Protection for Hire

by Camy Tang

  “I always wanted skinny wrists,” Elizabeth said. “I thought I looked so disproportional.”

  Tessa eyed Elizabeth’s hourglass figure. “Come again?”

  “Look at them.” She thrust her graceful hands out. “I have wrists like tree trunks. What’s the point of suffering through a personal trainer to keep your figure when you can’t do a thing about your man hands?”

  Tessa stifled a giggle. “Most men aren’t as shallow as the guys on Seinfeld.”

  “But I’m that shallow.” Elizabeth winked. “Now you look better. Too bad we don’t have a cute scarf we can give you to lighten that outfit.”

  “But I don’t look like a bodyguard.”

  “You’re only sort of my bodyguard. Until I pay you, you’re my friend. So you may as well look the part.”

  An unfamiliar feeling washed over Tessa, something warm and liquid, pleasant but strange.

  “What’s wrong?” Elizabeth asked.

  Tessa shook her head. “It’s nothing.” Plain silly was what it was.

  Elizabeth gave her a stern look. “It’s not nothing.”

  “I just … I realized I have never really been friends with a girl before.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes opened almost as wide as her mouth. “What?”

  “I’ve always been a tomboy. I got along better with my male cousins, and I’ve never gotten along with Alicia, who always criticized me. The girly-girls at school thought I was strange because I liked playing sports and being outdoors all the time, and the other tomboys didn’t like how I always said what I thought. I definitely flunked tact in the school of life.”

  “Your male cousins — were they all, you know … mobsters?”

  “Most of them are yakuza.”

  “They just let you hang out with them?”

  “My uncle was their oyabun, their boss, and so they didn’t mess with me because of him. But they treated me like a younger sister, and I felt like I belonged.”

  “Bless your heart,” Elizabeth said, reaching out to take Tessa’s hand.

  “Hey, I may be from California, but I heard that in the South, that’s an insult,” Tessa said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “Honey, if I wanted to insult you, I’d make sure you knew it.” But Elizabeth squeezed her hand.

  How odd it felt, to have this woman to talk to.

  “Daniel’s with the other children,” Elizabeth said, “so it’ll be just the two of us meeting with my lawyer.” But she cast a worried look at the back door of the living area, toward the rooms where the children were playing together.

  “Think of this as a girls’ day out,” Tessa said as she steered her toward the side exit.

  “I feel guilty.” Elizabeth wrapped a scarf around her head and put on a pair of borrowed sunglasses. The effect partially masked the bruise on her face. “Poor Daniel hasn’t left the shelter since we came, but I’m going out for coffee.”

  “You haven’t left the shelter since you came either, and it’s not coffee — it’s a meeting with your lawyer that happens to be at a coffee shop.”

  Tessa hustled Elizabeth into the 1981 Toyota Corolla parked in the alley next door to the shelter and after babying it through a rough engine start, they headed out toward Market Street.

  “Did you buy a car?” Elizabeth asked.

  “I borrowed this from my cousin Ichiro.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “He didn’t need much persuading. This is an extra car he has, it used to belong to his dad.” When her uncle was in college.

  They parked in the parking garage, and on their way to the coffee shop, Tessa kept a close eye on the cars driving past them and the people walking around them. Elizabeth seemed to be enjoying the brisk November air but cast occasional nervous glances when a man in a business suit came into view. Tessa studied him too, but he didn’t even glance their way — two women out for coffee on a cloudy fall morning.

  The coffee shop was only halfway full, so they ordered — Tessa paid with some cash she had borrowed from her mom — and got a seat in a corner near the back.

  “I don’t know why I’m so nervous,” Elizabeth said. “Heath doesn’t know I went to the shelter. He can’t have known we’d be here today. And I don’t have his son with me either.”

  “He might have somehow discovered you went to the shelter,” Tessa said, staring hard at a gray Nissan Sentra that passed by the shop. Had she seen that car behind them on the way here? “And even though Daniel isn’t with you, he can still grab you to make you take him to his son or tell him where he is.”

  “I feel so paranoid. If I went to the police talking like this, they’d say I was neurotic.”

  Tessa was the last person to want to become BFFs with a policeman, but even she thought Elizabeth should have gone there when Heath hit Daniel.

  “I think that’s him.” Elizabeth sat up straighter as a tall man in a sharp suit entered the coffee shop, looking around. “I remember his curly hair from when we played together as kids.”

  “No way!” Tessa said.

  “What? What’d I do wrong?”

  “I mean, I can’t believe it. It’s the dishy rock climber from OWA.”

  “You’ve met him before?”

  Dishy Climber met Elizabeth’s eyes and smiled, and an unseen choir from Hair sang out, “Leeeeet the sun shine in!” in the tiny shop.

  Then Dishy Climber saw Tessa sitting next to Elizabeth, and the smile morphed into horror.

  First a cold, lonely chill squeezed her heart, then fire engulfed her limbs. What was up with that? It wasn’t like she’d been the one to fall on him.

  Dishy Climber trudged toward them and sat at the table next to Elizabeth, and across from Tessa. “Elizabeth? I’m Charles. Vivian Britton is my mama.”

  They shook hands. “This is my bodyguard, Tess —”

  “She’s your bodyguard?” He eyed Tessa like she was yagijiru, goats’ innards soup, and his nostrils flared as if she smelled like it too.

  She discreetly tried to sniff her armpits.

  “She’s much tougher than she looks,” Elizabeth said. “She knows Tie-Kwayan-Do and Gee-you Jeets-you.”

  Tessa winced as Elizabeth’s accent decimated her favorite martial arts.

  Dishy — er, Charles, however, only frowned more. “She’s an ex-convict, and she’s involved in the Japanese mafia.”

  The words were like the Hiroshima bomb dropped on the table. Tessa and Elizabeth had been stunned speechless.

  Then they both spoke at once.

  “I know exactly what she is, and she’s been nicer to me than —”

  “I am not involved in the yakuza anymore, and who are you to —”

  “Sure you’re not involved with the yakuza,” Charles said, “what with your uncle being head boss in San Francisco.”

  “If there’s one thing my uncle did, it was never judging me before hearing my side of the story,” Tessa shot back.

  A spasm crossed Charles’s (rather muscular) throat.

  Tessa glared at him. “Besides which, I never tried to kill someone by flattening them like a pancake.”

  “My brother dropped me —”

  “You’re the one who fell.”

  “What in the world did you do to her, Charles?” Elizabeth demanded.

  He looked decidedly harassed. “It was an accident.”

  “Then a gentleman apologizes to a lady rather than accusing her of illegal doings.” Elizabeth’s voice could have sliced his head off.

  His mouth worked as if he’d eaten something nasty and was trying not to spit it out. Then he grunted, “Again, I’m sorry for falling on you. I hope you’re okay.”

  She noticed he didn’t apologize for wrongfully accusing her, but Elizabeth said, “See, now we’re all friends. Tessa’s going to protect me from my husband, and Charles is going to get me my money back.”

  Talk about dropping a bomb. A nuclear bomb.

  Years of debate in high school, top marks at Tulane, and y
ears of experience in a courtroom, and he couldn’t keep his gigantic mouth shut about Tessa Lancaster, right in front of her?

  What was it about her that set his back up? He’d seen her sitting next to Elizabeth — whom he’d recognized right away, despite the purple bruise over her eye — and been stunned to see a gorgeous woman with her light brown hair curling around her shoulders, glowing in the soft light from a nearby wall sconce. She was looking at him with a sparkle in her eyes and a slight smile on her lips.

  But as soon as he realized who she was, her smile faded, and the light in the room dimmed.

  He hadn’t been able to shake off his jitters — or stop looking at her — except by making some cross remarks.

  She glared at him now, noting his non-apology. Something deep inside him had to feed her animosity, to remind himself of who she was.

  Man, he wanted to kiss her.

  Dork. He had to focus. “Elizabeth, tell me what happened.”

  She looked down at her coffee cup and swallowed hard. “You know how my family didn’t want me to marry Heath?”

  He nodded.

  “It was mostly the St. Amants — my daddy’s family. They wanted me to marry some idiot with more land than brains. So when I eloped, they cut me off. I didn’t really care because I had my inheritance from my maternal grandmother, and Heath had plenty of money too.”

  “What does he do?” Charles asked.

  “He works for a private equity firm, Stillwater Group. They’ve been very successful in the past few years, making investment deals with very wealthy clients. He said they were getting twenty percent returns every year.”

  Charles knew that those types of firms didn’t need to register with the SEC and were largely unregulated. They worked with the ultra rich. Even if Heath were a minor fish in that pond, he probably made at least twice more than Elizabeth’s inheritance.

  “We were so happy the first few months,” Elizabeth said sadly. “He was so romantic — showing up unexpectedly with roses, or to take me out to dinner. He was so gentlemanlike — he never complained about holding my purse or opening my door for me. He loved telling me what clothes looked good on me, and always told me how beautiful I was. He praised me to his friends all the time, talking about how I was such a good hostess, I made people feel welcome, I helped him do his job … although in private he would sometimes tell me if I had said something that might have sounded ignorant to his colleagues.”

  Tessa’s brow lowered at this innocuous list of actions. Her reaction confirmed Charles’s own gut instinct, that the man sounded controlling rather than romantic.

  “But then, he started criticizing me more and more,” Elizabeth said. “He would get suspicious if I went to the ladies’ room for too long, and if I went out with my girlfriends, he’d ask if I met anyone interesting — as if I’d had some secret assignation. It got so bad that I stopped going out to lunch with friends. That seemed to make him happy for a while.”

  Her home sounded like a gilded cage.

  “But he began getting angry with me all the time over stupid things. He’d physically hurt me — at first it was just grabbing me too hard, but he always apologized so much afterward until I forgave him. And then he started hitting me.”

  Under the edge of the table, Charles’s hand clenched hard. His entire arm trembled with the tension in his muscles. Relax. He had to relax. He had to get a hold of himself.

  Tessa reached out to touch Elizabeth’s hand, and pain was written in her expression. Seven years ago, she hadn’t shown any emotion in her eyes. She’d heard her sentence from the judge with a face like a stone statue.

  This change, this foreign Tessa Lancaster, unnerved him.

  “Heath said it was always my fault, that I had made him do it. I believed him for a time. And then after a while, I just didn’t feel anything. His emotions became the only thing I felt.” Elizabeth’s eyes had become dull like black stones, but now he saw a spark. “Until he hit Daniel.”

  A sickening jolt went through him.

  “It wasn’t hard — an irritable backhanded thing like swatting a fly. But I saw my little boy on the carpet crying, and it just shook me up. Like I’d been sleeping and I woke up.”

  “How old is he?” Charles asked. His throat was tight and his voice came out sounding a little strangled.

  “Three years old.”

  Heath had hit a boy who had just begun to walk.

  “That’s when you ran?” Tessa asked.

  “I packed up and went to a small hotel near Union Street. I used a different name, but Heath found me that night. I took off with Daniel and just the clothes on our backs.”

  A woman alone with a three-year-old boy at night in San Francisco. She was lucky she hadn’t encountered someone even more dangerous than her husband.

  “A homeless man saw me on the street and was saying some strange things, so at first I ran away from him because I was so scared. But then he said he wouldn’t hurt us, he only wanted to lead us to someplace safe. He … he must have seen the bruise on my face.”

  It covered almost the entire left side of her face, making her cheekbone puffy. The scarf she wore around her head hid some of it, and he had noticed her sunglasses on the table, which probably helped too.

  “He started walking, and he kept looking back over his shoulder at us. He wasn’t making much sense, but he wouldn’t leave us alone until we started following a few feet behind him. He led me to Wings.”

  “Wings domestic abuse shelter?” He donated money to that shelter anonymously every month. His legal secretary, Abby, had told him about it.

  “That’s where I met Tessa.”

  “You did?” He had been successful in avoiding looking at her, but he turned to her now. A member of the yakuza at a shelter for abused women and children?

  His disbelief must have shown on his face, because Tessa grudgingly answered, “My cellmate Evangeline got out a few months before I did and ended up there one night because of her abusive boyfriend. After she got away from him, she started volunteering there. When I got out, she told me about Wings and I started volunteering there too.”

  “Why?” he blurted out.

  Tessa’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, why?”

  The martial gleam in Tessa’s eyes made him back off. He didn’t want to cause an even bigger scene than what he’d already done. Be cool and professional, Charles. Stop acting like a Neanderthal.

  “Tessa’s doing me a huge favor,” Elizabeth said. “She’s agreed to be my bodyguard, but she won’t be paid until I can get my money back.”

  “Did you put it into a joint account with Heath?”

  She slowly nodded. “He froze my account. I’m penniless.”

  “You’re not penniless. California law entitles you to your inheritance plus half of everything the two of you made while you were together, and if he’s making as much as he said he is, you might come out of the marriage with more than you brought into it.”

  “But I still need to get that money.”

  “I’ll start the paperwork for you,” Charles said. “It shouldn’t be hard to get him to give you what’s rightfully yours.”

  But Elizabeth was shaking her head. “He doesn’t want this. He’ll fight you. He’ll try to come after me.”

  “We’ll get a restraining order on him.”

  “That won’t help. He doesn’t just want his son. He wants to kill me.”

  The words seemed a bit hysterical. Sure, Heath beat her up, but the majority of abusers Charles saw weren’t murderers. It was a pretty big leap from one to the other, and they didn’t often cross it voluntarily. He glanced at Tessa, who also seemed confused. “Well …” He cleared his throat. “You have Tessa to protect you. If he comes near you, just call the police —”

  “No. They’ll call child services to take Daniel away from me, or worse, they’ll give him to Heath, because who looks like the better parent — the friendly, responsible businessman or the unemployed, homeless Southe
rn belle?”

  “Elizabeth, the police will know you’re in need —”

  “No, I won’t trust the police ever again,” she replied viciously.

  Her tone surprised Charles. From Tessa’s raised eyebrows, it surprised her too.

  “A neighbor called the police once,” Elizabeth said tightly. “Heath charmed the two officers. He even charmed the neighbor who called it in. Then he beat me and I … I miscarried.”

  The rage built up in him, like a dust devil in his gut. Heath had killed that child.

  “I hate the police,” Elizabeth bit out. “I won’t lose another child because of them.”

  There was a long moment of silence. He understood her anger at the police, although he knew officers who were honorable. “Can’t you go home?” Charles asked. He’d be more than happy to help her move back to Louisiana.

  Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. “When I first came to Wings, I called my daddy, but he wouldn’t even talk to me, wouldn’t call me back. I tried my daddy’s sister and brother — the entire St. Amant family wouldn’t help me. My uncle told me that I’d made my bed and I had to lie in it.”

  The coldness and cruelty made him press his lips together. He’d known families like hers, though — stubborn, proud, and unfeeling.

  “That’s why I called your mama. My mama’s family is gone, but your maternal grandma was such good friends with mine …”

  He couldn’t imagine a family turning its back on a daughter. It was almost worse than what Heath had done to her. “We’ll help you with this,” Charles told her. “Consider us your family now.”

  The words made the tears fall faster. “Thank you so much.”

  A few people in the coffee shop glanced their way, then turned aside and ignored her. Tessa hesitated, then put an arm around Elizabeth as she cried.

  He didn’t know what to make of Tessa. She’d been interviewing for a job at OWA, now working without pay as a bodyguard for Elizabeth. And volunteering at Wings. Was she trying to go legitimate or was this some strange scheme of hers? Or maybe her uncle was putting her up to it? Had she had some falling out with her uncle, and would it cause problems for Elizabeth?

  Whatever it was, he intended to keep a close eye on her. If she stepped even an inch out of line, he’d be there to rescue Elizabeth and Daniel and make sure Tessa Lancaster was sent back to prison.