Summer Vows

“I would prefer that you not make any calls, and if you do then limit them to a minute or less.”

A smug smile touched her lips. So, she was right. He didn’t want her using the phone. “That call was necessary because I had to tell my friend that my vacation plans had changed.”

Crossing his arms over his chest, Jacob continued to stare at her, brows drawing together as he continued to frown. “What you’re going to have to accept is that your entire life will change until the person or persons who want you eliminated is either caught or killed.”

A shiver eddied up Ana’s spine at the same time she closed her eyes. Killed. The single word was uttered as softly as a pleasant greeting. But then she couldn’t afford to forget that the man with whom she would live with for who knew how long carried a firearm and had been trained to use it with deadly force when necessary. And she said a silent prayer that whoever was responsible for shooting Tyler would be apprehended alive. After all, dead people couldn’t talk.

It hadn’t been a week since that fateful day when she stood in the restaurant parking lot with her cousin, but Ana wanted it over. Perhaps when she went to sleep and woke up she would realize it’d been a bad dream. That she’d read one of the mystery novels Samantha had edited and everything that’d happened was because of an overactive imagination.

But she knew she couldn’t blink and will it away because of the incredibly virile man standing only feet away. Despite the turmoil going on in her life that had impacted her family she did not want to think about sharing a roof with a man as attractive as Jacob. Why, she mused, couldn’t he be short, fat, balding and smelling of liniment? But he wasn’t, and that made her uncomfortable. She also wondered how long it would take before she would go completely stir-crazy from the inactivity.

Ana was used to getting up every morning and working out in her condominium’s health club before she prepared to go into her office. She and Jason alternated chairing bi-weekly staff meetings where they brought everyone employed by the recording company up on what was going on with their artists. And once she’d taken control as CEO she’d established an open-door policy. There hadn’t been a time when she did not entertain someone’s suggestion, whether she believed it would or wouldn’t benefit the company, whenever the executives held their brainstorming sessions.

“I know you see me as an imposition—”

“You’re not,” Jacob said, interrupting her. “If I thought of you as an imposition, then I never would’ve agreed to let you come and stay here.”

“Why did you agree?”

He smiled, the expression reminding Ana of a ray of sunshine warming her face and she wanted to tell him that it was something he should do more often.

“Because there are very few things I wouldn’t do for Diego.”

Her eyebrows lifted at this disclosure. “Did you and Diego go to college together?” She’d asked because her cousin had attended college in Miami.

“No. Diego has three years on me.”

Ana quickly did the math. Diego was going to celebrate his thirty-ninth birthday, so he had to be at least thirty-five or six.

“I’ll be thirty-six September seventeenth,” Jacob confirmed.