Bodyguard (Den of Thieves, #2)

by A. M. Cosgrove

  “It’s alright, I understand.” A warm smile crossed her face, “ I guess I got caught up in the moment. I’m sorry, too.”

  The irritation at being questioned quickly evaporated. She hadn’t meant it the way it had come across. He could see that.

  He parked and helped her to the lobby where the doorman quickly materialized with a wheelchair. Bo got the feeling he had been standing there, waiting for her to come back since he had gotten in earlier in the day.

  “Good to see you looking so well, Miss Woods.” The older man smiled warmly, holding he chair steady for her.

  “Good Lord, Alfred. We both know I look like hell.” A smile stifled as she feigned irritation at the fuss the older man was making.

  “Ma’am, regardless, I sure am glad that you are well enough to be released from the hospital.”

  “Not so sure they let me go because of that; according to this guy, I have to stay put and rest or some such nonsense.” She hooked her thumb up at Bo as she spoke.

  Bo smiled. He was glad to see that he wasn’t the only one she hassled. Maybe this time he would make it through the rest of this assignment.

  As much as he hated to admit it, it wasn’t quite as bad as he had thought it would be. Maybe Jake had been right all along and this was what he really needed.

  Not that he was willing to admit it to anyone.

  “Alright, Flyboy. Let’s get upstairs before Alfred here decides he needs to team up with you in keeping me stationary. I don’t need you both teaming up together.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Bo smiled and winked at Alfred as he wheeled the chair towards the elevator and headed upstairs.

  Getting off the elevator, Bo watched Olivia scramble to try and find her door keys one-handed.

  He pulled up to the door to her apartment and just stood there, watching her fiddle for her keys. She stopped suddenly and heaved a big sigh.

  By the time she wiggled around to look at him, he had fished out the keys she had been looking for and was dangling them over her head.

  “Looking for these?” Bo grinned.

  “Bastard.” She grinned back.

  “Why thank you, Bo, for keeping my keys safe while I was away,” Bo said in a squeaky falsetto, his grin spreading.

  Olivia rolled her eyes and tried to reach for the keys.

  “Give them to me.” She winced as she reached.

  “I think you should just leave this part to me, Missy,” Bo advised, reaching over her head and unlocking the door and opening it wide enough for the chair to pass through.

  “Fine.” She rolled her eyes again, waving her hand towards the open door.

  *****

  The rest of the day had been a delicate dance between what she wanted to do and what she was able to do, and by the time she retired for the evening, Bo found himself exhausted. It had been a long day. He had never realized how difficult it was to care for a single person’s every move. As much as she felt better as they day wore on, she still was weak and needed to build up her strength again, so he was left running around to get her whatever she was looking for.

  Despite what she had been told, she had gone right back to work on some of her cases almost immediately upon getting in the apartment and getting settled on the couch.

  Bo had tried to argue that she should have a nap, but that had been a thought cut off with a single icy look in his direction.

  He ordered in Chinese food for them, which she insisted on paying for, but being the gentleman he was, he didn’t allow that to happen.

  It was around seven in the evening when she had finally given up the ghost and retired to her room for the night. After making her comfortable, he settled in on the couch she had just vacated, with his laptop on the coffee table to keep an eye on the cameras and any alarms he set.

  He didn’t even realize he had fallen asleep until he smelled the distinct scent and heard sizzle of bacon.

  He bolted upright and looked over the back of the couch into the kitchen.

  “Good morning, Sunshine.” She smiled at him from where she stood in front of the stove.

  Bo looked at his watch. Seven thirty. Where the hell had the night gone?

  “Morning. How long have you been up?” His mind reeled with the fog of a dead sleep lifting.

  She glanced at the clock on the microwave, “’Bout an hour and a half, maybe two hours. I don’t know. It was early and you were asleep.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Because you were asleep and it was early?”

  “You aren’t supposed to be doing that stuff. You are supposed to be in bed resting.” He stood up and strode over to where she stood.

  She looked at him defiantly.

  He reached for the flipper in her hand but quickly found his hand smacked away with it.

  “Olivia,” he said looked at her.

  “Don’t give me that look. You are here as my bodyguard. You are not here to be my personal slave.”

  “Yes, but I am also under orders from—” he started before she cut him off.

  “Under orders from whom?” She eyed him.

  “The doctor said—”

  “I don’t give a shit what the doctor said. You aren’t being paid by the doctor. You are being paid for by the Lake City Justice Department. I am pretty sure nowhere in your contract is there a clause for waiting on me hand and foot.” She put her hand on her hip, still holding the flipper in her bad hand. “And even if there was a clause like that, please believe me, I am not going to allow you to hold me to that in any way, shape or form.”

  Bo looked at her and he almost burst out laughing. The entire conversation made him wonder if he was in the middle of a dream.

  The seriousness in her eyes told him otherwise.

  “You may be right. I am not being paid to wait on you hand and foot. But,” he held up a finger to silence the protest before it got a chance to make it to her lips. “My mother raised a gentleman and a gentleman would never allow a woman who was hurt or ill to look after herself until she was a hundred percent able to do so.”

  She stared at him.

  “That said, I want you to know that I will not allow for anymore of this foolishness of you cooking breakfast for yourself—”

  “I was also making you some,” she mumbled, but didn’t resist when he pulled the flipper from her hand.

  “Very sweet of you, but I think I will be taking over now.” He smiled and turned to the stovetop to see to the eggs and bacon she had been making.

  She sighed and made her way to the dining room table a few feet away, taking up a position to watch him.

  He could feel her eyes watching his every move.

  “You look very natural standing in front of a range.”

  “I spent a good deal of my childhood cooking for my mom and siblings.”

  “Oh?” She perked up, instantly curious.

  “Yeah, my mom was a single mom and raising me and my siblings. She worked a lot of long hours so I ended up doing a lot of cooking for her so she could just relax when she came home.”

  Olivia smiled at him when he looked at her while he spoke.

  “My mother was a single mom, too. But there was just me and my younger brother.”

  “Two younger sisters and a younger brother. Mind you, we are close in age.”

  “My brother is seven years younger than me.” She looked down at her hands, and Bo wondered what she was thinking about.

  “It wasn’t easy with all of us being the same age. My mother had to wait a long time to leave my Dad because it was easier to stay and take his shit than it was to leave with four young children to care for.”

  “Makes sense. My brother was babied badly by my mother. She always felt bad that my father wasn’t around to show him how to be a real man.” She shook her head but still didn’t make eye contact.

  Bo said nothing. There really was nothing he could say that would have been non-committal. He didn’t want to say anything that could set her off a
gain. He knew how hard it was without a father figure, but the choice was always his to either become a man she could be proud of or not. He had joined the army for that exact reason.

  “Sadly, it didn’t work out the way she had planned,” she sighed. “He decided to take the easy routes in life and I took the harder ones.”

  Bo still said nothing and just let her talk. Clearly she needed someone to listen to her.

  “We don’t talk to each other much anymore. Except Christmas when I go home to visit my grandmother.” Olivia smiled, “Now, she is an amazing person. Always took the time to make sure I had what I needed when my mother was too busy bailing my brother out of whatever he had gotten into.”

  Bo smiled. He’d had a close relationship with his grandmother growing up, too. The women of that generation were certainly strong, no-fuss women. They knew how to get the job done.

  “You know, she was the only one who showed up when I passed the bar?” She scoffed, “My mother was in another city, trying to post bail for my brother. He had been caught running a con and had bilked some old woman out of a few thousand dollars worth of jewelry.”

  “I was close to my Grams too. She’d whoop my ass if I set one toe out of line and my mother wasn’t around to catch it. Hell, she’d whoop me even if my mother did catch it and it warranted a second ass whooping.” He laughed, “Man, could she cook a mean meal. She lived down the road from us, and I swear to God, I could smell her cooking from a mile away and it was good. She ended up teaching me a lot of what I know.”

  It was Olivia’s turn to laugh.

  “Grandmothers are like that though. They are wonderful, amazing human beings, born at a time when things weren’t perfect but they made it work for their families. And they always wanted to make sure that their kids had better than what they started out life with.” She smiled, “And, heaven forbid if you forgot where you came from or what chances you had been given in your lifetime to make a better life. They never let you forget it.”

  “Nope, they didn’t,” he agreed, setting two plates of eggs, bacon and toast down at the table in front of her and taking a seat across from her.

  “Thank you for this.” She smiled around a bite.

  “Not a problem. I am just glad you didn’t argue too hard about it!”

  “Well, if you must know, I was sort of glad you woke up when you did. The grease was getting all splattery and I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to dump it into a can to cool off. Ha!”

  “See, I am good for something.” He grinned.

  They finished the rest of their breakfast in silence, each one enjoying the peace that had befallen them.

  *****

  Once the dishes were done, Olivia decided that it was time to discuss her plans for the day. She hoped that with his belly full of food and a peaceful conversation, he would be more understanding of how she wanted the rest of the day to go.

  She had no wish to spend another day cooped up when she had things she needed to get done.

  “So,” she started once they had finished eating and Bo was clearing away the dishes and loading them into the dishwasher.

  “So?” He turned around, giving her the look that made her think he could read her thoughts.

  She hated that look. It was almost as if he was already trying to come up with a way to talk her out of whatever it was she had on her mind.

  “Well, I was thinking—” she started.

  “From what I have gathered from you, that could be a dangerous proposition.”

  “Thanks, Flyboy.”

  “I was in the army, not the air force. Two completely different divisions.” He smiled.

  She felt her resolve shift slightly. Dammit, why did he always do that? It was so hard to be tough when the guy looked and acted like he did.

  “Since I am doing better today—”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’? You haven’t even heard what I was going to say.”

  “From the sound of how it is starting out, I don’t know that I want to hear the rest of it. I figured I would say no before you got too excited about whatever it was.”

  She stared at him. What the hell! She didn’t know whether to be angry at him or burst out laughing. He was certainly a piece of work.

  “Give me some credit. I know you aren’t going to let me go back to work and do whatever I want. No matter how much I insist that it needs to be done. I was hoping you would allow me to go into the office and pick up a couple of files that I can work on while I am stuck at home and on bed rest.”

  She held her breath.

  “Are you going to keep doing this to me every day?”

  She felt instantly horrible about asking. As much as she hadn’t wanted someone to be following her every moment of every day, she had started enjoying Bo’s company. It was hard to remember that his primary job wasn’t, in fact, to keep her company and make her feel good. It was purely to make sure that she was safe at all times.

  From what she had gathered since she had returned home, Bo had set up more than enough surveillance equipment to know what was going to happen before it happened.

  Leaving the safety of the cocoon he had built for her would jeopardize her safety and his bottom line.

  “Look, I am sorry.” She put her hand on his shoulder and felt the ripple of muscles beneath it. “I am not the sort of person who has the ability nor the inclination to sit around and do nothing all day. The fact that I have to is just about driving me nuts. And not knowing when I will be able to return back to the way my life was before this shit started isn’t helping.”

  “I understand completely.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course I do.” Bo nodded and got that smile on his face again, the one that instantly melted her heart and resolve, “I know you could have only gotten to the place you are in life with a whole ton of grit and determination. It has become everything you know in your life. It has consumed you to the point where being idle is a foreign feeling and one that you avoid at all costs.”

  She stared at him. She’d never thought about it that way. Truth be told, now that he pointed it out, she realized that he was right. Her work had consumed her life to this point and she had not left any room in her life to be idle. She hadn’t had a hobby or anything like that since she was a child.

  “I’ve never thought about it like that before. I have just been so caught up in it.” She looked down at her hands. As much as she hated to admit it, he was right about that.

  “I totally understand. I was the same way with the Army. It was hard as hell to come back to the land of the rest of the world when I left active duty. I know I was pretty aimless when I got out too. I suffered from depression along with PSTD.” He took a breath, “Hell, I still do. When you devote your life to your job it becomes your life and when that is taken away from you its like you are naked and have no idea what to do with yourself.”

  “So how did you cope? What did you do?” she asked; she was curious, as he seemed to have it all together.

  “I made a conscious decision to make a change. I don’t mean the tacky New Year’s resolutions that most people make every year. I mean an actual change that required daily changes.” He shrugged, “Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. My mind fought it all the time. I kept itching to go back to the daily regiment that ruled my life for so many years, but then I’d see myself slipping down that road and I’d get up and go for a run or walk down to the lake or a drive in the country. Something just to break myself out of that head space.”

  “Sounds like it’s just easier not to.”

  “For sure it is. But if you really want to make the change, then the work you will have to do will be worth it and in the end it will become the new routine.”

  “I guess you’re right.” She took a sip of her coffee.

  She could feel his eyes on her. She didn’t dare look up at him. Didn’t want to meet his eyes. It was awkward enough as it was to have him be
ing there giving her a lecture on how to change her life to something that scared her. The whole situation, while it was an eye opener, was not one she was willing to start facing.

  “You are still trying to find away to convince me to take you to your office, aren’t you?” he said quietly.

  She nodded, still not willing to look up and face him.

  “Yes.”

  “Alright, you have been through enough this week to last a lifetime. Now probably isn’t the greatest time to change all of your habits. How about a compromise?”

  Hope sprung up in her heart.

  “Really?” She felt like a kid who had just been offered a chance to earn some extra ice cream after dinner.

  Why did he make her feel that way?

  “I will take you to your office and we can pick up the files that you want to work on, but I want you to promise me that you will have a nap this afternoon and then take some time to sit back and read a book or watch some television or a movie.”

  She stared at him. Was he serious?

  “I am serious.” There he was, reading her mind again.

  “Alright. Sounds fair enough to me.” She smiled, “Actually it sounds more than fair. I am sure no matter how great I feel right now, I will be needing a nap sooner rather than later.”

  “Then it’s a deal. We both get what we want.”

  She nodded feeling almost giddy. Why did he make her feel like that?

  “Wasn’t so hard, was it? I’m not so hard to deal with.”

  “No you’re not at all. As much as I hate to admit it, I am very glad that they sent you to keep an eye on me. I am grateful for the company.”

  “Me too.” He smiled at her and her heart fluttered in response.

  Chapter 7

  An hour later, after letting her go into her room to get ready to go out, Bo decided to go and check on her to make sure she hadn’t hurt herself.

  He found her sitting on her bed, halfway dressed, silent tears streaming down her face.

  “Olivia!” His heart skipped a beat and he rushed to her side.

  “I’m alright,” she insisted, pushing him away.

  Bo sat down on the bed beside her. He was close enough to smell the faint flowery perfume she had put on. Its smell made him feel momentarily light headed.