by Meli Raine
He’s breathing hard, eyes wide and focused, taking in the scene so he knows how to act with rapid-fire precision because that’s what bodyguards do.
They save your body.
Mine happens to be right in front of him, nude and trapped.
Who knew shower doors could be so dangerous?
“I, uh...” I say, my eloquence long gone.
From the top of my wet, conditioner-covered head to the ankle trapped between two pieces of glass, Silas takes me in. Under any other circumstances, I’d find this embarrassingly amusing, or humiliatingly erotic, but the sheer pain radiating out from my ankle is sending waves of nausea and ice-pick bone pain through me.
Before I have to say a word, he’s on his knees before me.
Between my legs.
Chapter 10
“Let me alleviate the pressure on that ankle,” he says, carefully avoiding eye contact, one hand on the shower door handle and the other on my calf, as he finds a way to bend down and hold his position. He must have core strength that is out of this world. The firm but tender touch of his palm as he removes the source of pain makes me tear up.
And my nipples turn to pearls.
No. No, no, no. I will not be aroused by Silas in this position. Oh, no.
Hell, no.
My body doesn’t listen to me, though.
My body is a yes woman tonight.
It’s not the being naked part. I’m comfortable with that. Trust me. I have no problem being nude in front of people.
But people aren’t Silas.
Choked up, still in shock, and very, very aware of my naked inner thighs (and everything above them), I can’t speak.
“I have to get your ankle out of there,” he explains. Still holding the door in place, Silas lunges slightly and tugs on my calf.
I scream. The ankle bone is so wedged in there that it can’t make it through.
Silas readjusts the shower door.
“That’s as wide as I can make it,” he says. “Will it fit?”
I try not to giggle.
“They always say it won’t fit,” I murmur.
He laughs, a sound of shock.
“Point your toe,” he orders, composing himself with remarkable speed, eyes firmly on mine, unwavering. His focus is so precise, I can tell it comes from a place of extraordinary restraint. He wants to look. He’s holding back. Not because of basic decency.
Because if he looks, he’ll be aroused.
I try to follow his command. “I can’t. My toe won’t do that.”
“If you keep the foot in there for much longer, your ankle will swell and block it. We need to get it out now.” He suddenly searches the room, looking for something.
“What are you looking for?”
“Conditioner.”
“My split ends aren’t a priority right now, Silas.”
“I’m going to use it to lube you up.”
I giggle again.
This time he sighs, but a smile makes his mouth look lush and friendly. Grabbing the conditioner bottle from behind the toilet–mercifully on the other side of me–he squirts a huge amount all over my bare ankle, then uses his free hand to massage it in.
Oh, those fingers. The absolute last feeling I should be having is this–being turned on by Silas’s fingers massaging my injured ankle while I’m naked and hugging a toilet.
I don’t have any control of my external world. Apparently, my internal emotional control center has gone bananas, too. Warmth pours over my body like a waterfall. I stifle a moan.
“Ok,” he says, his touch featherlight and sweet. “I didn’t dig in, just got the important parts.”
Other important parts of me disagree.
“Pull out before it’s too late.”
I snort but do as he says. It comes free. I pull my foot in to my body and groan with the pain. Without looking back, Silas grabs a towel that magically stayed on a heated towel rack and hands it to me, his hand dangling the plush terry cloth.
“Here.”
“Thanks.”
Without another word he leaves, closing the door, which has a long strip of trim hanging off it from when he broke into the room. The handle doesn’t quite catch, but it stays closed just enough.
His laughter from the other side of the closed door makes me smile. Not that I plan to go out of my way to have him find me like that again, but if it makes him chortle like that, a sound of happy hilarity, I might be worth the sacrifice.
I think about that for precisely two seconds, until I put weight on my foot and pain shoots up through me like a current. It’s nerve pain, the kind that makes you feel like a bulldozer is rolling over a nerve cluster. The pain radiates up into my thigh and I gasp, grabbing a towel rack for stability.
Gingerly, I put a little more weight on it. Better.
I still have conditioner coating my hair, so I give the shower a resigned look. It doesn’t look back.
I need to get in there and rinse, don’t I?
Eyeing the shower door gap with a healthy dose of respect, I limp in and direct the water spray to my head. My fingers flow through the thick, wet lump until I can tell I’ve rinsed thoroughly. The hair around my brow is shorter, but not too short. Thankfully, that heat blast from the car bomb wasn’t a few inches closer, or I’d have a perpetually surprised look on my face after having my eyebrows burned off.
Even in my shitty life, I can find small mercies to be grateful for.
As I wash off the extra conditioner from my ankle, I relive Silas’s touch. Shame turns my insides into fire, but there’s so much more than embarrassment.
Being touched by him makes my pulse race, tempts me to lick my lips, makes me feel alive and real in ways I haven’t felt in, well–forever.
I laugh to myself. I laugh at myself. I’m being ridiculous. Silas has made his feelings about me well known. I’m not alive and real to him.
I’m just a client.
Toweling off, as the plane bumps up and down slightly with just a little turbulence, gets me dry. I grab the bag of clothes from Lindsay with the new panties and bra tucked in there. I slip on the new underwear. The bra is a close fit–a little tight, but that’s ok. I slip into her sleeveless dress and sigh.
That’s better. I’m not naked any more.
The imprint of Silas’s hands on me won’t fade. It’s as if he’s still holding my ankle, fingers slick and slippery, touching me so I can feel better. I close my eyes and force myself to feel the present. My wet hair is soaking the thin dress I put on. My ankle throbs from pain. My skin fluctuates between warm and cold, a weird series of shifts that finally even out as my heart slows down.
The airplane is level. No more turbulence.
Like any surprise, living through it is hard, but the aftereffects require more energy to process than you ever expect.
I’m still shaking on the inside. I need to figure out how to go out into the main cabin, take my seat, and not melt into the plane’s floor and ooze out into the atmosphere.
I just got myself trapped, naked, in a shower.
On a plane.
And a man who cannot stand me was my rescuer.
I hang the towel back on the rack, take a deep breath, and reach for the broken door. Squaring my shoulders, I open it, head high, and walk back to my seat. As I pass Silas, I see his eyes are closed, head against his seatback.
He’s pretending to sleep.
Cool operator.
I settle into my seat and mimic him.
By the time we land in Texas, I still have my eyes closed, but never fell asleep.
You can repeat a lot of memories that way, but the one that keeps looping through me is the tactile sense of Silas’s hands, providing more direct comfort and help than anyone has offered me in ages.
And Alice represents even more.
But her comfort comes with conditions.
Conditions I’m starting to think about.
Chapter 11
You cannot spend days on end a
round someone, endless hours bleeding into each other, and not get to know them on some level. Even the most stone-faced Secret Service agent gives off little clues, signals about who he is. We all do. It’s unavoidable. You would have to be a robot to be able to keep every nonverbal tip about yourself completely secured, safely compartmentalized, hidden from the world.
Silas doesn’t even come close.
His humanity radiates out from his pores, his face showing emotion even if it’s just in little flashes that give me insight. Some personal issue is distracting him. Not in the sense that he’s not protecting me, but more on an internal level.
People have lives that connect them to others. It’s one of the fundamental tenets of being human. We don’t necessarily define ourselves in terms of others–though some people do–but we are defined by connections of some type.
Which is why losing my links to other people, one by one, is so damaging.
We’re social animals by nature. All of us, even the most introverted person you know. On some level, we need to engage in circles of communication. We check in with others to see where the boundaries lie, to make sure we’re functioning and contributing, to be nurtured and to nurture right back.
I have none of that.
And the empty silence as the SUV takes us to Alice’s home heightens my sense of isolation.
Being teased about the shower situation would be a relief. Humiliation, even, would be welcome. It was funny. Truly.
Not joking about it makes me feel less human.
While I can’t go around being naked and needing help all the time to break the ice, my stupid predicament in the bathroom seemed to crack the layer between us. It’s back up, that thick barrier demarcating our space. As we drive down endless highways, marked off by cattle fencing and oil fields, I feel like we’re moving faster and faster away from any real connection.
Back to client and bodyguard.
Self and other.
The SUV slows, so much dust kicked up that it’s hard to see as we turn sharply at a corner. No other traffic can be seen for miles. I’ve never been to Alice’s home before. She lived near the campus when I was in college, though I knew she kept the family ranch here in Texas.
It’s an honor to be invited.
It’s also got me on edge.
Alice is a character. And that makes her unpredictable. When the invitation came through, I jumped at it. Now that we’re driving down a tree-lined driveway in the middle of a flatland oasis, I’m starting to get nervous.
Because Alice is a very demanding woman.
What, exactly, will she demand of me today?
The tires start to make a loud crunching sound, the SUV slowing as the unpaved road becomes rockier. A large, sprawling white mansion greets my eyes, though it’s hard to see through the dust-caked windows.
At first glance, the house is almost colonial, a white peak in the middle, black shutters, rectangles for windows all spaced evenly. Your standard clapboard New England-style home.
But then there are the wings. To the right, a single-story wing stretches out, as long as the main house. To the left, a double-storied section has a huge open-air-but-covered porch on the second floor, a solarium beneath it. Large trees, willowy yet full in a strange contradiction, reside in a crooked line along the entire front of the house, some close, some far away.
I can imagine Alice climbing out of a bedroom window onto a tree branch, her youthful indiscretions legendary for her time in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
I expected perfectly manicured, lush, rolling grass, the kind of lawn that is out of place where water needs to be conserved but wealthy people insist on having anyway. Instead the house is surrounded by blinding-white rock gardens, the trees surrounded by rocks, too. Small succulents dot the edge, carefully planted to look accidental.
Silas isn’t looking outside, his attention all for his phone. As we pull up to the front and stop, I’m slightly irritated. Aren’t bodyguards supposed to be constantly aware of their client’s surroundings?
And then I see all the Secret Service agents.
Ah. That’s right. This is the daughter of a vice president. She needs to be protected.
“Wait,” I mumble. “That’s not right. She wouldn’t get a Secret Service detail, would she?”
“Huh?” Silas’s acknowledgment that I’ve spoken is progress.
“Why are Secret Service here?”
“First, I can’t confirm or deny that those are Secret Service agents, Jane, but if they are, it’s because you’re here.”
“I don’t need a Secret Service detail. You know as well as I do they don’t protect private citizens.”
He shrugs. “Someone, somewhere, decided to send these guys. I don’t write the orders. I just execute them.”
“Is that why you’re ignoring the environment? Because you know it’s all safe and covered?”
“Ignoring?” He’s distracted, looking at his phone.
“Never mind.” I open my door and start to climb out. Before my first foot is on the ground, an agent is holding the handle, hand extended to help me out.
“Thank you,” I say to a pair of dark sunglass lenses with a human wall behind them.
He just nods.
Silas sighs behind me, then gets out on his side, immediately huddling with another agent, their conversations clearly an exchange of details necessary for protection. Emotionless faces attached to moving mouths lob words back and forth. I watch Silas, how he moves his hands carefully, the gestures precise and efficient. A curt nod from him, then one from the other agent, and Silas breaks away, walking toward me with a determined gait that is suddenly so commanding, I have to look away.
My throat tightens and my ankle feels like he’s stroking it again.
“Hot,” I gasp as he walks up to me.
He frowns as I struggle to cover for my weird lapse. “It’s Texas. Comes with the territory. You want hot, try Afghanistan in the summer.” His smirk isn’t unkind. Pointing, he guides me around the left side of the house, along a flagstone path that doesn’t have a single weed or blade of grass poking between the stones.
He’s a gentleman, walking behind me. “To the right, under the pergola,” he directs. I make a turn and see where we’re headed.
“A separate house?”
“It’s her studio. This is mostly where she lives, too. She comes to the main house maybe once a week, mostly to look at old photographs or entertain.”
“Good for her,” I reply. “Alice deserves to live by her own rules. When I’m ninety-two I hope I can do that, too.”
Silas mumbles something that gets caught in a short blast of wind. I stop, his hand brushing against my hip as he continues walking, not seeing I’ve halted. While he doesn’t plow into me, those reflexes of his aren’t quite sharp enough to stop without touching me.
“What did you say?” I ask, pretty sure I heard him but wondering why he said it. I turn around fully and look up at him, inches away, his sunglasses blocking his eyes.
That strong mouth tightens, his chin jutting and head tilting slightly. “I said, ‘Let’s hope you live that long.’”
“Is that a commentary on my current situation? You think I’m in so much danger, I’ll die young?”
He lifts the sunglasses and props them on his head, brow turning down over those bright blue eyes that are like mirrors of the sky. His dark hair contrasts and makes it very hard not to watch him.
“You’re being followed 24/7 by a bodyguard who isn’t permitted to have you out of his sight, bathroom excluded.” A smirk lifts one corner of his mouth. “And even then, you manage to get yourself into a serious scrape.”
I feel my face flush. My skin ripples with heat, none of it from the weather.
“And?” It’s all I can think to say.
“And you wouldn’t have a security team assigned to you if your life weren’t in grave danger.” Concern mixed with a fierce protectiveness floods his face. “Do you really not understand that
?”
“I understand that I don’t have control over anything in my life anymore.”
He makes a sound, low and quiet, like he’s suddenly getting the point at the same time he doesn’t like what he’s hearing.
“You’re here, aren’t you? You stuck to your guns for this one.” Sweeping his hand toward Alice’s studio, he cocks one eyebrow, his whole demeanor more congenial.
I just stand there and blink.
“You think I made the wrong choice?”
“I think you needed to be given a choice, Jane.”
“What?”
“You said you’ve had everything stripped from you. Dignity. Respect. The benefit of the doubt.” He pauses, then adds, “Your mother. And you’re being told what to do and where to go, so it makes sense that you need to be given some choices. Humans are wired for free will. Not being able to exercise it creates a kind of madness.”
I gape at him.
“Why are you suddenly being so nice?”
“I’m not. I’m just stating the facts.”
“You are.”
“I am.”
“And you’re being nice.”
“Your bar is very, very low if this meets your definition of nice.”
“Yes. It is.”
He jolts, my words hitting a nerve.
Before he can reply, a commotion near the front door of Alice’s studio makes us both turn.
A man in a black jacket and jeans is running away from Alice’s studio, his long legs fast, dust puffing up in little clouds as each footstep stirs up the dirt. He’s holding some kind of black electronic thing in his hands. As Silas takes off after him, I start to follow, my skirt wrapping around my shins enough to bother me.
I bunch the fabric in my fists and run.
Silas turns around and shouts, “Stay back! Get behind something!”
Oh, I’m behind something, all right.
Him.
No way am I going to be the good little obedient client who does whatever the big bad bodyguard says. Alice has some creep who has just run away from where she is. I need to help her.
Silas has taken off to the left after the guy, and as I sprint to the front door of Alice’s place, I reach the small paved path before her porch steps and halt.