Order of Protection

by Lexi Blake

  Indiscretions? It hadn’t felt indiscreet. It had felt right and good. “I still think this is a mistake.”

  “I can leave,” Henry offered, his demeanor going back to positively arctic in a second. “If you don’t want me to represent you, all you have to do is say the word and I’ll walk away. You can find your own way home and make your own decisions. You’re a big girl, after all. If you want to call an Uber and see how you fare, feel free.”

  He was such a bastard. And he was right. She couldn’t argue about that. She was alone right now, and she wouldn’t know how to start to look for another lawyer. All her so-called friends had abandoned her. Her uncle was trying to save the company and didn’t need to hear her sob story about how staying close to Henry hurt too much.

  “Can we go now?” She would survive it. That was all she could do. She would put a wall between the two of them and slowly she would learn not to care about him anymore. “I signed all the paperwork.”

  “Of course. Where are your bags?” Henry asked.

  She picked up the plastic bag they’d placed her medications in. She had a few days’ worth of antibiotics left to take. “I’m a light packer.”

  His jaw tightened. “I didn’t think to send someone to get you clothes.”

  She waved it off. “I’ll order some off the Internet. If you send someone to get my things, the press could follow them back. As far as I can tell it hasn’t died down yet. I need to see if the university will let me finish the semester remotely.”

  Noah cleared his throat, and when she looked at him, she realized she wouldn’t like what he was going to say next. “They’ve put you on suspension. I’m afraid they don’t like the press coverage. If you’re cleared, they’ll allow you back in the spring semester.”

  Her stomach dropped. “I don’t understand. How can they suspend me?”

  “Because I’m sure they have a student code of conduct that includes not murdering people,” Henry said.

  “But I’m not guilty.” She stopped. He’d made himself perfectly clear on that point. “I know. You don’t care.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I can look through their student code of conduct and see what I can do. There’s probably a loophole. I can force your way back in.”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to force herself on anyone. “No. It’s fine. If I manage to survive this, I’ll make some decisions about the future. I’d like to leave now.”

  She was numb and that was good. If she let herself feel anything, she might break down. One foot in front of the other. At least when she got to Henry’s, she could be alone. That had been so hard, knowing she wasn’t alone, that someone was always watching her.

  She could shut out the world and cry for a while. But not until she closed the door. Not until she was alone.

  “Ms. Win, are you ready to head out?” The big Cajun god of a man had a smile for her as Henry opened the door. “Wade’s got the car ready.”

  At least someone smiled at her. She gave him a tepid smile back. “Thank you, Mr. Guidry.”

  He winked her way. “Nah. You call me Remy. I heard you’ve got some problems with packing light. Give me a list of what you need and your size, and I bet I could convince Lisa and Genny to go do some shopping.”

  “Thank you. Tomorrow is soon enough. Tonight I want to actually get some sleep.” She followed him to the staff elevator. “But I appreciate the offer. I can give your wife some tips on where to shop. Though she might not want to drop my name now.”

  She knew tons of salespeople who lit up when she walked in the room. Would they do that now? Would Sandra at Bergdorf still smile and hold back the prettiest boots for her? Would the staff at Chanel bring her champagne and ask about her life? Or would she be a persona non grata there, too?

  “Have you eaten?” Henry asked as the elevator doors closed and they began their descent to the parking garage.

  She hated that question. It took her right back to a shitty time in her life. Though she had to admit, this one might be worse. “I’m good. I’m not hungry.”

  “I didn’t ask if you were hungry. I asked if you had eaten,” he insisted.

  “I had a lovely bowl of oatmeal this morning.” She’d forced it down, though she hadn’t wanted to. She lost her appetite when she got emotional. She knew she was already floating against her danger zone, but she didn’t want to talk about it here.

  “It’s almost three in the afternoon. They didn’t bring you lunch?”

  “It wasn’t anything I wanted.” She hadn’t been able to force herself to eat the mystery meat.

  Henry looked to Remy. “Tell Wade we’ll need to stop somewhere and get her lunch.”

  “I’ll be fine.” She wanted to get where she was going, not stop for lunch. Alone. She wanted so badly to be alone.

  “I don’t think you understand how this is going to go, Ms. Winston-Hughes. You’re going to be staying at my house. I will be in charge of you. You will not leave without my approval. You do not talk to anyone I don’t approve of. I don’t care if you’re talking to a cat you met on the street. You don’t say anything at all to anything with ears without first getting it vetted by me. And you will eat three meals a day. I don’t care if you’re not hungry. I don’t care if the thought of eating makes you a little sick. You will eat.”

  “Jeez, Garrison.” Remy looked at Henry, a frown on his face. “I thought I was supposed to protect her from crazy fans. Am I going to have to protect her from you, too? Maybe it’s because I’m from the South and we’re taught to be polite to ladies, but I don’t much care for how you’re talking to my client.”

  “I’m your client,” Henry insisted. “I hired you to watch over her and I’m who you report to. And I’m not on a power trip. I need you to watch her. If after a meal she stays too long in the bathroom, I would like to be notified. If you see her exercising excessively, I would like to be notified. Regular exercise is fine, but she might try to overdo it.”

  “She’s not a child,” Remy argued.

  “No, but I am a recovering anorexic and I might try to take control again,” she said, her voice completely toneless. “I already feel like it. I want to. It would feel good to have one thing in my life that I could control. I’ll eat three meals a day, and I promise not to make anyone work purge patrol. I wasn’t a big purger. I preferred to practice discipline. That’s what I called it. It really was oblivion. Addiction. It was my drug. I’ll try hard to stay on the wagon.”

  It was humiliating that all these big gorgeous men knew how weak she’d been, how little she’d once thought of herself. The silence was filled with her shame.

  “And I will try hard not to drink every bottle of liquor in Manhattan,” Henry said. “We’ll keep each other on the wagon. No falling off on either side. And I’ll let you order some groceries. I want you to eat so you don’t get sick again, Win. And if you want revenge on me, well, I’m not fond of beets.”

  The doors opened. He hadn’t had to put himself out there in front of Remy and Noah. He could have kept his mouth shut and not outed himself as an alcoholic. She wouldn’t have said anything.

  He was a frustrating man.

  She started out of the elevator, but Henry’s hand came out, stopping her.

  “You go nowhere until he’s checked it out.” His hand stayed on her arm as though he was worried she would try to walk forward anyway. “Unless you’re safely locked up in the apartment, he or Wade goes first.”

  She didn’t like the sound of that. “Henry, a few days ago someone waved a gun in my face. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. Those men are married.”

  “And they’re good at their jobs. They’ve stayed alive so far,” Noah said. “I’ve learned those McKay-Taggart boys are tough to kill.”

  She took a deep breath as Remy touched his earpiece and said something she couldn’t hear. “Well, the good news
is that crazy chick’s gun wasn’t actually loaded. She merely wanted to scare me.”

  “There are people out there who do want to hurt you,” Henry said under his breath. “I don’t want you to pretend like everything is all right. I’ve spent the last few days looking into the past year of your life. You mentioned the attack in Sweden, but you didn’t tell me about the car that tried to drive you off the road three months ago.”

  “It was some drunk asshole.” The only reason she’d reported it to the police was the fact that she’d had some damage to her car. She’d needed the report for the insurance company.

  “And then someone keyed your car while we were on the island,” Henry pointed out. He’d seen that damage himself. He’d been angry, but Win hadn’t even filed a report on that incident.

  “That’s a lot of near misses for one year,” Noah commented as a big black SUV with heavily tinted windows pulled up. “No one can see in the windows, but I think I would rather have you in the middle seat between us.”

  Remy opened the door for her, but Henry moved into his space, offering her a hand up. She stepped on the running board and got into the car.

  Were they right? She hadn’t thought the incidents had anything at all to do with one another. One happened in Europe and the other was nothing more than bad timing and being on the wrong road. “Why would someone follow me from Sweden?”

  “I have no idea,” Henry replied. “But I want to find out if anyone who knows you was in Sweden at the time when you were attacked.”

  “It was the weekend before I came home. Everyone was there. Brie and Hoover came out. My uncle came to bring me back to New York. Trevor was there because he’d heard it would be a party. Everyone was at the club that night except my uncle. He went back to the hotel after dinner.”

  “Well, that’s helpful.” Henry settled himself in beside her. “I don’t love the fact that Trevor was there.”

  Noah sat on the other side of her. “Why would someone want to kill Win? I know she’s got a shit-ton of money waiting for her, but I would assume Bellamy Hughes would desperately want to keep her alive. If Win dies before the age of thirty, the company would revert to the foundation they originally bequeathed it to. There was a codicil written in after the pregnancy was discovered that allowed everything to pass to a child of their blood. I assume they simply hadn’t taken the time to go in and name Win after she was born. They would have at some point, but she was a baby. They weren’t thinking about dying. Trust me. I’ve gone over that will a hundred times now. I wanted to see if there was any way that douchebag Trevor could get his hands on the prize if Win died.”

  “He wouldn’t. I don’t think. My parents originally wanted the company to be sold and all of the money to go into the Winston-Hughes Foundation,” she explained. “The money that originally funded my father’s company came from my maternal grandfather. The Winstons were old-school money, but they lost most of it over time. Basically, when my mom married my dad, my grandfather scraped together everything they had and backed Dad’s company. It paid off, obviously. But one of the promises my father made him was that if they didn’t have children to pass it down to, he would memorialize the Winston name by funding the foundation for decades to come. Dad agreed. My own will is written in the same way. If I die before I have kids, the company becomes property of the foundation. Not my uncle or my cousin. They shouldn’t want me to die. They would lose everything.”

  “It doesn’t make a lot of sense,” Noah mused. “From everything I’ve gathered, Brie was trying desperately to get Win back on the show. She wouldn’t have wanted Win dead either. I know you have excellent instincts, but this feels more like bad luck and coincidence.”

  “I want to investigate all of it,” Henry said as Remy got into the passenger seat.

  “Mr. Garrison,” Wade said, “you should know that while I can avoid walking her out in front of that crowd, I can’t avoid the crowd altogether. We’ll have to drive by, but they won’t have any idea who’s in the car. I can’t make a left turn, so I have to drive by.”

  “Go as quickly as you can.” Henry’s voice sounded tight.

  Wade turned out onto the street, and they went from darkness into the bright sunshine of the New York day.

  How was she here? A few days before, her main worry had been a test in statistics, and now she didn’t even have a school to go back to.

  She heard the shouts before she saw the crowd. As they started to move down the street in front of the hospital, she could see the mass of humanity that had gathered. News reporters were out talking to the groups of young women, most dressed a lot like Brie. There was also a group of youngish men holding signs.

  JUSTICE FOR BRIE

  NO MERCY FOR THE 1%

  BURN THE BITCH

  Well, the crazy chick had been right about one thing. Everyone seemed to hate her. Would it matter if Henry found a way to win her case? Or would everyone think she’d gotten away with it because she was rich? Would she spend the rest of her life with people looking at her like she was a circus sideshow freak?

  Or would some judge decide to make an example of her? To show the 99 percent that not all wealthy people got away with it. She could spend the rest of her life rotting away in prison.

  “Damn it, Win,” Henry said. “Don’t cry. They don’t mean anything. They’re utterly meaningless.”

  Maybe they were to him, but to her they were a symbol of what she had to look forward to. Her name dragged through the mud. A million stories on how the baby her parents had sacrificed their lives for turned out to be one more entitled bitch.

  She stared straight forward and tried to stop the tears.

  “Damn it.” Henry’s arm went around her, pulling her in close. “Don’t look. Don’t watch them. They don’t matter.”

  She let him hold her, closing her eyes.

  But the image would be there forever.

  * * *

  Henry watched her move through his apartment, her hand running over the spines of his books. If she was looking for some fiction, she was in the wrong place. This was his office and it had law books and not a lot else.

  She stopped at the picture of the bungalow on Martha’s Vineyard. It was one of the things he’d brought with him. It was a picture of him and his grandfather sitting on the porch. His grandmother had taken it. He’d been five or so, and his grandfather had been teaching him how to tie fishing lures.

  God, but he wished his grandfather had taught him how to deal with women. It was late and Win had changed into the only sleep clothes available to her—one of his old T-shirts. It hung down to her knees and was perfectly shapeless, but she looked so sexy in it he felt a physical ache.

  “I got you a toothbrush and some other things you might need.” He’d run down to the drugstore at the end of the block and bought her a few things. Hairbrush, shampoo and conditioner, and a whole lot of mini travel things she might or might not use.

  She walked out of the office, though it was more of a space than a true office. There were no doors. The majority of this part of the apartment was open space. It had a loftlike vibe that she looked right at home in. “Thanks. I thought you’d left for the evening after your duty was done.”

  He was sure she was talking about the duty of watching her eat. She’d ordered groceries and set herself up in his kitchen. She’d made a delicious chicken parm and salad for the entire group. David and Noah had spent the afternoon with them, along with the bodyguards and their wives.

  He would be eternally grateful to Lisa Guidry and Genny Rycroft for getting Win to smile again. She’d been so quiet for much of the afternoon as he’d worked with David and Noah, going over strategy. She’d puttered around the kitchen until the two women had shown up, and they’d been so friendly and kind that he’d watched Win open up and smile.

  It had been nice to sit and have dinner with people. It had been
nice to see her across the table.

  What the hell was wrong with him?

  “Where would I have gone?” He handed her the bag.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. You could have had a date.”

  He chuckled but there was nothing funny about it. “I don’t date, Win.”

  This was the time of night when he used to pour himself a glass of Scotch and watch the news. It had been months since he’d indulged in Scotch. He had to avoid both tonight.

  She held the bag close and glanced around the room. “Okay, well, you should know that I don’t want to disrupt your normal life. If you need to go out, you should. I won’t try to run.”

  “You don’t want to disrupt my normal life?” It was a ridiculous statement.

  She stared at him for a moment as though trying to figure out what hole she was about to step in. “No, I don’t.”

  How could she think for a single second that bus hadn’t already left the station? “You’ve already ruined my normal life, Win. You did that the minute you came into it.”

  He watched the color drain from her face. Her shoulders straightened. “Well, on that lovely note, I’ll go to bed. Good night, Mr. Garrison.”

  He hadn’t meant to start this with her. The whole time he’d been in the drugstore, he’d been thinking about how he had to back off. He had to find a way to be less angry with her, and part of that was viewing her merely as a client he was helping out. And one who could do magical shit for his new firm. He needed to treat her with the courtesy she should expect.

  As she started to walk past him, he intended to tell her good night and that he would see her in the morning. He did not intend to reach out and grab her arm. He didn’t mean to growl her way.