The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (11 page)

The second guy glanced back and
picked up the pace, his heavy boots thudding against the pavement.
 
He rounded the corner as Layne did, too, and
then the two were lost from my view.

There was a thin, piercing scream,
and then a long moment of silence.

Layne strode back around the corner
at a quick pace, her shoulders curled forward, her hands in her pockets.
 

Even at the distance she was from
me, I took a step back.

Her head was bent forward, she was
wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.
 

She wasn’t breathing hard.

“Layne,” I whispered as she reached
me.
 
I clutched my violin case tightly
to me—she must have given it to me before she ran after them, though I didn’t
remember her doing it.
 
“Are you…are you
all right?”

“Fine,” she said curtly, adjusting
her leather jacket’s collar against her skin as she growled a little and
spat.
 
“We need to call the police, get
these men arrested.”
 
She took a slim
black smart phone out of her pocket, dialed 911.

As she turned away from me, I
stared at that leather jacket, my heartbeat roaring through me.

There was a ragged hole from the
bullet, right over where her heart should be.
 
A hole on her t-shirt, right where her heart should be.

And beneath that hole was perfect,
unblemished skin.

With no wound.

Chapter 6:
 
The Ring
 

It rained that night, the unhappy,
torrential downpour of a violent June thunderstorm.
 
The wind raged outside my apartment window, making the glass
rattle in its casement and driving the raindrops sideways into the glass, but
though the storm raged outside, the lightning spearing the buildings around me,
all I could think about was the woman in my guest bedroom, her leather jacket
hanging on the peg behind the door.

The leather jacket with the hole in
it.
 

I’d been a little appalled when my
father insisted that Layne, as my bodyguard, should spend nights at my place,
too.
 
I wasn’t unhappy really for
reasons of my own independence or my own space, though that’s what I’d brought
up when he’d mentioned it.
 
Mostly, I
was appalled that Layne would have no downtime from me.

I had a pretty demanding job that
took up all my time.
 
I really wasn’t
that interesting of a person to spend twenty-four-seven with.
 

But Layne hadn’t seemed to mind in
the slightest.
 
She’d nodded at my
father, seated behind his desk with his happy grin pasted across his face
because I’d agreed to all of this, and she’d nodded to me with a bright grin.
 
My father had, of course, brought up the
fact that once the people who were after us were brought to justice, I wouldn’t
have need of a bodyguard, so this arrangement wasn’t forever.
 
He’d asked me to be a good sport, and then
Layne had glanced at me sidelong.

“It’ll be my pleasure to keep you
safe,” she’d murmured to me, setting my heartbeat to racing.

And tonight she
had
kept me
safe.
 

Apparently, she’d even been
shot
for me.

And there was not a single trace of
that bullet anywhere on her person.

Okay.
 
So
where could the bullet have gone?
 
The
gunman had shot the gun at point blank range.
 
That bullet had very obviously gone through the leather jacket—the
leather had been perfect just moments earlier, and there was no other way to
explain that gaping hole through it now.
 
And then there was the gaping hole in the t-shirt, directly over where
her heart should be, showing off perfect, pale skin.
 
Like the jacket, there was no other way to explain the hole in
the t-shirt other than the fact that the bullet had gone through it.
 

But if all that was true, then how
was it possible that the bullet had
not
hit her?

Obviously, I was pretty damn happy
that she hadn’t had to take a bullet for me.
 
I was deeply relieved that she’d not been hurt on my account.
 
It just didn’t make any
sense
, no
matter how many different times I put the pieces together.
 
The gun had been shot at point blank
range.
 
It had ripped through her
leather jacket.
 
It should have
connected with her heart.
 
She very
obviously (not that I’d stared at her for hours earlier to confirm this) wasn’t
wearing a bullet-proof vest under that tissue-thin t-shirt of hers.
 

And then, of course, I kept coming
back to the hole in that t-shirt.

And all that beautiful, bare skin
beneath it that was unharmed.

My face burned in the dark of my
bedroom as I thought about that skin.
 
As I thought about the fact that that gorgeous woman was a single room
away from me.
 

For a moment, I let myself think
about that fact—but only a moment.
 
My
father had hired Layne to keep me safe, and already in the first day she had.
 
She’d been right.
 
She
was
the perfect candidate for this job.

But how had Layne gotten out of all
of this unscathed?
 
And why had the
gunman reacted so violently to her?
 
And
how had she knocked them down?
 
She’d
hardly
touched
them.

And the man had screamed…

And she’d been so brusque after the
encounter, very unlike herself.
 
We’d
gotten into the car, had driven the entire way to my apartment in silence, and
when I’d shown her the guest bedroom she’d be staying in, she asked me if I was
all right, I told her yes, and then she’d practically shut the door in my face.

That had hurt.
 
I’d tried to explain that away, too—she’d
spent all day with me, and she’d just been shot at.
 
She was bound to be a little tired and needing a moment alone.
 
But there had been something flashing in her
eyes—something like anger.

I took a deep breath and rolled
over, listening to the crack of thunder and lightning outside, listening to the
rain beat itself against my window.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Layne
grinning at me, her mouth quirked sideways, that wicked grin making her eyes
flash with bright fire.
 
But then I saw,
too, the look in Layne’s eyes when she’d stared at the gunman.

The hair on the back of my neck had
risen.
 
My skin had gone so cold.

There had been something there in
her eyes.
 
Something I’d never seen
before.

I turned over again and punched at
my hot pillow a little with exasperation.
 
I had one of the biggest concerts in my life tomorrow and had given a
really rotten rehearsal this evening, and I
needed
my sleep.
 

But there was no help for it.
 

I
couldn’t
sleep.

There was too much going on in my head and in my
body with all its aches and stitches.
 
I
flicked on my bedside lamp with a long sigh and poked around in my bedside
table’s drawer.
 
No good books to
read—the last one I’d finished was on my e-reader, and that had been a week
ago, and I hadn’t kept it charged.
 
I
pressed the “on” button a few times just to be sure, but the same message kept
flashing on the screen:
 
“your battery
is dead—please charge your device.”
 
I
fiddled with the e-reader’s tangled charger cord, also in the desk drawer, and
plugged it and the e-reader into the wall outlet behind the table, so at least
it’d be charged for me soon.

As I went to shut the drawer,
something made me pause.

I didn’t have much in my bedside
table’s drawer.
 
Some pain medicine, two
novels I’d finished a long time ago and should really just shelve in my living
room, my e-reader and its charger.
 

And my mother’s ring.

I picked it up and turned it in the
light with a small frown.
 
The blood-red
garnet flashed, even in the low-wattage bulb from my bedside lamp.
 
My mother had had these rings made for her
and my father on their ten-year wedding anniversary.
 
She’d been so happy with them, had wanted to give my father a
sweet surprise.
 
I hadn’t been there to
see it, wasn’t even alive at that point, but the way he talked about it…it was
a gesture that meant a lot to him, though I never really understood the
significance of the garnets, and Dad had never gotten around to telling me.

And by the time I could have asked
my mother what they’d meant, she was already gone.

My father had asked me to keep my
mother’s ring after the funeral.
 
I’d
only been a kid, really, but it had meant a lot to me that something so precious
had been my responsibility.
 
And even
though she was gone…well.
 
It made me
feel that some small part of her was still here with us.

My father’s ring was a more
masculine construction, bright silver with high prongs and a very large
square-cut garnet that glittered out of them.
 
He never took it off, so I didn’t know if the inside of his ring bore an
inscription like my mother’s.

My mother’s ring was very
different.
 
Though it was silver, too,
the garnet was a round cut, set in high, fluted prongs that sort of resembled a
tiara from the side.
 
The scrollwork all
over the ring was so fine and pretty, very antique looking, though I knew the
ring had been made not that very many years ago—certainly not in the Victorian
era, like how it looked.

And on the inside of the band were
the words in a looping, hand-carved script:
our love is immortal.

My breath caught in my throat to
look at those tiny, carved words in the silver, and I brushed the pad of my
thumb over the inside of the band as tears pricked at my eyes.
 
I don’t remember much about my mother.
 
I remember the way she laughed, like
everything was wonderfully funny.
 
I
remember the way she looked at my father, like he was the only person in the
universe besides me.

It’s really sad, I suppose, but I
never thought about my mother that much anymore.
 
I was grateful for the fact that she’d brought me into the world,
and I’d loved her very much when she’d been alive…but there was nothing really
to remember her by.
 
I loved the memory
of her, but it was such an abstract one:
 
laughter and the way she looked at my father.
 
I’d given up mourning her a long time ago.

I was, however, very sad for my
father.
 
It had been so obvious that
this was the love of his life.
 
After
Mom had died, he’d become so extra over-protective of me, understandably
so.
 
Mom had died in a car accident, and
it was just one of those things that couldn’t have been prevented.
 
That’s what an accident is, isn’t it?
 
No one’s fault, but something’s gone
terribly wrong.
 
But my father had labored
under the belief, all these years, that the accident
could
have been
prevented if only he’d been more vigilant.
 
He was obsessed with the idea, actually.
 
So he put all of those over protective worries on me.

He missed my mother with a
fierceness that made your heart ache to witness.

Sometimes I thought about my father
never dating, never even looking at another woman since my mother’s death, and
though it was very sad, and I felt terribly sorry for him…I knew that it was
the product of a type of union that was all-consuming.
 
My father and mother had loved each other so
fiercely that my father hadn’t been able to consider another woman since she’d
passed.
 
And I had my doubts he ever
would.

Sometimes, I wondered if I could
ever settle in my own life for anything less than what my parents had
experienced.
 

I didn’t know if I believed in true
love or one person being meant for someone since before they were born.
 
That was all sorts of fate, destiny and
cosmic-juju stuff that, at the time, I’d had no experience with.
 

But if there was such a thing, I
knew my parents had had it.

It had never stopped me of course,
from dating the women I was physically or intellectually drawn to, and I would
continue to date and try to find the woman for me.
 

But I wondered if I’d ever be
content unless we had that same connection together as my parents had:
 
a bright, fierce, powerful love that could
stand the test of time.
 

And even death.

I turned the ring this way and that
in the dim bedroom light as the garnet flashed and winked at me.
 
I didn’t keep the ring in my jewelry box,
though probably I should have.
 

I kept it in this drawer because
I’d kept meaning to wear it.