by April Lust
I winced at the mention of Renee as a little girl. My feelings for her were in no way feelings that belonged to a little girl—and she definitely wasn’t one. Her full breasts and the curves of her hips, that rounded ass…no, definitely not a little girl.
“Anyway, he did some backtracking for me using the post date. The address is downtown.”
I was genuinely pleased to hear they’d found something at least. It wasn’t a silver bullet, they didn’t have the guy in hand—or in the ground—right in that moment, but at least they had something to go on.
We were one step closer to making Renee honestly safe.
“Alright, you sending someone?” I asked next, wondering who he’d send down to the address. Darren maybe? I didn’t think it was really something he was going to stand a chance at being good at, but at least he was a loyal guy. I just worried he wasn’t smart enough to do the job right. And this job was important damnit.
There was a pause. “Yes.”
“Who?”
“You.”
And it was my turn to pause. Me? I glanced over at Renee, whose attention had been pulled by whatever was bothering her to me. She was watching me like a hawk with those wide eyes of hers sharp as a pin, narrowed in on me. I could tell that she wasn’t just watching me, but looking at me, too. I always felt like she was looking me over, fixating on pieces of my body that she liked—or wanted to see more of.
“I really don’t feel comfortable leaving Renee alone,” I said finally, and that definitely got her attention.
Her eyes shot up, her eyebrows raised in surprise, and she got up from the couch all at once. She stalked over to me like a predator, like she wasn’t temptation incarnate, daring me to reach out and touch her, to fondle her and slip into her.
“No,” she told me.
I didn’t think Ryder had heard her because he was talking in my other ear. “I’ll send someone else over there for a while, just while you’re checking the place out.”
“I thought you said there was no one else to send,” I reminded him. My mind flashed to Jason and I realized I was very close to telling my boss to fuck off if he suggested that asshole to stop by. Jason was the kind of man I was protecting Renee from.
Ryder made an annoyed, impatient sound. “It’s temporary and Renee can stay at the house while you’re gone.”
Renee had her arms folded just beneath her chest, drawing my eyes down to her lovely bosom and making me wish I could just hang up the damn phone already. There were such better things that we could be doing right now.
Focus, I reminded myself.
“I don’t want anyone else,” Renee informed me, but Ryder was talking at the same time.
“I’ll send Darren. He’s loyal and a good kid. A little dumb, but he doesn’t have to be there for long.”
“Look, I really don’t think—”
But I was cut off when Renee snatched the phone out of my hands and threw it down on the table. She must have hit the speaker button as she did so because I could hear the sound of the shop coming through behind Ryder.
She rounded on me. “I don’t want a different bodyguard,” she informed me fiercely, surprising me by how adamant she was being.
And while I’d been arguing with Ryder against it, I’d also understood that I was about to give in. I happened to agree with Ryder about Darren, so while I wouldn’t want him permanently protecting Renee—I didn’t want anyone doing that but me—I knew that I could trust him for a couple of hours while I dealt with this address thing. Because as I’d thought about it, I’d realized that I didn’t want anyone else going there either. Yes, I wanted to stay and protect Renee, but if I could catch this bastard today, I wanted to be the one to do it. I wanted to kick his ass until it hurt. Until he was nothing left but a bloody, mushy bag of bones. If he was there, I wanted to be the one to stop him.
I needed to make sure that Renee was safe—both for the here and now and permanently.
“It’s only temporary,” I said to Renee. “I need to check this lead out and—”
She waved her hand at me in annoyance. “Why can’t someone else do that and you keep protecting me?”
“Look, I have to go and do this, okay? It’s a big deal. This could be what we need to catch this stalker and—”
“I don’t care!” she shouted, surprising me and apparently herself, too. She looked startled by her own outburst, but not enough to take it back. She stepped closer to me so that I could feel the heat of her body radiating out towards me, calling for me, begging me to close the small gap left between us and make her mind. In a small voice that was just barely audible, she said, “I want you here. With me.”
And there was both desire in her voice as well as a vulnerable need that didn’t have anything to do with the dirty things I found myself needing from her.
I swallowed and was about to answer when a loud laugh came through the phone, startling us both. We jumped back at the same time as though we’d both been struck by a cattle prod at the same time. It was Ryder’s voice that was laughing and I realized that he’d been on the phone the whole time.
I was relieved when it became clear that Ryder hadn’t caught much of what she’d said to me. About how she wanted me here. He didn’t hear the tenderness in her voice.
“Really, Renee?” he said between laughter. “Originally, you didn’t want Saber, remember? I’m sure you’ll come around to Darren, too.”
Renee shot the phone a murderous glare, then said, “That’s different.” When she looked at me, I thought it would be some form of that same furious glare, but instead it was a look that smoldered and burned like blue fire. It was searing, branding me until I felt as though I belonged to her.
“Yeah, well, different or not, those are my orders. Stop being a brat and deal with it.”
And then he hung up.
Renee was furious with him, and after begging me one last time to stay, she stormed away upstairs to her room. I waited just long enough to make sure that Darren was here—and to be clear with Renee that she was not to leave the house until I got back—then I hopped on my motorcycle and headed to the address Ryder had given me.
When I got there, I found that it was in an apartment complex. I asked for a tour under the premise of being a would-be renter. That got me into the complex and I got a quick tour. Just as the tour ended, the lady received a call and had to disappear, giving me the perfect opportunity to look around the gated apartments without any questions. I found the building number, then went to the third floor where I found the apartment.
I tried knocking several times, but no one answered. Frowning, I wondered at the wisdom of going further.
Checking the stairwells for anyone coming, I quickly decided to see if I couldn’t get into the apartment. It was a lost cause if the deadbolt was locked, but I tried it anyway. Kneeling down, I pulled out my lock picks—I had a set, just in case—and went to work. When I finally heard the click I was looking for, I held my breath as I tried the door.
It swung open with ease and I was relieved that whoever lived here was a big enough idiot that they didn’t use the deadbolt.
As soon as I entered the apartment, I noted two things: it was full of newspapers and it smelled slightly. The smell was stale, the kind of smell you got from a place that hasn’t been aired out in a long time—or hasn’t been lived in. And as I looked at the papers, I realized that they weren’t all newspapers. Some of them were magazines, some were online printouts. But they all had something in common. They were articles featuring Renee and the pictures had been cut out.
I clenched my jaw tightly, grounding my teeth. This was definitely the guy.
I spent the next two hours going over the place with a fine toothed comb, searching for anything that might lead me to the stalker. But I didn’t find anything of his there. As I searched through papers, going through drawers and desks and filing cabinets, all I found indicated that an older woman lived there, not a young man as I anticipated.
I took it with me and headed to Ryder’s to drop it off. Then I went back to Renee, finding myself impatient with the need to see her again.
Chapter Eleven
Renee
Grudgingly, I had to admit that I didn’t mind Darren. He was a good-looking young man with a good heart, though I doubted he was ever accused of being the smartest in the bunch. He was of average height for a guy with broad shoulders and a wiry frame that made him look kind of gangly. If he’d had Saber’s height and that build, he might have looked sort of funny. His sandy brown hair wasn’t a particularly flattering color—I thought it looked like dishwater blonde—but his eyes were pretty. He’d stuttered through our introduction and asked for an autograph before he could catch himself. Still, he kept things light and kind of lazy, and in the end, I didn’t even throw a fit about being sequestered in my home until Saber got back.
I wasn’t thrilled, but it wasn’t as bad as I had anticipated. It helped that Darren liked to play cards.
“You may like to play cards,” I teased poor Darren as we continued with our hundredth game of poker, “but you’re not very good at it.”
“I’ve got this one, really!” he answered me, a determined look on his face that made him look like a five-year-old trying to figure out how a car worked.
I smiled at him sweetly, knowing that he didn’t stand a chance. I’d had lousy hands the last six times and had managed to out bluff him every time, but this time I had a real winner. Full house, kings and tens, and I knew the poor boy wouldn’t be able to beat that. It almost made him feel sorry for him and I might have taken it easy if we weren’t playing with sticks of sugar free gum instead of real money. As it was, I intended to walk away from this table with several packages of that awful minty sugar free goodness.
Just as I was about to annihilate him—again—the door opened and Saber walked in. I was sitting in the right spot to catch sight of him first and I found my breath catching as I did so. It was silly, ridiculous even, to find my heart thumping wildly in my chest all of a sudden at the mere sight of him, but it did. I’d already seen him in that heather gray shirt and those dark jeans, but it still sent a shiver of need through me.
Darren was laying out his cards as Saber approached us, his eyes locking onto mind and burning a hole straight through me, searing into my flesh until I thought I might explode. When he spoke finally, his voice shredded through me, leaving me raw and exposed in its wake, needy and breathless. “You’re relieved, Darren.” His eyes never left me.
Startled by his sudden reappearance, Darren shot up from the table, jostling it so that some of the gum slid over the side and onto the floor. “Saber! When did you get back? We weren’t doing anything.”
I actually laughed at the guilty sound of Darren’s voice.
Saber’s eyebrows rose skeptically. “I can see that. What have you been playing?”
Darren’s shoulders slumped as he mumbled, “Poker. And whatever you do, don’t trust her.” He pointed an accusing finger at me. “’Cause she’s got one hell of a poker face.”
I grinned wickedly at his words, wondering if I couldn’t get Saber to play a little poker with me. Maybe with higher stakes. A little strip poker never hurt anyone after all.
Before I could say anything suggestive, Saber let out a laugh. “Well, she is an actress you know.”
Darren ruffled his dirty blonde hair sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders. “Yeah, good point. Guess I should have remembered that.”
Saber nodded. “Next time.”
Darren agreed. They spoke for a little bit as I cleaned up the playing cards. I’d pretty much dismissed the idea of strip poker because I’d come to know Saber well enough to know that, although I was fairly certain he’d want to play, I was starting to realize that he was trying not to act on those wants.
Which means I’ll have to think up something else to tempt him with, whispered a voice in my head that could have been the little devil on my shoulder. If I believed in such things.
They continued to go over things—in hushed tones, the bastards, so that I couldn’t hear what was going on—and I had just packed up the cards when the phone rang. I froze. It’s probably my agent. Or Ryder. Or…but I didn’t have any more or’s, because by this time, I’d realized that the ring tone was the one I used for unsolicited calls or numbers I didn’t recognize. It meant that whoever was calling me wasn’t someone I knew.
And honestly, I didn’t give my phone number out to a lot of people to begin with so the list of people it could have been was pretty damn short to start off with.
I must have been staring at the phone for too long because Saber and Darren had stopped talking. Now, Saber was looking at me instead with a little frown beginning on his full, pouty lips. His eyes darted to the phone and I tensed, then reacted before I even had the chance to think about what I was doing. I sprang up from the table and rushed towards the phone, bowling over one of the chairs as I did so. Just as I reached for the receiver, Saber snatched it up out of my grasp.
With horror shining in my eyes, I watched as he put it to his ear and said simply, “Hello?”
It could be someone else, I told myself silently, a prayer more than anything else. It could be someone else, a fan who got ahold of my leaked number. Someone who was calling for the last owner of the number. A wrong number!
But even as I tried to calm myself with these unlikely possibilities, I could tell by the features on Saber’s face that I wasn’t so lucky. I watched as his eyebrows went low, forming a thick line over each eye. The line of his mouth grew hard and grim. His eyes were sharp, like daggers looking for a target. And his hand gripped the phone so hard that I thought it might break from the force. I silently prayed that it would.
A moment later, with forced calmness, Saber put the phone back in its cradle. Then he turned his dark eyes to me. I flinched at the look shining in them.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded in a low voice, and I could see that Darren off to the side looked a little panicked, too, his eyes wide and scared.
I tried to be calm, forcing a smile to my face, glancing between the two larger men. “What did they say?” I asked, hoping that it was all a misunderstanding, even though I was far past the point of believing that anymore.
“‘Stay out of it.’ Any idea what that might mean?”
I shuddered. Had my stalker known that Saber would pick up? No, don’t be ridiculous! Saber barely got to the phone before me! I admonished silently. But it didn’t do anything to ease the feeling inside of me. Saber wasn’t the only person to have ever picked up the phone and gotten my stalker. But he was the only one my stalker had actually spoken to.
I didn’t think that was a good thing.
The stinging in my eyes began, though I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to be weak right now—hadn’t I don’t that enough lately? And especially in front of Saber. But I couldn’t help it. I kept calm even when the tears started to roll down my cheeks and my voice was level as I finally came out with the truth.
“I don’t know for sure,” I began in a detached voice. “But I think he’s the same one who wrote the letters.”
Saber let out a vicious curse, then grabbed my phone up off its cradle again. Saber easily chucked my phone to Darren, who scrambled to catch it, surprised by…well, everything I was pretty sure. The poor thing didn’t look like he had any idea about what to do. He hot potatoed the damn thing for a full thirty seconds before getting a good hold of it.
“Get it to Ryder. See if they can trace the last incoming call.” When Darren just stared at him a little dumbfounded, still a little scared, Sab
er snapped, “Now!”
“Right!”
Darren turned and hurried out the door, leaving it open as he raced to his motorcycle—which he’d forgotten was parked underground, so he actually had to come back in and hurry downstairs to get to it because he didn’t know how to open the garage on his own.
I would have felt bad for him under normal circumstances, but right then I was too scared—of my stalker and of how mad Saber was.
When we heard the rumbling of Darren’s motorcycle, Saber stalked over to me in two strides, stopping barely a hairsbreadth away from me. “What the fuck, Renee?”
In a voice that I cursed for being so small, I said simply, “I’m sorry.”