LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Three

      The flight to the States the following afternoon seemed interminable, and was made even longer by the knowledge that she had only seventeen dollars in a purse she hated. According to the bank manager she’d spoken to that morning, her accounts had been frozen because Eduard had escaped capture and had apparently used one of her credit cards somewhere in Spain. In an effort to track him down, they wanted to stop any other activity on her accounts. They regretted the inconvenience. Not enough, she was sure.

      She’d spent the next two hours scouring clothing and old purses for money left in pockets or coin compartments. Then, to add insult to injury, she had to put what she found in a brown leather pouch purse she’d never liked because everything sank to the bottom in it. Someday she was going to pummel Eduard herself for tossing her favorite ergonomic bag into a crevasse.

      “I can’t believe it,” she grumbled, not for the first time. “Twenty-two years an actress, high-yield stocks and bonds, carefully acquired real estate, and I have seventeen dollars to my name.”

      That sounded like a pouty princess talking—or possibly, Lady Bellows. Good. She wasn’t having to reach to stay in character.

      Duffy wasn’t sure what that was all about—residual stress from her ordeal, maybe. As a girl, she’d never been one to flaunt her beauty, her intelligence, her family’s comfortable situation or her popularity. She’d been very real and able to lower herself to the level of a child who needed her friendship.

      “I’ll give you my American Express,” he offered, “if you’re reluctant to take money from your father.”

      She rolled her eyes. “Why would I be more willing to take money from you than from him?”

      “Because we broke the ice when I bought your ticket,” he replied, knowing he was annoying her. He suspected that her life, her determination to live it onstage, was wobbling, and he was going to do all he could to topple it. “It’ll be easier the second time.” He was going to give her a week with her father in Arlington, then he was going to invite them to Lamplight Harbor to visit. He wanted her to see where he lived, get to know his boys, relax.

      Then he was going to do his damnedest to seduce her.

      She closed her eyes against his candor and shook her head. “I’m going to be happy to say goodbye to you when we reach Kennedy,” she said. “You were much sweeter as a boy than you are as a man.”

      “A man has too much to do to be sweet,” he countered. “And sweetness is generally not a favorable trait in a bodyguard, anyway.”

      She smiled reluctantly at that, then leaned back in her seat and studied him as though she was seeing the child and not the man. He didn’t particularly like that. But having her attention in any way was a plus.

      “You must have gotten over the asthma,” she said. “All your efforts at bodybuilding certainly paid off.”

      He watched her eyes scan his shoulders, but inclined his head modestly and pretended not to notice. “Thank you. I stayed with it, then learned a lot in the Army. I did outgrow the asthma and am now disgustingly healthy.”

      “And a little overconfident.”

      “A bodyguard—like a cop—has to have presence. This time you wouldn’t have to save me from the burning vaporizer. I could rescue you.”

      Her eyes widened and she turned toward him with a slight smile at that memory, forgetting that he annoyed her.

      “I’d forgotten that!” she said, her eyes losing focus as she thought back.

      He’d been eight years old and just getting over a cold, so his asthma had been very active. His parents were at a dinner meeting with a client, and his mother had placed a vaporizer at his bedside to ease his breathing.

      Maggie had been in the kitchen downstairs, preparing dinner, when a short in the vaporizer had caused it to catch fire. It had ignited the decorative quilt that hung over his bed, and he’d barely found the air in his lungs to shout Maggie’s name.

      She’d appeared in an instant, hesitated only a second before unplugging the vaporizer, draping it with his blanket, and carrying the now smoking device into the bathroom where she dropped it in the tub and poured water on it. Then she ran back to yank the burning quilt off the wall and submerged it in the bathtub, too.

      He always looked back on that as the moment he fell in love with her. She’d then put him in his parents’ bed, brought him dinner, then cleaned up the mess while he ate.

      “Of course, I killed the vaporizer, your blanket and that beautiful quilt,” she remembered with a nostalgic smile.

      “Maybe, but my father paid you with a hundred-dollar bill that night. You averted what might have been a real disaster.”

      She nodded, accepting praise with a light laugh. “If I hadn’t saved you, you couldn’t have grown up to be such a smart aleck.”

      “There, see. I knew it was all your fault.”

      The flight attendant arrived with a cell phone. “Miss Lawton?”

      Maggie blinked in surprise. “Yes.”

      “The airport radioed the pilot with a call from your father. We have him on the pilot’s cell phone.”

      She listened, looking surprised, then disappointed.

      “What?” she exclaimed. “What about your heart? What about…?” She stopped abruptly, apparently forced to listen again.

      “Dad, I’m sorry, too,”

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