Her Bodyguard

“S-stop!” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Title Page CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Copyright

“S-stop!”

Gillian tore her mouth away and moaned as Trace circled the delicate rim of her ear with his tongue.

“Mmm?” He rubbed his face through her fragrant hair. She could not possibly mean that.

“We’ve got to stop,” she insisted, but without conviction.

“Who says?” He kissed the tip of her nose. “You don’t want to stop. I don’t want to stop. So we’re stopping?”

‘Yes.“ She said the word softly, but with no compromise this time.

“Mind telling me why?”

She laughed incredulously. “Trace!” He could feel her shake her head. “In a word? Lara, that’s why.”

He swore silently, viciously, then tipped back his head to consult the invisible rocks above. let me explain! Except that he couldn’t He couldn’t break his cover while there was one chance in a million that Gillian was untrustworthy.

And he wouldn’t have done it even if he was entirety sure of her. Being undercover meant you lived the part night and day till you were done. People died when you broke that rule.

Which meant he could come to Gillian only as Trace Sutton, faithless gigolo, not Trace Sutton, heart-free bodyguard....

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

For ten years Peggy Nicholson lived aboard a boat moored in Newport harbor. Nowadays, during southeast storms, she can hear the rumble of waves breaking against the Cliff Walk from her office window. She often runs the cliffs at dawn.

Her Bodyguard

Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CHAPTER ONE

SHE TRADED YOU FOR A CAR. A shiny red Mustang—that’s all you ever meant to that little lady. Now, why would you want a mother like that?

“I don’t,” Gillian said to the door she stood facing. One of two double doors, twelve feet tall, carved from some golden wood varnished to gleaming perfection. They barred an entrance almost wide enough to admit a Mustang car, shiny red or otherwise. She clenched her hand to knock, but her arm stayed straight at her side. I don’t want her, she’d told the lawyer—a horrible little man—nearly two years ago. I want the facts. My facts.

Like the name of her father. Whether she had any brothers or sisters or grandparents. Whether she might be deathly allergic to anything else besides bee stings. Facts that it seemed, some days, the whole world was conspiring to hide from her.

The people who’d raised and loved her, the doctor who’d delivered her, the lawyer who’d arranged her adoption, the woman who’d borne her almost twenty-eight years ago—every one of them had lied or twisted or forgotten or lost or hidden her facts. Or simply refused to give them.

Her facts lay behind this door and she’d come to steal them, since asking politely had gotten her nowhere.

Had gotten her much worse than nowhere. Her letter of shy and hopeful inquiry last year had earned her a stinging, contemptuous response: “If I didn’t want you when you were born why would I want you now, Sarah, if that’s who you really are? So go get a life! And stay the hell out of mine!”

And so I will, Mother. Just as soon as I have my facts. Gillian Sarah Scott Mahler raised her fist, held her breath and knocked, then noticed the doorbell and jabbed that, too.

But of course a woman who owned a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, a millionaire by marriage and a queen of television soap opera in her own right, didn’t open her own front door. How idiotic to have expected it. Gillian blinked at the frowning older woman who swung back the door. “I...” She swallowed and tried again. “I have a ten o’clock appointment with Mrs. Corday. About the job. I’m Gillian Mahler.”

“And just how did you get in here? Nobody buzzed the front gates,” declared the woman.

Must be a member of the household rather than a maid, Gillian guessed, if she felt free to quiz visitors. She might even be a relative, an aunt or cousin, though Gillian could see nothing of herself in the dour and freckled face, the short square body, of her inquisitor. “I walked in,” she said as the woman tapped one foot impatiently. “Someone was driving out as I arrived, and waved me through.”

“Those kids!” The woman glared over Gillian’s shoulder toward the massive iron gates at the end of the driveway, although the couple, a blond young man and woman in a Range Rover, were long gone.

“I really do have an appointment,” Gillian insisted. She didn’t care if she’d broken some unwritten rule of the household. No one was turning her back now, not when she was this close.

“Well, come on, then.” Leaving her to shut the door herself, the woman marched away.

Gillian hurried after her, dimly aware of high, high ceilings, cool marble that clacked underfoot, a grand staircase that swept up to the floors above. Her mother’s house. Assuming Lara Corday—Lara Leigh to her adoring fans—was really her mother. And she is. Same birth date. Same high-school photo. Of course she is.

So why wouldn’t she acknowledge her own daughter?

Traded you for a car and never looked back, the lawyer assured her for the thousandth time in memory. That’s all I can tell you.

If that trade had set a girl named Lara Lee Bailey on the road from a ramshackle cabin in the hardscrabble mountains of West Virginia to this palace, maybe it had been the smartest deal a girl of fifteen had ever made. But why—

“Wait here and I’ll tell her you’ve come.” Gillian’s guide opened a paneled door, waved her inside and closed it firmly behind her.

“Whew!” Gillian leaned back against the door and pressed one hand to her thundering heart.

“Damn it all!” A golf ball rolled across the carpet before her. It bypassed a crystal vase laid on its side and disappeared under a sofa. “So much for my birdie!”

A man stood in front of the fireplace, glaring after his errant putt. He lowered his golf club and leaned on it, then turned his attention to her. “And who the devil are you to mess up a man’s game?”

“I’m G-Gillian. Gillian Mahler.” And who are you? Not Lara Corday’s husband, the famous TV writer and producer. Richard Corday had died in his sleep two years ago. And Corday had been in his late sixties, not mid-thirties like this man.

So friend of the family then, or even a relative—Lara’s relative and therefore hers? It was conceivable. Gillian was tall for a woman, yet he was taller. Six-one or -two easily. Hair darker than her own light brown. His eyes were too deepset to see the color from where she stood. Still, she felt an odd shock of... something. Recognition on some instinctive level?

Or maybe it was just the mood of him as he glared at her from under his black level eyebrows that made the impact, and her sense of kinship was entirely false. Everyone was a potential relative once you learned you were adopted. You found yourself staring at faces as you walked down the street.

He crossed one running shoe over the other and slouched more comfortably against his putting iron. “You sky-dive, Gillian Mahler? Or maybe you made your approach by sea.” He tipped his head toward the six pairs of French doors that formed the entire south wall.

Beyond them stretched the lawn, then the back side of the estate’s unbreachable granite wall, and then the cliffs, with Newport’s famous Cliff Walk meandering high above the blue waters. Gillian had strolled that path often enough these past four months, staring up at this mansion. And now she stood inside it, about to meet her mother. At last.

“You scuba?” the golfer prodded mildly. “Left your wet suit and fins out on the terrace?”

Why was everyone so intent on learning how she’d gotten in? “Helicopter, actually.” She edged away from him toward the windows. I don’t want to talk to you, whoever you are. I came to meet my mother.

“Funny, I didn’t hear it. Didn’t even hear the buzzer for the front gates.” He straightened and ambled across the room to the sofa, then stooped with ease to peer beneath it. “You climbed over?” he hazarded idly, and swept his well-muscled arm under it for his ball. “Grappling hooks and all that?”

The ball he sought had rolled out in front of the sofa. Gillian picked it up and toyed with the notion of stuffing it into his mouth. Would you please, please shut up? Her whole life was about to change. Knowingly and unknowingly, she’d been coming to this encounter for almost twenty-eight years, and now, just when she needed to savor the moment, prepare for it, rehearse the role she meant to play and the first cautious words of her script, this big babbling...jock wouldn’t leave her in peace. “I walked in the gates when a couple drove out, all right? They saw me. It isn’t as if I snuck in.”

They’d barely seen her. They’d been too busy laughing at some private joke to spare her more than a glance, their smiles fading for a moment, their cool eyes passing through her. The boy had flipped her a careless wave, then turned onto the avenue and roared away. Those two hadn’t been concerned about any intruders.

“Toby and Joya,” the man murmured, his trim rump in the air as he groped beneath the sofa.

“We didn’t introduce ourselves.” Gillian knelt and thrust the ball under the sofa, toward his sweeping fingertips. “Here.”

“Where?” His hand closed instead on her wrist—and tightened when she tried to withdraw.

She was suddenly angry out of all proportion to the act, whether he was teasing or only hopelessly dim. Their hands connecting in the dark, touch their only link—her skin shivered with the unexpected, unwelcome intimacy. “In my hand. Where do you think?”

He slid warm, surprisingly hard fingers down her wrist to trace the ball she clutched. “Oh.” Then he lifted it delicately from her palm. “Thanks.”

She sat upright, started to wipe her hand on her skirt, then chose a throw cushion, instead. Its silky chintz fabric didn’t wipe his touch away but seemed to drive it into her bones. She bounced to her feet and retreated to the wall of French doors, scowling through the glass at the lawn beyond. Such a velvety expanse of green, a symbol of wealth more potent than a Rolls or diamonds. Why didn’t he take his toys and go golf out there?

“I suppose you’re here about the job,” he said behind her. “We’ve been up to our chins in would-be companions all week. Short ones, tall ones, nice ones, crabby ones.”

If he’d been the welcoming committee, she didn’t doubt the crabbiness! Gillian swallowed and gripped her elbows. For some reason she hadn’t thought there’d be many applicants for the job. Somehow she’d seen it as...fated. Earmarked for her and her alone. But if there’d been that many applicants... And her qualifications—she was really reaching to think they’d do, but somehow she’d thought...

Wished. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, her aunt Susan—her adoptive aunt, Gillian corrected herself—had always said. She’d been foolishly wishing...

“Funny,” the pest said behind her. “You don’t seem very companionable.”

Could he possibly be coming onto her? “Companion to a woman was the job description, I believe,” she said coldly, without turning.

“Companion/personal assistant to a businesswoman” was the actual wording of the ad in the Newport Daily News. Responses to be directed to Mrs. Lara Corday, Woodwind, Bellevue Avenue, Newport. There had been no mention of the celebrity who lived at that address, who presumably required the assistant. That Mrs. Lara Corday was actually Lara Leigh, star of the long-running soap opera Searching for Sarah, was one of Newport’s best kept secrets. The locals might know it, but they were used to bumping into movie stars at morning coffee, presidents on the harbor launch, princes at the post office. To stare or to show yourself impressed was to mark yourself an out-of-town yokel, a tourist. And the locals didn’t tell secrets to tourists.

“Getting a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it?” A big hand slipped past Gillian’s ribs, reaching for the door’s brass handle. His tanned forearm rubbed along her waist. She gasped and shied to her right. And stumbled over her heels.

“Hey, easy!” His other arm hooked around her waist to steady her, then draw her upright again. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you like that. You could have jumped right through the glass.” His arm tightened around her for an unbelievable, outrageous moment, pulling her backward. Her hips bumped his crotch.

“I’m fine!” she snapped, jamming one elbow into his ribs. “Perfectly—He let her go instantly and she whirled around. ”F-fine.”

Or not. He hadn’t withdrawn one inch. Standing toe to toe with him, she was trapped by the door at her back. A pair of broad male shoulders filled her entire horizon. He wore his white golf shirt unbuttoned, showing her a curl of dark hair at the V. She tipped back her head and found him smiling.

“Sorry,” he said again, too softly. “I didn’t mean to...”

Right. She sidestepped along the wall, careful to give him no excuse to “help” her again. He opened the first pair of doors, then the next, heading her way. She shied off to the center of the room and scowled at his back. Could that have been an accident?

“You don’t need to be so nervous,” he said, swinging open a third pair. The whisper of distant surf filled the room. “It’s just a job like any other.”

“I’m not—” She stopped and shrugged. Did it show that much? Being on edge, maybe she had misread his actions.

Dark against the brightness silhouetting him, he turned back to study her. “I suppose you’re a local girl, a Vod-islander.”

That mockery of the upstate accent marked him as hailing from other parts, she thought absently. “No.” His expectant silence at her one-word response dragged more words from her. “I’ve been here since the spring.” She’d meant to stay only a day or two, a week at most. Still wounded by Lara’s letter of rejection, she’d intended only to catch a glimpse of her mother, see her in the flesh once, then go.

Oh, she’d seen Lara Leigh a hundred times or more by then watching reruns of Searching for Sarah. But she’d felt no sense of reality, no connection. That beautiful, mobile, weeping or laughing face on the TV screen hardly seemed a real person, much less a person connected to her as no other.

“Living here in Newport?” he prodded.

“Yes.” Her first week, she’d stayed at a bed-and-breakfast a quarter mile down the Cliff Walk. Had haunted that stunning path morning and night, sure somehow that if Lara was any relation to her, then this was where they would meet. Her mother would love the cliffs, too. Living so near, she’d be bound to stroll there, drawn by the cry of the gulls, the cool breeze off the glittering ocean, the rumble of the waves grinding the rocks below.

And her certainty had proved right—proof more clinching than any DNA test, to Gillian’s mind, that they were of one blood. Walking the cliffs on a misty dawn, her third in Newport, she’d looked eagerly toward Woodwind, its tall chimneys slowly taking shape through the fog. Looked—and had seen a slim figure step out through a wooden door hidden among the wild rugosa rosebushes that hedged the cliff side of the high estate walls.

The figure set off at a long-legged, floating run and vanished around a bend in the path. Gillian caught her breath and jogged after. Wait, Lara! Wait for me!

If the runner was her mother. Gillian rounded the bend and glimpsed silvery hair the same shade as Lara Leigh’s. Then more rosebushes intervened, black against the pearly mist.

But no hurry, she told herself. She was fifteen years younger and a runner herself. She could overtake Lara whenever she chose. Cliff Walk edged the ragged peninsula jutting out into Rhode Island Sound for another two miles or so. She had plenty of time.

Mist dewed her face, beaded in her lashes, as she ran. A loon called its weird laughing cry from the gray waters below. Gillian came to a set of mossy stone steps and bounded up them, then down another set, her ears straining for footsteps ahead, hearing in- stead the rip of a wave combing down the black pebbles of the shingle beach fringing the base of the cliffs, some seventy feet below. The path skirted the very rim of the drop-off, and here someone had built a waist-high chain-link fence to keep unwary sightseers from stepping out into echoing space. Wild white daisies softened the craggy soil, trailing downward from rock to rock. Elephant-high clumps of rugosas pressed in from both sides of the Walk now. Blossoms of magenta and white brushed her shoulders as she ran. Through gaps in the bushes Gillian snatched glimpses of the black silhouette of a lobster boat idling in toward a line of pots laid along the cliffs. On a clear day you could see twenty miles out to the islands, but not this morning, when visibility was measured in yards.

And somewhere ahead...Gillian stepped up her pace. She passed a trail that led up between the mansions on her right toward the avenue, but somehow she knew Lara wouldn’t stray from this path. A woman who lived most of her life in the public eye would surely treasure this gorgeous solitude.

And what do I do when I catch her? Glance sideways? Say something inanely pleasant, as runners often do when they pass each other—Nice day, huh? Or should she run a little farther, then wheel and confront her? Mother, it’s me, she could say, Sarah. But she never would dare. Not after that savaging letter. Gillian pulled up the hood of the orange sweatshirt she wore till it covered her hair. Tightened the string at her throat to keep the hood in place. There was no reason to think that Lara might recognize her, but still...

Mind focused on the bow she was tying and on the coming encounter, she rounded another bend and shied violently sideways, grazing the bushes, thorns plucking at her sleeve. For all her fascination with vistas, she had a healthy fear of heights, and this was a spot she never liked. Just as the path passed a wide gap in the bushes, it dipped, then tilted subtly toward the cliff edge. Here, water ran off from the hillside above, carving a notch in the cliff. Someday the path would be entirely undermined; the hillside would cave in and fall. Cliff Walk, Gillian had learned, had been crumbling for time out of mind, the sea taking the land inch by inch, the soft slate cliffs eroding year by year. The path was perfectly safe, but still, you could feel the abyss calling. Three wincing steps and she was by the gap, looking ahead again.

Lara? The path sloped downward; the highest cliffs were behind them now. The surf sounded louder and the fog was thicker, as if it had chosen this low spot to crawl onto the land. Gillian looked down, picking a route around a puddle in the path, looked up—and Lara burst out of the mist. Retracing her steps, homeward bound already.

No time to think at all. As their strides carried them closer, their eyes met and locked. Hers were a gray so light as to seem silver, fringed by lashes as dark as Gillian’s own. Lara’s lips parted, Gillian opened her mouth to speak, but the only word that sprang to mind was Why? Oh, why?

Gillian slowed, her steps faltering, her mind stumbling. That’s her! Near enough to touch! Near enough to question—if only she dared.

She didn’t. Not this time, anyway. So instead she ran on, reliving the moment, trying to hold that startled, questioning face in her memory. Seeking from it some likeness to her own.

Finding none—

CHAPTER TWO

A HAND WAVED BEFORE HER face, then dropped as she focused on it. “Do this often, do you?” inquired the man. His lopsided smile was whimsical; his eyes missed nothing.

They were hazel, she noticed for the first time. “Do what?” She’d entirely forgotten he was in the room! For only a minute or so? It might as easily have been an hour.

“Vanish down a rabbit hole. Not a very nice one, by the look of it.”

“I...was trying to remember if I’d turned off the stove.”

He didn’t buy it, but he cocked his head obediently, then one eyebrow. “Don’t hear fire engines.”

Newport wasn’t large. Whenever the trucks turned out, the whole town heard the racket. “I believe I did turn it off after all.”

“Ah.” He’d jammed his hands into the pockets of his chinos. Eyes fixed on her face, he strolled around her. She suppressed an urge to spin warily with him, and let him instead inspect her profile, then her backside. Clenching her teeth, she tipped back her head to study the chandelier above. She’d thought meeting her mother would be the ordeal of the day. Now she looked to Lara for rescue. Somebody deliver me from this... this... whatever he was.

Bad news, that’s what he was. Elegantly packaged bad news, from his sexily too-long, razor-cut dark hair, to his runner’s shoes, which probably cost more than her monthly rent. With all stops in between just as scenic. Not handsome exactly, but something more potent, topped off with a whiff of... unpredictability. Not a trait she cared for in someone who was shaping up to be an opponent.

“You know she’s been ill,” he said idly from somewhere behind her right ear.

Ill? That was hardly the word Gillian would have used to describe a fall off the Cliff Walk.

Shattered? her mind supplied, and she shivered suddenly. It had been two days after their encounter before she’d heard. She’d picked up a day-old Daily News in the Waves, the town’s favorite coffeehouse, and sucked in her breath at the headline: Woman Survives Fall From Cliff Walk! Somehow she’d known what had happened even before she’d read about it. “I heard she had...an accident,” she murmured, picturing for the hundredth time the stumble—a shoelace perhaps coming undone, or Lara catching the tip of a toe. Then the horrified nosedive, the frantic snatch at the brush on the rim, a flailing cartwheel into space, the rocks rushing upward, the ice-cold sea...

The article said the woman had been lucky, unlike others over the years. She’d fallen at half tide, when a few feet of water covered the jagged beach. Luckier still, a lobsterman tending his pots had seen her from his boat, and rowed frantically over in time to save her from drowning.

The woman had a fractured skull, the article went on to note, and broken bones. She’d been rushed to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where the most critical cases were sent. Her name was being withheld pending notification of relatives.

Like me? Nobody told me!

Checking the date of the paper and counting backward, Gillian deduced the fall had occurred the morning of her encounter with Lara, probably within minutes after they’d passed each other. “Name withheld” was a dead giveaway. It took money and power to keep a person’s name out of the papers, especially when that person was a celebrity.

The newspaper had been circumspect, but still the rumors had made the rounds. Gillian had heard them from the women in her aerobics classes at the YMCA, heard them murmured over cups of coffee at the Waves. It was Lara Corday—you know, that Lara—who’d fallen—

She glanced up as a humming came from somewhere overhead. The crystal pendants on the chandelier trembled and a shard of rainbow danced across the ceiling.

“The elevator,” the man said at her elbow.

At last! Gillian swallowed and glanced desperately around the room. Her mind had gone utterly blank; all her endlessly rehearsed words had flown through the open doors and out to sea. There was a carriage clock on the mantel, she noticed, showing the time as ten-thirty. Half an hour, she kept me waiting.