He firmed his lips, walked toward her, then shoved the phone into her hand. "Your father wants to talk to you."
Her fingers wrapped reflexively around the cell phone. She stared from it to those cold blue eyes. "My... father?"
He blinked—-a study in abject boredom—then walked out of the room.
Utterly baffled, she dragged damp hair back from her forehead and lifted the phone to her ear. "D.. daddy?" "Don't be mad, sweetheart."
"Mad? Daddy ... what—"
"Look, Jillie—I know how resistant you are to the idea of a bodyguard."
"Bodyguard?" she echoed numbly.
"I told him you'd be a hard sell. I asked him to convince you how vulnerable you are—and I didn't care how he did it."
Bodyguard?
Her mind raced in a hundred different directions and finally settled on the impossible conclusion. That cold-eyed killer was her bodyguard?
The terror coiled in her chest unwound Like a spring, then rewrapped into a squeezing knot of pure, primal rage.
"Are you telling me you hired this . . . this ...
person
to scare twenty years off my life just to convince me I need protection?"
"I hired him to convince you how vulnerable you are to attack."
She lifted a hand to the top of her head, fisted her fingers in her wet hair, and tugged until it burned. "I don't believe this."
"Come home, Jillian," he insisted as if it were the only logical conclusion in the face of such obvious proof. "You're not safe there. Move back to the estate—at least until this maniac is caught. No one can get past my security."
"Do you know what he
did
to me?" she demanded, ignoring her father's suggestion, enunciating each word with care, working with everything that was in her to control the fury slamming through her blood and flushing her face with heat.
"Not precisely, no. He did tell me that he got into your penthouse with minimum effort."
Little prickling sensations tingled through her fingers and toes. She was less relieved that he hadn't come here to kill or rape her than she was livid—and she was about two breaths away from hyperventilating. "And you
sanctioned
this?"
His heavy sigh said yes, he had. "I want you safe."
"I'm
not
leaving the penthouse."
A long silence punctuated the anger simmering on both ends of the line.
"I was afraid that's what you'd say," he said finally. "If you're insistent on staying there, then he stays, too."
She actually managed a laugh, although there was little humor in it. "Over my dead body."
"Which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. It's settled, Jillian. And so is he."
Settled? He was
settled?
Eyes blazing, Jillian marched out of her bedroom and down the hallway. A sick feeling rolled through her chest even before she swung open the door to her guest bedroom. The beat-up army surplus duffel sitting open in the middle of the bed was an abomination against the pristine white designer spread; the scuffed black lace-up boots splayed drunkenly beside the closet door were as out of place on the polished cypress floor as a velvet Elvis in a Monet exhibit.
She spun around, her fury rising. She flew into the kitchen, her bare feet slapping tile just as her
bodyguard
reached into the refrigerator. He pulled out a bottle of root beer that he'd evidently buried out of sight somewhere on the bottom shelf.
"Jillian? Are you still there?" her father asked, his voice infused with wary tension.
"Where else would I possibly be?" she ground out.
"Sweetheart. I was hoping we could talk about this rationally."
"Oh, it's waaay too late for that."
Darin Kincaid sighed heavily. "You know, sometimes you're just too damn stubborn for your own good. Sometimes you don't see the sense of things for your pride. Think about it, baby. The police department's investigation into these death threats has turned up nothing. Nothing," he repeated for emphasis. "I'm sorry, but until this lunatic is caught, I'm not taking any chances with your life."
She shook with anger as she turned to the man who had just twisted the cap off the bottle of soda and tossed it onto her black granite countertop.
"What's your name?" she bit out.
He leaned a hip against the lip of granite, took a long, deep pull from the bottle, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before giving her a mock salute. "Nolan Garrett, at your service. Ma'am."
"ID." She snapped her fingers, ignoring his insolence. He had the nerve to grin—if you could call the sneer tipping up one corner of his mouth a grin—as he dug into his hip pocket and fished out his wallet.
She flipped it open when he held it out to her, then scowled at the driver's license with his photo and name. His raised brow said,
Satisfied?
Ignoring him, she repeated the same clipped question into the phone. "What's his name?"
"Garrett," her father said, confirming that the reprobate lounging in her kitchen, drinking root beer, was, in fact, the man he claimed to be. "I asked for him specifically. His firm's reputation is solid. So is his," her father continued. "I wanted the best for you, baby, and these guys are the best in the business."
"I don't care if he can shoot the dorsal off a great white at a hundred yards; I want him out of here." Only hard-fought control kept her from shrieking as, apparently oblivious to her fury, Garrett shouldered around her and sauntered into her living room.
He turned on a floor lamp, found her TV remote, and sank down on her sofa. When he spread his arms across the length of the sofa back, propped his feet on her marble-topped rosewood table, and started flipping through the channels, Jillian gritted her teeth so hard she was afraid she'd crack a cap.
"I want him out of here " she repeated, clench jawed, and, clutching the towel that had begun to slip, stormed back to her bedroom before she acted on the growing urge to smash her Cameo Favrile vase over Garrett's head.
"Jillian—you do realize that you're acting and sounding like a spoiled, recalcitrant child."
"Yeah, well, I tend to get a little testy when someone packing a gun breaks into my home." She punched off the CD player with an angry stab of her finger, then sank down on the edge of the bed. The pounding of the blood in her ears like kettledrums was the only sound that broke the sudden quiet filling the room.
"You've always been headstrong, but I gave you more credit than this. I haven't asked much from you, Jillian. All these years when I could have helped, you wouldn't let me. I respected that. I backed away."
She lowered her face to her hand, drew in a deep breath, then let it out.
"Well, this time I'm not backing down. It's too important.
You
are too important—to me and to your mother. If she knew about these horrible threats—and God willing she'll never find out—she'd worry herself sick over this deplorable situation. This is all about keeping you safe, sweetheart," he added after a long pause. "This is about keeping you alive."
She squeezed her eyes shut as love and guilt and the lingering and unwelcome threads of fear joined forces to undercut her anger.
Justifiable anger,
she reminded herself. He'd set her up. Railroaded her into this position.
"I love you, Jillian." He paused, waiting for her to reciprocate the sentiment.
She was too angry, felt too violated, to find it in her to respond in kind.
Another long moment passed before her father ended the discussion with two concise words: "Garrett stays."
The line went dead.
Jillian stared at the cell phone for a long vacant moment before winging back and hurling it across the room. It smacked the wall above the doorjamb with a resounding crack. It wasn't until the phone hit the plush white carpet and landed directly in front of a pair of black leather running shoes that she realized she was no longer alone.
She looked up the length of long legs covered in black denim, past a flat abdomen and broad chest wrapped in black cotton knit and a shoulder holster, until she reached those laser blue eyes. Along with a roiling anger, she felt run over by the overwhelming sting of defeat and a slowly dawning truth. He'd watched her undress. He'd seen her naked. Soaping herself in the shower. Moving to the music.
A knot of humiliation joined the anger and her sense of vulnerability.
"How much money is he paying you?" she asked in a flat voice.
Legs braced wide, arms crossed, hands tucked under his armpits, he rolled a shoulder in a negligent shrug. "Enough to know that you're one hot property, princess ... not that it matters. What matters is that I managed to breach your
high-security
building and get access to you. It could have been anyone. It could have been someone who'd have left you dead instead of alive and pissed off. You can recover from pissed off."
At the moment, she wasn't so sure she could. Her heart leveled several hard, irregular beats. "Get out." He considered her with a detached regard that clearly said he wasn't considering it at all. That particular look was beginning to
piss her off,
as he so delicately put it, almost as much as his presence.
"OK, look, we can do this the hard way," he said, his tone a
study in bored male tolerance. "Or we can go for easy."
Jillian gathered herself. She rose, notched her chin, and with all the pent-up terror, anger, and broken pride he'd brought to life in the past ten minutes looked him straight in the eye. "By all means, let's go for hard."
He measured her response through narrowed eyes. Made a decision. "All right. You need some time. Understood. So sleep on it, princess. Things might look different in the morning."
As far as he was concerned, it was the end of the discussion. He turned to go.
"Garrett."
He stopped and slowly turned back to face her, his expression relaying reluctant forbearance. "Yeah?"
"You're a sonofabitch."
The bastard had the nerve to smile. "Yeah, well, we all have our crosses to bear. That's one of mine. Just like I'm going to be one of yours for the duration. Of course, you could always run home to Daddy," he added with a hopeful look.
She snapped then. Dived straight off the deep end.
She balled up her fist, put every ounce of her 110 pounds behind it, and launched a roundhouse punch. Her knuckles connected with his jaw in a satisfying crack.
More satisfying was the sight of his head whipping to the side as the impact backed him up a full step. He shook his head and blinked before he got his feet under him again.
Jillian was shaking with fury when his gaze connected with hers. She was past fear now. Barely felt the pain radiating all the way up to her shoulder and the burning ache in her knuckles as she braced for a blow that didn't come.
She almost wished it would. She'd never hit another living soul in her life, and yet she relished the idea of having reason to hit him again. In fact, at that moment, she'd have liked nothing better than to draw blood.
Fire melted the ice in his narrowed eyes as he glared at her, visibly settled himself, then nodded. "OK." He lifted a hand, rubbed his jaw. "I had that coming."
Suspicious of his acceptance, she waited in wary silence for the qualifier. It came with the same chilling delivery as the promise in his eyes.
"Hit me again, though, and we might just have to have a little come-to-Jesus meeting. You won't
like
it."
"I don't
like
you." Another one of those maddeningly amused grins had her seeing red.
"Understood. In the meantime, let's get something else straight here. Daddy didn't hire me because I'm a nice guy. He hired me because he wanted someone who would get the job done. I think I've already proven that I'll do whatever it takes to ensure Daddy gets what he wants. And trust me—I couldn't give a shit if it comes at your expense."
She flinched when he reached out, but he only chucked her under her chin—like she was some addle-brained bimbo who didn't know black from white—before he turned away. At her bedroom door, he stopped and scooped up his cell phone. Before he left, he glanced at her over his shoulder. "Get some sleep. We've got a lot of work to do tomorrow."
Jillian was too stunned—that she'd hit him, that he hadn't hit her back, that he had the audacity to give her orders and then smile like she was his own personal source of amusement—to do anything but stare as he walked out of her bedroom.
When she snapped out of it, she reached for the door and slammed it shut. Then she leaned back against it and let loose an outraged roar.
It all caught up with her then. The fear, the humiliation, the defeat. For long, agonizing moments, she'd thought she was going to die—and she'd held it together as long as she could. Her knees finally gave out and she slid to the floor.
She'd thought she was going to die.
She let her head drop back against the door, closed her eyes.
She wasn't dead.
She was alive.
She was alive and the man who was supposed to keep her that way was the only man who had ever awakened a rage so primal that she'd resorted to physical violence to release it.