LITMIR.BIZ

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hard mouth, tilting a corner.

      “Let me get this straight,” Val said. “Somebody paid you to come out here and be my bodyguard?”

      The word was so ridiculous she almost couldn’t bring herself to say it. It was one of those words that belonged only in the movies. Or on bad TV shows. The people she knew didn’t have bodyguards. Not even the rich ones.

      “Beneficial Life,” he said.

      “I don’t have a policy with Beneficial whatever,” she said. “Now, if you’ll just get off my porch, Mr…?”

      “Sellers,” he supplied obediently, the upward quirk of his lips increasing minutely.

      “Mr. Sellers,” she echoed. “If you will just get off my porch and off my property, I’d be very grateful.”

      She had already begun to turn Harvard toward the barn when he spoke again. “They had a policy on your father, ma’am.”

      That stopped her. The wound of her father’s death was too new for any information about him not to give her pause. When she turned back, Sellers was holding out a packet of papers.

      Without reaching for them, she asked, her voice full of sarcasm, “And they sent you out here to pay it off?”

      No one with half a grain of sense would trust this man with money, not as disreputable as he appeared, and they both knew it.

      “No, ma’am,” he said, still rather obviously amused. “If you’re short of cash, I’m afraid it wasn’t that kind of policy.”

      She took a breath, holding on to her temper. She realized that, surprisingly, she didn’t feel any sense of threat. Even her initial wariness at finding a stranger on her porch had begun to fade, turning to skepticism instead.

      “Then what kind of policy was it, Mr. Sellers?” she asked with studied patience, as if she were talking to someone who wasn’t quite bright.

      “You can look at the paperwork,” he said, laying the packet on the railing. “But as I understand it, the policy assured the other owners that nothing untoward was going to happen to the CEO of Av-Tech Aeronautics.”

      “Nothing…untoward,” she repeated. The word was as unexpected on his lips as his lean body had been on her porch.

      “As I understand it.”

      “You’re here to see that nothing untoward happens to me.”

      “Yes, ma’am,” he said solemnly, but again there was a flash of something in the depths of those gray eyes.

      “I don’t think that there is a single untoward thing lurking around out here. Do you?” She raised her eyebrows and waited.

      His gaze circled the neat yard and then rose to the mountains that loomed over the narrow valley where the ranch and the spring that fed it were located. It was that spring that made her small operation possible in all this barrenness.

      “I deposited their check,” he said, his eyes seeming to consider the line of fencing that faded off toward the barn.

      She waited a moment to see if there would be some further enlightenment as to why he had thought she might be interested in that revelation. “And?” she asked finally.

      “And frankly, I’d play hell giving that money back,” he said, turning to face her again. The mobile corner of his mouth had inched upward a little farther, almost a smile. His eyes, however, were still carefully neutral. Still opaque.

      “Well, I think that’s probably going to have to be between you and them, Mr. Sellers. It seems to fall in the category of not my problem. I want you off my place in…two minutes?” she asked, looking toward the battered truck.

      “I could do that, ma’am, providing my truck will start, of course. And sometimes that’s doubtful. But I don’t think they’d be any too pleased if I did. Beneficial Life, I mean.”

      “You know, I don’t really give a damn whether they are pleased or not,” Val said. “I want you out.” She didn’t raise her voice, but the last word was sharp. And final.

      “I wish I could oblige you, Ms. Beaufort. I really do. But I have a professional obligation, ma’am. I’m sure you, being the C-E-O of a big company and all, can understand that.” He had said the initials slowly, emphasizing each, drawling them out mockingly. “I took their money, and now I’m obligated to do the job. Whether you or I like it very much,” he added.

      “You’re planning on protecting me,” she said, her anger building, “whether I want you to or not. Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Mr. Sellers?”

      “That’s what I’m telling you, ma’am,” he agreed solemnly.

      “Don’t you imagine that’s going to be hard to do without my cooperation?” she asked, her voice falsely sweet.

      “Well, it would certainly be easier with your cooperation, but I think I can probably manage the other,” he said.

      She drew a deep breath, feeling Harvard stir beneath her. He was probably responding to her tension. She was furious, but she wasn’t sure at whom she was angrier. Beneficial Life? Av-Tech’s attorneys for not telling her about this policy, if it even existed? Or with this smug son of a bitch sitting on her porch? She edged Harvard closer to the railing and reached out to retrieve the tri-folded packet of documents he’d laid there. When she had it in her hand, she backed the gelding.

      “Get out,” she said softly.

      “They’ll just send somebody else,” Sellers said, his tone devoid now of the amusement that had lurked in it before. “They aren’t going to leave you alone out here without some kind of security system in place. And I assume you don’t have one.”

      She’d be a fool to tell him she didn’t, of course, but she had never seen the need for security. When you lived at the back of beyond—in the devil’s armpit, as her dad used to say—you didn’t worry about the occasional burglary. Especially when there was nothing out here worth stealing in the first place.

      “What would make you assume that?” she asked, controlling the gelding’s impatience with the ease of long practice.

      Grey Sellers held her eyes a moment before he unfolded his length out of the rocker and walked over to her front door. He opened it, and then he waited. Nothing happened, of course. There were no alarms. No automatic notification of the sheriff’s office. Considering the roads that led to the ranch and the distance from the nearest town, by the time anyone from the Bradford County Sheriff’s Department could get out here, anything that was happening would be long over with anyway.

      Then Sellers walked over and pushed up the window behind the rocker he’d been sitting in. It wasn’t locked. Val didn’t worry too much about locking windows either, of course.

      He turned to look at her, his hat shadowing his face. “Your alarm system doesn’t seem to be working, Ms. Beaufort.”

      “That’s because there isn’t one. As you are well aware.”

      “So are they,” he said. “The insurance company, I mean. Something happens to you, they pay Av-Tech through the nose. And they don’t like paying. Can’t say I blame them.”

      “What do you think is going to happen to me out here?”

      “Nothing,” he said. And then he added, his tone again amused, “At least, not as long as I’m around.”

      He came back to the railing, looking up at her from under the brim of that dusty black hat. Appropriate, she thought. This one certainly wasn’t a member of the white hat brigade. Those shadowed eyes had seen too much.

      And how the hell do I think I can tell that by looking into his eyes? she wondered in disgust. She seemed to have developed an eye fetish in the past few minutes.

      Harvard snorted, tossing his head and working at

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