Her Bodyguard

“Nice, isn’t it?” Sutton said from the far end of the long room, where he waited in a doorway. “I used to live here myself.”

“You did?” Perhaps that accounted for his proprietary air. Still, Gillian didn’t like it. He rubbed her wrong; the vibrations he’d left behind would bother her, too. Frowning, she followed him into the bedroom, and stopped short in delight.

The end wall was mostly glass, a gigantic Palladian window that looked out on the side lawn, then over the distant back wall. Beyond that all was blue—robin’s egg sky, a slash of aquamarine sea.

“Yes, I rented this place for a month this spring, before I moved in with Lara.”

So their relationship was quite new. Must have blossomed almost overnight, given that Lara had spent most of her spring and summer in hospital. One of those sickbed romances—he’d wooed her when her resistance was at its lowest, chocolate and flowers and reading to the invalid? “I see,” she said evenly. He’d set her box of clothes down on the bed. The top flaps, which she’d interlocked, had somehow come undone. She dumped her own boxes beside it. “What did you mean by ‘a bad night’? Pain?” She straightened to find his eyes locked on her face.

“Nightmares,” he said bluntly.

“Oh.” Yes, she could imagine that. She shivered, and watched him note it. Why was he staring like that? The memory of his arm sliding around her returned abruptly: She’d put any notion that he might have been making a pass aside after his obvious attempt to block Lara’s hiring her. Rationally, one action didn’t follow the other. If Trace was attracted, then why would he object to her working at Wood- . wind? He wouldn’t. Since he had objected, therefore that fumble at the windows had not been a pass.

Now, with his eyes lingering on her mouth, she wasn’t so sure of her logic. “Er, there’s lots more in the car.” She ducked out the door.

They brought up a second load, Trace in the lead again. He swung her suitcase onto the bed, then opened a sliding door to reveal a closet. “There’re plenty of hangers. Why don’t you hand me your things and I’ll hang them up.”

Funny, he didn’t look in the least domestic. “Thanks, but I’d rather do it myself.” Later, without an unblinking audience.

Her words hung between them in the small room, a little too emphatic, a little too prim. Maybe she was wrong to take offense. Maybe this was no more than the kind of service a slightly younger man grew used to giving an older, richer woman. She found herself wondering for the first time what Sutton did for a living.

His smile deepened at the corners, but he didn’t rush to fill the uncomfortable silence. So she did. “It’s just that I’ve been living crunched into a tiny apartment with too many roommates.” When she’d taken the place back in May, she’d signed on to share a two-bedroom apartment with its original tenant. Then Debbie had lost her job. To pay the rent, she’d taken in another two girls, college sophomores in Newport to party for the summer. “Dirty dishes in the sink, people coming and going at all hours or, worse, declaring parties at all hours. Laundry hanging all over the bathroom.” And Michele, who’d decided she preferred Gillian’s clothes to her own and who borrowed without asking. “It’s been too much togetherness by half. So it’ll be heaven doing for myself for a change.”

Trace cocked his head. “Let me guess. You’re an only child.”

One minute he doesn’t like me, the next he wants to know all about me. She was tempted to brush him off, but she didn’t need an enemy at Woodwind. Lara’s desire to hire her had overruled her lover’s opposition. Still, Gillian didn’t know by what margin. Better to play it safe. Try to win him over, too.

“Not quite,” she said lightly, leading him out of the bedroom and back toward the stairs. “I have a brother.” By adoption. “Chris. But he’s fourteen years older than I.” And when her adoptive parents had divorced back when Gillian was eight, Chris had gone with his father. She had stayed with Eleanor Scott—her adoptive mother—and had wondered for years why her father, Victor Scott, had dropped out of her life so completely.

Because I was never his in the first place! Because it was Mom who wanted to adopt a child, not him—he had Chris by a previous marriage and Chris was quite enough. So many mysteries of her childhood had come clear when she opened that safe-deposit box.

“And Chris lives back in Houston along with the rest of your family?” Trace prodded, coming down the stairs at her heels.

Houston. She hadn’t told him she came from there. He read my résumé, which listed Houston as her previous residence and the location of her last two jobs. “Oh, he’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” she said with a smile over her shoulder. “He’s a delivery captain. Moves other people’s yachts around.”

There wasn’t much family beyond that to claim, in Houston or anywhere. Aunt Susan, Victor Scott’s sister out in San Diego. And Ed Mahler, the lovely loony man who had married her mother when Gillian was fifteen and had adopted her, never knowing she was adopted already. He had been as thunderstruck as she at Eleanor’s deception. Ed was an engineer in the merchant marine, and after her mother’s death, he’d signed on for a regular run on a tanker between Kuwait and New Jersey.

Reaching the car, Gillian found herself still smarting at Trace’s invasion of her privacy. It was silly to be so irritated. Perhaps he’d helped Lara cull all the applicants, deciding which were worth an interview. Still, his big hands on a paper that described her life...she didn’t like it. “So what about you?” she said recklessly as she opened the trunk. “Any siblings?” Two could play the prying game.

She looked up to find a distinct frown on his face. You’d rather question than be questioned? Good. She cocked her head at him inquiringly. I bet you’re the youngest brother, with two older sisters. You’re comfortable hanging around with older women. Pleasing them.

Trace accepted her challenge with a wry smile and said, “Three. A younger brother and two even younger sisters.”

So much for her betting instincts. “Then that makes you the responsible, conscientious one.” she observed. And it would account for his air of command. The eldest was always the kid left in charge. “And what is Trace, a nickname your family gave you?” Might as well keep him on the run once she had him there.

He pulled her portfolio and the big wooden box she used for a paint kit out of the trunk. “It’s short for Tracy,” he said amiably, and turned to face her. “And what does the S stand for—your middle name?”

Touché! she thought wryly. He wasn’t one to run far. S stood for two names in one. Sarah and Scott. But Sarah was the name Lara had given her at birth—Gillian knew that from the papers her adoptive mother had bequeathed her—and then apparently her adoptive parents had retained it. Simply because they liked the name Sarah? Or as some sort of salute to Lara’s wishes?

Scott was the surname of her adoptive parents at the time of Gillian’s adoption. The name she’d refused to give up in a fit of teenage defiance when her mother married Ed Mahler.

So Sarah Scott was how she’d signed her letter last year, when she first wrote to Lara asking if they might be related. And Gillian had no intention of risking exposure by giving it now. Probably she should have changed the S to something else on her job application, but all her ID showed her as Gillian S. Mahler.

She met Trace’s eyes and realized that her hesitation had stretched for a minute or more. That he stood motionless, his face as intent as a cat’s at a mouse hole.

“My middle name?” She smiled. “S stands for Seymour.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“Now, TAKE A DEEP BREATH,” Lara laughingly advised, as she paused, hand on a doorknob. Despite the nightmares Trace had mentioned, she seemed in fine spirits this morning. Trace and Gillian had collected her from her bedroom suite, where she had taken a late breakfast. She’d led them on a leisurely tour of the public areas of the house, the high point of which, to Gillian, had been an exercise room, complete with lap pool, in the basement that she might use whenever she pleased. The conclusion of the orientation was Gillian’s new office, located upstairs in the same wing as Lara’s suite, all the way at its western end. “And remember,” Lara continued as she opened the door, “it isn’t as bad as it looks.”

“It’s worse,” Trace lazily assured her. Apparently having nothing better to do, he’d tagged along on the tour and Gillian wasn’t sure if she was grateful or annoyed. On the one hand, his presence diluted the intensity of her first extended interaction with her mother, so that she wasn’t constantly “onstage,” having to pick and choose her words every minute. But on the other hand, his presence prevented her from connecting with Lara on a more intimate level.

“Hush,” Lara commanded as she opened the door.

“If this is bad,” Gillian murmured, following her into the office, “I don’t know if I could stand good. It just might kill me!” The large room ended in a gigantic, three-sided bay window, with tiny stained-glass diamond panes trimming its upper reaches; at eye level, half-moon expanses of plate glass framed the outrageously splendid view. A long cushioned seat was built in below each facet of the window; a coffee table was placed in the alcove thus created. Gillian could see the tops of the rosebushes that edged Cliff Walk peeking above the estate walls, then 180 degrees of ocean glittering in the noonday sun.

“It is gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lara agreed. “This used to be Richard‘s—my husband’s—office. I never did understand how he could write here. But then, he used to sit with his back to the view.” Her smile wavered for a moment. She swallowed, tipped her head in a movement that seemed to say, Oh, well, and continued. “It was Joya—my stepdaughter—who turned the desk to face the windows last year when she took over.”

Her stepdaughter! Somehow Gillian had thought, if she hadn’t been told by now, that Lara had no children.

“Up until last year, I’d had the same assistant for nine years. But when Beckie left to be married, Joya asked for the job...” Lara went on, glancing around the room with a faint frown.

“And you can see what a good job she’s been doing,” said Trace, nodding at the boxes lined along one wall.

A dozen boxes at least, Gillian estimated, filled with—“Yikes! Is that all—”

“Fan mail,” Lara said with a look of comic guilt. “Still want the job?”

“Well, yes.” More than ever. Lara wasn’t like anything she’d expected. There was some mystery here that needed unraveling. “Who’s afraid of a little fan mail?” And now was probably not the time to admit that she had suffered all her life from mild—okay, moderate—dyslexia. Reading required intense concentration and exacted fierce headaches. “Am I looking at a week’s worth of mail or—”

“Oh, just today’s,” Trace assured her blandly.

Lara elbowed him in the ribs. “Sit down and hush up before you scare Gillian off the job, you brute!”

“Your wish, oh heart, is my...” Trace retired obediently to a window seat. He selected a catalog from a pile arranged on the coffee table, opened it, and seemed instantly absorbed.

Lara turned back to Gillian with a smile. “It’s six months’ or more accumulation. Joya fell behind some time before last Christmas and the poor darling never caught up again.”

“Though she tried valiantly,” Trace murmured without looking up. He turned a page.

“She was only working part-time,” Lara defended her stepdaughter. “She and Toby—her brother—were attending college here in town, at Salve Regina...”

A brother, as well! Gillian’s stepbrother, also, or was Toby Lara and Richard Corday’s son? Which would mean that he was Gillian’s half brother. She found herself hoping keenly for the second alternative. Her own adoptive brother had been plucked from her daily life with her parents’ divorce. She would have liked a full-time sibling or two.

“What with her midterms and a paper she had to write...” murmured Lara, still defending the absent Joya. Trace rustled his catalog too loudly. Lara shrugged. “Anyway, all these letters need answering. So here’s how you go about it.”

She selected a letter from the last box in line along the wall, opened it and pulled out a printed get-well card featuring a doleful rabbit on crutches, his ears bent, his head bandaged. She laughed to herself and held it out to Gillian. “They’re filming the fall season’s episodes of Searching for Sarah already. Since I won’t be returning for another six months or so, the scriptwriters have written me out of the story. They’ve decided that I had a dreadful accident while skiing in Switzerland, and no one knows if I’ll ever walk again—art imitating life, but not too closely, thank God.”