“Grab some coffee—I’ll be right out,” Tom shouted from one of the back offices. “How’s your mom?”
“Much better, thanks,” Cosmo called back.
And she was. Right after the accident, when Cosmo had first gone to see her, she’d been in a lot of pain. Her face had been almost gray, and she’d looked old and frail lying in that hospital bed.
But she’d been home a few days now and was feeling far more her old self.
Which was great.
But, dear sweet Jesus, if he had to listen to the soundtrack from Jekyll & Hyde one more time, he was going to scream.
Cos took his coffee and sank down into one of the new leather sofas in the Troubleshooters waiting room. Buttery soft and a light shade of honey brown, they replaced the former mismatched collection of overstuffed chairs—thrift shop rejects—that had cluttered the area in front of the receptionist’s desk.
Whoa, the walls had been repainted, too.
Tom’s wife, Kelly, had been threatening to redecorate for months, insisting that the image Tom was trying for with his new company probably wasn’t “piss poor and tasteless to boot.”
“Are you here for the meeting?”
Cosmo looked up. The woman coming down the hall toward him was a stranger. She was wearing a pin-striped suit that had been tailored to accentuate her feminine shape. Petite, with blond hair cut short and delicate features in a launch-a-thousand-ships face, she had blue eyes that were coolly polite. Professional. Intelligent.
Her hands were ring-free. Both of them. Her fingernails were short, bitten down almost to the quick—a direct and intriguing contrast to the career-woman persona.
She took a few steps closer and tried again. “May I help you?”
“No, ma’am,” he finally answered her, then mentally kicked himself. Talk, asshole. She most certainly could help him. He would love for her to help him. And at least be polite. “Thanks. I’m waiting for Commander Paoletti.”
She finally smiled, and it transformed her from merely breathtakingly beautiful to full-power-defibrillator heart-stoppingly gorgeous. He wanted to drop to his knees and beg her to bear his children.
“You must be one of his SEALs,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Stand up, fool. But, Christ, don’t spill the coffee…Too late. It splashed over the edge of the cup and onto his fingers. Gahhhhd, it was hot.
She pretended not to notice as he pretended that he hadn’t just been scalded. She even held out her hand to shake. “I’m Sophia Ghaffari.”
Sophia. It was a beautiful name, and by all rights violins should have started playing when she said it. She looked like a Sophia, she dressed like a Sophia, she even smelled like a Sophia.
He tried to wipe his fingers dry on his pants, but it was hopeless. “Cosmo Richter. Sorry, I’m…”
A freakin’ idiot.
He crossed to the coffee setup, where he found some napkins, thank the Lord.
But Sophia didn’t run out of the room screaming, “Save me from cretins!” as he wiped off his hand. “You must be here to help out with the Mercedes Chadwick job,” she said instead.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “Tommy said something about an easy op in L.A.”
“That’s the one.” Now that his hands were clean, she had crossed her arms. “She’s a movie producer—and I guess a screenwriter, too,” she told him. “She’s been getting death threats.”
His chance to touch Sophia, to shake her hand, had apparently passed. What a crying shame.
“Hey, Cos.” Tom Paoletti came out from the back, smiling his welcome. “Sorry to keep you waiting.” He looked at Sophia. “Soph, you better get moving, if you’re intending to catch that flight.”
“Yeah. It was nice meeting you,” Sophia told Cosmo.
As she hurried down the hall, he led Cosmo back toward his office. “You’ve got how many weeks of leave left?”
“Three weeks, two days, seventeen hours.”
His former SEAL CO smiled. “Well, at least you’re not counting the minutes.”
Cosmo glanced at his watch. And fourteen minutes.
“And you’re sure you don’t want to use this time as a vacation?” Tom asked.
“I’m quite sure, sir.” Like many SEALs in Team Sixteen, Cosmo wasn’t good at taking vacations. After just a few days, he got bored. Restless. “I just want to be able to check in on my mother once or twice a day.” He got down to business. “So tell me about this Hollywood producer. What’d she do to piss people off enough to make them want to kill her?”
“I don’t need personal protection—a team of bodyguards? That’s absolutely ridiculous!” Jane Chadwick told Patty, her new college intern.
Patty didn’t seem convinced, so Jane turned to Robin, hoping for just a teensy bit of brotherly support.
But he wasn’t paying attention. He was giving Patty one of his “hey there” smiles. The girl, naturally, was dazzled. Of course, she was impossibly young and didn’t yet have the mileage that would enable her to see past Robin’s gorgeous face to the inner low-life womanizing scum within.
“Yo,” Jane said, clapping her hands sharply at her brother. Half brother. At times like this it helped to remind herself that they shared only a fraction of their genetic makeup. “Robin. Focus. Patty, go call the studio back and tell them no. Thank you, but no. I’m perfectly safe. Be firm.”
Unlike that of many young movie-loving girls who made the pilgrimage to Hollywood, Patty’s freckle-faced cuteness wasn’t an act. She actually wore kneesocks and meant it. Jane didn’t know her very well yet, but unfortunately being firm didn’t seem to be high on her skill list.
“If you touch her,” Jane told him, “I will kill you and I will make it hurt.”
“What?” Robin said. Mr. Innocent. He made that sound that was half laugh, half indignation. “Come on. I was just smiling at her. Besides, you of all people shouldn’t be making idle death threats.”
That was supposed to be funny. Jane didn’t crack a smile.
“That wasn’t a threat,” she said. “It was a promise. Let me put this in terms you’ll understand, Sleazoid. If you sleep with her, she’ll think she’s your girlfriend. And when she finds out that she was merely your Friday night distraction, she’ll be badly hurt. Now. Maybe you don’t give a rat’s ass about Patty’s feelings, but I do. And I also know what you do care about, so listen close. If you break her heart, she will quit. And if she quits, you will take her place and become my personal assistant, and you won’t have a single minute to yourself from that moment until we are done making American Hero. Which means in Sleazoid-speak that it will be two months before you have sex again. Two. Months.”
Her little brother laughed. “Relax, Janey. I’m not going to sleep with her.”
Jane just looked at him. She liked Patty. A lot. The girl was smart, she was sweet, she was way overqualified for this glorified gofer position.
“You need to lighten up. What is it Variety calls you?” Robin reached for a copy of the trade magazine that was out and open on her desk and started to read the latest section that Patty had highlighted. “‘Never too serious, party girl producer and screenwriter J. Mercedes Chadwick heats things up at the Paradise.’” He looked at her over the top of the oversized page. “Who are you, you too-serious she-bitch, and what have you done with my real sister, the party girl producer?”
Jane gave him the evil eye that she’d perfected back when she was six and he was four.
It didn’t scare him as much anymore. “Look,” he said, “I know you’re freaked out by these e-mails—”
“But I’m not,” Jane interrupted. “I’m freaked out by the fact that the studio’s freaked out. I don’t need a bodyguard. Robbie, come on. It’s just a few Internet crazies who—”
“Patty told me you got three hundred just today.”
“No,” she scoffed. “Well, yeah, but it’s, like, three crazies each sending a hundred e-mails.”
“You’re certain of th
at?”
“Yes,” she told him.
Robin was silent, obviously not believing her.
“Really,” she insisted. “How could this possibly be real?”
Also by Suzanne Brockmann
Published by Ballantine Books:
HEARTTHROB
BODYGUARD
THE UNSUNG HERO
THE DEFIANT HERO
OVER THE EDGE
OUT OF CONTROL
GONE TOO FAR
FLASHPOINT
HOT TARGET
BREAKING POINT
PRAISE FOR SUZANNE BROCKMANN
The Defiant Hero
Chosen by Romance Writers of America as the #2 Romance of 2001
“A smart, thrilling keeper…While heating tension and passion to the boiling point, Brockmann firmly squashes the cliché of military men with hearts of stone and imbues her SEALs with honest emotional courage.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Unsung Hero
Chosen by Romance Writers of America as the #1 Romance of 2000 Winner of the Romance Writers Golden Leaf Award
“A novel that is richly textured, tenderly touching, and utterly exciting. This is one book you will be unable to put down or forget!”
—Romantic Times
Bodyguard
Winner of a RITA Award
“Count on Ms. Brockmann to deliver a thoughtful and tightly woven plot with plenty of action.”
—The Romance Journal
Over the Edge
Chosen by Romance Writers of America as the #1 Romance of 2001
“A taut, edgy thriller.”
—LINDA HOWARD
Out of Control
“Brockmann consistently turns out first-rate novels that tug on the reader’s heartstrings, and her latest is no exception.”
—Publishers Weekly
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 2002 by Suzanne Brockmann
Excerpt from Hot Target copyright © 2005 by Suzanne Brockmann
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
www.ballantinebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-345-49868-7
v3.0
Into the Night Page 50