“We have a team at your apartment as we speak to set up cameras that will be monitored via the software I told you about on the phone.”
“The software David designed?” I smiled. “I know all about it. Ricki likes to brag about her fiancé.”
Ash inclined his head, a proud smile just making it to his eyes before he focused on business again. I found myself wondering what his story was. Ricki had told me that he’d lost his fiancée not long before his and David’s parents died, but she didn’t know many details. It was kind of romantic, thinking of this big, strong man remaining single by choice because he lost the woman he loved. I should make a note of it for the short story section of our website. Might be a good idea for the writers.
“Then I guess we have most of the business out of the way. If I could just get you to sign this paperwork,” Ash said, indicating an impressive stack in a file folder on his lap, “I can let you and Kirkland get to know each other.”
I again glanced at Kirkland, but there was something about him that made my brain just kind of fizzle. I don’t know what it was. His gorgeous, caramel-colored skin? His dark, carefully trimmed hair? His mostly green, but sort of gold, hazel eyes? He reminded me of an actor. Michael Ealy, maybe. Or that guy on that medical show…I don’t know. I don’t watch much television, and I don’t get out to the movies much. Maybe I need to.
I signed the paperwork and stood to shake Ash’s hand again. He smiled politely, then turned to Kirkland. There was some sort of silent exchange between them, but I had no clue what it was about, or if it was a good or bad thing.
When Ash was gone, Kirkland and I were left standing, my desk separating us, just staring at one another. He slid his hands into his pockets and rolled back on his heels.
“I guess all we need to talk about is your schedule.”
I shrugged. “Carrie keeps track of my meetings. I usually start the day a little after eight, stay until I’m done, usually between seven or eight, then head home. Nothing really unusual.”
“Do you mind if I get a copy of your schedule from Carrie?”
“No. That’s fine.”
“And your vehicle…?”
I tilted my head, as a question bounced on the end of my tongue. But I knew before I could ask the question what the answer was. He was here to protect me, after all.
“I have a little Buick down in the parking garage on the fourth level. If I have to go somewhere during the day—a lunch meeting or something—the company provides a car.”
“The company?”
I shrugged. “It looks good to show up in a fancier car sometimes.”
He nodded. “Gray Wolf provides an SUV to transport you back and forth to your house.”
“Why?”
“Your personal car makes it too easy for someone to track your comings and goings.”
“Oh.”
I sat back down, wanting to run my fingers through my hair, but trying to remember that I couldn’t because I’d taken the extra time to put it up this morning. Sometimes I picked the worst days to get creative.
“I realize that this feels like an invasion of your privacy and your personal freedom, but it will, hopefully, only last a few weeks. Ash has already contacted our liaison with the Los Angeles Police Department, and she’s checking into the threats you’ve gotten.”
I brushed a hand over my jaw. “Ricki mentioned you’d probably do that.”
It all seemed like too much fuss. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten death threats since starting Cumming’s Treasure, but Ricki freaked out when she saw one of the emails on my phone earlier in the week when we met for dinner. I had to admit, this one was creepier than any of the others were, and this person was more persistent than any of the others were. However, it still felt like overreacting to have all this going on, especially having this super-hot guy staying with me at my apartment.
What had I gotten myself into?
“Mabel?” Carrie called from the door. “They’re waiting for you in the conference room.”
“Oh, yeah,” I muttered, climbing to my feet again. “I have a meeting with one of our video distributors,” I said to Kirkland.
“Lead the way.”
I glanced at him, a little uneasy about having him watch me do my job. I’d never been observed doing my job, at least not since I became my own boss almost two years ago. Before that, of course there were supervisors, which is part of the reason I went in search of a profitable business I could run on my own. Who wants someone looking over his or her shoulder all the time? Especially for just a bit more than minimum wage.
I was able to stay on my feet as we walked down the hall. I have this habit of tripping over things other people manage to walk over without an issue. John Callum stood as we walked through the door, greeting me.
“Mabel, it’s always a pleasure.”
It was a lie he spoke every time he came here. John Callum was the kind of guy who gave pornography the sleazy reputation it’d had all these years. I didn’t like dealing with him, but he ran the biggest studio in the state. If a website wanted to sell videos, they had to deal with John Callum, and videos were our biggest seller.
“I’m so glad you could make it out today, John.”
“No problem.”
He gestured for me to take my seat so that he could the gentleman and tuck me in. What he was really doing was patronizing me. However, I let him get away with it because it made him easier to handle.
“I realize we have a month left on our contract,” I began, “but I was hoping we could go ahead and renegotiate the new one.”
“Of course,” John said, leaning back in his chair.
I rested my hands on the table and studied my fingers, trying to look as subservient as I could. I wanted a fifteen video deal. Fifteen full-length, original videos every month that I could advertise and sell on my website. That was up five from our last contract. However, I didn’t want to pay more. The trick was going to be in convincing John that it was all his idea.
And that would have been hard enough without Kirkland Parish leaning against the wall beside the door, watching the men sitting around the table as if they were all potential threats. I could feel the weight of his presence—even though I couldn’t see him, and it was making my thoughts do funny things. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
“The last deal we worked out was really a work of art.”
John smiled. “Of course it was. I was the author.”
“You were. And you’re brilliant.”
He sat back and smiled, his eyes moving to his companions as though he was saying, “Told you I was brilliant.”
“I’m sure you can help me hammer out something just as brilliant this time.”
John’s eyebrows rose. “We were thinking we’d leave things just the way they are. Maybe up the cost by fifteen percent because the cost of living has gone up in the past year. We have to pay our actors.”
“Of course. And everyone knows how generous you are.”
John’s smile was even wider this time.
“The thing is, we’d like fifteen films a month instead of ten.”
“We can do that.”
“And the kick back to you, as always, will be thirty percent.”
John’s assistant leaned close to him and whispered something in his ear.
“Isn’t that what you’re paying now?”
“Well, yes. But our users know your name, and most of them go from our website to yours, so you’re getting twice as much traffic as we are.”
“Yes, but…”
“We generate more business for your website than I can imagine most of your advertising budget can do. We make sure that your name is prominent on the pages where your movies appear. And, I suppose you know this as well, your movies are the hottest sellers on our website. If it weren’t for you…”
I let the words fall, my voice growing more and more demure as I spoke. It worked like a charm. John’s face lit up, as if he bought every wor
d I said. And he did. I could see that. But the truth was far different. His videos sold well on my website, but they weren’t the biggest seller. And we’d probably survive without him, if it had to come to that. The only reason we used him was because he was a God in this industry and the other, smaller distributors I preferred working with—and whose movies sold much better—wouldn’t work with me if I didn’t pay homage to the king. So this was how I did that.
“Well,” John said, brushing his assistant away from his ear, “we wouldn’t want to put you in a bind by demanding a bigger cut. What if we simply went up five percent?”
“Thirty-five percent on fifteen movies?” I pretended to think about it for a minute. “That would probably work.”
“Great. I’ll have my lawyer draw up the contract.”
We stood, and John kissed my cheek—which was annoying because the man smelled like spoiled pickles!—and he was gone.
“Good job,” Carrie said, barely containing the laughter. “He never sees you coming!”
I glanced at Kirkland. He was watching me, a new interest in his eyes.
“What’s next?”
We spent most of the afternoon in meetings. Kirkland never said more than two words, but he was incredibly polite. He held open doors and pulled out chairs, the silent gentleman. And charming. He had this smile that made my bones literally melt. I couldn’t stand when he looked at me a certain way. It was the strangest thing. No man had ever affected me quite the way he did.
“He’s a playboy,” Ricki told me when I called her during a bathroom break. The bathroom was the one room where Kirkland didn’t insist on following me. However, he waited out in the hall like a bored boyfriend waiting for his girl to finish trying on clothes in a department store. “You should hear the stories David tells me about what he’s seen on the cameras. They’re almost better than your short stories on your website.”
“He pulls out my chair and holds the door—”
“He’s a Southerner. They’re all born with chivalry in their DNA.”
“Where’s he from?”
“New Orleans.”
That surprised me a bit. He didn’t have any kind of accent, not even the slightest southern lilt. Not that I knew a lot about the South. I was born and raised in Oregon.
“Maybe he’ll be good for you,” Ricki said. “You know what they say about men with experience…”
I blushed. “Is that why you pushed me to call Gray Wolf?”
“No. David actually tried to have one of the other people assigned to you, but everyone else was busy.”
“So I got the bottom of the barrel?”
“Kirkland’s good at what he does. You’re in good hands. David was just trying to protect your virtue.”
“Well, tell David I appreciate the thought, but I have a daddy to do that.”
“You’re my friend. That makes you his friend, and David takes good care of his friends.”
I’d only met David once or twice. Ricki and I…we had been the kind of friends who would talk over text messages from time to time, the kind that would maybe meet for lunch once or twice a year. And then last summer, she just called me out of the blue and asked if I’d have dinner with her. We talked about everything but what she really wanted me there for. She had lost a good friend, and David was not in her life at the time because of some argument they had over his keeping secrets from her. And she’d just sold her company. She openly admitted that she felt like I was the only one she could turn to because all her other friends were gone. And I…it’s kind of hard to explain to female friends what you do for a living when you run a pornographic website. So, my dance card wasn’t that full, either.
And now…it felt like we’d known each other forever.
“I appreciate all of this, Ricki,” I said. “But I don’t know what I’m going to do when it’s time to go home. I mean, you’ve seen my apartment. It’s not that big. The two of us are going to be tripping over each other.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“You should have warned me he’d be sleeping at my place.”
“If I had, you wouldn’t have called.”
“True.”
“And I wanted you to call. I’m worried about those emails, Mabel.”
“I know. And I appreciate it. It just feels like all of this is so over the top.”
“It’s not to me. Whatever it takes to keep you safe. You and David are my family now.”
I smiled. I liked that idea. “Thanks.”
“Go back to work. And be nice to Kirkland. Maybe he’ll be nice to you.”
I groaned as I hung up to the sound of her laughter.
Kirkland was leaning casually against the wall when I stepped out of the restroom.
“Everything okay?”
I glanced at him, wondering if he thought I was sick or something.
“Fine.”
He smiled, this crooked smile that made his eyes sparkle. Then he waved his hand, telling me to lead the way to our next stop. I was still so lost in that sparkle that I wasn’t sure where I was going.
Not to mention the fact that I was utterly exhausted. I’d been up half the night, worrying about a new video program we’d started. Legal kept assuring me that putting up videos by amateurs was completely legal, as long as we had a contract signed by the owner of the original video and all participants, but we sometimes got comments under the videos where people would claim they didn’t give permission. That bothered me. How did we know when someone forged a signature? We did the best we could, checking each one out and—according to legal—we were dotting all the right i’s and crossing all the right t’s. But it didn’t feel right. Yet, in the five months we’d offered the amateur videos, they’d become one of our top pay services. I couldn’t turn my back on that. But …sometimes legal and moral weren’t the same thing. That was a lesson I was learning over and over again with this job.
I could feel Kirkland growing impatient behind me. I realized we were still standing in front of the ladies’ room. I took a deep breath and led the way down the corridor to my office.
“I just have some things to finish up before we leave for the day.”
“No problem.”
I wanted to ask if he had a suitcase. Or what he thought he was going to eat at my place. I couldn’t remember if there was any food in the refrigerator. The last time I went grocery shopping was longer ago than I cared to remember. I usually ate my desk or went out with Ricki. Cooking had never really been my forte.
I sat behind my desk and woke my computer, immediately overwhelmed by the number of emails that had come in over the four hours since I’d last checked. Kirkland made himself comfortable on the couch with a magazine as I dug in, reading requests for more money in the legal budget, a problem with a movie we’d been hoping to put up for distribution tomorrow morning, an issue with the servers…it never seemed to end.
When I was done with my emails, I looked over a couple of contracts that had been sitting on my desk for nearly a week. They probably could have waited another week, but there didn’t seem to be any rush to head to my apartment. But then I ran out of things to do, so I began to reorganize the files in my desk drawer.
Kirkland, much to his credit, never said a word. He didn’t disturb me to complain about how long I was taking, never asked if we were going to eat sometime soon, never even mentioned that the selection of magazines on the coffee table were old and boring.
He was incredibly patient. I found myself wondering what he was thinking.
I finally stood and grabbed the leather backpack that I carried as a briefcase. Kirkland stood when I did, as though he could read my mind.
“Ready?”
I nodded.
Once again, he gestured for me to lead the way. It made me nervous to have him walking behind me through the hallways of my office building. I should feel confident walking here, but I didn’t. Not even when there wasn’t a hot guy following me around. It still didn’t feel real. Two y
ears ago, I was fresh out of college, working as a programmer for a small technology company. My boss was a real ass, always picking apart my work and then claiming it as his own. I think I lost out on at least two patents in the short time I worked there. I was desperate to find something better and, somehow, I stumbled on Cumming’s Treasure. How it happened, I still don’t know. And the fact that what started as a small, one-person operation had grown into a business that employed over seventy people and offered contracts to another hundred freelancers was just mindboggling to me.
To realize that I was in a position to require a bodyguard who looked like Kirkland knocked me off my feet. Literally. I tripped over the perfectly flat, perfectly smooth carpet halfway to the elevator.
Kirkland’s arm came around my waist just as I was about to hit the floor. He pulled me back, holding me tight against the length of his body for a long moment. His scent surrounded me, a lovely cologne that was a mixture of sandalwood and lavender, along with something a little musky. And the warmth of his arm under his suit jacket was incredibly delicious.
“I’ve got you,” he said softly near my ear.
Oh, my God!
I thought I was going to melt into this puddle of nothing at his feet.
He let me go, but he stayed closer to me, walking more at my side than behind me. It was good, too, because I tripped again as we got onto the elevator, and he was there to grab my arm and keep me from slamming my forehead into the thin, metal strip placed at waist level for nervous passengers to hold onto.
We didn’t speak all the way down to the main lobby. He led the way outside, stepping out and looking around in a quick, subtle gesture that reminded me why he was here. An SUV sat at the curb. He pulled keys out of his pocket and opened the passenger side door for me.
“Thank you.”
He made a little gesture with his hand that made me smile. It reminded me of something one of my brothers used to do whenever he thought he’d been especially gallant. I’d almost forgotten about it until just then.
Kirkland jumped into the SUV and started it up, pulling into traffic with the grace of a racecar driver. I waited for him to ask where we were headed, but then realized he probably knew my address better than I did. I wondered what all he knew about me. Ricki said Gray Wolf was very thorough, but that David ran most of the background checks so if there was anything embarrassing that might come up, she’d make sure that David didn’t share it with anyone else. The only embarrassing thing in my past, however, was the fact that I was a twenty-three-year-old virgin. But I didn’t think that would come up on any background check.
KIRKLAND: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) Page 3