The Perfect Target

“Not what, but who. My father. He’s a very careful man. He knew I’d try to give Hawk the slip the second I saw him, so he sent a backup.” The mere thought caused her chest to tighten. Betrayal slashed brutally. She’d believed her father this time. She’d believed that for the first time in eleven years, he was willing to let her live her own life.

Now she knew everything had been staged, just like so many times before. Hawk was probably throwing back a cold one somewhere, congratulating himself on a job well done, indifferent to the trauma he’d caused.

Just like he’d done with Elizabeth.

“You casually come on to me, then I see Hawk, run, shots are fired, and voila, there you are, ready for me to run gratefully into your arms.”

Like a perfect little puppet.

Over the years, she’d become adept at sniffing out her father’s security drills, but she hadn’t seen this one coming. She’d been too intrigued by the man with the penetrating eyes and flattering words.

Humiliation left a bitter taste in her mouth.

But Sandro didn’t seem to notice. He wasn’t frowning anymore, wasn’t glowering, didn’t look like a warrior primed for battle. A purely male smile curved the mouth Miranda found entirely too erotic for a face of such hard lines and sharp planes.

“You were already in my arms,” he reminded.

Miranda narrowed her eyes, wondering where the commando had gone and half wishing he would return. At least she knew how to defend herself against him.

“Your hands, not your arms,” she corrected tartly. “There’s a difference.”

“Not always,” he said, “but we’ll save that nuance for another time. Right now I’m more interested in knowing why your father would expect you to run from someone assigned to protect you.”

Miranda stiffened. With skillful precision Sandro was steering the conversation down a path she had no desire to travel.

“It’s not like that,” she defended, but knew he wouldn’t understand.

“Then tell me how it is.”

An emotion she didn’t understand tangled through her. She couldn’t summon one single memory of any of her father’s men asking her opinion on anything. Ever.

“I’m just…tired,” she admitted, and with the words, the fight drained out of her. Weariness took over, a bone-deep fatigue sharpened by the chase through back alleys and the unexpected kiss, the battle of wills, the long walk to the abandoned villa. She slid down against the wall and sat on the pathetic excuse for a sleeping bag, pulling her knees to her chest as she did so.

The family net had closed around her once again.

“I thought for once I was…free,” she said, surprised by her candor. She and Hawk had rarely spoken, certainly not about anything personal. Of course, she’d never had any desire to confide in the smooth-talking yes-man who’d almost shattered her sister’s life, and he’d never regarded her as more than an escape from the mess his heartlessness had created.

He was ridiculously lucky her father had no idea what had really gone down between his perfect daughter and the hardened bodyguard he’d assigned to protect her.

Intimacy always carried a price.

But Sandro seemed different from the clowns her father usually sent to shadow Miranda’s every step. He seemed…more human. He seemed more real. And the way he looked at her, that dark gaze concentrated fully on her, loosened the tight flag of indifference she normally kept furled close.

“As Astrid, I could go places,” she told him with a smile her grandfather had called impish. The one her father called willful. For two months she’d been traveling the European countryside with her camera as her companion, capturing slices of a life she’d never known existed. “I could do and see things without worrying about attracting unwanted attention.”

Her smile faded, along with the sense of freedom she’d embraced only a few hours before.

“Now I realize these past weeks were just an illusion. I never left the Carrington fishbowl after all.” The sting of disappointment burned her throat. “He’s been watching me every step, hasn’t he? All his talk of trust and freedom was nothing but lies.”

Sandro frowned. “You don’t know that.”

But she did. Sandro with the machine-gun briefcase was living, breathing proof of that.

She looked at him standing in the hazy light creeping through the dirty window, but for a moment didn’t see the man who’d chased her through alleys or followed her father’s orders. She saw only the man who’d approached her alongside the ocean.

The picture you’re about to take. It’s all wrong.

Wrong? How so?

Because you’re not in it.

Her heart staggered. Moisture stung the backs of her eyes.

I see myself in the mirror every morning. I don’t need pictures of myself.

Then give it to me.

Now why would I do that?

So I can remember the way you look standing here, with the sun in your hair and the smile on your face.

Emotion swelled through her. She’d wanted him to be real, damn it. She’d wanted the moment to be real.

But like everything else in the Carrington world, the encounter had only been a carefully orchestrated means to an end. Just like her first drink. Her first kiss. Except those hadn’t been arranged by her father but, rather, pathetic scum who wanted to use the Carrington name as a meal ticket.

“Miranda?” Sandro asked, going down on one knee.

The gesture struck her as foolishly gallant. “I’m sorry he dragged you into this,” she said, forcing a smile and pushing to her feet.

“I’m tired and I’m hungry,” she added. “So why don’t you take me back to my hotel, so I can call my father and tell him I’m not interested in playing any more of his games.” If he insisted on having someone shadow her, she didn’t want the man to be Sandro. She couldn’t look at him without remembering the ray of anticipation she’d felt by the ocean. She couldn’t stay with him in a small room like this without remembering the way he’d made her feel for those first few minutes, that seductive sense of intrigue, the intoxicating glow of discovery.

If her father had to keep tabs on her, she’d rather Hawk or Aaron or any other of his yes-men, not this tall man with the midnight eyes and rough voice, who reminded her how foolish she’d been to hope, for even a few minutes, that she could have a life beyond the Carrington mystique.

Slowly, Sandro rose to his full height. “You think this is a game?”

“Not a game. A drill. A lesson. A powerplay.” Eleven years before, a tragic accident had forever changed the Carrington family. After burying his oldest daughter Kristina, her father had never left anything to chance, ever again.

Equal parts grief-stricken and naive, a seventeen-year-old Miranda had been unprepared for the measures Peter Carrington had implemented to protect his remaining children. Only months later, during her freshman year at Wellesley, she’d been horrified when the caring, considerate girl with whom she’d shared secrets, clothes and a dorm room turned out to be a female bodyguard, hired to keep an eye on her. Watch her. Report back to her father. Since then Miranda had become skilled at spotting his setups. It burned her that she hadn’t seen this one coming.

But then, never before had her father sent someone who looked like temptation and spoke like a poet.

“You’re not the first, you know,” she said, deliberately dismissing him. “Dad excels in orchestrating little security exercises to prove I need to be more careful.”

“Security exercises?”

“You know. Because of Kris. Friends that turn out to be federal agents, bouncers that turn out to be bodyguards. Once he arranged for a raid at a college bar, just to prove that if he could find me drinking, so could the media or a kook.”

Sandro swore under his breath. “You think the scene by the ocean was staged for your benefit?”