Protecting His Assets (13 page)

“You sound as if that was a lesson you learned the hard way.”

She glanced down and visibly swallowed, but said nothing. Nope. She still wouldn’t let him in.

He told himself it was too soon but couldn’t help the stab of disappointment that speared him in the gut.

“A pro will tell you that a match is all about strategy,” she said. “It takes as much planning and preparation as anything else. You have to study, so that you know exactly what your opponent’s going to do
before
you get in the ring with him. And then it isn’t a matter of waiting for openings or pushing back, because you’ve worked out the entire fight from beginning to end before it even starts. No matter what he does, you can keep steering him where you want him until it’s time for that final shot, the one that takes him down.”

He soaked in her advice, but at the same time, he wanted to take the bottom lip she kept chewing on between his teeth and run his tongue across it. But then she would stop talking, and when she spoke it was like being bathed in sunlight. She could tell him that an ice storm was on the way, and he would still melt.

“Everybody has a tell , and if you can figure out what your adversary’s are, then you use them against him. For example, you have a tendency to project your moves with a double step, especially your right cross. In fact, Leo’s shoulders tensed up every time you did it, so he obviously recognized it, and he was able to counter every time.”

He grinned. “Is that all?”

She hesitated. “Well…”

He chuckled.

She shrugged, drawing back a step with a crease in her brow. “It’s nothing, never mind. I didn’t mean to
—
”

He leaned forward and grabbed her hand to keep her from backing away. The contact shocked them both. Each of them drew in a short breath and froze in place.

When she would have extracted her hand from his, he squeezed. “I have an honest to goodness professional boxer offering me advice on my technique, and you better believe I’m going to suck every drop of knowledge out of her.”

Her cheeks went pink as if he’d offered to suck something else from her.

Damn. And now that’s
exactly
what he was thinking of, and he wasn’t going to get it out of his head until he got her alone.

“You throw too much weight in front of your lead step. It makes you vulnerable, because in that moment it wouldn’t take much to send you toppling off balance with the right nudge.” She cleared her throat and glanced down at his hand still clasping hers. “You know, I could maybe give you some pointers. If you wanted me to, I mean.” She shook her head almost before the words were completely out of her mouth. “Sorry, you don’t need… That’s presumptuous of me, and—”

He stopped her before she could take back the offer and stood up to look into her eyes. “Yes.”

She blushed even deeper, but nodded. “Okay.” He pulled the towel off her shoulder and draped it across the bench. Her gaze snapped up. “Uh, now?”

“Have you got somewhere better to be?” he asked with a smile.

“Not if you don’t.”

Her response didn’t satisfy him like he’d thought it would. Was he still
just
an assignment to her? There would come a time when it was no longer her job to be with him, and then what would her response be to that same question?

But he wasn’t going to be asking that question once this was all over. He was going to move on and seize the future he’d been planning for ten years, like it never happened. He was going to focus on giving his family the lifestyle they deserved.

Chapter Eight

A
pril stood under the spray of water as she showered in the club’s locker room. She and Nolan had sparred together for about an hour, the best hour she could remember spending in a long time. Not too many guys would have been able to take boxing instruction from a woman, but his confidence shone from him like a beacon, and she quickly realized he wasn’t really taking her advice because he needed it. He was more than capable of analyzing his own weaknesses and hammering them into strengths. He had entered the ring with her because he enjoyed it, and Steve Nolan didn’t deny himself anything that would bring him pleasure.

That should have been just one more reason for her to keep her distance, but being with him, she didn’t think about death, germs, her career, her past, or anything else. He was like a force of nature, overwhelming her senses with his vitality and intensity, and all her worries stayed on the other side of those ropes. She had no choice but to focus on him completely.

A dangerous activity. Watching him move, watching the sweat trickle over every bulge of muscle, watching him watch her. More than once, the tips she’d opened her mouth to tell him floated away from her like all of her good intentions, and all the reasons why falling for him was a bad idea seemed unimportant.

He turned out to be a great partner, except for the fact that he’d refused to hit her. She’d egged him on, but he hadn’t budged. They danced around each other, and she gave him a few tips her dad had taught her back in the day, but whenever she came at him, he dodged and faked, and if it looked like she wouldn’t be able to evade a hit, he’d always pulled the punch.

When she’d climbed out of the ring, she had been breathing heavily, her entire body singing, her blood pumping. But not just because of the workout. Even now, she still hadn’t cooled off, even under the icy spray of water.

She turned off the shower and quickly dressed. But this time, Nolan was the one waiting for her when she came back out fifteen minutes later.

He’d changed back into his new jeans and sweater. It should be a sin for someone to look so good and so laid-back at the same time. He leaned against the post with his arms crossed , and his gaze turned scorching as she approached. “You have no idea the trouble I get into when left to my own devices,” he said in a low voice when she stopped in front of him. “Ten minutes waiting with nothing to do but imagine you naked in the showers, and I was this close to going in there and joining you.”

She hissed and looked around, but thankfully, they were alone. She understood by now that he thrived on unsettling people and she couldn’t take anything he said seriously, but her heart pounded despite the reminder. “You’re horrible. Why can’t you be serious just once?”

His eyes flared with challenge. He pulled away from the post and came closer. He traced the line of her jaw with his finger. “You’re not ready for me to be serious,” he murmured.

T
hey stopped to pick up Nolan’s tuxedo for the gala. Luckily, it had been at the drycleaner’s and not his apartment, or it probably would have been slashed along with the rest of his clothes.

When they got back to his place, John was already there, waiting in the hall by Nolan’s front door. He nodded hello as they passed. April had insisted on some added backup for the gala tonight. Posing as Nolan’s date would keep her close to him, but now that the incidents had escalated into violence, she’d suggested to her boss that they should also have eyes on the sidelines to watch the crowd. The head of their agency was a good friend of April’s from college. When April went to Quantico, Nora had taken over her father’s security company, where she’d met John—now her husband and business partner—and she’d agreed with April.

April hung back at the front door to make it clear she wasn’t staying. “What time do you want me to return in order to leave for the event tonight?”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll pick you up,” he said. Nolan hadn’t been overly impressed with the idea of more bodyguards, but surprisingly, he hadn’t argued with her. He seemed a little preoccupied, though. Was he having second thoughts about not having a real date?

She grimaced. “That’s probably not a good idea. It wouldn’t be—”

“Professional? I asked you out on a date, which means I get to be the one in charge of the details.”

“Not a real date,” she reminded him. She should keep reminding herself as well, because it was all too easy to envision herself on his arm as he looked down at her with the promise of what would come afterward gleaming from his eyes.

He grinned. “If we’re going to fool anyone, we’ve got to treat it like a date.”

“Fine, but you’re the client. You shouldn’t have to drive all the way out to Brooklyn when I could just come—”

His voice lowered. “April, if it doesn’t involve a security issue, you will not be calling the shots tonight. Do you understand that?”

She opened her mouth to object, but his expression turned dark. He stepped forward. Unprepared and unnerved, she took a corresponding step back. Her shoulder blades hit the closed door. His hand flattened against it, trapping her there between the wood…and a hard place.

“Tonight you are going to enjoy yourself. You are even going to let me get to know you.” He dipped his head.

“I am?” she croaked. A rush of goose bumps rose in response to the provocation of his hot breath against the too-sensitive skin at her nape, right there just beneath her ear.

“You are,” he promised. She felt his mouth twitch against the column of her neck. He was smiling.

A shiver of anticipation shook her.

“Do you think you can loosen that ironclad grip you’ve got on yourself long enough to do that?”

She swallowed hard. She was a control freak. Lately, so much had spiraled out of her control—including her father’s illness and her own future—that she hated the idea of willingly giving up any of the things she
could
control.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you care about getting to know me? Another few days and I’ll be out of your life again, anyway.”

He nodded, acknowledging without hesitation that their acquaintance had a short shelf-life. “But we have right here, right now.” He punctuated every word with a press of his lips to her neck, starting at her jaw and working his way down to the protrusion of her collarbone. Her legs turned to jelly, and her grip on the door handle tightened until she couldn’t feel her fingers. “And there’s no reason not to make the most of it.”

Could she do it? Could she give herself a free pass and live in the moment for one night? It wouldn’t be repeating her past mistakes with Jeremy if she kept her eyes wide open and her heart closed. Besides, she had to admit, she was curious. So far he’d been inappropriate, irreverent, and mostly charming, but what would it be like to get the full-on Steve Nolan charm, the kind of treatment that inspired entire websites to his prowess? Finally, she nodded. “As long as it doesn’t compromise your safety, I can agree to a certain level of…intimacy.”

“Good. Very good,” he murmured. She held her breath and waited for him to kiss her…but he didn’t. Abruptly, he drew back, looking like the cat that got the canary. “Then I’ll pick you up at eight. Be ready.”

S
he was still thinking about his proposal as she drove up to her father’s house, but the sight of the dark windows was sobering. She turned on the hall light as she unlocked the door, turned on the kitchen light on her way through to the living room, and turned on the lights going all the way up the stairs.

It didn’t help. The house still felt empty, abandoned. She stood in the doorway of her father’s bedroom. The bed was bare, and the drapes had been drawn tight. Even her father’s dresser had been cleared of all the stuff he usually piled up on there, like boxing gloves, photos, and cologne, as if he didn’t expect to be back. Was this her father’s not-so-subtle way of preparing her for the worst? Did he think that if he died there’d be less for her to do if his room had already been stripped clean?

She smothered a sob with a hand over her mouth and turned out the light. Down the hall in her own room, she picked up the phone and called the hospital. The phone rang four times, then five. She was about to give up and run out to the car to race over there and find out what was wrong, when he finally answered.

“Dad?”

“Hey,” he said. “What do you want?”

She winced at the abrupt edge to his thin voice.
I want to see you. I want to hold your hand through this. I want you to remember how much I need you and love you.
“Oh, well I thought… I wanted to ask how your treatment went today. How are you feeling?”

“Didn’t I tell you this morning that I was fine? You didn’t have to call again.”

Tears clogged her throat. “Dad, I just—”

“I have to go. The nurse is bringing dinner in now.” There was nothing else for such a long moment that April thought he’d simply hung up on her, until finally he said, “Good night, April.”

She waited with baited breath, but this time the line had gone dead. “Good night, Dad,” she whispered.

When the doorbell rang promptly at eight, she’d pulled herself together. Did being on time mean that Nolan was as anxious about tonight as she was?

She spared a final look in the full-length mirror hanging from the back of her bedroom door and took a deep breath. She hadn’t felt this nervous since she and Jeremy had gone to that fancy Italian place uptown.

For the hundredth time, she wondered if agreeing to this had been a mistake.

The bell rang again, and she swore. Too late to back out, but as long as she remembered that Nolan was a successful businessman who was headed for great things, and she was just a bodyguard—his bodyguard—she’d be able to get through one night, and she would just have to re-establish their professional boundaries in the morning.

She hastened down the stairs as quickly as she could in the two-inch heels she hadn’t had any other occasion to wear in over a year.

Her breath caught as she pulled the door open to greet him. “Uh, hi.”

For the life of her, she couldn’t come up with anything else.

It was a gorgeous late-spring evening. Presumably, the stars glittered in the cloudless sky overhead, and if she could breathe, she’d be filled with the scent of daffodils and white magnolias from the neighbor’s garden. But the sight of him stripped away everything, even her reason. She struggled to remember her own name as she took him in. The sexy grin. The fresh shave. The devastating breadth of his shoulders in a perfectly cut tuxedo. And the limousine parked at the curb behind him.

She was completely out of her league. The garter holding up her stockings felt old-fashioned. She felt the straps against her legs like they were made of iron. The dress itself was beautiful, and she had no doubt that it looked great on her…which suddenly made her feel like a fraud. Nolan looked completely natural all dressed up, but she’d been practicing walking in these shoes for an hour before getting dressed, just to make sure she wouldn’t trip over herself and embarrass him. She’d even debated wearing a pair of ballet flats instead, weighing her responsibility as his bodyguard with her desire to look like she belonged on his arm.

The heels had won out only because her boss Nora had assured her there was going to be enough backup at the event tonight, so she shouldn’t have to do any running even if something did happen.

He didn’t say anything right away. His appreciative gaze ran the length of her slowly, as if he wanted to savor the moment. Her whole body tightened in response, from her nipples to her core. Finally, he gazed into her eyes and the sparks bouncing back and forth between them only intensified. “Hi, yourself. You look amazing,” he said with the most sincerity she’d ever heard out of him.

She only realized he’d kept one hand behind his back when he pulled it out to hand her the single white rose. She’d never received one before. She loved it. White was simple, clean, and perfect, without the drama of a red rose. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He held out his arm.

She turned to grab her clutch and lock the door behind her, then let him lead her down the walk. She giggled as John got out of the driver’s seat of the limo and came around to open the door for them, with a deadpan look on his face.

“What’s so funny?” He threw her a bemused look, which only made her giggle harder as she slid onto the buttery leather seat.

She waited until he’d followed her in and the door closed. The glass divider between the front and back seats was already in place, so they were basically alone. The car was huge, but Nolan didn’t give her any space. Instead of sitting on the bench opposite her, he sat right beside her so their thighs touched.

“This reminds me a little too much of my senior prom.” She looked around and grinned. “But you’re not Tommy Morrison, and I’m not wearing yards of poufy pink chiffon and an orchid wrist corsage the size of my forearm.”

He laid his arm across the back of the seat and smiled. “Somehow, I can’t envision either the boxing spitfire April Porter, or the investigative genius April Porter, decked out in pink chiffon.” He snapped his fingers. “And I also can’t believe I forgot to pick up a corsage.”

She laughed and let herself relax into the seats. “That’s not a sight anyone is ever going to see,” she said. “Only my father has a copy of those photos, and I’ve been assured that they’re locked up tight against the light of day.”

Her hand clenched in her lap as she mentioned Dad. Nolan noticed. God, he noticed everything. “How is your father?” he asked.

“Fine. He’s doing fine.” She plastered on a smile and changed the subject. “So, who did you go to the prom with?”

A moment of disappointment flashed across his face, but it was gone before she could even be sure that’s what she saw. “I didn’t go at all,” he admitted with a casual shrug.

“Don’t tell me a guy who looks this hot in a suit couldn’t get a date?”

“There wasn’t always so much of this.” He showed off a cheeky flex of his bicep. “I
was
a pretty hard-core math geek once, remember?” He was still smiling, but the smile no longer went to his eyes. “Besides, my birthday was right around that time, and…” He trailed off and glanced over her shoulder out the window.