Her Sworn Protector

She frowned slightly. “Your heart’s still jumping around.” How long had that been going on? she wondered.

The exam was thorough but swift. Milos had even bought his own personal EKG machine so that he didn’t have to go into her office to have his heart monitored. And during the exam, Kady asked a few pertinent questions in between dodging blatant invitations they both knew he would never act on and neither would she. Her questions encompassed his lifestyle, what he’d been eating lately, what he’d been doing. His diet remained relatively unchanged. His activity, however, had heightened.

She listened and watched his face as Milos told her about the other company, Skourous Shipping, the one that was breathing down his neck and had been for quite some time now. Alexander Skourous and his grandson, Nicholas, were trying to steal his customers any way they could, he told her, the veins in his neck thickening as he spoke.

The rivalry between Milos Plageanos and Alexander Skourous, whose families had both originated from the same small fishing village in the south of Greece, had been steadily heating up over the past twenty-five years. In the last five, it had gotten especially ugly. Matters were not helped by the fact that Milos’s second wife had eloped with him a week before she was set to marry Alexander.

“This is not over the woman,” Milos assured her. “For that, Alexander should have sent me a thank-you note because I saved him from a terrible shrew. But he is trying to steal my oldest customer from me. My very first one,” he emphasized. “Theo is gone now, but his grandson…”

He waved his hand, unable to finish his sentence because the words he wanted to use to describe what he thought of his old friend’s grandson weren’t fit for her ears. In some ways, Milos was very much a courtly gentleman and she appreciated it.

Milos sat up, buttoning his pajama top as she put her stethoscope away. “I am a sentimental man—”

“Not to mention a superstitious one,” Kady pointed out, pausing to write something down on her prescription pad.

“Superstition is healthy.” Leaning back against his pillows again, he eyed the pad suspiciously. “It tells us where our place is.”

“I want you to stop thinking about the business so much and start thinking about you.”

“I am the business and the business is me,” he said with finality, then he nodded toward the pad. “What is that you are writing?”

“A prescription.” She tore off the top page and held it out to him.

He made no effort to take it from her. “I have no time to go to the hospital.”

“Good.” Opening his hand, she placed the paper in it, then pushed his fingers closed again. “Because you’re not going.”

The pain had been real. And frightening. It was clear he didn’t believe himself out of the woods yet. “I’m dying?”

She laughed warmly, placing her hand on top of his and patting it reassuringly. “You’ll outlive me, Mr. Plageanos.”

He frowned, shaking his head. “I have no wish to live in a world without beauty.”

The man would be a player on his deathbed, she thought. Kady rolled her eyes. “I have to be getting back.” She nodded at the paper in his hand. “Have one of your people fill that.”

He looked at it, but without his glasses all he saw were wavy lines on a page. “What is this?”

She told him the name of the medication, then explained. “It’s for your anxiety attack—the next time you have one.”

An indignant expression came over his face. “I was not attacked by anxiety.” Making a fist, he brought it in contact with his chest. “My heart attacked me.”

She knew what the problem was. Men like Milos associated anxiety with weakness. They didn’t understand that at times, the mind and body had wills of their own that had nothing to do with what a person might want or expect.

“Not this time. What you had was an anxiety attack—with a touch of heartburn.” Lowering her voice, she leaned over his bed. “Stop eating all these rich Greek dishes, Mr. Plageanos. And cut down on the pastries.” She indicated the plate of half-finished confection that was on his other nightstand.

“Stop eating baklava?” The instruction brought a look of mock distress to his face. “But eating baklava is like going to heaven.”

“You’ll be booking passage to there permanently if you’re not careful.” Closing her medical bag, she picked it up. “You have the constitution of a man half your age, but you have to take care of yourself—otherwise all this—” she waved around the huge room “—gets wasted.”

He looked at the paper in his hand, his expression dubious. “Anxiety?”

“Anxiety,” she affirmed.

Folding the paper again, he drew in his breath, resigned. “You can’t tell anyone.”

“No,” she agreed, not knowing if he was ordering her or requesting it of her. In any event, she had her ethics. “I can’t. I’m your doctor. This is just between you and me, remember? Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to wash up before I leave.” She glanced over her shoulder at the door. With Byron gone, she had no way of knowing which way to turn. “Where can I—?”

“No need to go anywhere, use mine.” He gestured toward the sumptuous bathroom at the far end of the room. The door stood open, and from where she stood, Kady could just about make out the black onyx tiles. The man certainly did like black, she mused.

Nodding, she started across the room.

Chapter 2

The master bathroom was larger than her bedroom back at the apartment. As a matter of fact, Kady thought, taking a long look around, this bathroom looked larger than her living room. Not to mention that the gold sink and tub fixtures probably cost more than a year’s rent.

She shook her head as she turned the handles and proceeded to wash her hands. What did a man need with a gold swan spouting out an arc of water into a black onyx tub? She dried her hands on towels that felt softer than whipped cream.

Moving over to the tub, Kady paused to look at it more closely. A huge stained-glass window directly behind it cast beams of blue and gold into the room. The tub itself was round and roomy enough for three wide-hipped people to sit comfortably without touching.

Opulence run amok, she couldn’t help thinking.

It seemed like such a waste. The money that all this had cost would have been put to better use funding another clinic or helping to get people off the streets and on their feet again.

Kady straightened the towel she’d used and backed away. It was Milos’s money, she told herself, and she had no right to impose her own set of values on him. The man should be free to enjoy it. Heaven knew he seemed to enjoy very little these days, focusing exclusively on his company and obsessing about it the way he did. It wasn’t healthy. At his age, a man as well off as Milos should have no reason to stress himself out to the point of having an anxiety attack. He should be into the coasting part of his life.

And then she smiled. She sincerely doubted if she’d be willing to just coast at seventy. She’d still want to work, still want to make a difference. She supposed that was what kept the man going, a sense of purpose. Work, if you didn’t hate it, was what kept you young. And Milos just told her that he considered the business his life and—

About to go back into the bedroom, her hand on the doorknob, Kady paused, cocking her head. Trying to make out a sound. She could have sworn she heard a series of popping noises coming from somewhere within the bedroom. If she didn’t know better, she would have said they sounded like firecrackers.

Kady frowned slightly. All right, what was Milos trying to pull now? She knew he thought himself invincible, but she wanted him to spend the rest of the day in bed. Anxiety attacks were not heart attacks, but they could certainly feel that way to the body, and after that kind of an ordeal, Milos’s body deserved to rest.

Now that she’d told Milos that the situation wasn’t actually dangerous, he was probably champing at the bit to get back into the game of besting Skourous and his company, making sure the other man had no opportunity to get the better of him.

She sighed, shaking her head.

With a reprimand on her tongue, all set for release, Kady opened the bathroom door.

And stopped dead.

There was someone else in the room. Someone dressed all in black, right down to the gloves on his hands and the shoes on his feet.

The collar of the turtleneck pullover was raised up high, covering his mouth and his nose. Even his eyes seemed to be coal black. The only thing of vague color was the gun in his hand. Gray. The gun’s barrel appeared strangely disproportioned.

And then she recognized it for what it was. A silencer. The intruder had a silencer at the end of the gun barrel.

He’d come to kill someone.

He had killed someone, she realized in the next moment. That was what the noise had been. Bullets fired through a silencer.