But no, there was no reason to be frustrated. Not today. Not now that she had her plan.
Fifteen minutes later, after attacking a plateful of pancakes, bacon, fruit salad, and yet more coffee, she was contemplating rounding everything off with a berry Danish, when the door to the suite opened and Jack King came striding in.
And everything in her tightened the way it had the night before in the nightclub, a rush of adrenaline making her pulse spike and excitement gather in her throat.
God, the way he moved, so fluid and predatory, yet with that slight hitch that somehow only made him even more mesmerizing. Had he really been that tall last night? That broad? His lean, muscular body radiating a strength and a certain kind of power that made her mouth go dry.
She wanted to take that power for herself or maybe test herself against it, push him the way she had under those stairs, feel how hard he was, how immovable . . .
Her breath caught and she knew she should look away, but she just couldn’t seem to do it.
He stopped dead when he saw her, then his intense green gaze dropped to the plates on the coffee table. In the daylight, his scars seemed more pronounced than they already were, great gouges along the side of his face, marring his olive skin, making it seem like a huge animal had raked its claws across his mouth and jaw and eyebrow.
They were terrible and yet somehow they hadn’t managed to ruin his looks. In fact, if anything they only added to his charisma, making him seem savage and dangerous as hell.
A very female kind of shiver ran through her in response.
Jesus, you’re a cliché. You like a man with scars, a bad boy . . .
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She actually didn’t know what men she liked since the only men she’d ever met were ones her father had thoroughly vetted and approved of, and she hadn’t liked even one of those.
Jack would definitely not be approved of.
No. He wouldn’t. And God help her, that only made him more fascinating to her.
“You had some breakfast?” he asked in his rough, abrupt way.
A tart response almost came helplessly out, but she managed to bite down on it. Nice. She was going to be nice to him from now on. “Yes, I did, thank you. Did you order it?”
He nodded. “Thought you might be hungry when you woke up.”
“Well, I was.” She lifted her coffee cup. “And double thank you for the coffee. I needed it.”
He gave another nod as he came over to the table and began gathering up her plates, moving to put them on the trolley. She sat on the couch, cradling her cup, watching him move, unable to help herself.
She didn’t know why she found those scars so fascinating, but she did. Where had he gotten them from? And how? And did the scars on his face have anything to do with that hitch in his walk? They probably did and she was curious as to how. She was curious about everything about him.
Clearly, no matter his physical appearance, he had to be very good at what he did because her father wouldn’t trust her life to just anyone. Only the best for Senator Hawthorne.
But you know how good he is. You saw it last night.
Callie blinked, remembering the way Jack had reached over into the front seat of the car the night before, looping one of those powerful arms around the neck of the driver and jerking him back against the seat. And then his other hand lifting, holding the gun, slamming the butt of it down . . .
In a matter of seconds it had been all over, the problem neutralized.
Once again that female response fluttered right down low inside her and she had to take a soft, silent breath to deal with herself.
She was being ridiculous getting all worked up over him. It wasn’t what she was supposed to be doing anyway. She was supposed to be getting this get-Jack-on-her-side show on the road. Which meant an apology for her behavior yesterday, because people did like an apology. Her father always did.
“So,” she began, settling back against the sofa. “I think I owe you an apology.”
He’d finished depositing the plates on the trolley and was now looking down at his phone, his strong features set in lines of intense concentration. “Yeah, you do,” he said without looking up.
Irritated at his casual assumption, Callie opened her mouth to tell him how damn arrogant that was, then shut it again before the words came spilling out.
Getting annoyed was not the path she needed to take with him, no matter how irritated she was. She needed to ignore this weird impulse she had to fight him and treat him the way she treated all her father’s staff: politely, calmly, and as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
Gripping her coffee mug, she took another fortifying sip. Then she said, “Well, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you run around after me yesterday. And I shouldn’t have been such a bitch to you when you arrived at the club. I just . . .” My father is an abusive asshole and I’m pretty certain you’re his spy. “It was a shock.”
Jack put his phone in his pocket and turned, his gaze catching hers. “Why? Because I managed to track you down to that club?”
She bit her lip. “Yes, well. There was that.”
“What were you doing there anyway?” His gaze was relentless. “Trying to get wasted? Get high? A hookup where Daddy can’t see you?”
It was so tempting to just say yes, that’s exactly why she’d been at the club. To protect her real reasons for being there so her father would never know what they were, so he couldn’t use them against her at some point.
But for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to lie. Jack’s sharp green eyes seemed to dig the truth from her whether she wanted to tell him or not. “No,” she said thickly. “I was there because I liked the music. And I wanted to dance. That’s all.”
Surprise crossed Jack’s face. “You wanted to dance?”
“Yes.” Callie gave him a challenging look, unable to help herself. “You know, when you move your body to music and—”
“I know what dancing is,” he interrupted, scowling. “You should have let someone know where you were though, especially with this threat situation going on.”
Sure, she could have. And her father would have forbidden it, like he forbade her to do pretty much everything she liked to do that he didn’t approve of.
For a second she debated telling Jack exactly that, but then decided against it. He’d probably end up agreeing with her father and she couldn’t stand the thought of that. “Well, I didn’t.” She looked down at her cup. “Next time.”
Though, of course, there wouldn’t be a next time and she knew it.
An uncomfortable silence fell between them.
She could feel the pressure of Jack’s attention boring into her, as if he were a scientist and she were some kind of new life form he’d discovered. It made her heart race, made her want to shift around restlessly on the couch. It made her want to look at him, but then she had a feeling that would be a very bad idea, so she didn’t.
“You were scared last night, Princess,” he said at last.
Something in her stomach dropped away. “Yeah, well, nothing like a death threat to really make you feel secure,” she murmured before she could stop herself.
“I told you I would protect you. It’s my job. You don’t need to be scared.”
“Wow. And now all my fear has magically gone away.”
Another silence.
Then she looked up, unable to resist the urge, his green gaze clashing with hers and sending a bolt of pure electricity arrowing down her spine.
“Is it me you’re afraid of?” he asked abruptly.
“No.” The denial was instant and automatic and the absolute truth. And maybe she should have questioned it, but she didn’t. “I’m not afraid of you. But you’ll forgive me if it takes more than a couple of hours to trust you with my life.”
He stared at her for yet another long, uncomfortable moment. “Okay, fair enough. But you might just have to. Especially if you want to avoid situations like the one I had
to deal with in the car last night.”
Callie gripped her coffee mug tighter. “I’m sorry. Yes, that was my fault. I should have listened to you.”
“You should.” His face was set in hard, uncompromising lines. No softness, no mercy. “And next time you will, right?”
Again that inexplicable urge filled her. To refuse him, to tell him where he could stick his goddamn orders. To kick against him. Rebel. Match her strength to his, show him somehow that she wasn’t this weak little woman he had to protect.
Strange to want to prove herself to him when she didn’t even know him. When she didn’t even like him. It wasn’t going to help her in the long run anyway, so all she did was nod like the good little girl she was trying to be. “Yes. Of course.”
His black brows, one straight, one twisted by scar tissue, twitched and his gaze narrowed, as if he was assessing whether she was telling the truth. But she simply stared back guilelessly, as if the thought of telling him where to stick it hadn’t even entered her head.
Eventually he gave another of those curt nods. “I went over your place with a fine-tooth comb this morning so we should be good to go to get you home. New security will be installed sometime today also.”
Wait. What? He’d been in her home? Without her permission?
A flash of rage went through her, instant and hot. Her town house was her haven, the one place in the world where her father didn’t have control. It was hers and now this asshole had “gone through it”? With a “fine-tooth comb”?
“What?” he asked before she could speak, obviously reading her expression. “You don’t like the idea of new security?”
A thousand furious words burned on her tongue, but she swallowed them down, ignoring the bitterness. Like her music, her one little piece of privacy was something she protected as fiercely as she could without giving away how important it was to her. And it felt invasive to have this complete stranger going through all her stuff without even asking her first.
“I would have liked to have been informed of this beforehand.” She only just managed to keep the words level and cool. “But I guess it’s too late for that now.”
Jack lifted a shoulder. “You were asleep. Anyway, it had to be done, especially after last night. And a good thing I did too.”
Callie froze, a whisper of foreboding curling through her. “Why was it a good thing?”
Something flickered in his eyes, though she couldn’t immediately tell what it was. “Did you know there were cameras in some of the rooms?”
She blinked, not understanding. “Cameras?”
“Yeah. In the living area and kitchen and bedroom. None in the bathroom.” He studied her closely. “You didn’t know.”
And then she understood.
There were cameras in her house. Cameras she didn’t know about.
Cold shock had started creeping through her, her fingers going numb, making her feel as if she were slowly turning to ice. “No.” Now her lips were feeling numb too. “I didn’t know.”
Jack frowned, his green eyes flicking over her again. Then he moved over to the minibar and extracted something from it before coming back to where she sat. He had a mini bottle of what looked like brandy in his hands, briskly unscrewing the top and holding it out. “Here. Drink this.”
Then suddenly the bottle was in her hand and she was tipping her head back, taking a healthy swallow, the alcohol burning on the way down, then settling into a warm, glowing mass in her stomach.
Cameras. There had been cameras in her house.
You know who put them there.
Of course she did. There was only one person who’d do that to her and it wasn’t the person who was issuing death threats. It was someone closer and far more dangerous.
In another of those fluid movements, Jack crouched in front of her, studying her intently. “You’ve gone very pale, Princess. You okay?”
“No.” Her voice sounded curiously blank to her own ears. “I’m not okay. There were cameras in my house.” Her anger at Jack for going through her home without permission suddenly seemed ridiculous. Especially when it was clear she’d never had any privacy to start with.
She looked down at her hands, the warmth of the brandy helping the cold numbness fade. Yet it left behind a kind of despair that made tears prick behind her eyes.
Jesus, she’d never imagined her father would go that far. Sure, he’d been annoyed about her having her own place, but she’d promised to be good and she had been. Apart from the nightclub and concert excursions, she hadn’t put a foot out of line.
He doesn’t trust you. He’ll never trust you. Not while he feels he can’t control you.
She blinked fiercely, refusing to let the tears fall. The really stupid part about it was the fact that she didn’t even have anything to hide. All her father would have seen was her going about her life. Just her, being herself in the one place she felt safe doing so.
Except it wasn’t safe and it had never been safe.
He’d reached her even there.
He’ll know about the music.
A shudder swept through her, making her hand shake, so Jack calmly took her coffee mug and the mini bottle of brandy—somehow magically empty—away from her and deposited them on the table. Then he took her icy fingers in his and began rubbing them gently.
His hands felt the way they had last night, roughened and calloused, and so good against her skin. Reassuring and warm and strong. And she had the sudden urge to press her face against his palms, hide from the world behind his strength.
“I took them all down,” he said after a moment’s silence. “So you won’t have those to worry about when you get home.”
But she was already shaking her head in instinctive denial. “I don’t want to go home.”
“They’re gone, Princess. Like I said, I took them away.”
“I don’t care.” She pulled her hands from his grip, abruptly uncomfortable with how much she liked the feeling of his fingers on her skin. “I don’t want to be there anymore.”
He didn’t reach for her again, simply letting his hands rest on his knees. “Your dad ordered me to keep you at home for the day and I have to say, I agree with him. Security needs to be reviewed and you’re safer at home while that’s being done.”
Oh sure, her father wanted her to stay at home. Where he could keep an eye on her, no doubt.
Except he can’t now since Jack took away his cameras.
Callie swallowed as a sudden thought struck her. If Jack had been really hired to report on her for her father, as well as guard her from this death threat thing, then why had he taken down the cameras she knew without a doubt her father had been responsible for installing? Wouldn’t her father have instructed him to leave them intact? Unless her father hadn’t told him about the cameras and hadn’t wanted him to know they were there. Which meant that maybe Jack wasn’t as in her father’s pocket as she’d first assumed.
Except Jack had just said he’d agreed with her father about keeping her home, so maybe he was after all....
God, this whole damn situation was complicated and she had no idea whom to trust.
Maybe you should just ask him?
She could. But then what if he was truly reporting everything back to the senator? She didn’t want him alerting her dad to the fact that she knew Jack was his personal spy. She didn’t want Jack to know that either, not when she couldn’t be sure of him. Yes, he’d saved her life, but only because he was paid to. She was a job to him, nothing more. A job her father paid his salary for.
“Your house is secure.” Jack’s voice was calm. “The cameras are gone. There’s no reason for you not to feel safe there.”
“Yes, but you can understand how I wouldn’t, right? My privacy has been invaded. I mean, who put those cameras up there in the first place? And why? And for how long?”
Slowly he rose to his feet. “I can’t answer those questions, but I’ve handed the hardware over to your father’s security team to
examine. Your privacy has been restored, surely that’s the important thing?”
He didn’t understand, that was obvious. “You wouldn’t have a problem if you found out that there had been cameras in your home? You wouldn’t find it at all weird going back there?”
He shook his head. “Not really. And I certainly wouldn’t care once the cameras were gone.”
Easy for him to say. He probably didn’t have a father like hers.
Jack began turning away. “I guess you can stay at the hotel if you prefer, but you’re going to have to go back to your place at some point, even if it’s just to get some clean clothes.”
She bit her lip. Sadly, he was right. She wanted clean clothes and her good headphones, and her fingers were itching for her guitar strings, while her soul was desperate to be back in the safety of her little town house, where she could shut the rest of the world out and pretend she had a normal life.
Not that it was ever safe.
Fear twisted inside her, but she forced it aside, concentrating instead on the tingling warmth in her fingers from where Jack had rubbed them and the pleasant heat that the brandy had left.
Her father must know that the cameras had gone now, which meant that actually, for the first time in who knew how long, her place was truly hers.
“Okay,” she said after a moment. “You can take me home.”
* * *
Callie’s town house had been pretty much what Jack had expected, a small, but very nice little place in an expensive part of town.
When he’d gone to do his security check early that morning, having organized to get a key from one of the Hawthorne security staff, he’d taken his time to have a look around, familiarize himself, though he told himself it was all part of the job and not because he was curious about her.
Serious money had been spent on the decor, with lots of pricey knickknacks, furniture in pale wood, the fabrics and walls decorated in the same kind of soft, muted tones as the hotel room had been. Definitely the kind of place that should have been featured in some fancy home-and-garden-type magazine. Or at least it would if it hadn’t been in such a fucking mess.
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