The Socialite and the Bodyguard (12 page)

Now Mo stood, and the barstool he’d been sitting on sighed with relief. The man was built like a tank. “Can’t be working with you on a job if we’re not going to be honest,” he said, deadpan.

Nash raised a hand in capitulation. “Quit busting my chops. She’s okay. I kinda like her. I guess.”

At that, the two gave identical grins.

He itched to knock their heads together over the counter, but that would have led to a brawl and a destroyed penthouse apartment. Not the way to get back into Kayla’s or Welkins’s good graces, so, instead, he opened the folder that had been sitting in front of him on the counter. “Can we move on to business? We do have a killer to catch.”

S
HE WAS TIRED
and furious and not entirely sure how to handle the situation. She called both Mike and Dave. They were mad beyond reason, but neither seemed inclined to come back and tackle the men in her kitchen. And after a couple of moments Kayla understood that once again she had overestimated her relationships. They weren’t her best friends. They’d been her hired bodyguards. They would have given their life for her while they’d been on her payroll. But now that their employment had ended, they were moving on to their next assignment. One where they wouldn’t have to fight three ex-commando human tanks just to get started.

On some level, she understood. But on another level she was hurt and felt betrayed by those men. She had thought they were part of her core team. The team she could trust through thick and thin.

Her father had been big on the whole
core-team
thing. To him, it had meant the family: his wife, his sons and his daughter. He was big on not trusting anyone beyond that, not even his own brother. He viewed Uncle Al more as competition. He hadn’t been crazy about sharing the company’s leadership with him. William Landon had been too much of an alpha male to share something like that.

Which meant that Uncle Al hadn’t been a big part of Kayla’s childhood. But they’d grown much closer since her father’s death. He’d become a replacement father figure of sorts. He’d never remarried after his wife had run off with that bodyguard. Maybe he had his own trust issues, Kayla thought for the first time. Was her whole family struggling with that?

Her stomach growled. But she no longer felt like eating. It was past eight anyway. She would watch a movie in her room and go to bed. She couldn’t face Nash Wilder again tonight or she might murder him.

Her dreams were dark and disjointed. In one of them, Nash loomed large and dark, scaring her spitless. He held a gun on Greg. Her uncle stood in the background.

She woke gasping for air in the middle of the night, turned on the light on the nightstand. She was alone in the room, save for Tsini, who raised her head for only a minute before going back to sleep.

He’d considered her people suspects from the get-go. She should have fired him then and there. She should have trusted her staff more than she trusted him.

In her dream, he was going to kill Greg. And she just knew she would have been next.

But why would he be her enemy? What would he gain by that?

Her head pounded harder.

He could be someone’s hired man. The hired-man theory had been his from the beginning. Maybe it was a situation he was more than familiar with?

Then she remembered how in the dream, her uncle had been there.

Her uncle had told her to hire someone from this particular agency. Then Nash had been sent.

Her uncle had told her to take a break from work.

Her father had never fully trusted Al. Had there been a reason for that? Her uncle was leading the corporation. But he didn’t own enough shares to control it. Kayla and Greg were also major shareholders. The three of them were each other’s beneficiaries. If Kayla and Greg were gone, Al would become majority shareholder with the ability to control the company.

She hated that those thoughts would even come into her head. Hated the fact that Nash had made her paranoid. Odd, though, that he would try to get her to be suspicious of everyone close to her, but never her uncle. Did that mean anything?

Enough things clicked to make her sit up straight. But then she hesitated.

It couldn’t be. No way it could be Al. What about the picture someone had sent to her? But if Al could buy Nash, he could buy someone on that camera crew to take the picture. Nash had been the only one who seemed to recall clearly that none of the camera crew had been in the den, thereby neatly transferring all suspicion to her people.

Al could have sent the threats to Tsini—he was a cat person, never cared for dogs in the first place—just so he could talk her into hiring extra help, someone who was his man.

Still, she could barely wrap her mind around the idea. Her brain cells were having a bongo-drum festival in her head. She was aware that it was the middle of the night, she’d just woken from a nightmare and she wasn’t thinking straight. She was also aware that Al was out of the country, due back tomorrow. He lived in a historic brick townhouse just across the park. And she had a key and the code to the security system.

She had no one to ask for help. If she wanted to find out the truth, she needed to get over there and look around. Three murders and an attempted murder had to have left some kind of trail.

Tonight was her only chance to search through her uncle’s place.

She would be this time.

“Don’t trust anyone,” Greg had told her before they left for Vegas. A lot of people thought Greg was dumb, but not her. Sometimes, Greg saw things nobody else did.

She poured her water on the nearest potted plant, then walked out of her bedroom with the empty bottle.

Mo was sitting in the darkest corner of her living room. Joey was in the kitchen, on the one barstool from which he had a clear view of the front door. They didn’t look like the kind of men she would want to mess with.

And what did that say about how out of control her life was? She was surrounded by men she was scared of. That would have to change.

Her hands trembled. She made a point of steadying them. These men could have killed her and Greg twenty times by now. Nash could have, too, for that matter. What were they waiting for?

Maybe a chance to make it look like an accident.

But then how did the elevator crash fit into their plan? Nash had been on that elevator with her. Maybe he’d made a mistake. Or maybe getting off just in time was part of his plan. He could have set it up that way to make sure that later, when he did take her out, nobody could suspect him.

But then who was the guy Nash had chased? Maybe some poor innocent who’d gotten pushed to his death.

She tossed the empty water bottle in the recycling bin and grabbed a full one from the pantry. “Where’s Nash?” she asked on her way back, her mind buzzing with a thousand thoughts, each wilder than the one before.

“Checking on something,” Joey said. His answer was pretty vague.

“When will he be back?”

The man shrugged.

Her heart picked up speed.
Nash is gone
, was all she could think. An advantage she needed to grab.

“Could I talk to both of you for a minute?” She remained standing as Mo lumbered out of the living room, giving her a what-now? look.

The two men loomed large in the dim light, beyond intimidating. She was well aware that either one of them could snap her like a twig without breaking a sweat. She inched toward the knife block and pulled her spine straight when she got there. She’d faced down rabid paparazzi, managed problem employees at work and successfully ran her part of the Landon empire. She couldn’t back down now. She wouldn’t.

“I thought about this. I’m sure you guys are great, but the fact is, Nash hired you without consulting with me first. I was happy with my own men. I was used to them. We worked together like a team. I’m going to ask them back. You’re relieved of duty. You’ll get your pay for the full week.”

Mo and Joey exchanged an unreadable glance.

“I want you to leave.”

“Not till Nash gets back,” Mo said.

She gave him a strained smile. “See, that’s kind of my problem with Nash. I am the boss here. When I say somebody is hired, they’re hired. When I say they go, they go. This is my home.” She paused for effect.

They still didn’t seem impressed.

“Let me spell it out. I thank you for your hard work, but if you’re not out of here in the next five minutes, I’ll consider you trespassers and I’m calling the police.”

Mo sat on the barstool next to Joey, tilted his head, gave her a look that might have been meant to seem patient. “Listen, Nash wouldn’t like it if we left.”

“I’m not terribly concerned over Nash’s happiness. You can call him and explain later.”

“He doesn’t have his cell on when he’s—” Joey started, but Mo fixed him with a glare, and he snapped his mouth shut without finishing.

“I really don’t care. You need to leave.”

“When Nash gets back,” Mo said.

She stood there for another thirty seconds, trying to figure out what to do. She had to get them out of her home. No way was she going to leave them with Greg while she went across the park to her uncle’s place. And she didn’t want them following her either. She looked between the two men. Obviously, they didn’t take her seriously.

Mo stood, his half-mangled eyebrow up all the way to his hairline. “What did you do that for?” He clucked his tongue as he picked up his black duffel bag from the foyer, giving her a dirty look.

Joey was right behind him. “Nash isn’t going to be happy about this.”

She punched in the security code so she could open the door for them. She didn’t want the full alarm going off and waking Greg. “I’ll worry about that later when I have some time to spare. Right now, I’d like to get back to bed.”

She closed the door behind them with a smile, locked it then called the security firm to call off the alarm. She dressed and checked in on Greg. She hated leaving him alone. But there had never been a single threat directed at him. And if she succeeded tonight in finding some proof against their uncle, solid proof that she could take to the police, then they would both be safe at last, safe for good. She had to take this chance.

“You watch him,” she told Tsini, then set the alarm again and left the condo with her uncle’s backup keys in her left pocket and a small bottle of pepper spray in her right. She lived in one of the best neighborhoods in the city, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

Nobody in the hallway, nobody in the elevator. The lobby was empty, as well, except for the doorman.

“Going out late, Miss Landon. Should I call a cab?”

“Just stepping out to meet a friend for a second.”

Stanislav, a Polish immigrant who was working to collect money to bring his fiancée over from Poznan, held the door open for her.

She walked up the sidewalk until she was out of his sight, then crossed the empty street and strode into the park.

Still no sign of Mo and Joey. Looked like they’d taken her seriously and cleared out for good. In the morning, she’d call a couple of friends, find a reputable security agency and hire her own men. Who would be right at her back when Nash showed up to demand an explanation, which she was sure he would. He was damned hardheaded. She wasn’t looking forward to that confrontation. And Mike and Dave weren’t the right men to stand up to Nash—she knew that now, as much as she liked those guys. To deal with Nash, she needed someone much tougher.

For a second she thought of him as he’d been with her nearly every second of the Vegas trip, and she wavered. Her uncle and Nash. God, that seemed so far-fetched. But nothing else made sense. And she’d fired Nash’s men now. She was committed to seeing this to the end.

Where on earth was Nash anyway? For all she knew, he was off someplace even now, plotting against her.

The sound of gravel crunching under her feet seemed deafening and made her head pound harder. The lights over the path were great, but they didn’t reach far into the bushes. Darkness surrounded her.

The first rush of energy was beginning to wear off. And she slowed as she considered that there might be other issues here she hadn’t yet considered. But if she’d waited to think every angle through, Nash would have returned. She wanted this over with, wanted proof in her hands either way before they met again.

She jumped when she heard a noise behind her, or thought she had. There was nothing there when she turned. Her heart beat faster. Okay, Nash or no Nash, it was probably pretty stupid to come out here in the middle of the night.

But it was too late to turn back.

If someone had followed her, without her noticing, and intended to harm her, she would be walking right into his arms. She had to keep going forward. She quickened her pace.

Light wind ruffled the bushes. A car passed on the street now and again. She reached the fountain at the halfway point. The water was shut off at night to save electricity. She didn’t dare slow. She wanted to be out of the damned park. She grabbed the pepper spray in her pocket tighter. Just a little farther. She was almost there.