FRIEND, LOVER, PROTECTOR

by Sharon Mignerey

  "I see you've acquired another pretty boy," Doreen said as she walked around her desk.

  The statement was Doreen's usual spin, but this morning Dahlia's immunity to the barbs wasn't as much as she would have preferred. The comments rankled, and she hated the idea that Jack had heard every word through the open door.

  "If Jack hadn't been with me yesterday, I wouldn't be here this morning."

  "Dramatic and serious. Get to the point."

  Dahlia succinctly related all that had happened the previous day. Through it, Doreen made various comments that sounded sympathetic enough. Dahlia kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. With Doreen it always did. Dahlia would rather have been telling all this to the department head, Dr. Walter Worth. Doreen had a thing about going through channels, and Dahlia knew that he would have sent her back to talk to Doreen.

  "I think the police have the right idea of it," Doreen said when Dahlia was finished. "Strange, yes, but it's a little paranoid to think they are after you personally, don't you think?"

  Dahlia met her boss's eyes. "I'm not being paranoid."

  "I assume you told me all this because you think this affects your work."

  "I'd like to postpone the field research for a couple of weeks, and if possible I'd like to have one of the postdocs take over my lectures until I—"

  "Oh, my. You may want to rethink that." Doreen did one of her dramatic pauses. "Walter continues to be very concerned about your work habits. After everything that happened with those pesky little problems associated with Richard—"

  "That was two years ago and has nothing to do with this," Dahlia returned. "And Walter—"

  "Dr. Worth."

  "Didn't mention anything to me," she continued, ignoring the correction. "I'll talk to him."

  "If you think that's wise." Doreen tapped a page on her leather-bound daily calendar. "You did agree that you would keep me posted on all developments. I haven't seen your report for this week."

  "It's on the laptop that was stolen," Dahlia returned, struggling to keep her voice even. "And as soon as I recreate my notes, I'll e-mail it to you."

  "So, you didn't back up your files. Help me to understand why that didn't happen."

  "You remember the part about someone shooting at us yesterday morning, then discovering someone had been in my house." Dahlia's patience slipped a notch. "I forgot. Not a great excuse, but I simply forgot."

  "And now, you're requesting time off." Doreen shook her head. "I don't see how that's possible. As I've mentioned to you before, Walter thinks this hypothesis of yours is ill conceived, and he's not in favor of the thrust of your research. I've done what I can to protect you, Dahlia. Taking time off right now. Mmm, that would be most unwise."

  "Unwise or not, that's what I need."

  "Even if your job hangs in the balance?"

  Dahlia stood. "You're telling me that I'll lose my job—"

  Behind her the door was pushed open, and Jack came into the office, looking thoroughly annoyed. Dahlia looked behind him, her first thought that the men from yesterday were outside. His scowl wasn't directed at her, for once, but at Doreen.

  "You don't seem to understand that the threats against Dahlia are real," he said to Doreen. "If anything, she understated the problem."

  "Hmm." Doreen picked up a pen and made a notation on her calendar. "You don't know Dr. Jensen very well, do you?"

  "Better than you, evidently," he responded.

  "Jack, I can handle this," Dahlia said.

  As often as she had dreamed of having a champion, his interference wasn't going to help a bit. She stood and gave him a push toward the door. He clasped one of her hands in his, his gaze never leaving Doreen's. Things had been tenuous enough before Jack burst in. Dahlia had maintained a fine balance over the past two years of doing work that she loved and working for a person that she no longer liked or respected. Hard to believe that she had once considered herself one of Doreen's protégées. Jack's defense of her wasn't going to help the situation one bit.

  Doreen smiled at him—her lips curving but the expression around her eyes not changing at all. "It's not your career at stake here, is it?" Without waiting for his answer, her attention shifted back to Dahlia. "I'll talk to Walter, but I'm certain that he's not going to agree to your taking any time off. And, Dahlia, since you're having problems again, I think daily check-ins are once again necessary. I'll expect to hear from you tomorrow. Now then, is there anything else you need?"

  Dahlia shook her head and pushed past Jack through the door. At the doorway she bolted ahead.

  "Jack." Doreen came around her large, immaculate desk. "Have Dahlia tell you about Brandon and Richard."

  "Why should I?" he asked. If he was sure of anything, it was that he didn't want to know anything about other men in Dahlia's life.

  "Do you like her?"

  He nodded. Surprisingly, that was the truth.

  "Then ask her." She sighed. "It's good of you to be a knight in shining armor. Just make sure you choose your causes wisely."

  Jack glanced down the balcony. Dahlia was nearly to the stairs. "That sounds like a threat. Like the one you gave her about her job." He spared Doreen a last glance. "Like you said before, that would be most unwise."

  He took off after Dahlia and didn't catch up until the first huge landing where additional chairs were arranged facing the windows and the view beyond.

  "That didn't help," Dahlia said, when he reached her. "You should have stayed out of it, Jack."

  "That woman didn't even listen to a thing you were telling her. Man, what a witch."

  Dahlia came to a sudden halt and lifted a finger toward him. "Don't you even go there. You have no idea what you're talking about." She pressed a hand high against her chest. "She's my boss, and no matter what you think of her—"

  "I think she's a self-centered manipulative crone who doesn't care who she hurts as long as she comes out on top."

  This time she did poke him in the chest. "She's my mother-in-law, damn it. I don't need any help from you to handle her."

  "Mother-in-law? You're married?" He ought to have known. The thought of it—and his attraction to her and the kiss she had returned—made him furious.

  She shook her head. "No. Brandon and I were divorced five years ago."

  Brandon. One of the two men he was to ask about. Relief and jealousy churned through his chest. She had been married. It was no great surprise, but the knowledge still burned. "And that's why she's holding grudges against you?"

  Again she shook her head. "She has her reasons."

  "Name one."

  "It's none of your business."

  "The hell it's not. Everything about you is my business until this is done."

  "Not this."

  "Especially this. Especially since she's threatened you with your job."

  Dahlia came to such a sudden stop at the landing that Jack nearly ran into her. "Doreen will tell you—" She took a deep shuddering breath, then plunged on "—she will tell you that I cheated on her nearly perfect son. That I didn't have just one lover, but lots." Dahlia raised her chin and made a vague gesture toward her body. "After all, a woman like me couldn't be satisfied with just one man, could she? Face it, it's what you see first."

  "I'm not going to apologize for being hardwired to like your body." He didn't like being lumped into any group that included her boss, but he wasn't about to lie to himself that he'd judged Dahlia just as she had described.

  "So now you know," she said. "Satisfied?"

  He expected to see tears within her brown eyes, but there were none. Just a righteous anger that he was hard-pressed not to believe. "No, I'm not satisfied."

  "Well, that's too damn bad." She turned on her heel and continued down the stairs, then opened the doors that led down a long hallway.

  Jack followed her, noticing the classrooms filled with students and the relatively empty hallways.

  The problem was that he was tempted to believe that what she told him wa
s true … and he didn't want to. The problem was that he hated the idea of her having a Brandon and a Richard or anyone else in her life who had claim to her gorgeous body.

  She went through yet another door, leaving him to grab yet another door that nearly slammed in his face. Inside the classroom-size space, there were a half dozen cubicles. A couple of different people greeted Dahlia as she came through and commented that she looked as if she had just gone another ten rounds with Dragon Lady. Jack was certain they referred to Doreen.

  "Can I help you?" The question came from a slim brunette whose face was hidden by a pair of oversize glasses. She looked far younger than the coeds had when he'd been in college.

  "I'm with Dr. Jensen."

  Dahlia's head appeared over one of the cubicles. She still looked mad at him, but she didn't deny his statement. "Give me twenty minutes." She pointed at a chair on the far side of the room next to a water cooler. "You can sit there. Say hello to Wanda."

  The coed waggled her fingers at him. "That would be me."

  "Hi, Wanda." He went in the opposite direction. By the time he'd made a full turn of the room he knew that, besides the brunette and Dahlia, there were two other people, both involved in a discussion about a graph on one of the computer monitors. He took up a post next to one of the windows, where he had a full-view of Dahlia's cubicle.

  She sat in front of her computer, sending e-mails and checking off a handwritten list. She moved without any of the hair tossing or other unconscious primping gestures he associated with women.

  His gaze strayed to Wanda. She was reading, twisting her hair around the end of her finger, then smoothing it out. She fiddled the bracelet on her arm and swung her leg, letting her shoe flop against her sole.

  He looked back at Dahlia. Her glorious blond hair was pulled away from her face and into the loose intricate braid he was coming to associate with her. No nail polish, no rings, in fact, no jewelry other than a neat gold watch. She worked with total concentration, total focus on the tasks at hand. With her there were no overt signs of any kind that she used her sexuality to make a man look at her. In fact the opposite was true.

  Her boss wore her sexuality like a badge, while Dahlia didn't. That was, he realized, the real power of Dahlia's allure. She didn't use it at all. Not like Brandy June Adamson, who had seduced him with her come - on - baby - you - can - have - me signs one night shortly after he had turned sixteen and had come by the club to pick up his mother. At twenty-one, she'd been exotic and forbidden and exactly what he wanted—not to mention more than willing to accommodate him. Nor was Dahlia anything like Erin, who had seemed an innocent in comparison to Brandy June. She had played him the same way, all the while hiding that she was really in love with someone else … and carrying someone else's child.

  Doreen judged Dahlia as though she was a woman who would use her body to get what she wanted. Hell, he judged her like that, he admitted, his stomach turning at Dahlia's accusations. Women built like Dahlia used their bodies to get what they wanted—everything else was secondary. It had been proven to him so many times, he hadn't even questioned it until now.

  That thought had him pulling a chair out of the cubicle across from Dahlia's and sitting down next to her. She spared him one lethal glance.

  "What happened?" he asked.

  "About what?" She continued typing.

  "With your ex-husband. Brandon."

  Her fingers stilled over the keyboard. "That is ancient history, and I don't discuss it with anyone." She glanced at him. "Not even you."

  "How ancient?"

  "I was nineteen and he was twenty-two when we got married. The second-worst mistake of my life. We got divorced three years later. A year after that he drove himself and his latest girlfriend off the road, and they both died."

  "What was the worst mistake of your life?"

  "None of your business." She looked over her shoulder. "Go away so I can finish this."

  She began typing again, pointedly ignoring him. He retreated to his spot where he could watch her and keep an eye on the door to the outside hallway.

  Clearly, she no longer cared about her ex-husband or her ex-fiancé, but she wasn't yet to the indifferent state. Maybe you never got there, he decided. He would be lying to himself if he said he didn't carry around any baggage about Erin.

  Dahlia finished with the e-mails, logged off her computer and began gathering up files that she evidently intended to take with her. She sent him to get a box from next to the printer, mostly to get him out of the way, he suspected.

  She retrieved a laptop from an empty cubicle, then told him that she was ready to go. Her manner was still no-nonsense, and she barely looked at him. When she did, her frosty gaze slid right through him as though he wasn't even there.

  Too bad, he decided. She was stuck with him until her sister testified. And the sooner that happened, the better.

  When they reached the front of the building, Jack laid a hand against her arm to keep her from going outside until he scanned the walk between the parking lot and the front of the building. She tensed when he touched her, telling him more clearly than words that she was still angry.

  "Okay," he said when he didn't see anything that struck him as out of place. "Stay close." He took her hand with his left one and walked toward his SUV. She pulled on her hand, but he only tightened his. As they reached the car, he unlocked the doors with his remote. After they were both inside, he locked the doors and started the engine.

  Dahlia looked around. "You think they're here?"

  "I would be."

  Those simple words reminded Dahlia why Jack was here and why she needed him. He'd only been holding her hand because… Deciding she was completely off the wall for thinking the man was remotely interested in her, she frowned. He'd simply wanted her to stay close. Too bad she hadn't thought of that while her hormones were dancing in anticipation of his touch.

  She realized that she had told her boss the truth—she was glad to have him here. Even if he was a jerk. As Dahlia buckled her seat belt, Jack backed out of the parking space. It was time to stop being in denial and start being a participant. As the old saying went, two heads were better than one. As the man had said, they were partners, and it was way past time to start acting like one.

  "What should I be looking for?" she asked, glancing around them and looking at the side mirror as she had seen Jack doing the day before. "The guy following us yesterday—"

  "Was good," Jack finished. "Just not quite good enough." He came to a stop at the light, his eyes roving between the street around them and the rearview mirror. "First, trust your instincts. If something doesn't feel quite right, it probably isn't."

  "Instincts? I'll take a little empirical evidence anyday." Her thoughts raced back to her conversation with Doreen, who lived by the credo that appearances were everything and what mattered was who you knew rather than what you knew. Empirical evidence would play hell on her game of insinuation and hearsay.

  "What about a hunch?" Jack asked. "Like a car that seems to be following you down the freeway for miles, takes the exit you take, then turns when you turn—"

  "And finally makes the turn onto his own street."

  "Exactly." Jack nodded, his gaze on the rearview mirror. "So far, so good. Nobody that obvious." The light turned, and they moved forward with the traffic.

  "Especially black shiny cars."

  "I still don't know what the hell that was about. I got a real good look at that car yesterday afternoon, and if it's the same one that came last night, their choice was stupid. All flash and noise. Not exactly unobtrusive."

  "I think it's what they planned," Dahlia said, letting go of some of her irritation. In this, Jack seemed to have a much clearer head than she did. "One of the teenagers at the end of the block is into cars and big speakers. And his friends all have exotic paint jobs and big speakers, too. If more than one of them is coming down the block, you think the house is going to jar right off its foundation."

 
"That's a great hunch." He glanced at her. "Blend into the neighborhood, is that what you're saying?"

  She nodded. "Not a hunch at all. Just following possible motive, based on what they did. Disguise any noise, be a general nuisance, use a sound that fits already, even if it's not pleasant."

  "Drop a guy off who comes through the back, cruise down the street, drop off another guy. Two guys came into the house, right?"

  "Yes," she said. "The one guy came upstairs, and I heard another one call to him."

  "Plus a driver," Jack said, his voice preoccupied as though he was thinking aloud. "That puts our bad guys up to four. I'm liking this less and less." He glanced over at her. "Describe the guy again. And tell me everything about it from the time you heard the car go by."

  She did as he asked, trying to remember, beyond her fear to what was happening at the time, especially in light of Jack's questions. Then she remembered a detail. "Just before they threw the rock through the window, it was quiet. I don't remember hearing the car." Copying Jack, she watched the traffic behind them through the passenger side mirror. "Maybe there wasn't a driver."

  "They'd be amateurs, then." Again Jack mused out loud. "The first guy from yesterday morning was alone. They might have had us if he hadn't had to stop shooting to drive. And, when he came by here yesterday afternoon, he was alone. He's unobtrusive. But the guys last night, assuming they're the same ones that came down the street yesterday afternoon, are bold, obvious. And there's at least three of them." He slapped a hand against the steering wheel. "Plus our other guy—Mr. Pale Eyes. This makes no damn sense."

  A few blocks later he parked the vehicle in front of an electronics store. Before they got out, he leveled her a look that she was beginning to think of as his G.I. Joe glower. "One more thing."

  He looked away, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. She watched him, her curiosity piqued—this was far from his usual direct brashness. Finally he sighed and looked back at her.

  "This animosity that I have about you—about your body…"

  She bristled. "Leave my body out of this." She put a hand on the door handle. "You don't have to even look if I bother you so darned much."