LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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