LITMIR.BIZ

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to the soft, rich light falling onto the desert sands.

      There were definitely worse ways to spend your Christmas.

      He’d heard the distant splash of Sera lowering herself into her pool a while earlier, so he trusted that she was too busy enjoying the view to be getting up to any early mischief. But he’d figured she could probably use a little mental space after her dramatic arrival in the country, so he’d cooled his heels for the twenty minutes after unpacking, then done a token perimeter assessment of both their suites to stretch it out a little more.

      In his experience, protectees never adjusted quite as well to the idea of close contact as the protectors, even the ones whose lives depended on high-level guard. It was a skill, hitting that fine balance between too much and too little supervision. Relaxed enough to keep your client sane and compliant, but not so relaxed that it opened a window for the kind of risk that he was hired to protect them against. And not so much that the client became overly reliant on you and stopped listening to their own instincts. Overly reliant or overly fond—the small twist in his gut reminded him. That was just as dangerous. As he’d discovered the hard way.

      The best balance was...indifferent acquiescence.

      That was what he’d be pushing for with Sera.

      His suite, which also meant hers, was unchanged from the last time he was assigned to Al Saqr—locked from the inside, glass doors on three sides, huge pair of timber doors on the public side, privacy fences all around but open to desert everywhere else. Rule of thumb here was that you kept your desert walks away from your neighbouring accommodations; a privacy thing. So staff wouldn’t visit while Sera was in the suite and no one should be hauling themselves up the dune face and stumbling into her private pool area any time soon.

      Though shouldn’t and wouldn’t weren’t necessarily the same thing. His formal orders were to make sure Sera stayed out of trouble while the media attention from her recent legal troubles died down, but when your father was as rich and famous as hers, anything was possible. And he wasn’t about to get caught out by letting his guard down.

      Once burned, ten times shy.

      Brad locked suite eleven’s door behind him and jogged past Sera’s to the neighbours on the other side to confirm nine was definitely empty. Then he checked his watch to ensure a full hour had passed and he presented himself back at her door, knocking firmly.

      He counted to ten before trying again.

      Still nothing.

      ‘Sera?’

      His chest filled with lead. Please don’t let her have gone exploring alone...

      Just because she’d agreed to ground rule number two in the SUV didn’t mean she’d stick to it when faced with the seductions of this unique place. He stepped down off the decking leading to the front door and walked around the side of the suite where his own had a side opening for maintenance staff to use. He could hear a bunch of animal noises he didn’t recognise—one of them a kind of gaspy hitch—so the wildlife around them could be just about anything.

      ‘Sera?’ Something about the desert silence made him not want to shout. ‘I’m coming around.’

      But as he stepped back up on to the decking within her back yard, his quick eyes saw exactly why Sera hadn’t heard him. She floated at the deep end of her little pool, the water cascading over her arms that lay folded on its tiled infinity edge, chin resting there, staring out at the desert beyond. Her long hair looked even darker wet and it hung flat down her back between pale shoulders and blue swimsuit straps, which made it easy to see the headphones she had wedged into her ears. He followed the white wires over to where her phone rested on the flat, dry tiles of the pool edge.

      Something about her posture stilled his feet before he reached the steps, though.

      And then he heard it... The choked hitch he’d attributed in amongst the other desert wildlife sounds. It wasn’t an exotic bird calling at all; it was Sera, crying—sobbing, actually, if only she weren’t doing such a good job of muffling it in her folded arms. He stood, frozen, and stared at her heaving shoulders and back. Everything in him burned to go and check on her. The urge bubbled up and made his feet twitch.

      But a single image fought its way through all the instinct and kept him utterly immobile—a young, glittery-eyed face, splotched red with distress, pressed up against the rear window of a hastily departing transporter, his little mouth open in a cry that Brad couldn’t hear.

      But he’d felt it down to his very soul.

      He still did.

      Sera’s tears could be about just about anything. The ex-boyfriend her file said she’d parted ways with. Bad news from home. Work hassles, if not for the fact that she didn’t have a job, at least, not a proper one. Her father’s money had brought her freedom from the worries of ordinary people.

      He stared at the soft lurches of her pale shoulders.

      Clearly, money hadn’t exactly bought her happiness.

      Whatever it was, it wasn’t any of his business until it put her at physical risk. His job was to keep Sera out of trouble for four weeks. Muddling around in her emotional well-being was completely outside his remit. He wasn’t paid for it.

      And he wasn’t remotely skilled at it.

      He took a backwards step, and then another, and vanished the way he’d come, leaving Sera to her privacy.

      And her pain.

       CHAPTER THREE

      ‘HAVE YOU TASTED the bananas?’ Sera burst out, answering his door knock a little later. ‘They’re amazing. God, I’ve missed bananas.’

      Brad reeled a little at the sheer joy on her face. Quarter of an hour ago she was inconsolable. Maybe the desert with its ever-changing moods was a fitting place for her.

      ‘Is there some kind of British banana shortage I’m not aware of?’ he said, rather than obsess on things that were outside his purview.

      She turned and walked back into her suite, leaving him to follow. ‘I stopped eating them. All our bananas are flash-frosted and shipped in from West Africa or South America; it’s been ages since I’ve had a fresh, locally harvested banana. Sensational.’

      Somehow, she’d even managed to make fruit political.

      ‘Are you okay?’

      She smiled, and it appeared totally sincere. Obviously a quick rebounder, then.

      ‘Sure. Are you?’

      He narrowed his focus on her red-tinged eyes. ‘Do you need some eye drops?’

       Really, Kruger? You gotta keep snooping? Let it go, man.

      She waved his concern away. ‘The pool is lightly salted.’

      A little bit extra now, given her copious tears. But her easy dismissal made it impossible for him to exercise the absurd Galahad complex she seemed to have triggered in him.

      Seraphina Blaise did not need—or want—his help.

      His attention tracked to her still-unpacked luggage. ‘How are you settling in?’

      Her mouth split into a smile as wide as the desert they sat in. ‘It’s unbelievable, already. Have you seen the light? It changes by the hour. It’s going to be amazing to photograph.’

      ‘We’ll be doing a bit of that, then?’

      ‘I’m here for a month,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll go mad without a focus. Besides, it’s what I do. You know?’

      Yeah. He knew all about her photography. It was what had got her in the papers in the first place. Taking photos of animals in confidential research labs. And getting caught

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