THE PERFECT TARGET (6 page)

"I already have. I'm the man who's not going to let anyone hurt you."

The take-no-prisoners words curled though her like an ominous mist rolling in from the ocean. She held his inscrutable gaze a moment, then glanced at the nasty scar slashed across his throat, then over to the briefcase he'd finally set down.

"You're the backup," she said.

"Backup?" He spoke slowly. Quietly. "Backup for what?"

"Not what, but who. My father. He's a very careful man. He knew I'd try to give Hawk the slip the second I saw him, so he sent a backup." The mere thought caused her chest to tighten. Betrayal slashed brutally. She'd believed her father this time. She'd believed that for the first time in eleven years, he was willing to let her live her own life.

Now she knew everything had been staged, just like so many times before. Hawk was probably throwing back a cold one somewhere, congratulating himself on a job well done, indifferent to the trauma he'd caused.

Just like he'd done with Elizabeth.

"You casually come on to me, then I see Hawk, run, shots are fired, and voila, there you are, ready for me to run gratefully into your arms."

Like a perfect little puppet.

Over the years, she'd become adept at sniffing out her father's security drills, but she hadn't seen this one coming. She'd been too intrigued by the man with the penetrating eyes and flattering words.

Humiliation left a bitter taste in her mouth.

But Sandro didn't seem to notice. He wasn't frowning anymore, wasn't glowering, didn't look like a warrior primed for battle. A purely male smile curved the mouth Miranda found entirely too erotic for a face of such hard lines and sharp planes.

"You were already in my arms," he reminded.

Miranda narrowed her eyes, wondering where the commando had gone and half wishing he would return. At least she knew how to defend herself against him.

"Your hands, not your arms," she corrected tartly. "There's a difference."

"Not always," he said, "but we'll save that nuance for another time. Right now I'm more interested in knowing why your father would expect you to run from someone assigned to protect you."

Miranda stiffened. With skillful precision Sandro was steering the conversation down a path she had no desire to travel.

"It's not like that," she defended, but knew he wouldn't understand.

"Then tell me how it is."

An emotion she didn't understand tangled through her. She couldn't summon one single memory of any of her father's men asking her opinion on anything. Ever.

"I'm just … tired," she admitted, and with the words, the fight drained out of her. Weariness took over, a bone-deep fatigue sharpened by the chase through back alleys and the unexpected kiss, the battle of wills, the long walk to the abandoned villa. She slid down against the wall and sat on the pathetic excuse for a sleeping bag, pulling her knees to her chest as she did so.

The family net had closed around her once again.

"I thought for once I was … free," she said, surprised by her candor. She and Hawk had rarely spoken, certainly not about anything personal. Of course, she'd never had any desire to confide in the smooth-talking yes-man who'd almost shattered her sister's life, and he'd never regarded her as more than an escape from the mess his heartlessness had created.

He was ridiculously lucky her father had no idea what had really gone down between his perfect daughter and the hardened bodyguard he'd assigned to protect her.

Intimacy always carried a price.

But Sandro seemed different from the clowns her father usually sent to shadow Miranda's every step. He seemed … more human. He seemed more real. And the way he looked at her, that dark gaze concentrated fully on her, loosened the tight flag of indifference she normally kept furled close.

"As Astrid, I could go places," she told him with a smile her grandfather had called impish. The one her father called willful. For two months she'd been traveling the European countryside with her camera as her companion, capturing slices of a life she'd never known existed. "I could do and see things without worrying about attracting unwanted attention."

Her smile faded, along with the sense of freedom she'd embraced only a few hours before.

"Now I realize these past weeks were just an illusion. I never left the Carrington fishbowl after all." The sting of disappointment burned her throat. "He's been watching me every step, hasn't he? All his talk of trust and freedom was nothing but lies."

Sandro frowned. "You don't know that."

But she did. Sandro with the machine-gun briefcase was living, breathing proof of that.

She looked at him standing in the hazy light creeping through the dirty window, but for a moment didn't see the man who'd chased her through alleys or followed her father's orders. She saw only the man who'd approached her alongside the ocean.

The picture you're about to take. It's all wrong.

Wrong? How so?

Because you're not in it.

Her heart staggered. Moisture stung the backs of her eyes.

I see myself in the mirror every morning. I don't need pictures of myself.

Then give it to me.

Now why would I do that?

So I can remember the way you look standing here, with the sun in your hair and the smile on your face.

Emotion swelled through her. She'd wanted him to be real, damn it. She'd wanted the moment to be real.

But like everything else in the Carrington world, the encounter had only been a carefully orchestrated means to an end. Just like her first drink. Her first kiss. Except those hadn't been arranged by her father but, rather, pathetic scum who wanted to use the Carrington name as a meal ticket.

"Miranda?" Sandro asked, going down on one knee.

The gesture struck her as foolishly gallant. "I'm sorry he dragged you into this," she said, forcing a smile and pushing to her feet.

"I'm tired and I'm hungry," she added. "So why don't you take me back to my hotel, so I can call my father and tell him I'm not interested in playing any more of his games." If he insisted on having someone shadow her, she didn't want the man to be Sandro. She couldn't look at him without remembering the ray of anticipation she'd felt by the ocean. She couldn't stay with him in a small room like this without remembering the way he'd made her feel for those first few minutes, that seductive sense of intrigue, the intoxicating glow of discovery.

If her father had to keep tabs on her, she'd rather Hawk or Aaron or any other of his yes-men, not this tall man with the midnight eyes and rough voice, who reminded her how foolish she'd been to hope, for even a few minutes, that she could have a life beyond the Carrington mystique.

Slowly, Sandro rose to his full height. "You think this is a game?"

"Not a game. A drill. A lesson. A powerplay." Eleven years before, a tragic accident had forever changed the Carrington family. After burying his oldest daughter Kristina, her father had never left anything to chance, ever again.

Equal parts grief-stricken and naive, a seventeen-year-old Miranda had been unprepared for the measures Peter Carrington had implemented to protect his remaining children. Only months later, during her freshman year at Wellesley, she'd been horrified when the caring, considerate girl with whom she'd shared secrets, clothes and a dorm room turned out to be a female bodyguard, hired to keep an eye on her. Watch her. Report back to her father. Since then Miranda had become skilled at spotting his setups. It burned her that she hadn't seen this one coming.

But then, never before had her father sent someone who looked like temptation and spoke like a poet.

"You're not the first, you know," she said, deliberately dismissing him. "Dad excels in orchestrating little security exercises to prove I need to be more careful."

"Security exercises?"

"You know. Because of Kris. Friends that turn out to be federal agents, bouncers that turn out to be bodyguards. Once he arranged for a raid at a college bar, just to prove that if he could find me drinking, so could the media or a kook."

Sandro swore under his breath. "You think the scene by the ocean was staged for your benefit?"

She lifted her chin. "Wasn't it?"

"Bella,"
he said in that hoarse voice of his, that seeped through her defenses like a smoky mist no matter how hard she worked to reinforce them, "I hate to shatter your illusions, but this isn't a drill or a lesson. This is as real as it gets." His gaze on hers, he lifted his hands to his chest, his fingers practically brutalizing the buttons of his black shirt.

Her heart started to hammer again, this time in a halting, irregular rhythm. "What are you doing?"

"Those shots back there were the real thing," he said, his voice softer than before. Almost strained. Reaching the waistband of his pants, he shrugged out of the cotton shirt.

Miranda braced herself for the sight of darkly tanned flesh and hard muscle, but instead found herself staring at a thick gray vest.

A vest she instantly recognized.

"The man trying to hurt you was real," Sandro continued, working the buckles and snaps of the familiar body armor. Impatience snapped through his voice. "And come morning," he growled, dropping the heavy vest to the floor and turning his back to her, "this will be a real damn bruise."

Shock cut through Miranda. She stared at the nasty green and purple already discoloring the center of a back otherwise magnificently perfect. His shoulders were broad, bronze, thickly muscled. They tapered to the center of his back, which in turn tapered perfectly to the waistband of his pants.

Perfect, that was, save for the nasty streaks of dark red. Abruptly, she followed the trail of dried blood back to his shoulder, where a crust tried vainly to conceal blood still oozing from a nasty wound.
"You're bleeding."

Sandro twisted around to look at his upper back. "Am I?" he asked, then grimaced. "Son of a bitch. No wonder my shoulder feels like it's on fire."

Deep inside, Miranda started to shake. The chill came next, starting in her heart and seeping through her blood. This man had risked his life for her. He'd been not only shot at, but shot.

Because of her.

"Here, let me," she said, stepping closer. She lifted her hands to his back, not really knowing what she planned to do, but knowing she had to touch him. Help him. Very gently, she touched her fingertips to the heat of his flesh—

"Cristo!"
he shouted, then continued in a language she didn't understand.

She jerked back. "I'm sorry. I—"

"Your hands are like ice!"

And his skin was like fire. She stared at him, but the room started to revolve. The walls pushed closer. The air grew too thick to breathe. Thoughts and possibilities crashed around inside her like bullets in a mausoleum. Horror stabbed deep.

It was real.
Everything that had gone down in the crowded marketplace had been authentic, not staged. The shots and the shouting. Hawk going down, then pulling himself back up, only to be mowed down again.

Dear God, Elizabeth.
Her sister said she didn't love Hawk, had never loved him, but Miranda had always believed—

"Miranda?"

She blinked rapidly, working desperately to bring Sandro's face into focus. He was moving closer, his big body blocking out the meager light seeping through the window, until her world consisted only of him.

"If there was a th-threat, he should have told m-me," she whispered in a voice she barely recognized as her own. "He should have warned m-me. T-told me about you."

"Miranda—"

"I wouldn't have been on the street like that," she insisted, gazing up at him. She widened her eyes, imploring him to believe her. She'd seen how her sister's death had shattered her family, would never do anything willingly to put them through that again. She wasn't foolish. She didn't have a death wish. She'd taken countless self-defense classes. Had a few tricks up her sleeve. "I would have been more careful."

"Miranda." Sandro took her shoulders in his hands and gave her a gentle squeeze. "Your father loves you," he said softly but firmly. "He wants to keep you safe. Where's the crime in that? If I hadn't been there, don't you realize where you would be right now? What could be happening to you?"

She did realize, that was the problem. If he hadn't been there, she could be with the horrible man who'd killed Hawk—or dead. But in not warning her about the threat or telling her about Sandro, her father had left her equally vulnerable.

"What if you'd been shot somewhere besides your chest or back? What if I'd stabbed you? Then what would have happened? Both my bodyguards would have been down, and because my father chose an underhanded method of protecting me, I wouldn't have had a clue what was really going on."

Sandro lifted a hand to her face, his fingers skimming her cheekbone. "None of that happened. I have you now, and everything's going to be okay."

There was an unmistakable gentleness to his touch, a persuasiveness that sent an unwanted rush through her. "Why didn't he warn me? Why didn't he tell me about you?"

"Everything happened too fast. There wasn't time for warnings."

"He should have found a way!"

"Bella, bella, bella,"
he said, his voice like velvet. "Are you always so tough? Do you always malign those trying to help you? Protect you?"

The softly spoken questions hit with unerring accuracy. "You don't know what you're talking about," she said, ripping away from his touch. She needed to think, but couldn't gather her thoughts when he stood so close she felt his every breath, his every heartbeat.

"Don't you have something more important to do than psychoanalyze me?" she asked with a sharpness he didn't deserve. "Like report back to my father?"

His expression darkened. "Actually," he said, glancing at the nasty wound on his shoulder, "I do."

Regret hit hard and fast. This man had been shot because of her, was bleeding. This man had put his body between her and a bullet. And here she stood, berating him because he willingly followed the orders she'd grown to despise.