Protect Me (2 page)

Winters
glanced across the table at her with a crooked half-smile.

“I can
probably guess what you’re thinking. And I can’t tell you much, because I don’t
know much that you don’t. But I asked around and those incidents Stone reported
really did happen. There’s video footage of people trying to break into his
mansion. Just couldn’t exactly stick it in the file.”

Hope
leaned back, intrigued despite herself. “Could have just been attempted
burglary,” she mused out loud.

Winters
nodded and then shrugged. “So?” he asked, not unkindly.

Excellent
point, well made. Hope gave him a small smile of her own. Then she gathered up
the folder and clicked it decisively against Winters’ desk.

“Alright
then,” she said. Winters nodded approvingly. “Guess I’m off to the beach.”

The
seaside town was bright. As soon as Hope stepped out of the car, unbearably
strong light assaulted her eyes and made her scramble for sunglasses. The heat
was strong but dry. It reminded her a little of Africa, except when Hope
glanced around she noted there was a lot more water and a marked decrease in
crocodiles.

Africa
also didn’t have a whole lot of yachts.

“You
Hope Lasser?” A white guy of average height and nondescript build strode down
the pier toward her. Hope tried to downplay her immediate assessment and the
way her shoulders wanted to pull back defensively.

“I am.”
She gave the man a firm handshake, taking in his carefully gelled hair and
expensive clothes. “Are you Rick Stone?”

The man
barked out an incredulous laugh. “I wish, lady!” He tilted back his own
sunglasses and stared at her. “You don’t know what Rick Stone looks like?”

Hope
resisted the urge to roll her eyes, even hidden behind her sunglasses. Not
professional. But honestly, was she really supposed to be able to tell apart a
bunch of rich white guys with overstyled hair and loafers?

“Just
checking,” she said, which was usually vague enough to make people worry they’d
said something stupid. “Sorry, didn’t catch your name.”

The guy
wavered, like he was thinking about informing Hope that he hadn’t told her at
all. But in the end he blinked and said stiffly, “I’m Grant Burstein. An old
friend of Rick’s. We go way, way back.”

Potentially
useful. “Oh, really? How far back?”

Grant
brought his hand up to run through his hair and then obviously thought the
better of it. With that much gel, it would probably stick.

“You
know. Back. Want me to take you over?”

Hope
side-eyed him through her sunglasses. “Sure, thanks.” Suspicion confirmed:
Grant was just a wannabe flunky.

The man
walked her down the pier. He’d gone silent, which Hope didn’t mind, though she
did wonder why. Maybe it was because she kept her own counsel. For a second
Hope tried to imagine being talkative and cheery. She racked her brains, trying
to think of a single thing to say to this coiffed, huffy man.

Nope,
she had nothin’. Hope mentally shrugged her shoulders and enjoyed the scenery.

It was
undeniably beautiful out here. As Hope’s footsteps echoed under the wooden
pier, she gazed out at the ocean, which stretched on for seemingly endless
miles of pure blue waves. The beach that Rick Stone owned was an unspoiled
crescent of white-gold sand that slowly slid into the water. The pier reached
over the waves several meters to a huge, sleek white boat. Or was it a ship?
Hope knew nothing about boats, but rich people always seemed to own yachts, so
she was going to go ahead and guess it was one of those.

Grant
stopped at the end of the pier and climbed up onto the yacht. Why it was
necessary to have stairs connecting your boat to a pier was a little beyond
Hope - wasn’t the whole point of a boat that they weren’t connected to land? Or
were people actually this lazy?

“Hey
Rick, your friend’s here!” Grant called as he made his way toward a group of
men clustered at the front of the boat next to a huge and likely superfluous
wheel. Hope automatically counted them off (six), judged their probably
capability in a fight (low), and threat level (also low, unless they decided
she wasn’t well-dressed enough to be on their boat).

The man
leaning up against the center of the wheel, clearly the leader of the group,
lifted his head and looked over. Hope’s first impression was of sun-bleached
brown hair and an easy smile.

“Oh
hey, great,” Rick said. He gestured Grant toward the group in a way that
managed to be both casual and commanding at once. “Why don’t you come over here
and take over the entertainment while I say hello, yeah?”

Grant
nodded happily and headed into the center of things while Rick broke away and
walked over to Hope.

Rick
was a shade above your average kind-of-tall guy and had the chiseled good looks
that a certain class of young businessmen seemed to grow as part of their job.
There was a line of stubble traced along his jaw and he had on an
expensive-looking pair of aviators. His tousled hair was at odds with his
impeccably tailored charcoal-gray suit, but somehow it worked for him.

With
his sunglasses and sun-tanned skin, Rick looked like a man who spent a lot of
time with his sleeves rolled up on the decks of yachts. It was hardly a quality
that Hope admired, but she found it difficult to look away from him all the
same.

Hope
tried to keep her once-over as professional as possible. He was just another
man in a suit, she reminded herself. No need to be intimidated, or worse,
interested.

As soon
as he reached her, Hope stuck out her hand, though she kept the glasses on.
Clients always seemed reassured by the glasses.

“Good
to meet you, Mr. Stone,” she said. She liked the way that Rick reached out
without hesitation and shook her hand firmly. “I’m Hope Lasser, from Winters
Protective Agency.”

Rick
nodded and glanced around. “Yeah, I know who you are, but keep the whole
bodyguard thing on the DL, okay? This black on black clothes thing you’ve got
going on is fine, little dour, but that’s cool.” He spoke rapid-fire, clearly
expecting her to keep up. Fortunately Hope was good at understanding just about
anyone after years of translating hundreds of dialects into comprehensible
Zulu, Afrikaans, or English.

That
didn’t mean that she understood his slang. “DL?” she asked.

Rick
rocked back on his heels and Hope couldn’t see it happen, but she swore he
rolled his eyes. He definitely sighed. “The down-low. Under the radar. Just
between the two of us… we can make it if we try?” And now he was singing.
Poorly. “Comprende?”

“I
understand,” Hope said, biting back a very different comment, “but you should
know that’s not standard procedure.” Normally she would have protested a lot
more, but this assignment was already warped beyond repair. Since there was
only one of her, she might actually do better by staying undercover than she
would through open intimidation.

The man
waved it off airily - Hope noticed with some interest that dotted over his
hands were old and new scars crisscrossing through his tan. They looked blurry,
like burns or chemical scars. She wondered where he’d gotten them.

“Standard
procedure is for standard people,” Rick said. He grinned with very little
warmth. “What use do you think I have for that?”

Hope
tilted her head and pretended to consider it.

“Well,”
she said, “I suppose it depends on how serious you are about staying alive.”

There
was a pause where all Hope could hear was seagulls and Rick’s posse chortling
in the distance. She stood her ground. In this business, there was a trade-off
for being the best: sometimes you lost a client to tough love. It was that, or
lose them to carelessness.

Rick
finally said, “Aren’t you supposed to be taking a bullet for me if I need you
to?” His face was totally expressionless and his voice was impossible to read.
Hope started to wonder if Rick was the sort of man who would only work with
people he could intimidate. If that was the case, this job was going to be over
before it started.

She
laced her fingers together and straightened her posture.

"If
I have to, yes," she said, "but I'd prefer it not get to that point,
if it's all the same to you." She stared Rick straight in the eye.

There
was another long moment of silence where Rick just looked at her.

Then a
grin curved up over Rick's face, instant and infectious. His eyes lit up
and he started laughing, so open and honestly amused that it almost made Hope
want to laugh with along with him.

How
long had it been since she really laughed, she wondered? She didn't think she'd
ever laughed like that, sounding totally unguarded and carefree.

Rick
stepped forward and shoved his hands in his pockets, carelessly wrinkling the
fabric. He slipped the aviators off and really looked at her. Hope’s heart
turned over in her chest. The easy grin and casual action took him instantly
from bored socialite to someone good-humored and charming. Someone
characterized less by his money and more by the intensity of his eyes.

Hope
was used to adrenaline rushes hitting her body in the instant where a locked
gaze turned into the need for self-defense. She instinctively braced herself
and pulled back, widening her peripheral vision to take in the whole area.

Of
course as soon as she did so she felt foolish. There was no threat on this
boat, unless it was to her dubious virtue. Mentally she scolded herself for
being ridiculous. It wasn’t like she was some teenage boarding school prisoner
meeting a man for the first time. She needed to get ahold of herself.

Luckily,
she was subtle enough in her confused reactions that Rick didn’t seem to
notice. As an olive branch, and to give herself something to do, Hope reached
up and slid the sunglass onto the top of her head. Rick watched her intently.
It was odd, being the obvious focus of someone’s attention like this. Hope
resisted the urge to squirm.

"You
don't look bigger than me. I mean, you have some muscle on you, but you just
look like you’ve been to the gym. You’re not even tall.” Rick surveyed her with
an openly curious expression. "Are you some kind of martial arts
master?"

Hope
suppressed a sigh. This was familiar territory, at least. "I practice
Judo, but generally assassins don't wait long enough for you to get them in a
headlock. They prefer long distance things, like snipers. Or bombs."

Rick
seemed to think about that, and then raised his eyebrows. "Are you about
to tell me that you're functionally useless, but we need to give security the
old college try anyhow?"

"Hardly,"
Hope said, though she couldn’t keep her eyebrows from raising. She hadn’t been
expecting the man to actually listen, or think about what she said. He had come
to the wrong conclusion, but it was still a conclusion, which was unexpected enough.
"I'm telling you that being a bodyguard doesn't mean what you think it
means. And if anyone's told you different, they were either humoring you or not
very good at their job."

Rather
than looking offended, Rick’s interest only seemed to increase at her candor.
He moved toward a cluster of benches set in the middle of the boat and waved
Hope after him, not taking her eyes off her. Hope wondered what he was looking
for. Was he watching her gait, like her ability to adjust to the gentle toss of
the waves said something about her? Or maybe he was just looking for scars, the
way some people did.

Whatever
he was looking for, he kept looking for it after she sat down across from him
and folded her arms.

“I’ve
never had a bodyguard before, actually, so I didn’t know what to expect.”

Hope
frowned. “Never? But you’re very…”

A smirk
curled up the side of Rick’s mouth. “Stupid?”

“…Wealthy,”
she finished.

Rick
shrugged that off like it was nothing. She’d seen that reaction before, on
other men who thought their privilege was meaningless because they’d never been
without it. Hope smiled grimly. She knew all too well what it was like to be so
far from stability and comfort that you couldn’t imagine what it felt like.

Something
about this man seemed to distract her. Hope was normally extremely focused but
his presence tugged at loose threads of her attention and spun them out, away
from the task at hand. She had to focus to reel her thoughts away from studying
the unexpected callouses and old bruises that marked his hands and forearms. It
almost looked like the man did some sort of physical labor, but that didn’t
correlate to what she’d heard about his personality.

Hope
made a concerted effort to smack her brain back into gear.

“Sir, I
think it would be best if you gave me a clear rundown of your expectations,
since they’re already differing from your file. It said nothing about you
wanting me to pretend to be something I’m not,” she said.

Rick
made a face, which amazingly enough didn’t actually make him look unattractive.
It made him look humorous, like he was in on some joke that Hope wished she
understood.