by Noelle Adams
One Night with her Bodyguard
Noelle Adams
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Noelle Adams. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means.
Contents
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
One
Claire Kenyon was getting a second cup of coffee when Michael barged into her apartment without knocking.
She’d finished her first cup in the process of dressing, so she wore nothing but a black bra and little red cotton panties.
She choked in surprise at the sight of Michael Lyle where he wasn’t supposed to be.
He was big—more than six inches taller than her with a broad-shouldered, athletic build—and he seemed to take up all the room in her small kitchen. He wore his normal outfit of dark trousers and a dress shirt.
“Hey! What the hell are you—”
Before she could finish the outraged exclamation, Michael had pushed her backward into the pantry.
His icy blue eyes were dead serious. “Don’t move. Stay here.”
Then he shut the pantry door in her face.
Michael had been the head of her father’s personal security team for almost six years. She hadn’t lived with her father since she was twenty-one, but she was over at his place a lot, so she’d known Michael for a long time. She’d seen him more often than usual for the last two months, ever since her father had received a threat aimed at her and had ordered his team to watch her around the clock.
Being an extreme introvert, Claire was often tongue-tied around people she didn’t know, but she hadn’t been shy around Michael for years. In fact, she’d been known to bark like an obedient dog when he told her to “stay” in that curt way.
She didn’t this morning. His expression—invariably stoic—was tenser than normal, and he had a gun in his hand.
Something was wrong.
Her pantry was a walk-in, but there wasn’t a lot of extra room. It was also pitch black, since the light switch was on the outside.
She didn’t particularly like to be trapped in small, dark places, but fortunately claustrophobia wasn’t one of her neuroses. She could handle the lack of light and space. What she couldn’t handle was knowing there was danger somewhere out there but having no idea what it was.
She was trembling ten minutes later when Michael finally opened the door.
She blinked several times as her eyes adjusted to the light. When she could see clearly, her gaze landed on Michael’s clean-shaven, square-jawed face and his ever-unrevealing expression.
His eyes scanned her closely as she squinted up at him.
She assumed he was just checking her condition, but she was uncomfortably aware that she was still just wearing her underwear.
He turned around without speaking and left the kitchen. In someone else, the abrupt departure might indicate rudeness, but Michael was just being himself.
He never spoke unless he had something to say. It was a quality she appreciated in him.
When he returned, she snatched for the fuzzy snowflake robe he’d brought her from the bathroom.
“Remember, I’m just part of the furniture,” he murmured, avoiding looking at her until she’d tied the robe closed.
That was his refrain—whenever she complained to him that a member of the security team was hovering or that she needed more space. They were part of the furniture, he always told her, and she should treat them as such.
She wanted to snarl every time she heard it.
“I don’t care if you saw me in my underwear,” she said. “Just tell me what’s going on.” Her voice was a little wobbly since she hadn’t yet caught her breath.
“Everything is fine. No emergency.” He poured coffee into the mug she’d left on the counter earlier, added the cream, and handed it to her.
She held it with both hands as she took a sip, the liquid warm and comforting as she swallowed. Then, “Well, what did you think was the matter that caused you to stick me in the pantry?”
He put a hand on her back and pushed her out of the kitchen and into the dining area, where he pulled out a chair for her at the table.
She sat because her knees were a little shaky. Not because he’d bossed her into it.
“Tell me what the hell is going on,” she demanded as he sat down across from her.
There had been a time when she’d hated Michael more than anyone else she knew. She’d believed he was cold, pushy, obnoxious, and utterly heartless.
Now she just thought he was pushy and sometimes obnoxious. She didn’t hate him anymore.
“You work for me,” she insisted when he remained silent. “Tell me.”
“I work for your father,” he corrected.
“But I’m not a child. I’m twenty-five years old, and I have the right to know about something that affects my life—as this clearly does. Tell me.”
“There was someone unauthorized in the building,” he explained, his tone as calm and impersonal as always.
Michael wasn’t a mean man, no matter what she’d thought five years ago. In fact, in the time she’d known him, she’d sometimes noticed him being surprisingly considerate—like when he’d searched for hours for the lost cat that belonged to the daughter of one of her father’s housekeeping staff. He hadn’t stopped looking until he’d found the cat.
She knew he was a good man in his own detached way, but never once had he been friendly with her—or even just casually good-natured. No matter his mood, no matter how she behaved, no matter the situation, he was always, always professional.
“Who was it?” she asked. Her hands weren’t shaking quite as much now, and her voice had returned to normal, much to her relief. She didn’t like feeling weak and silly with Michael. He was the kind of man who respected strength.
“It was the ex-boyfriend of a woman on the floor below yours. He’d snuck in to see her since she wasn’t answering his calls. It had nothing to do with you.”
She nodded and kept sipping her coffee as Michael checked something on his smart phone. She assumed he’d gotten a text with further information.
Since she was feeling better, she got up to pour Michael a cup of coffee as well. She’d learned not to ask, since he would just say “no” to the offer, but he would always drink it when she just set it in front of him.
As she took her seat again, she realized her robe was gaping open, showing a lot of cleavage and a hint of lacy bra.
Not that Michael would ever leer at her—he was evidently completely impervious to any potential feminine charms she possessed—but still… She pulled the robe closed.
“What’s your schedule today?” he asked, picking up the coffee she’d given him and taking a long swallow.
“I’ve got to be at the Center from nine to noon, since our normal volunteer is on vacation.”
He nodded, more to acknowledge that she’d spoken than out of any show of interest.
“Then I need to restock some supplies. Oh, and stop by the art store on Willow.”
Claire was the assistant director of an urban community center. She’d started as a volunteer, teaching art lessons to kids during college as part of a required community service project in a sociology class, but she was now a paid employee. She enjoyed the work, but the social interaction had been excruciatingly hard when she’d first begun, since she was so incredibly shy. A lot
of her work was with children, however. She liked kids a lot and wasn’t as nervous around them as adults, and now she knew most of the people in the neighborhood anyway.
It wasn’t well-paying job, and she never would have been able to make a living at it. She could only afford her nice apartment because her father was the head of one of the most successful movie studios in Hollywood.
“You’ll need to stop by your father’s before work,” Michael said, looking up from his smart phone.
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Your father needs to talk to you, and he asked for you to stop by first thing.”
She almost groaned. “Why didn’t he just pick up a phone?”
Michael, of course, ignored that question.
Thinking about it, Claire sucked in a sharp breath. Her father only demanded a meeting in such an indirect way when he had something serious to discuss.
She suddenly knew the purpose of the meeting today.
Her father was angry about something he’d found out and wanted to lecture her about it.
She gave Michael a narrow-eyed look, wondering if he was somehow to blame for it.
He’d been known in the past to discover things he shouldn’t discover.
He’d never actually told anyone about them, though.
Five years ago, when she’d started secretly dating a member of her father’s security team, Michael hadn’t told her father about it.
He’d simply fired Brandon, the bodyguard in question.
Claire had kept dating Brandon for several months after he’d been let go, until she’d realized he mostly just wanted a free ride on the coattails of a rich woman.
That was the year Claire had hated Michael.
Since then, Michael had never hired another young, good-looking man as part of his team.
Michael was fairly young himself—in his early to mid-thirties, she guessed—and he was good-looking in a big, rugged, dark-haired way.
But he was completely different from Brandon’s lean, charming, blond gorgeousness. Plus, Michael’s über-professionalism would make it impossible for him to fall for a protectee.
Even if he was remotely attracted to her. Which he obviously wasn’t.
“Will you be ready to leave in fifteen or twenty minutes?” Michael asked.
Claire nodded. She was low-maintenance and rarely wore much make-up. Since she’d already showered and dried her hair, all she had to do was put on clothes.
Then she glanced at the clock on the mantle in surprise. “What are you doing here anyway? Where’s Rick?”
“Rick is no longer on staff.”
“What happened? I like Rick.”
Michael just met her eyes levelly, the way he always did when he wasn’t going to answer her questions.
He didn’t answer her questions a lot.
“I liked Rick. And I certainly wasn’t sleeping with him.”
“I know you weren’t sleeping with him. If you think that’s the only reason I would let someone go, you’ve seriously underestimated my requirements for the team.”
She frowned. “He was in good shape and everything.”
Michael just looked at her.
“He did his job just fine. And I liked him. He made me laugh.” Claire had liked Rick, and she also dreaded the idea of trying to get used to someone new.
“I understand you’re disappointed, Ms. Kenyon, but making you laugh wasn’t part of his job description.”
Claire took a deep breath so she wouldn’t snap at him. There was no sense in getting into an argument with Michael, although she’d tried many, many times before. He would never argue in a satisfying way. He wouldn’t get upset or angry. He would try to respond to genuine objections but would otherwise simply ignore her, his expression as impassive as always.
She’d never met anyone as frustrating to argue with as him.
She knew he expected an argument from her now. He never called her Claire, but he only ever called her Ms. Kenyon when he thought she was annoyed with him.
Managing to keep her voice level, she said, “But he did fine at all the stuff that was in his job description. He was a perfectly good bodyguard for the night shift. It’s mostly just sitting around, anyway.”
Even as she said the words, she realized Rick hadn’t exactly fulfilled all of his required duties. He hadn’t caught her or even noticed when she’d snuck out every Thursday night for the last six weeks.
But Michael didn’t know that.
Or maybe he did.
Her father, after all, was summoning her to a lecture this morning.
She dropped her eyes and didn’t speak, closing out her surroundings for a few seconds to restore her equilibrium. She and her father always called it “shutting down.” She had done it all the time when she’d been a child—so shy it was almost debilitating—but she’d gotten better about it as she’d grown older. She didn’t have to resort to it nearly as often as she used to, and usually a few seconds was all she needed.
Sometimes she just couldn’t help it. Social interaction was always stressful for her. She genuinely liked people, and she enjoyed talking to people she knew well—as long as it wasn’t in large groups and the interactions didn’t get too intense. When it did, her instinct was always to withdraw, to hide away where it was safe. Since she couldn’t always get out of the room, shutting down was the way she was able to make it through difficult conversations.
This morning, she didn’t snap back as quickly as usual—probably because she’d gotten so anxious earlier as she waited in the pantry.
Being with Michael wasn’t usually hard for her, since she knew him so well. At the moment, however, she wished he would leave. Even as she tried to close him out and retreat into her mind for a few moments, she could feel him watching her silently.
At least he didn’t say anything. At least he didn’t force her to push through it before she was ready and then spill all her most intimate feelings as if she were psychologically ill the way her former stepmother had.
She heard Michael get up and walk away, and she let out a relieved exhalation at being left alone, even for a few seconds. The cold wave of vulnerability faded as she stared down at her hands and envisioned herself painting a desert scene on an empty canvas.
She wasn’t even aware that Michael had returned to the dining area until he set a fresh cup of coffee on the table in front of her, picked up her hand, and wrapped her fingers around the mug.
She lifted it to drink automatically.
She swallowed a sip of coffee and felt a different kind of wave overtake her—this one of hot embarrassment.
Michael was as cool, competent, and in control as anyone she’d ever met. He must think she was a pitiful wreck, not even able to make it through a simple conversation.
She’d never told him about her social anxiety, but he was around so much he couldn’t not know about it.
Her cheeks burned and she took another sip, still unable to meet his eyes.
“Ms. Kenyon,” Michael said, as if he could somehow tell the difference between her embarrassed withdrawal now and her restorative withdrawal earlier.
“What?”
He didn’t reply immediately. When she didn’t meet his eyes, he repeated, “Ms. Kenyon.”
“I said what?” She was starting to get annoyed.
He again didn’t reply. Just sat there in infuriating silence. When she still didn’t lift her eyes, he said again, “Ms. Kenyon.”
His obnoxiousness pushed her past her embarrassment. She snapped her head up to glare at him. “For the third time, what the hell do you want?”
Despite her tone, his eyes were almost mild as they rested on her. “Your father is expecting us shortly.”
She scowled but bit back an instinctive retort, since she tried not to act grumpy with the people who worked for her father.
She got up and went to her bedroom to get dressed, both her brief paralysis and her embarrassment completely forgotten.
&nbs
p; Two
Thirty-five minutes later, Claire entered her father’s huge mansion in the Hollywood Hills, wearing jeans and a green velvet jacket with her dark blonde hair pulled into a low ponytail.
She’d been chatting with her father’s chauffeur, Roger, about his wife’s bad case of the flu, until Michael had cleared his throat to hurry her along. Now Michael was in his normal position two steps behind her.
Claire gave a kiss to Stella, her father’s housekeeper of thirty years, and whispered, “Do you know what’s going on?”
Stella had greeted her with normal warm affection, but now she pulled back and made a reluctant face, which meant something unpleasant was going to happen.
“Shit,” Claire breathed.
Her father must have found out she’d been sneaking away from her protection.
She was an adult. Her dad couldn’t force protection on her if she refused, and both of them knew it. But he would worry himself into a heart-attack if she dug in her heels about this, and she couldn’t make him suffer that way.
“He’s on the breakfast porch,” Stella said, with no further information about the impending unpleasantness.
During the summer, her father ate breakfast next to the pool, but in the winter he ate on a large glass sun porch, filled with ferns and potted flowers.
Claire found him there and took the seat across from him, after leaning over to give him a kiss on the cheek.
“Hi, pumpkin,” he said with a smile. “Have some coffee and a muffin.”
She took a blueberry muffin and poured herself a glass of orange juice, since she hadn’t had time for breakfast but she’d had plenty of coffee already.
Her father had been calling her “pumpkin” all her life. When she was a teenager, she’d spent years trying to correct him, practically begging for him to call her something less childish.
He’d never been able to change his habit, and now she didn’t even mind anymore.
She loved him, and they were the only family either of them had. He could call her whatever made him happy.
His eyes—a warm brown that was exactly the same color as hers—rested on her soberly.