LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

have been in the apartment when we were all out. Things were out of place. I don’t think it was Angie, the woman who cleans.”

      “You asked?”

      “Yes.”

      “I’ll talk to her. I want to talk to your whole staff.”

      Just what she didn’t need. “Mike and Dave are going to hate that.”

      Her bodyguards were protective of her and their jobs. They’d been with her for close to three years.

      “What extra security measures have they put in place since you told them all this?” Nash’s gaze was direct, his tone honed steel.

      Point taken. Mike and Dave agreed with the police that the stress of the paparazzi was getting to her. They all thought she was getting paranoid as a result of living under constant stress.

      Still, Mike and Dave were not going to let Nash walk all over their work and start to interfere. Yes, she was probably in danger. But she had a strategy and she was working it. And, so far, nothing had happened.

      Except that now she was getting those death threats for Tsini. Which really was unacceptable.

      “Maybe you could snoop around under the radar. Without them noticing that you’re checking into things.” She didn’t need a power struggle among her staff.

      He lifted a dark eyebrow. Here came the part where he would demand full command, she thought. Alpha male was written all over the man.

      For a long second, he just watched her. Then he surprised her by saying, “All right. I can do that.”

      DAMN, he was in so much trouble here. He hadn’t been inside Kayla Landon’s penthouse for a full hour yet and he was already getting sucked in, getting involved on what felt suspiciously like a personal level. Nash scratched the underside of his chin.

      At least he had taken her suggestion. That was something. He was protecting the client without completely taking over her life. Welkins would be proud of him.

      “I don’t want any of my staff interrogated or inconvenienced,” Kayla was saying.

      On the other hand, she did need to face reality.

      “Do you want to stay alive?” Sometimes a man had to put things bluntly.

      She paled. And something else. It was as if she wasn’t all that surprised by the severity of her situation. He noted the way she sat—stiff, on guard even in her own bedroom—and wondered what else was going on that he didn’t know about, what else had happened that she wasn’t telling him.

      “You really think my life is in immediate danger?” She seemed to be holding her breath as she waited for the answer. She was so beautiful, those big blue eyes hanging on him.

      For a moment, his mind went blank. Not good.

      He focused back on her question. “Someone wants to scare you. His desire to harm you in other ways is not that huge a leap. The fur coat is disturbing. This guy could be a psycho.” He drew a deep breath and brought up the issue that had been on his mind for the last ten minutes. “Tell me about the deaths of your parents and your brother.”

      She blinked, hesitating a moment before she started. “Two years ago, my parents died in a car accident. My father had just gotten a new Porsche. The police said he was driving way too fast. Probably testing its power and all that.” Her full lips trembled.

      Some lips.

      He wasn’t going to notice them. He lifted his gaze to her eyes. “What else?”

      “Last year my brother died in a skiing accident. Smashed into a tree and broke his neck. His blood alcohol levels were pretty high. He was on a slope that had been shut down due to dangerous conditions.” She pressed those tempting lips into a thin line. “He was always a daredevil.”

      He took in the information, turned it over in his brain. It wasn’t all new to him. He’d heard the stories at the time, although he’d paid little attention. Then the facts had come back again when he’d run a quick background check on her. Police reports were cut and dry. Nothing there had piqued his instincts.

      Was it unusual to have two lethal accidents in a family within two years? Maybe. But the Landon family wasn’t exactly average. Most people didn’t drive superpowered Porsches. Most people didn’t have the kind of pull to have a closed slope open for their private night-skiing pleasure. You could do a hell of a lot more with money than without, and some of those things were dangerous.

      Back when he’d thought this was nothing bigger than some idiot fan trying to get Kayla’s attention by sending her dog death threats, he hadn’t seen any connection to the family deaths. But she clearly thought there was a connection and she was rattled. And after he’d seen that blue fur coat, he did get that cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. His instincts said there was something more here than what showed on the surface.

      “My father wasn’t a reckless driver. Lance was never a heavy drinker,” she added in a soft voice.

      And she would know them best. The uneasy feeling in his gut grew. What she’d just told him changed everything. “If someone’s after your family,” he told her, “then both you and your brother are in danger.”

      She surprised him by slumping back in the chaise and saying, “I know that.”

      “HOW WAS your day?” Kayla asked Greg over dinner.

      Her brother ignored her for a moment, doing Sudoku on the side, next to his plate.

      She didn’t tell him to put it away. He wouldn’t. He had a thing about that. Always had to finish what he started.

      Her back ached from being on her feet all day. Sitting up straight and looking upbeat took effort. And she still had other commitments, a business meeting over drinks at a popular restaurant nearby, although she’d cut way back on going out since the threatening notes began to arrive for Tsini. She didn’t want to leave the dog alone in the apartment in the evenings.

      “Boring, like work always is.” Greg finished the puzzle at last and closed the book, then meticulously arranged and rearranged his utensils and his napkin until they were lined up with military precision.

      “Do you want me to talk to Uncle Al about that?”

      Lance, their older brother, had been a director at the company. Their father had made Kayla financial consultant when she’d received her MBA. He’d put Greg in Human Resources, where he’d said his younger son would do the least damage. Greg was entering old employee files into the computer system, an insult to the twenty-five-year-old with a degree in Organizational Management.

      Uncle Al had immediately moved Kayla up in the ranks after their parents’ death, to the appropriate level for her education and experience, but had left Greg in HR. Which Greg hated.

      “I’m fine.” He tugged on his Eagles jersey, a gift she’d recently gotten him, signed by the whole team. “I don’t want any more family arguments about this.”

      Neither did she. God knew, they’d had plenty of that in the past. She hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye with her father. But she missed him now that he was gone, and she wished she could take some of those fights back. She’d grown up a lot in the past two years. Maybe they could have discussions now on a different level. Maybe she could make him see reason. Maybe she could engineer some sort of true relationship between him and Greg.

      But her father was gone, and she couldn’t take back anything they’d said to each other. It was too late to make anything better. She would have felt guilty even if she didn’t think that she might have played a role in their parents’ and brother’s death, something she hadn’t told Nash.

      The man had thrown her for a loop on more than one level. He was fast. Lightning. In every way. Caught on immediately. And he was hot beyond words, although that part she was going to ignore if it killed her.

      “I’m

Скачать книгу