Mountain Shelter

“I’m the bodyguard, not the investigator. I gave their names to Detective Cisneros.”

Mason sank back in his chair and rubbed his hand across his forehead. “What do you want me to do?”

“That depends on Jayne.” Dylan turned to her. “You had a surgery scheduled for tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock. My advice is for you to postpone.”

Though she had been thinking the same thing, she didn’t like having her plans dictated by some South American assassin. Koslov didn’t rule her life. She took her cell phone from her jeans pocket and checked the time. “It’s just after midnight. If I could sleep until nine in the morning, I could operate.”

“We don’t know what to expect from this kidnapper. He might come after you again. Are you sure you don’t want to schedule the operation for another time or have someone else take over for you?”

“I’m the best surgeon for this procedure, possibly the best in the world.” She wasn’t bragging, just stating a fact. “Also, I have a relationship with this patient. He’s a professor of philosophy in his early sixties. A stroke robbed him of his memory. I can get it back for him, and I don’t want to wait.”

Dylan regarded her with a measured gaze. “Is his condition life threatening?”

“No, but this is about the quality of his life. He’s brilliant and wise. He needs to be able to use his memory.”

“Agreed,” Dylan said, “but he could wait a few days.”

“I want my life to proceed as normal. That’s why I hired you as a bodyguard.” She rose to her feet as she played her final card. “But if you can’t protect me...”

Dylan unfolded himself from the sofa and stood, towering over her. Though she was above average height at five feet nine inches, he was over six feet, maybe six-five. He was taller, broader, stronger. An archetypal male, he was everything a man should be. She felt herself melting.

Gazing down at her, he removed his horn-rimmed glasses and made direct eye contract. “I’ll keep you safe, Jayne.”

The effect caught her off guard. Desire twitched in her belly. Goose bumps erupted on her arms. She wanted to grab his arm and pull him into the bedroom with her. No way, absolutely not. She shouldn’t be thinking about sex.

She pivoted, took one step and walked into the chair beside the sofa. Lurching to an upright position, she marched to the bedroom door, stepped inside and closed it with a loud slam.

Chapter Four (#ulink_cf75ffae-c929-59b5-8b60-dce9c47f8bc1)

The aroma of fresh coffee twitched in her nostrils. Chords of harp music tickled her ears. Where am I? Her usual wake-up alarm was as loud and as harsh as a fire engine, the better to wake her up. Then Jayne remembered that she wasn’t sleeping at home.

The harp continued as she lifted her eyelids and saw a man with long, sun-streaked brown hair sitting in the chair beside her bed. Dylan wasn’t wearing his glasses...or his baggy flannel shirt...or his baseball cap. His black T-shirt outlined his wide shoulders and lean chest. A handsome man, there was nothing of the nerd about him.

Without thinking, she extended her arm toward him. He caught her hand, raised it to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles before she was aware of what he was doing. The gesture seemed absurd, given that she was wearing flannel pajamas. After being caught on her rooftop in a filmy gown and feeling exposed, she’d chosen the world’s unsexiest flannels on purpose.

“Nine o’clock, Jayne.”

“I love the harp music.”

“It’s a wake-up app called Morning Angels.” He gestured toward two china cups on a silver room service tray. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

Her usual clumsiness was even worse in the morning when she wasn’t wide-awake, and she hated to risk slopping a hot beverage all over herself. But it couldn’t be helped; she needed caffeine. While she arranged the pillows against the headboard, Dylan went to the windows, where he opened the shades and the filmy drapes. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from him. Those jeans were the same ones he’d worn yesterday, still rolled at the cuff. But today they seemed well fitted, not tight but snug enough to outline firm glutes and muscular thighs. Long legs—he had very long legs.

He returned to her bedside and poured steaming coffee from a white room-service pot. He added two dollops of cream and gave it a quick stir before passing her the eggshell-white cup and saucer.

“I never mentioned that I took cream but no sugar.”

“If you know your way around the internet, you can find almost anything.”

She figured that discovering her coffee preference required a search that went deeper than a quick identification. He’d researched her. On one hand, she didn’t like being spied upon. But she was complimented that he’d taken the trouble. Last night, she hadn’t been sure he’d want to stick around after she’d slammed the door and thrown out an unveiled threat to fire him.

He took a sip from his cup. “How are you feeling?”

“Are you asking whether I’m alert enough to proceed with the scheduled surgery?”

“I am.”

Jayne tasted the delicious coffee and considered for a long moment. “Not sure.”

After he fiddled with his wristwatch, the harp music went quiet. “I’m resetting an alarm for eight minutes while you make up your mind. You’ve already had a bunch of phone calls and—”

“Stop!” She held up her palm to halt him. “About these calls, why didn’t I hear the phone ringing?”

“I took your cell phone into the outer room.”

“Are you telling me that you came into my room, uninvited, and took my phone without my permission?”

“As your bodyguard, I have to invade your personal boundaries. Coming in and out of your bedroom, even watching you sleep...” He shrugged. “It’s part of my job.”

“Watching me sleep?”

A warmth that had nothing to do with the hot coffee spread through her body. Though she didn’t recall her dreams last night, some of her REM and delta-wave activity had to be about sex. As she lifted her cup to her mouth, she sloshed coffee into the saucer.

“I took your phone,” he said, “because you wanted to sleep until nine, and I was afraid you’d get calls earlier than that.”

Reaching for a napkin, she tilted her saucer, almost spilling coffee over the lip. He passed her a napkin which she used to dab at her mouth, then to swab the near spill. “I’m glad you caught those calls. I needed the sleep, and I’m surprised that I got it. After all that happened last night, I didn’t think I’d be able to relax.”

“Oh, yeah, you relaxed. There was some big-time snoring going on. One time, I peeked in to make sure you weren’t being trampled by rhinos.”

A lovely image! “Who called?”

He recited from memory. “Eloise, your assistant, needs to know something about scheduling the ER. Mrs. Cameron is worried about her husband’s surgery and wants to know if he can eat chocolate-chip cookies later today. Three doctors—Lewis, Napoli and Griggs. And one more.”

When he hesitated, she cast a curious glance in his direction. “Are you going to tell me who?”

His eight-minute alarm went off, blasting a noise that sounded like screaming cats in heat. He silenced it. “What’s it going to be, Jayne? Are we going to the hospital or not?”

“Why won’t you tell me about this person who called?”

“It was your father.”

His words hit her with a jolt. She spilled her coffee, with most of the liquid being sopped up by the napkin before she shoved the whole mess onto the tray. “What does he want?”

“He didn’t tell me.”

Belatedly, she realized that if Dylan was answering her phone, he must be giving some kind of explanation for why she was unavailable. She didn’t want wild stories about her intruder to spread all over the hospital. “What have you been telling people?”