lyra. I feel so helpless it physically hurts. And your father...God.” Her eyes flutters closed and she exhales slowly before reopening them. “Just know that whatever he does, it’s because he loves you and wants to keep you safe. I trust his judgment utterly, so if he’s comfortable leaving you under this man’s protection then so am I.”
Of course she’s siding with him. She always does. She loves him as much as he loves her. She just can’t be the woman he needs. “You always side with your baby daddy over me. Tell me, is it his smile-dimples that has you so under his spell? Or is it his dad-muscles?”
With an exaggerated eye-roll, she straightens and start out of the room. “Just drink your soup and shut up, you little twerp.”
“All roads lead to you, Mom,” I lilt.
“Lysandra!” And, because she’s a cool mom, she flips me the bird as she disappears out of the room.
Seconds later, as I’m lifting a spoonful of soup to my mouth, her head pops around the doorframe, her brown eyes narrowed as she says, “And don’t think I don’t know you’ve been faking.”
Busted. “Am not!”
“Con artist,” she fires back before disappearing again, and I can’t help grinning.
I love my mom.
CHAPTER NINE
“I’m a ray of sunshine.”
Lyra
“HOW MUCH DID YOU OFFER HIM to agree to this?” I ask Dad. “What with him being on vacation and all.”
Standing on the steps outside our house, we watch the matte-black jeep speed up our long driveway.
“Your safety doesn’t come with a budget, Lyly.” He slips his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “He has repeatedly proven himself to be worth every dime. When you want things done right, you hire the best.”
I munch on a baby carrot and resist an eye roll. “You have way too much faith in this man.”
When the jeep halts to a stop in front of our house, it’s not Torin Garza who jumps out, but Reuben.
He jogs up and sticks his hand out to Dad. “Henderson.”
Dad shakes it, but with a frown. “Hey, Reuben. Where is Torin?”