by Dana Marton
“I’m flying out for the dog show tomorrow,” she reminded her brother, wanting to switch to a topic that would distract both of them. “I’m so nervous for Tsini. Would you come with us?”
She needed to convince him to tag along. Nash had insisted on that. He didn’t want the two of them to separate. He wanted to be able to keep an eye on both of them.
Right now he was down in the parking garage under the building, surveying it for possible security breaches or whatever.
That he believed her and was coming up with a plan to protect them was a relief, even if they didn’t agree on anything else. He thought her current security was worthless. She was proud of herself for standing up to him and not letting him ride roughshod over Mike and Dave.
“You’ll have fun. If it gets to be too much, you can always hang out in the suite. I reserved the best one they had.”
“I hate crowds. I’d rather have a couple of quiet evenings here instead.” Greg gave her a sheepish smile.
She would have done anything to see him smile more often. She would have done anything to protect her brother.
For a moment she hesitated on the verge of telling him everything. But as competent and highly functioning as Greg was, he did get stressed easily and when he was stressed, his disability became more pronounced. For that reason, she’d never discussed her suspicions about the “accidents” with him. And though he knew that some sick person out there had threatened Tsini, she hadn’t given him any details beyond that.
Something else she’d meant to talk to him about popped into her mind. “I’m thinking about a little get-together for your birthday when we come back. Just family and friends.” It’d give her a chance to meet some of the new people he hung out with these days.
His eyes lit up. “Okay.”
“You can give me a list of who you want to invite.” She hated that she had to keep track of his friends, but past experience had shown that sometimes people took advantage of him and befriended him for monetary gain. All they saw in him was the Landon name.
Even at the company. Their father had had to fire a security guard shortly after Greg had gone to work there. Yancy had quickly become Greg’s friend and had taken him to parties after work. To parties and other places. Greg had lost a ton of money betting on illegal street races, which were Yancy’s secret passion. Thank God that creep was no longer in the picture.
But Greg had new friends Kayla knew little about, friends who worried her, considering how much money Greg was borrowing from her lately. She needed to figure out what was going on there, and needed to do it diplomatically, without making Greg feel that she thought he was a child who needed watching over.
“Tsini could use the extra support at the show this year,” she told him, returning to that bit again.
Truth was, even before she’d talked to Nash, she hadn’t felt comfortable leaving Greg alone, had already talked to the housekeeper about spending more time at the apartment for the next four days. And back then, all she’d had were her own fears and suspicions, since everyone she’d ever told was telling her that she was wrong. And since she wanted to believe that, she’d half talked herself into thinking that they were right and all the stress of the last two years had made her paranoid.
But Nash agreed with her.
And, more than any of the cops she’d brought the issues up to, he looked as though he knew what he was doing.
So most likely there really was someone out there after her family.
Which meant she couldn’t leave Greg behind.
He pushed the peas aside on his plate, away from the potatoes. “I’ll like staying here.”
Of course he would, she thought, ashamed for a moment. He’d never had much autonomy. He’d gone to a small local private college, at their parents’ insistence, and had commuted from home every day. Their mother had been overprotective of him. Their father had never had any confidence in his abilities. From the moment he’d been diagnosed, he’d become damaged goods in Will Landon’s eyes. If his son could be of no use in his father’s quest to build his empire, Greg was good for nothing. Worse than that, he was ballast.
And as much as she loved him, Kayla hadn’t been much better, had not encouraged him to become more independent after their parents’ death. He’d been so distraught. She’d insisted on him moving in with her, pleaded with him, telling him she needed him. Then, after his brother’s death Greg had become depressed. She should have helped him build his own life, but she was worried about him, so she kept him tethered to hers instead.
And to keep him safe now, she had to continue doing that.
She patted his hand on the table. He had long, slim fingers like their mother’s, the blond coloring that Kayla had inherited, as well. He had a slight body, had never been into sports or anything physical. He looked younger than his age, but he was smarter than most people expected. He’d gone through college with the help of a private tutor their father had hired, and had received a degree he’d worked hard for and earned.
He did deserve a normal life. A better life than she was making for him, she thought, and decided to help him become more independent once she was sure they were past all danger. But she needed to keep him close until then.
“I’m nervous. It’s a big show for us. I don’t know what I’ll do without you. I need you there. You don’t have to go to any of the big events if you don’t want to. Just come along. Please.”
And to her relief, Greg nodded.
Chapter Three
He was okay with his assignment changing when it had barely begun. That happened all the time. He didn’t mind being responsible for Kayla Landon, her brother and her poodle all of a sudden—especially since she was turning out to be different than what he’d expected. That someone wanted the client in his protection dead and Nash had few clues, no leads beyond the dog’s death threats, was par for the course. He liked a good challenge.
But that Kayla wouldn’t openly acknowledge him as her bodyguard bugged the hell out of him. He couldn’t take charge in any capacity. Even Dave and Mike outranked him.
“You’ve been in the dog business long?” Mike asked as he made his way toward him, down the aisle between rows of seats, Dave not far behind as the plane flew above a solid layer of clouds toward Las Vegas.
The two men looked enough alike to be related, maybe cousins. They had the bodies of linebackers, plus the whole Secret Service haircut and body language. But Nash had seen plenty of badasses to know that deep down these two weren’t real tough guys. The best that could be said about them was that they would look good playing tough guys on TV.
Which meant he was pretty much alone on the job. He felt like someone entering a high-speed chase while being forced to drive from the backseat.
“You two ever been in the service?” He folded his arms, putting his tattoos in plain sight, letting the two men draw their own conclusions, showing an admirable amount of self-restraint.
Resist the urge to take over everything, had been the last thing Welkins had told him, and, keep the client happy.
He was doing good so far. They were going to Vegas, not that he didn’t absolutely hate the whole dog-show business. At least he’d prevailed in having the entire first-class section reserved for Kayla and her staff.
A flight attendant came by with drinks, drawing Mike and Dave’s attention temporarily.
They were on a commercial airline with 231 possible villains—to give himself a break, Nash wasn’t counting the crew, just the regular passengers. It was enough to give a man a headache. But Kayla had put her foot down and insisted that on the Landon jet she would have been an even easier target. And at the end he’d agreed. Sometimes there was safety in numbers.
“I’ll beat the pants off you in blackjack,” Elvis, the makeup artist, said, joking around with Fisk, Kayla’s agent, and Ivan, her manager, up front.
The two had tagged along because at the last minute she had decided that she would agree to some advertising dea
ls. Since the full amount of income from the ads would go to dog-related charities, her agent and manager were coming to lay the groundwork and take advantage of the media coverage that would already be present.
“Just as long as you know that everything under my pants belongs to my wife,” Ivan, a stocky black man, countered with a good-natured laugh.
Greg, Kayla’s brother, had been playing some video game obsessively since they’d boarded. He sat in the first row, keeping out of the conversation.
Tsini was gently snoring in the middle of the aisle, not impressed by any of the grand plans for Sin City that were being hatched by the humans. Tom, Tsini’s professional handler, was watching an action movie, pretty much ignoring everybody.
Nash was currently running background checks on each of them, plus on the staff who had stayed in Philly: Kayla’s secretary, her stylist, everyone she met with regularly, even her uncle. He should have the results by the time the day was out. Her immediate environment seemed like a good place to start looking. Then, as he uncovered more clues, he could widen the circle.
“Semi-pro football,” Dave put in, resuming their conversation once the flight attendant passed. “Same as war. Man-to-man combat.”
Nash thought of some of the fights he’d bled through where he’d cut people’s throats without a second thought and put more bullets through more hearts than he’d cared to count. “I’m sure.”
Kayla slept in her window seat next to him in the back. Since he was the newest member of the team, he’d wanted to spend some time with her going over concerns and questions, which they had done for the first hour or so after the plane had taken off. Then she’d passed out from exhaustion.
He would have thought she’d overdone the partying the night before, but her manager had mentioned a late meeting with some business partners.
Her laptop stood open on the beverage tray in front of her. From the corner of his eye, Nash caught a small window opening on the screen. You have a new message.
“Civilian life is different than the military.” Mike puffed his chest out. “Just watch what we do and you’ll be all right.”
“Thanks.”
“And don’t push her.” Dave nodded toward Kayla. “She doesn’t like that. She has plenty of other stuff to deal with. She needs her staff to be in her corner.”
“She needs her staff to protect her,” Nash put in.
She looked too young and more innocent than perhaps she’d ever been. If the tabloids could be believed, she’d had enough lovers to fill a football stadium. But right now she looked like a little girl who’d gotten into her mother’s makeup and her older sister’s closet. If that older sister were a pole dancer.
“She ever get threatening messages?” he asked the men.
“Just the dog. All she gets is fan mail,” Mike said.
Dave rolled his eyes. “Tons of it.”
“Who processes that?”
Mike gave him a narrow-eyed look that transmitted a clear back off message, but did answer his question. “Her secretary.”
Next to Nash, Kayla shifted in her sleep.
He turned his head to get her out of his peripheral vision.
He didn’t need another flash of those long legs, or creamy thighs. Hell, creamy everything. Enough of her breasts were uncovered for him to bury his face between them. He tamped down the heat that was beginning to tingle to life in the bottom half of his body.
Her stylist should be strangled. Or given a bonus. His opinion on that flip-flopped about once a second.
She was hot. Scorching. There was no denying that. But there was more to her than showed on the surface.
He had a feeling that what he’d thought she was, what he’d seen of her on TV, was going to turn out to be her organization, a persona made up by a full staff. Her organization—the people around her, her schedule, her image—was like a machine. Since they’d met yesterday afternoon, he’d caught glimpses of the woman inside that machine, and was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t trapped in there.
Don’t get sucked in.
He took a drink of mineral water as Mike and Dave returned to their favorite subject and went on about the bloody combat that football really was, and how they were all warriors. Part of him itched to set them straight—if only to distract himself from Kayla—but another part of him knew it wasn’t worth it.
Stick to the job, Welkins had said.
Trouble was, she was the job. And he would have liked only too much to stick real close to her.
If he had any brains, he would leave her to Dave and Mike, walk on back to coach and ask the first pretty woman he saw if she wanted to join the mile-high club with him. He had to get this restlessness out from under his skin.
Except, with Kayla Landon next to him, he didn’t feel like walking away.
“I’m thinking the threats to the dog might have something to do with her. Could be someone wants us distracted while he goes after Kayla,” he told the two men, interrupting a playoff story.
There was a brief pause as they gave him some hard looks.
“We protect her. You stay out of the way and keep your eyes on Tsini,” Mike’s eyes flashed as he issued his warning at last, the true reason for their coming over.
The two had been eyeing him since he’d shown up at the apartment last night. They obviously didn’t like the idea of anyone sticking his nose in their business.
Nash ground his teeth, but somehow managed a nod, silently cursing his latest assignment all the way to Hades. Ivan prevented further friction by calling the two bodyguards to the front to settle some dispute between him and Fisk. Then Nash was finally able to turn his attention to the e-mail.
He’d seen her type in her password earlier and had no trouble getting in now. She had only one unread message.
The sender field was blank. The subject field said: Did you like my gift?
He could have waited until she woke and asked her to open the message and let him look at it. Instead, he reached over and clicked.
No text, only an attachment. He had to wait until the program ran a virus scan before he could open the picture file.
The image was grainy, but good enough to make out what was important. The picture showed Kayla’s living room with her sitting in her pod chair and Nash on the couch, holding up the blue fur coat.
Could have been taken with a cell phone. By someone who’d been in Kayla’s apartment yesterday when he’d arrived. Which meant all the people who traveled with them in first class right this minute. The cooking-show crew had stayed in the kitchen the whole time. Her staff had been coming and going from the den. And this picture had been taken from there.
By one of her people. One of her friends.
Oh, hell. She was really going to hate him for telling her that, he thought as his blood heated. If there was one thing he couldn’t forgive, it was betrayal. In his eyes, maybe because at the core he would always remain a marine, betrayal of a teammate was the ultimate sin. He couldn’t stand the thought that a member of her own staff would betray her.
And he couldn’t even talk to her about this right away. He needed a chance to observe her interacting with the staff first. Once she realized that whoever was harassing her was one of them, she would relate to them differently. He wanted to get a fair assessment of her relationship with each and every person before suspicion hit her and she pulled back.
He looked at the people in first class. Nobody was watching him. The message had been sent in the last couple of minutes. But anyone could have sent a saved message with a surreptitious click on their cell phone, just reaching for a second into their pockets. Or they could have timed delivery set up from a remote computer.
That was a trail Dave and Mike might not have been able to trace back, but Nash had his sources. He forwarded the note to his own e-mail account, then deleted the original.
He didn’t have the previous threatening notes with him. They were already at a lab, along with the fur coat, to be dusted for
fingerprints. They weren’t much to start with—pictures of poodles printed off the Internet, DIE in big block letters printed underneath. But now he had one more clue.
It should have made him happy. Except that one thing about this whole setup bugged him. Why would the bastard send a picture like that? Sure, the photo would make Kayla nervous, would make her feel she wasn’t safe even in her own home. But it also narrowed the field of suspects considerably. And that was decidedly not to the sender’s advantage.
HE DIDN’T WANT to kill her. He looked out the plane’s window and saw her face even in the clouds. He loved her. He’d hoped that harassing that dumb dog of hers would distract her from the “accidents.”
But she wasn’t distracted, she was thinking, thinking, thinking. He could see it in her eyes every time he looked at her. And she was smart. He couldn’t let her figure it all out. She would never forgive him.
He’d set up a last warning for her this morning, but as she was talking with the new guy, Nash, in the back while the pilot announced that soon they would be landing, he saw that fire in her eyes. And he knew what they were talking about. She was never going to quit.
He reached for his cell phone and sent a text message. He couldn’t say he didn’t regret it, but it really was time for plan B.
NASH LOOKED around the show area on the first floor of the hotel, checking out the various stations, the seating section for the audience and the ring. Special lighting, microphones, the judges’ table—the setup was fancy enough for a Miss America pageant. Except this show was for dogs.
A waste of pageantry as far as he was concerned. Who would want to look at furry canines when they could be looking at hot women in bikinis?
He finished recon and walked back toward the handful of smaller meeting rooms that were set up as storage areas for the dog show. Tom, the handler, had put some hair product for Tsini in his carry-on by accident, and since it was over the allowed ounces, airport security had confiscated the bottle. Tsini needed the special coat-shine spray or whatever for tomorrow so everyone was scrambling around. Tom and Dave were scouring the city’s specialty pet shops while Mike and Kayla went to the storage rooms that contained extra supplies for cases just like this.