Protect Me

by Selma Wolfe

  She opened her mouth to say no, and then shut it again. She waited a moment and reminded herself that sharing information wasn’t always bad.

  “Unless he’s changed his number, I could still call the kgosi I worked for,” Hope said carefully. “But I don’t think - I can’t do anything for him now. I don’t see why he would help.”

  Rick threw himself into one of the plush armchairs and steepled his hands under his chin. Probably it should have looked ridiculous. Maybe it would have been, if Hope didn’t know he had the money and intellect to command a thousand people.

  “Information, my dear,” he said. Then he smiled. “And I think you’re underestimating yourself. Powerful men are people too. If he can do you a good turn, I suspect he will.”

  Hope gave him a skeptical look; Rick stared back undaunted. He nodded at her. “Go on then. What’s the worst that could happen? He hangs up the phone?”

  There was a logic to that she couldn’t ignore, so Hope settled for glaring while she took her phone out of her pocket and fumbled through the contacts list.

  Her finger hovered over the call button. She looked at Rick, who was watching her with a steady gaze. Hope bit down on the inside of her cheek. He was sure. That would have to be enough.

  The sound of the dial was like another trigger being pulled. When a cool voice answered in heavily accented English, Hope remembered enough to greet Thabo in his own language.

  “Ah, Ms. Lasser! What can I do for you?” The voice on the other end of the line was casually cautious, much as she remembered it. She swallowed.

  “You have a good memory, sir. I was… I was wondering if there were any changes over there - if you’d heard anything, er, strange? It’s just, I’ve run into some Afrikaners recently when I wasn’t expecting to. Not here.”

  She immediately sensed the interest on the other end of the line. “Ah, is it so? There have been certain… rumors, yes. Ones that we were not told, but meant to hear all the same, if you follow?”

  Hope pinched the bridge of her nose and screwed up her eyes. She wasn’t made for talking in riddles. “I… I think so, sir. What did those rumors say?”

  Thabo hummed, his accent thick on his tongue. For a moment Hope was reminded viscerally of dusty, fenceless plains. Of what freedom actually felt like. “They claim of a powerful weapon. Something that we country folk cannot understand, that will make us flee our own land.” The man’s voice took on a dark tone. “We have heard of such things before, for fright is a very useful tool. But there seems to be something more than simple fear behind this claim. So I find this call very interesting. Do you know something I do not, Ms. Lasser?”

  Shit. “Well, I - that is. I think… It’s possible that Gouws is after something he… believes my current client has access to.” There, that should be close enough to be useful. Hope hated talking like this, where the truth was only available in halves and quarters.

  “Ah. I would not put it past him. Willem Gouws has the honor of a drunken goat,” Thabo said sourly.

  Hope bit back a laugh. “As you say, sir. Thank you very much for your help. I appreciate it.”

  “Of course, Ms. Lasser. I would ask that you give me another call if you hear something else. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir. I will do that.” She stifled a sigh. There was always a price.

  She hung up, slid the phone back in her pocket, and surveyed the room again for any possible threats or eavesdroppers with an efficiency she barely thought. Her mind was swirling around the idea of the dark rumor.

  “Do I get to hear what’s going on?” Rick asked, and Hope glanced up. He was smiling patiently at her. Being jarred out of her thoughts by him didn’t irritate her, oddly enough. In fact, she actually wanted to hear what he had to say.

  She nodded and moved closer without really thinking about it, until she could feel the edge of his body heat, almost close enough to touch.

  “There’s this rumor going around about a weapon. Something really powerful, something the natives can’t even imagine. Something technical, or biological maybe? It can’t be hardware, God knows they’ve seen enough of that.”

  Hope hated being involved in these things. But Thabo’s request that she report back with news was more than fair - after all, Thabo hadn’t needed to speak to her in the first place.

  When she said as much to Rick, he surprised her with a short laugh before getting up and standing close. He took her hand and tangled their fingers together.

  “You hate this stuff because you take those promises seriously.” Rick raised her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles, keeping eye contact with her. “Most people don’t, darling.”

  Hope raised a skeptical eyebrow but didn’t move away; the tingling warmth of his mouth felt too good on her skin. “If that’s so, why did he bother to ask?”

  “What do you think leaders do? Their job is to read people.” Rick squeezed her hand and let it go. “I’m sure he’s well aware of what he can expect from you.”

  This time Hope didn’t bother to suppress her sigh. “I really hate this stuff. When all this is over, I’m never taking on another weird case. It’s going to be all Presidents and shoot-em-ups for me.”

  Rick hesitated and then reached out for her. “I was sort of hoping when all this was over… you’d stay with me.”

  Hope stared at the brown-eyed, well-dressed man standing in front of his shelves and shelves of books she’d never read. “What?”

  “Look, you’re obviously used to handling yourself, it’s not even that I think the whole bodyguard thing is unsafe,” Rick spread his hands wide, “but if you keep doing this, then when are we gonna see each other, exactly? You’re guarding me now and that’s great, but after…”

  “After,” Hope repeated, staring at him blankly. This place didn’t look like her home anymore. Rick didn’t look like - well, he’d never been hers, not really.

  She’d never belonged here, not really.

  Hope took two deliberate steps back toward the door. Her hand slipped behind her back and her fingertips touched the doorknob. She could pull it open smoothly like this, if she needed to.

  “Not to be rude, but you’re looking a little crazy-eyed,” Rick commented. “Are you thinking something stupid?”

  He sounded genuinely concerned and before she could stop herself, Hope burst out into a short laugh. She clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide with shock, but it was too late, Rick was already laughing back without even bothering to know what the joke was.

  “I…” Hope dropped her hand and shook her head wryly. “You’re very bad for me.”

  To her surprise, Rick rolled his eyes and for a second something tired broke through his expression. He looked older than his age for just a moment, and Hope chased the look, wondering if she’d imagined it, but it vanished.

  He arced an arm up over his head to rub at the back of his neck. “Bad for what? Look, it’s okay to laugh - shit, it’s okay to smile. Sometimes it seems like you think you’re a gun with an unfortunate penchant for speech.”

  She barked out a laugh and stared at him incredulously, this rich boy with all the answers who thought he could tell her she wasn’t a weapon.

  “You have no idea,” she said. It was hard to pull in enough breath to back up the words. “No idea who I am; do you really think for one second that you can even imagine…” She hadn’t realized until right this second that she thought of herself as separate from Rick, from everybody. But it was true, wasn’t it? Trinity didn’t know how to pick danger out of a room like a puzzle. Iseul didn’t know what it felt like to dodge a knife so it dragged down her skin rather than stabbed. Rick didn’t know what it felt like to have someone fire a gun at your head and have to pick up your weapon, have to keep moving even as your mind seized up in shock.

  Rick’s face wasn’t exactly angry, but the lines around his eyes were tight and drawn. He looked tired again.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I don’t know about a
lot of things. But do I have to? Do I have to have pulled a trigger to be able to talk to you?”

  Hope suppressed a soft noise at the back of her throat at those words. No, she didn’t want that. Even if she didn’t know anything else, she knew that.

  “Look, if you want me to follow you; if you want me to give up all this, we can… we can figure it out. I can be happy anywhere." Rick spread his hands and looked into her eyes, painfully earnest. "But I don't think I can be happy without you anymore. And I'm not willing to try."

  "Rick," she said weakly, "you can't just... follow me places. That's not how the real world works." And he wouldn’t be happy in cramped bedsits with only a cancelled magazine subscription for company, she knew.

  His face was set in rare stubborn lines that she recognized immediately. He raised an eyebrow.

  "I don't accept that," he said simply.

  And it was just as simple as that for him. Rick had enough money that he could wallpaper his mansion with it and never know the difference. He had the weight of a family name behind him. His mind could race circles around everyone.

  Anger twisted in her belly and Hope turned away from him.

  "What is it?" Rick asked, for once quiet and subdued. He could adjust so easily to any situation. If he wanted to, he could charm anyone just by watching to see what they wanted him to do. He could charm Hope like that too - he was doing it now. She wasn't sure if it was manipulation, but she wasn't sure it felt good either.

  "Everything is so easy for you," she burst out, turned just far enough away that she didn't have to look at his face, but could still watch his back. "You can just say, oh, this will happen, and it does. That's not - it's not right." Her hands fell to her sides, palm up. She felt like the inside of a hurricane, every pent-up emotion swirling, desperate to get out and wreak havoc. She had never felt this way before Rick. She hated him for that, too.

  She shook her head helplessly. Maybe if she'd been an Ivy League kid she would have the words now to express all the frustration she felt. But she was just Hope Lasser, who worked with her hands and her eyes, and she didn't have anything.

  Rick took a few steps forward and then stopped a foot or so away. Probably the distance was calculated for maximum efficiency, Hope thought bitterly.

  There was an oddly long silence before Rick cleared his throat. When she looked out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hands were open by his sides as well.

  "I can't change who I am, Hope," he said in a low pitch that rumbled through her body so that she felt the words more than heard them. "I can't change it and I won't apologize for it. It's not fair that I can do things - have things - that most people can't. I know. But you don't seem like the kind of person who expects life to be fair."

  "I'm not," Hope said quietly. She caught the ghost of a nod behind her.

  "Then I guess you have to decide if you can live with it. You aren't the first person to have this reaction, you know," Rick said, sounding gently rueful, like he was remembering something that had stung a long time ago. "I'll be a constant reminder that the world isn't fair; of every little injustice that's ever come your way."

  Hope started to say, "That's not..." and then stopped herself. Rick was right. That was the problem.

  "I'm rich, and smart, and happy," Rick continued, and she wished he'd shut up. "But I'm happiest with you."

  The world shuddered to a halt under Hope's feet and then started right back up again before she could panic.

  She jerked around and stared at Rick. He looked back at her with that open expression, wide green eyes with curiosity he'd never learned to hide. Life had been gentle with him.

  She wanted it to stay that way, Hope realized. Even if it made her rage in some deep, unhappy part of her soul, that was alright. She cared enough for Rick that she just wanted him to be happy in a simple, uncomplicated way that had nothing to do with how he was raised and everything to do with who he was.

  At seventeen Hope had learned on the front porch of her mother's house that some things had to be forgotten if you wanted to go on living. Hope had never really acknowledged it to herself, but the truth was that she'd had a choice at that moment. She could have curled up on the porch and sobbed and waited to see if her mother would let her back inside.

  Instead, she'd lifted her backpack onto her shoulders and walked away, quivering chin held high.

  "I don't want to go in circles," Hope found herself saying out loud, somewhat to her horror. Rick had a terrible effect on her. But he was listening eagerly, all of his considerable attention trained only on her. And Hope couldn't deny that she wanted that.

  She took a deep, shuddering breath and scrubbed a hand over her face. “But I don’t know… I just don’t know, okay? Can I just…”

  Rick looked the closest to truly unhappy she’d ever seen him, and the sight made her chest ache, but he nodded. Hope watched his throat work as he swallowed and then gave her a smile that didn’t reach all the way to his eyes.

  “Of course. I’ll just… leave you here.” He walked over to the door and then paused with a hand on the doorknob.

  He looked over his shoulder and gave her a tiny real smile. “You could always get through some more of Jane Eyre,” he suggested, and then he was gone.

  Hope shook her head incredulously and dropped down into one of the plush chairs like her strings had been cut. That was Rick, wasn’t it? He thought he knew what everyone else should do with their time. Circumstances made it so that he could think that way.

  She rubbed a hand over her face a second time. It felt like it should clarify things, but it didn’t.

  The simmering anger of before had all but drained out of her by now; Hope had long since trained herself to leave it behind the same way she’d left careless laughter. Anger did you no good in a fight, except perhaps in the heat of the moment when your blood was up anyway.

  Rick wouldn’t change. People didn’t, generally. He would continue to order people around and presume on their time because he’d never needed to know any better. Sometimes she would be the person he was ordering around. The idea was annoying but not infuriating. He would be a pain in the ass from time to time, but so would she. Rick would continue being his kind, brilliant, insufferable self. And Hope couldn’t imagine anything she actually wanted more than to experience it. Not even those wild plains that were already starting to blur in her mind.

  What did she think she was leaving behind, anyway? Danger and utter freedom, and yes, she might miss it, but at one point she’d wanted to leave it behind too. That was why she was here.

  Sometime in the middle of her inner turmoil Hope just gave up and fell asleep curled up in the plush chair, toeing off her GSG9s and laying her head down on the wide armrest.

  When she woke up the sun was lower and shadows arced out over the room from the high windows. She blinked and came back to herself slowly. She felt warm and safe and comfortable. Like this was home.

  Yes to whatever you’re thinking, to whatever you want. She could have this. This could really be her home. This could be her life.

  Hope’s lips flattened into a thin line and she nodded decisively to herself. Change was inevitable. And fear was not an excuse.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Hope laced up her boots and got out of her chair. As she walked to the door, she swept a reflexive glance over the room. Her gaze landed on the empty table and she blinked at it, surprised. She wondered who had taken Jane Eyre. Human nature being what it was, now that it was gone she kind of wished she’d had the chance to read it.

  She wandered through the halls, peering around doorways, but the mansion was quiet and still. Even the kitchen was empty. Hope wondered if Trinity had gone somewhere or if she was just in her private rooms. She wished Trinity was still around; she could’ve used an ear to bounce things off of. She fingered the cell phone in her pocket half-heartedly, then pushed on all the way to her own room.

  The room was as still as the hallway. Hope looked around. You co
uld barely tell that somebody was staying in her room. What baggage did she have? A bag full of clothes and gear, neat and black and anonymous. If she lost any of it, she wouldn’t care. Usually that was a point of pride for her. Usually she was pleased to bypass the luggage lines at the airport. But this afternoon as she sat on her bed and looked around, Hope felt very aware of the fact that her only real impact on this room that she’d spent weeks in was the indent pressed into the bed around her body. It would be gone as soon as she stood up.

  Did she want to live like this forever?

  Unsettled, Hope got up and rapped on the door between her room and Rick’s. There was no answer. She waited a moment and dialed his cell phone.

  There was no answer - but after a second, a loud ring echoed in the other room.

  Hope’s key was in the door before she’d fully processed her thoughts.

  She turned the key in the lock quietly and dodged to one side of the doorframe as she pulled it open. The room was dark and quiet. Hope dropped to her haunches and peered around into the darkness. There was no sign of another person, no shadowy outline, and there was a limit to caution.

  Especially when Rick might be in danger.

  She swiftly stood back up and stepped into the room; flicked on the light.

  Whatever had happened - and something had happened, she was sure, because Rick went nowhere without his phone, occupational hazard of owning a Fortune 500 company, he’d told her with an exaggerated wink and an honest barely audible sigh - it hadn’t happened here. Rick’s room looked both pristine and exactly the way it had looked yesterday.

  Though she didn’t linger over it long, Hope still noticed the human touches that were missing from her own space. A variety of ties that all looked the same were thrown over the back of his desk chair; an assortment of papers that were also identical to her were strewn over the desk itself. There was a framed picture of what Hope assumed were Rick’s parents shoved off to the back of the desk. Lab coats were draped over the end of his bed. Half of them were stained. One of them was missing an entire arm and Hope really didn’t want to know what he’d done to it. A painting consisting of several haphazard slashes of blue was hung on the wall. Hope assumed it was expensive.