When the door opened, he looked to see who it was and sprang almost instantly to his feet.
“Elena!” His hip bumped the desk and a cup of coffee tipped over. A cup of pens catapulted off the far side of the desk.
Elena watched in bemusement as the large man rescued folders of papers and his keyboard from the spreading puddle of coffee and scrambled to shut off the audio that was blaring through the speakers.
It took a second for what she was hearing to register. A strangely robotic voice was reciting familiar words.
They were words that she herself had written.
Cedric shut off the audio and shook some coffee off one folder that he hadn’t been able to rescue.
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” she said apologetically as she came into the room and scooped pens back into the cup. “Honestly, I expected this door to be locked just like all the others.”
Elena straightened the cup on the desk and when she looked back, all the coffee had already been wiped up, the folders set back in perfect right angles to the edge of the desk. He tossed a wad of sodden paper towels across the room and they banked perfectly into the trash can. “You were trying all the doors?”
She shrugged and wandered over to see the view. “I like to know my surroundings.”
“I do too.”
“This is a big building, but I think I’ve pretty much seen it all by now.”
She’d gotten a lot of her color back, he noted. He thought it might be too much to hope that she might flourish here, but he hoped that it at least wouldn’t hinder her healing process. Her hair was clean and braided down her back and she wore a pair of worn jeans, white at the seams that made Cedric want to test their softness with his cheek. As she turned back to him, he saw she wore an oversized Columbia sweatshirt.
Her eyes skated down his body and she cocked her head to the side. “Do you always wear slacks and a button up?”
“Rook likes for us to be professional.”
“Even though you’re pretty much working from home?”
He knew she was fishing for information, but he didn’t see anything wrong with explaining it to her. “The team only lives here when we’ve gone dark with a client. Once we’ve got this situation under control for you, you’ll go home and so will we.”
“Where’s home for you?” she asked, tucking her hands into the front pocket of her jeans and coming around the edge of the desk.
“Ah,” he cleared his throat and hoped his blush didn’t show on his cheeks. “I’m still up in Queens.”
Her eyebrows raised in surprise. “In our old neighborhood?”
He nodded.
“So are my folks,” she told him. “And a fair few of my brothers and sisters. They were all pretty betrayed when I moved to Brooklyn.” She leaned one of her slender hips against the desk and looked out the window for a moment. She turned back to him, a thought blooming behind her eyes. “You’re not still in the same spot, are you? That little brownstone next to the park?”
His eyes widened and he ruthlessly ignored the strange flip-flop his stomach had just done. “You remember that?”
She shrugged, her hands still in her pockets. “I spent hours and hours there while we were working on that project. It was for a history class, right?”
He nodded, unsure of what to say next. After she hadn’t initially recognized him, he’d been completely certain that she’d wiped all her memories of him. He figured that there was only so much room in anyone’s head for data. And she had obviously spent her twenties downloading all sorts of information about the environment. He wouldn’t have blamed her if she’d booted him out of her brain to make way for deciduous forest factoids.
Unwilling to sit while she was standing, Cedric leaned against the wall behind his desk. “Yeah,” he eventually said. “I’m in the same place. My grandfather left it to me.”
“Oh,” Elena said as her eyes clouded. “I’m sorry to hear he’s not with us anymore. I liked him.”
One of Ced’s hand found its way to the back of his neck. “I forgot that you would have known him. I… don’t really talk to people who knew him. I spend most of my time here and he never met anybody here.”
“How long has he been gone?”
“Ten years.”
She made a noise of distress. Because she’d done the project with him, and spent time at his house, she’d known that he’d been raised by his grandfather. To hear that his grandfather had died so soon after high school hurt Elena’s heart. She was pretty sure that meant that Cedric had been alone, family-wise, since then. Elena couldn’t even imagine that kind of loneliness.
“So,” she said. “What are you working on in here?”
“Well,” he said as he turned the computer screen to face her. “Research. For your case.”
She immediately recognized an old article she’d written about elephant poaching in the Sahel desert. “I thought I recognized what you were listening to.” She paused and then decided to just ask what she wanted to. “Why were you listening to it like that?”
“Oh.” One of his hands went into his pocket and the other went right back to the back of his neck. “Ah. Well. I’m an auditory learner.”
She’d heard of that, of course. But she really couldn’t imagine any world in which she’d prefer to listen to the robotic computer voice painstakingly dictate every word of her 5,000 word article. Unless… A thought woke up inside her and she filed it away for inspection at a later time.
“You prefer to listen to it rather than read it?”
He nodded, a light blush stealing over his cheekbones.
“I think we can do better than that robot voice.” Elena scanned the room and found another swivel chair at the desk across the room. She wheeled it over and pulled up next to where Cedric stood.
“You really don’t have to do that,” he said, seeming like he wasn’t sure if he should sit down or flee the room.
“Please,” she took him by the shoulder and tugged him down into his chair. “Let me read it to you. It’ll be good for me to remind myself that I used to be an environmentalist. Before I spent my days rambling around a warehouse in Red Hook and playing ping pong with Atlas.”
He smiled and dropped into the chair beside her. She read her article out loud to him, pausing only when he wanted a clarification or a definition for something.
They spent the entire afternoon side by side. The heat from the other’s shoulder warming each other.
CHAPTER FOUR
Cedric switched from the movie he was watching to the surveillance screens the second he heard Elena’s door open. Three different notifications popped up on his phone, computer, and smart watch, all notifying him that her interior door had opened and that she was now in the hallway.
It didn’t surprise him, considering that every morning around 3 am she went down to the kitchen for chamomile tea. He gave her privacy these days. Considering there was no real reason to tail her there. She knew where to find the kitchen and always returned to her room immediately afterwards. She was completely safe within the walls of this building. She didn’t need a bodyguard in her footsteps.
Or hugging her against the fridge.
Cedric had included that part of their interlude in the kitchen in his report to Rook and it had humiliated him to do it. He’d felt as if Rook could see every last fiber of desire that ran through his being. To his surprise, though, he hadn’t been reprimanded for it. Rook hadn’t seemed to think too much of it. They all knew that bodyguards who allowed themselves to be humans with their clients made better bodyguards. The relationship was a personal one, and they could do their jobs better if they got to know their clients.
But Cedric had kept his distance from Elena for the most part. Except for the afternoon that she’d read her articles aloud to him, answering his questions and peppering her original words with updated commentary on every topic. It was such a familiar position to be in with her. Wanting to be close to her, but holding her at arm�
��s length at the same time. He needed to keep a line between them. For his sanity and, more importantly, for her safety.
But there’d been something so deliciously high school about sitting at a desk with her. Her loose hairs tickling at him as she leaned forward to squint at the print. Him, desperately pretending that he wasn’t an oaf who could barely read. Her, all slender and gorgeous and bright as a firecracker.
Sigh.
Cedric knew that history apparently repeated itself; he just hadn’t anticipated it happening quite so literally.
He watched in the surveillance cameras as she padded down to the kitchen and back with her steaming cup of tea in her hands. He was just switching from the surveillance feed back to the movie he’d been watching when she surprised him by knocking on his door. He’d been expecting her to go right back into her room.
“Come in,” he called, setting his laptop on the double bed beside him and swinging his feet down to the floor. He grabbed his t-shirt off the desk chair and pulled it on as she quietly opened the door.
“Figured you’d be awake,” she said.
“On duty.”
“Right.”
She paused in the doorway, her socked feet crossed at the ankle and her oversized shirt flirting with her knees.
“Is everything all right?” he asked her, rising up and jamming his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants.
“Yup,” she said, her eyes swinging around and taking in his small room. He had another room downstairs in the building, where he actually slept. This was just where he did his night duty. But he suddenly felt strangely embarrassed by the impersonality of the room. Though he wasn’t in charge of the decor in here, the white walls and IKEA furniture seemed to be a personal commentary on his life.
“So,” she said, her eyes on the surveillance screens that lined one wall. “Do you get to relax when you’re on duty, or do you spend the whole night perving on me?”
His mouth dropped open, all the blood pricking away from his face. “I’m not perving on you. You know we don’t have cameras in your room or your bathroom. I’d never—”
“Just joking, Ced. I know you’re not getting your jollies in here.” She had a smile at the corners of her mouth, but she lifted her tea to drink before he could see the full smile bloom. “I guess I just wondered if this job is as boring as it looks.”
He cleared his throat, still flustered. “I find ways to pass the time.”
“So, as long as you know where I am, then you’re allowed to just hang out?” She put one foot forward, across the threshold of his room, as if she were toying with the idea of coming into the room.
“Pretty much,” he said, shrugging, his hands still in his pockets. He wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at. “Unless it’s during the day when I’m researching.”
She paused for a second, took a sip of tea and seemed to study the way her pink sock looked against the cement tile floor of his room. Then she shifted her weight and stepped into his room. “I could read more articles to you, if you wanted.”
Did she mean now? Cedric wasn’t sure his heart or his pride could handle that right now. “No! Ah. No, thanks, that’s okay. We can take a break from that.”
She hesitated, then seemed to make her mind up about something. She padded across his room and sat herself, crosslegged, on his bed, setting her tea on the nightstand. “You didn’t like it?”
Cedric looked around the room and pulled out the desk chair. He lowered himself down. “I loved it. You’re a lot nicer to listen to than Siri.”
“But you don’t want to do it again?” she asked, obviously fishing after the reason for his intense reaction.
“No, I’d do it again. It’s just, I— I guess it just makes me feel like I’m in high school again. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do that whole dance.”
“What dance?”
“Trying not to let people know just how bad my learning disorder is.” He was looking at his hands as he said it, slowly rubbing his palms together, but he lifted his gaze to gauge her reaction.
“I wondered,” she said carefully, her elbow on her knee and her chin balanced on her palm.
“Then or now?”
“Now.” She leaned back on her palms and studied the profile of that friendly face of his, his neat beard and flattish nose. “Back then I just thought you were lazy.”
He laughed, surprised at her candor. “Lazy?”
It was truly the first time anyone in his entire life had accused him of that.
“Well, you were always making me take all the notes and look up all the information for that project. I figured you were the same as all the other jocks, just trying to get me to do the bulk of the project.”
He smiled and shook his head at himself. “There was no way I would have told you the truth, so if I’d had a choice, I guess I still would have just gone along with the lazy story.”
“I definitely would have understood if you’d told me the truth!”
“No way,” he shook his head. “You were the last person I would have told about my learning disorder.”
“Me? Why?”
“Too pretty.”
The words popped out before he could stop them. He didn’t look at her reaction. He didn’t look at her at all. Instead his gaze dropped right back to his hands, rubbing them together. “Uh, I mean that I definitely didn’t want any girl to know what a dumbass I was.” There. Hopefully that made sense and didn’t completely reveal the hopeless crush he’d nursed for years. When he finally looked back up at her she had a little half-smile on her face. Her oversized shirt swallowed her up as she sat crosslegged on the bed. Just her little, golden knees popped out. Her dark hair was tangled and loose, shadows loved her face.
“I hope you don’t think having a learning disability makes you a dumbass,” she said eventually. “And I’m sure you’ve realized by now that girls love a complicated hero.”
He laughed and scraped a palm over the back of his neck, leaning forward and placing his hands onto his knees. “Right.”
“So, we’re not going to read together apparently. What were you doing in here before I knocked?”
“I was watching a movie.”
“Which movie?”
He nodded his head toward the laptop that sat on one end of the bed and then tried not to swallow his tongue when she stretched herself out to grab it, the hem of her shirt working up her thighs. She put the sleeping laptop on her lap and he watched her face while she woke up the screen. Her face lit with blue light and with happiness. “I love this movie! I’m so glad you’re not watching the remake from a few years ago.”
“Honestly, I considered it. I still might. But I kind of have a thing for Mia Farrow, so I thought I’d start with the old version.”
Elena laughed. “Well, that works out well because I kind of have a thing for Robert Redford.”
Cedric nodded, a small smile on his face. That checked out. Elena was the kind of woman who ended up with a handsome leading man like Robert Redford. Of course her taste ran toward a kind of classic look.
She pressed play on the movie and settled back onto the headboard, the movie propped up so both of them could see it.
He was a little surprised. He hadn’t anticipated company this evening. And especially not her company. But she looked so small there on the bed, curled onto one side like a snail, her attention already on the movie quietly playing out of the laptop speakers.
He sighed.
He knew he should send her back to her room. He also knew he definitely wasn't going to send her back to her room.
Instead, he leaned forward and started the movie over from the beginning.
“We don’t have to start it over,” she protested, lifting her head from where it had been laying against her arm.
“It’s okay, Elena. Really.”
He leaned back in his desk chair and focused his attention on the movie, hoping she’d do the same. He couldn’t take a ton more of her eyes on
him.
When he looked up a few minutes later, he saw, with a pleased noise in the back of his throat, that her eyes were closed and her breaths were coming evenly.
He glanced at his watch. Asleep by 3:30 in the morning? That was definitely a record since she’d come to stay here.
He paused the movie and instead pulled his phone out of his pocket. He listened to an audiobook and let her sleep.
***
Elena woke up alone in Cedric’s bed. Well, she knew that it wasn’t actually his bed. It was the bed of whoever was on night duty. But as Cedric was the only one who was ever on night duty, it was kind of his bed.
She sat up and looked around the small room that was lit only by a lamp on the nightstand. The door was propped halfway open and the room was empty, the desk chair neatly slid into the desk and the laptop at perfect right angles on top of that.
She stretched her creaky muscles and realized that at some point she’d gotten under the covers and kicked her socks off. And, yup, there they were in a little pile on the side of the bed. She slid out of the bed and pulled her socks on, padding out to the hall and expecting to see Cedric waiting there. She figured that after she’d fallen asleep he’d gone to wait out in the hallway. She felt a little bad about spooking him out of his own space. But she saw, to her confusion, as she stepped into the hallway, that not only was it empty, but there was broad daylight pouring in through the windows from her room.
Cedric’s room was windowless, so it had been dim in there. She crossed to her bedroom and stared in disbelief at the clock on her nightstand. It was 10:18 am! She’d slept through breakfast and straight through the guard switch! Wow.
She slowly took stock of her body. She was a little stiff, and still tired. But it wasn’t the delirious, bone-deep fatigue that she was used to. She’d slept for seven-ish hours and she felt like it. She actually felt like a member of the human species.
***
That night, Elena bumped her tea-run up to 2:30 in the morning and was knocking on Cedric’s door at about 2:45. He paused the audiobook he was listening to and slid to standing as she opened his door.
Rook Security Complete Series Page 6