The Protector (Lone Wolf, Book 1) (5 page)

“Then I rest my case,” she said
with a smirk, settling back against the seat a little more firmly as she
flicked her right blinker on.
 

“
What
case?”

“Though I’ve never been a
bodyguard, I assure you—I’m the best candidate for the job.”
 

“That’s not the same thing at all,”
I muttered as she turned right, her sure hands gripping the wheel effortlessly
as it guided the car onto the next street.
 
I tried not to watch her long fingers flexing over the wheel’s surface,
her biceps moving under the supple leather jacket that drew my gaze like her
entire body wore a coat of magnets—I was beginning to suspect it did.
 
“How did my father find you?” I asked, then,
anger still making me a little terse.
 
I
tried to soften it with sarcasm, not really the
best
softener.
 
“Is there a bodyguard yellow pages or
something?”

“Something like that,” said Layne,
her lips twitching as she chuckled a little under her breath.
 
“He found me through a friend of a friend,
so he knew that I came highly recommended, and I knew that employment with Mr.
Grayson would be a pretty good place to start my bodyguarding career.
 
By the way, where exactly are we headed,
miss—I’m just headed in the general direction of downtown right now.”

“Call me Elizabeth,” I said
serenely, trying not to let her know how curious I was about her.
 
It was hard to swallow down all of my
follow-up questions, but for some reason, I didn’t want this cocky, gorgeous
woman to know that she interested me, or exactly how
much
she interested
me.
 
“And we’re heading to Verity’s
Violin Shop, which is down by the Fine Arts Museum.”

“Gotcha,” she said, nodding and
taking another turn.
 
Her shoulders
flexed again when she made that turn, which is really not something I should
have been noticing, and which I was trying really,
really
hard not
to.
 
“So, you’re in the orchestra,” said
Layne, which didn’t exactly sound like a question, but after a long moment of
silence, I realized she was trying to draw me into conversation.
 
I cleared my throat.

“Yeah,” I said, worrying at my
bottom lip with my teeth.
 
“I really
love my job,” I tacked on lamely.
 
Wow.
 
I looked like crap and I
was being incredibly inarticulate.
 
What
a great start to this working relationship.

“That’s good, that’s good,” said
Layne, glancing in the rearview mirror as she began to merge onto the
highway.
 
“You’re luckier than a lot of
people.
 
Very few nowadays can say they
love their work.”

“What about you?” I asked, my
curiosity getting the better of me.
 

She grinned sidelong at me.
 
“Well, technically, it’s my first day on the
job, so…so far, it’s pretty all right.”

I swallowed hard and grimaced.
 
“I probably ruined your first day.
 
I mean, I kind of blew up back at my
father’s…I’m sorry about that,” I told her quietly.
 
“I was kind of a jerk.
 
It’s just…well, my father’s wanted me to have a bodyguard since I was a
teenager, and my independence is very important to me.
 
But then there was the whole accident
thing…”
 
Oh, my God, I was
rambling.
 
I silently cursed at myself
and bit my lip to shut myself up.

“Yeah, that had to be downright
terrifying,” said Layne, shooting me a sideways frown.
 
“You came out pretty okay, though—you could
have been squashed like a grape.
 
Fortunately, you’re more a bruised apple than a grape.”

I was laughing in spite of
myself.
 
“What happens when my stitches
and bruises are all healed up?”
 
I
teased her.
 
“Do you have anymore fruit
comparisons?”

I kid you not:
 
Layne glanced at me sideways, but she was
absolutely, positively not looking at my face.
 
“Well, yeah.
 
But I think that’s
harassment, and it’s my first day on the job, so…”
 
She tossed her hair out of her eyes and grinned wickedly, keeping
her
 
gaze on the road.

Speaking of fruit metaphors, I
think I blushed about as red as a cherry.

I didn’t know what to say.
 
I mean, what
do
you say to something
like that?
 
From the moment I saw her, I
figured she had to be gay.
 
She was such
a butch, an incredibly attractive woman who knew exactly how attractive she
was, who prowled like a wolf through the world, confidant and powerful and so
magnetic I couldn’t take my eyes off her.
 
But did she know I was gay?
 
Was
she just guessing, or was she fishing for info with that bit of flirtation, or
did she get a vibe from me, or had I been staring at her a bit more than any
straight woman would?

Or was she just, you know,
harmlessly flirting?
 

The time for a sarcastic retort or
a flirtatious response came and went, and I subsided into miserable
silence.
 
I’d wanted, so badly, to say
something funny or clever back to her, but this magnetic, gorgeous creature
just made me tongue-tied.
 

Normally, I’m the one flirting with
women, flashing a cheeky grin and cracking jokes and being a little
inappropriate, but mostly giving out the kind of come-ons that result in me
asking the woman out and the woman usually being a moderate level of charmed
and agreeing to it.
 
This sort of
thing—someone acting that way toward
me—
doesn’t really happen to me
because I don’t usually let it.
 
I’m the
kind of lady who gets out there and goes for what she wants.
 

Layne cast me a sidelong glance
after several moments and cleared her throat.
 
She didn’t apologize, only made a sound, and then sighed for a long
moment.

“Look,” we both said at the same
time, then.
 
She chuckled at that as she
turned off the highway.
 
We had to take
city roads all the rest of the way now.

“You first,” she said, one brow up.

A really insidious thought had
stuffed itself into my head, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
 
It’d been awhile since I’d been out on a
date.
 
I was, sadly, the kind of
workaholic that can get into an orchestra—meaning, I was a pretty bad
workaholic.
 
I practiced the violin for
about eight to ten hours every single day, and then there were the orchestra
rehearsals and life just seemed to be extra busy lately, which meant that I
really didn’t have time for anything that didn’t involve strings, a bow and
sheet music.

And my dad was the kind of person
who liked to kill two birds with one really big stone.

“My father,” I said, chewing on my
lip as I tried to figure out how to tactfully say this.
 
But there wasn’t really any sort of tactful
way, so I went for blunt:
 
“did he
choose you as a bodyguard because he was trying to set me up?”

Layne laughed out loud at
that.
 
She had this rich, velvety laugh
that seemed to roll over me, but I was paying too much attention to how red my
cheeks were getting to really appreciate it.
 

“So, I’m what…a call-girl
bodyguard?” asked Layne, wiping at the corner of one of her eyes under the
sunglasses as she kept chuckling and sighed.
 
“Oh, my God, that was too funny.
 
No, Elizabeth—your father didn’t choose me for any other reason than
keeping you safe.”

Now I just felt stupid.
 
I bristled at that.
 
“I’m sorry,” I said tersely, feeling my
cheeks redden so severely, I wondered if they’d ever go back to being
flesh-colored again.
 
“It’s just my dad
is the type of person who would…who would do that.”

God, how could I possibly dig
myself out from this hole?
 
And she was
still chuckling about it, which didn’t help matters much.

“That’d be an awfully specific
job,” said Layne, shoving her sunglasses up onto her head as we hit the city
streets.
 
Here the sunshine didn’t even
reach us—it was getting late in the afternoon and the skyscrapers and buildings
hid the rays of sun completely.
 
Layne
cast another mirthful glance in my direction, then shook her head.
 
“I mean, think about it.
 
A bodyguard call-girl for a fishing baron’s
daughter.
 
That’s an
awfully
specific job.
 
I don’t know how many
people like that exist in this whole big world.”

So from that…I guess she knew I was
gay.
 
Exactly how she knew, I wasn’t
certain, but at least we had that out of the way.
 

“I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you,” I
said, my words sounding brittle and just the least tiniest bit prim.
 
“It wasn’t my intention.”

“Hell, that wasn’t an insult,
sweetheart,” she said, casting me another sidelong glance.
 
Her voice had dropped about an octave at
those words, and a shiver ran through me that I couldn’t control.
 
Oh, God, that
voice
.
 
It was pure, velvet sex.
 
She chuckled a little at my obvious, visible
shiver, and then she was pulling into a parking garage.
 

She took the ticket the attendant
machine spat out at us, and after ascending the very long ramp with all its
sharp turns, she parked on the third level.
 
We hadn’t said anything more to each other, and I was feeling so frazzled
and embarrassed that the moment we pulled into the spot, even before she threw
the Cadillac into park, I had the door open, and was trying to push myself up
and out of the vehicle as I fumbled with my crutches.
 

It was unreal how quickly she
turned off the ignition and sprinted around to my side of the car.
 
I stared at her for a long moment, with the
sunglasses perched on top of her head, her hair swept to the side.
 
I stared into those damnable flashing blue
and green and brown eyes that seemed to never stop shifting color, and that
also seemed to pin me to the spot with their bold intensity.

“Let me help you,” she said softly
as she took the crutches from me, as she looped a strong arm around my middle,
placing my arm around her neck.

She was so strong, the kind of
strong that made me think she’d probably won every fight she’d ever gotten in,
the kind of strong that is so obvious that you half wonder if she could bend
steel girders around an arm, twisting them into pretzel shapes.
 
But she was so gentle, too, as she held me
firmly about the waist, but with such a soft touch, and helped me limp across
the parking garage and to the elevator, taking each step slowly and at my pace.

As I leaned against her, I realized
that I was paying a really unfair amount of attention to how she felt against me,
the firmness of her muscles, her hip bone pressing against mine.
 
There was something out of place in all
those sensations, though:
 
I felt a
slim, unnatural hardness against her side, close to her breast, in an odd
shape.
 

I went cold a little when I realized
it was a firearm.
 

The elevator
dinged
and
opened, and Layne helped me into it, pressing the ground floor button once I
was leaning against the back wall.

I stared at her for a long
moment.
 
This woman was carrying a
deadly weapon—a deadly weapon that she had been hired to use to keep me
safe.
 
She tossed her jet hair back,
running a long-fingered hand through it before taking off her sunglasses,
folding them and sliding them easily into her back jeans pocket.
 

Layne caught me staring, and smiled
roguishly, her head to the side as she leaned back on her heels.
 
“I’ve never been in a violin shop,” she
said, her smile deepening as she shoved her long fingers into her back pockets,
too.
 
“I never even knew there was such
a thing.
 
Though I guess it’s kind of
obvious that there’d have to be.
 
But
there’s really enough people in the entire Boston area to keep a violin shop in
business?”

“You’d be surprised how many kids
take violin lessons,” I said, smiling a little, too after clearing my
throat.
 
“And there are actually three
string shops in Boston…the other two have cellos, basses, other stringed
instruments—Verity’s is the only one that deals solely in violins.”

Layne whistled lowly, under her
breath as she rocked back onto her heels again.
 
“Must be a lot of kids driving their parents crazy with
screeching strings around these parts.”

I laughed at that.
 
“Sometimes, I give lessons—I like kids,” I
shrugged when her brows went up.
 
“And
yeah—there’s a lot of screeching with those bows dragging across the strings,
them trying to find the right places for all of their fingers, learn the
posture.
 
Though the
screechy-string-stage doesn’t usually last long, believe it or not—kids are
pretty quick learners.”