Her Bodyguard

They’d barely seen her. They’d been too busy laughing at some private joke to spare her more than a glance, their smiles fading for a moment, their cool eyes passing through her. The boy had flipped her a careless wave, then turned onto the avenue and roared away. Those two hadn’t been concerned about any intruders.

“Toby and Joya,” the man murmured, his trim rump in the air as he groped beneath the sofa.

“We didn’t introduce ourselves.” Gillian knelt and thrust the ball under the sofa, toward his sweeping fingertips. “Here.”

“Where?” His hand closed instead on her wrist—and tightened when she tried to withdraw.

She was suddenly angry out of all proportion to the act, whether he was teasing or only hopelessly dim. Their hands connecting in the dark, touch their only link—her skin shivered with the unexpected, unwelcome intimacy. “In my hand. Where do you think?”

He slid warm, surprisingly hard fingers down her wrist to trace the ball she clutched. “Oh.” Then he lifted it delicately from her palm. “Thanks.”

She sat upright, started to wipe her hand on her skirt, then chose a throw cushion, instead. Its silky chintz fabric didn’t wipe his touch away but seemed to drive it into her bones. She bounced to her feet and retreated to the wall of French doors, scowling through the glass at the lawn beyond. Such a velvety expanse of green, a symbol of wealth more potent than a Rolls or diamonds. Why didn’t he take his toys and go golf out there?

“I suppose you’re here about the job,” he said behind her. “We’ve been up to our chins in would-be companions all week. Short ones, tall ones, nice ones, crabby ones.”

If he’d been the welcoming committee, she didn’t doubt the crabbiness! Gillian swallowed and gripped her elbows. For some reason she hadn’t thought there’d be many applicants for the job. Somehow she’d seen it as...fated. Earmarked for her and her alone. But if there’d been that many applicants... And her qualifications—she was really reaching to think they’d do, but somehow she’d thought...

Wished. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, her aunt Susan—her adoptive aunt, Gillian corrected herself—had always said. She’d been foolishly wishing...

“Funny,” the pest said behind her. “You don’t seem very companionable.”

Could he possibly be coming onto her? “Companion to a woman was the job description, I believe,” she said coldly, without turning.

“Companion/personal assistant to a businesswoman” was the actual wording of the ad in the Newport Daily News. Responses to be directed to Mrs. Lara Corday, Woodwind, Bellevue Avenue, Newport. There had been no mention of the celebrity who lived at that address, who presumably required the assistant. That Mrs. Lara Corday was actually Lara Leigh, star of the long-running soap opera Searching for Sarah, was one of Newport’s best kept secrets. The locals might know it, but they were used to bumping into movie stars at morning coffee, presidents on the harbor launch, princes at the post office. To stare or to show yourself impressed was to mark yourself an out-of-town yokel, a tourist. And the locals didn’t tell secrets to tourists.

“Getting a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it?” A big hand slipped past Gillian’s ribs, reaching for the door’s brass handle. His tanned forearm rubbed along her waist. She gasped and shied to her right. And stumbled over her heels.

“Hey, easy!” His other arm hooked around her waist to steady her, then draw her upright again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you like that. You could have jumped right through the glass.” His arm tightened around her for an unbelievable, outrageous moment, pulling her backward. Her hips bumped his crotch.

“I’m fine!” she snapped, jamming one elbow into his ribs. “Perfectly—He let her go instantly and she whirled around. ”F-fine.”

Or not. He hadn’t withdrawn one inch. Standing toe to toe with him, she was trapped by the door at her back. A pair of broad male shoulders filled her entire horizon. He wore his white golf shirt unbuttoned, showing her a curl of dark hair at the V. She tipped back her head and found him smiling.

“Sorry,” he said again, too softly. “I didn’t mean to...”

Right. She sidestepped along the wall, careful to give him no excuse to “help” her again. He opened the first pair of doors, then the next, heading her way. She shied off to the center of the room and scowled at his back. Could that have been an accident?

“You don’t need to be so nervous,” he said, swinging open a third pair. The whisper of distant surf filled the room. “It’s just a job like any other.”

“I’m not—” She stopped and shrugged. Did it show that much? Being on edge, maybe she had misread his actions.

Dark against the brightness silhouetting him, he turned back to study her. “I suppose you’re a local girl, a Vod-islander.”

That mockery of the upstate accent marked him as hailing from other parts, she thought absently. “No.” His expectant silence at her one-word response dragged more words from her. “I’ve been here since the spring.” She’d meant to stay only a day or two, a week at most. Still wounded by Lara’s letter of rejection, she’d intended only to catch a glimpse of her mother, see her in the flesh once, then go.

Oh, she’d seen Lara Leigh a hundred times or more by then watching reruns of Searching for Sarah. But she’d felt no sense of reality, no connection. That beautiful, mobile, weeping or laughing face on the TV screen hardly seemed a real person, much less a person connected to her as no other.

“Living here in Newport?” he prodded.

“Yes.” Her first week, she’d stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a quarter mile down the Cliff Walk. Had haunted that stunning path morning and night, sure somehow that if Lara was any relation to her, then this was where they would meet. Her mother would love the cliffs, too. Living so near, she’d be bound to stroll there, drawn by the cry of the gulls, the cool breeze off the glittering ocean, the rumble of the waves grinding the rocks below.

And her certainty had proved right—proof more clinching than any DNA test, to Gillian’s mind, that they were of one blood. Walking the cliffs on a misty dawn, her third in Newport, she’d looked eagerly toward Woodwind, its tall chimneys slowly taking shape through the fog. Looked—and had seen a slim figure step out through a wooden door hidden among the wild rugosa rosebushes that hedged the cliff side of the high estate walls.

The figure set off at a long-legged, floating run and vanished around a bend in the path. Gillian caught her breath and jogged after. Wait, Lara! Wait for me!

If the runner was her mother. Gillian rounded the bend and glimpsed silvery hair the same shade as Lara Leigh’s. Then more rosebushes intervened, black against the pearly mist.

But no hurry, she told herself. She was fifteen years younger and a runner herself. She could overtake Lara whenever she chose. Cliff Walk edged the ragged peninsula jutting out into Rhode Island Sound for another two miles or so. She had plenty of time.

Mist dewed her face, beaded in her lashes, as she ran. A loon called its weird laughing cry from the gray waters below. Gillian came to a set of mossy stone steps and bounded up them, then down another set, her ears straining for footsteps ahead, hearing in- stead the rip of a wave combing down the black pebbles of the shingle beach fringing the base of the cliffs, some seventy feet below. The path skirted the very rim of the drop-off, and here someone had built a waist-high chain-link fence to keep unwary sightseers from stepping out into echoing space. Wild white daisies softened the craggy soil, trailing downward from rock to rock. Elephant-high clumps of rugosas pressed in from both sides of the Walk now. Blossoms of magenta and white brushed her shoulders as she ran. Through gaps in the bushes Gillian snatched glimpses of the black silhouette of a lobster boat idling in toward a line of pots laid along the cliffs. On a clear day you could see twenty miles out to the islands, but not this morning, when visibility was measured in yards.

And somewhere ahead...Gillian stepped up her pace. She passed a trail that led up between the mansions on her right toward the avenue, but somehow she knew Lara wouldn’t stray from this path. A woman who lived most of her life in the public eye would surely treasure this gorgeous solitude.

And what do I do when I catch her? Glance sideways? Say something inanely pleasant, as runners often do when they pass each other—Nice day, huh? Or should she run a little farther, then wheel and confront her? Mother, it’s me, she could say, Sarah. But she never would dare. Not after that savaging letter. Gillian pulled up the hood of the orange sweatshirt she wore till it covered her hair. Tightened the string at her throat to keep the hood in place. There was no reason to think that Lara might recognize her, but still...

Mind focused on the bow she was tying and on the coming encounter, she rounded another bend and shied violently sideways, grazing the bushes, thorns plucking at her sleeve. For all her fascination with vistas, she had a healthy fear of heights, and this was a spot she never liked. Just as the path passed a wide gap in the bushes, it dipped, then tilted subtly toward the cliff edge. Here, water ran off from the hillside above, carving a notch in the cliff. Someday the path would be entirely undermined; the hillside would cave in and fall. Cliff Walk, Gillian had learned, had been crumbling for time out of mind, the sea taking the land inch by inch, the soft slate cliffs eroding year by year. The path was perfectly safe, but still, you could feel the abyss calling. Three wincing steps and she was by the gap, looking ahead again.

Lara? The path sloped downward; the highest cliffs were behind them now. The surf sounded louder and the fog was thicker, as if it had chosen this low spot to crawl onto the land. Gillian looked down, picking a route around a puddle in the path, looked up—and Lara burst out of the mist. Retracing her steps, homeward bound already.

No time to think at all. As their strides carried them closer, their eyes met and locked. Hers were a gray so light as to seem silver, fringed by lashes as dark as Gillian’s own. Lara’s lips parted, Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but the only word that sprang to mind was Why? Oh, why?

Gillian slowed, her steps faltering, her mind stumbling. That’s her! Near enough to touch! Near enough to question—if only she dared.

She didn’t. Not this time, anyway. So instead she ran on, reliving the moment, trying to hold that startled, questioning face in her memory. Seeking from it some likeness to her own.

Finding none—

CHAPTER TWO

A HAND WAVED BEFORE HER face, then dropped as she focused on it. “Do this often, do you?” inquired the man. His lopsided smile was whimsical; his eyes missed nothing.

They were hazel, she noticed for the first time. “Do what?” She’d entirely forgotten he was in the room! For only a minute or so? It might as easily have been an hour.

“Vanish down a rabbit hole. Not a very nice one, by the look of it.”

“I...was trying to remember if I’d turned off the stove.”

He didn’t buy it, but he cocked his head obediently, then one eyebrow. “Don’t hear fire engines.”

Newport wasn’t large. Whenever the trucks turned out, the whole town heard the racket. “I believe I did turn it off after all.”

“Ah.” He’d jammed his hands into the pockets of his chinos. Eyes fixed on her face, he strolled around her. She suppressed an urge to spin warily with him, and let him instead inspect her profile, then her backside. Clenching her teeth, she tipped back her head to study the chandelier above. She’d thought meeting her mother would be the ordeal of the day. Now she looked to Lara for rescue. Somebody deliver me from this... this... whatever he was.

Bad news, that’s what he was. Elegantly packaged bad news, from his sexily too-long, razor-cut dark hair, to his runner’s shoes, which probably cost more than her monthly rent. With all stops in between just as scenic. Not handsome exactly, but something more potent, topped off with a whiff of... unpredictability. Not a trait she cared for in someone who was shaping up to be an opponent.

“You know she’s been ill,” he said idly from somewhere behind her right ear.

Ill? That was hardly the word Gillian would have used to describe a fall off the Cliff Walk.