Highlander Assassinated (Highlander In Time #16)

Chapter 1

Lissa touched the grip of her pistol through the thick fabric of her jacket, smoothly disguising the movement as a fidget in case her client was watching from the other couch.

Precious little chance of that — the woman hadn’t stopped talking for the last half hour at least, and her eyes were fixed somewhere on the middle distance as she nattered on about a night out she’d had years ago with some apparently famous friends.

Still, worth being careful.

Lissa had learned it was better not to draw too much attention to her weapons, especially not this early in the relationship.

She’d only met Angela a week ago, despite having negotiated the contract a month earlier, and she was still working on understanding exactly what was going on with her.

Not that it was ever easy, getting to know her clients — especially since she’d fallen more and more into a pattern that was becoming her calling card.

When she’d first set up shop as a private bodyguard three years ago, Lissa had had no particular clientele in mind, only interested in making a living doing what she was good at.

Then she’d worked with her first stalking victim.

Megan had been a quiet woman in her mid-thirties who’d fired six security personnel before reaching out to Lissa on the recommendation of one of her old Army buddies.

At first, Lissa had hesitated about taking her on as a client, not particularly thrilled about the idea of getting fired so early in her career.

What could she have to offer that had been somehow lacking in the six hardened professionals that Megan had dismissed before her?

It turned out to be as simple as a working pair of ears.

Megan told her about the reason she was in the market for a bodyguard — a stalker she’d worked with three years ago who’d been unwilling to take no for an answer when he asked her out.

The photos were of a frail, unassuming man with a weak chin and watery eyes — but while Lissa didn’t feel threatened by the man in the picture, the same was clearly not true of Megan, who all but vibrated with tension whenever she glanced down at the pictures.

And so when Megan asked her to treat every day as though the guy was on his way over to the house with a gun, Lissa had obliged.

That, it turned out, had been the sticking point with the other bodyguards she’d hired.

High alert for the first few days — and then they’d lose interest as time wore on without any sign of the guy.

Well, Lissa had a lot more patience than that.

It had always been her greatest strength — patience, or as she considered it, a fundamental lack of the ability to get bored.

And so, night after night, she’d run the necessary checks on Megan’s house.

Day after day, she’d scanned hours of security footage.

For three long months, it had been the easiest job she’d ever had — she’d almost begun to feel a little guilty about how much she was getting paid to guard a woman from a man who, it seemed, had no intention of ever returning to bother her.

It wasn’t protection that she was being paid for, she’d realized in those long weeks.

Megan was paying Lissa to give her peace of mind.

And with that in mind, she’d happily dedicated herself to her tasks… which only seemed pointless until the day she saw the creep turn up on the security footage.

It was unmistakably him, and he’d clearly done his research before he’d made his attempt — he’d managed to avoid almost all of the cameras and security sensors.

But when he’d pried open the window and slipped into the house, Lissa had been ready for him.

It was an absolute triumph.

With Lissa’s testimony, plus the security footage, plus the incriminating contents of the backpack the stalker was carrying, Megan was finally able to get the authorities to take her fears about him seriously.

In three months of living in the woman’s house as her constant shadow, Lissa had never seen Megan smile so widely — nor had she imagined that the slender woman was strong enough to give her such a tight hug.

Word had spread after that, and Lissa had quickly found herself with a long waiting list of female clients, most of whom had a depressingly similar story — a man who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

Some of them were ex-boyfriends or ex-husbands, others just hopeful suitors who’d been rejected — but all of them needed someone who would take their fears seriously, and who would believe their side of the story.

Some stories were messier and more complicated than others — she always found the ones that involved children particularly depressing, especially when the kids didn’t quite understand why the scary six-foot woman with the military posture had been brought into their house.

She’d never been very good with kids.

But she knew how to keep them safe — and she took a quiet, fierce pride in being able to use the skills she’d honed in the military to protect the lives of ordinary people.

Plenty of people got lost when they left Army life, but her work meant Lissa knew she wouldn’t end up as one of them.

That being said, some jobs were harder than others.

She forced herself to smile as she looked up at her current client, who was midway through a long-winded retelling of a story Lissa had heard at least six times.

She was trying very hard to remind herself that building rapport with the client was just as important as any other part of the job — even if the client was someone she had absolutely nothing in common with.

Angela was the kind of girl she’d never really gotten to know.

Sheltered, that was the diplomatic term for her — spoiled, that was another.

The kind of girl who’d never had to think about life in the same terms Lissa had.

Angela had been born into so much wealth that the idea of working for a living was a fascinating novelty to her.

She had no idea what anything cost, including her bodyguard — it had been Angela’s parents who’d reached out to Lissa to employ her after their precious baby girl who was well into her mid-twenties, had been through a messy breakup and mentioned that she was scared to sleep alone.

Quietly, Lissa was beginning to suspect that the job just might be a waste of her time.

Aside from constantly blowing up Angela’s phone with dramatic texts begging for a second chance, the guy in question hadn’t exactly behaved in a threatening way.

That was no reason to assume he wouldn’t, of course, and it was always Lissa’s policy to trust the client when they said they were in danger.

The difficulty here, of course, was that Angela didn’t seem to think she was in any danger at all.

When the subject of the ex-boyfriend came up, of course, she had no shortage of stories to tell about how poorly he’d treated her during their relationship, and the frequency of the texts and calls was a little alarming, but Lissa didn’t see any of the fear she’d come to recognize in her years on the job.

Nor was Angela particularly responsive to her security suggestions.

Half the time it felt like she’d been hired as a friend for the spoiled young woman, not a bodyguard.

“Seriously? Again? You’re so obsessive.”

Angela rolled her eyes, taking a quick sip of her wine before leaning forward to hit pause on the movie they’d been watching — though it had taken something of a backseat to Angela’s long, rambling stories about the nights out she’d had with her friends and the famous people they’d gotten drunk with.

“It’s my job,”

Lissa pointed out, keeping the testiness she felt out of her voice as she got to her feet.

“But we’re in the middle of the good part,”

Angela pouted, gesturing at the screen.

Resisting the urge to point out that the storytelling was a much more profound distraction from the movie than a ten-minute security sweep of the house, Lissa managed an apologetic smile before stepping out of the room.

The cooler air in the hallway was a relief — Angela always insisted on having the heating on at near-tropical levels, and the room they’d been sitting in had been suffocatingly close and small.

Lissa set off down the hallway.

In truth, it wasn’t strictly necessary for her to physically walk the perimeter of the house quite so frequently as she did — the security systems she’d set up were more than capable of alerting her to any problems as they arose.

But a ten-minute walk every few hours reminded her client why she was actually there… and gave her a much-needed interlude of peace and quiet.

The cold midwinter air bit into her skin when she stepped outside, and she took a moment to close her eyes and breathe in the quiet, snow-scented evening air.

The house was one of many across the country that belonged to Angela’s very wealthy parents — they usually rented them out, but their only daughter had been given carte blanche to avail herself of whichever one she liked.

She’d been here in Chicago for a few months, which was where the drama with the ex-boyfriend had begun.

Quietly, Lissa wondered why she hadn’t simply left the state if he was such a bother — it would have been far less expensive than paying Lissa’s full-time rates.

Grateful as she’d been for the money at first, she didn’t like feeling that her services would be of more benefit to someone else.

Anyone else.

Lissa exhaled, already bracing herself to return to that stuffy little room and her client’s seemingly limitless collection of stories.

But something stopped her — some flicker of intuition, the kind of message from the future that her career had taught her never to ignore.

She stood as still as stone on the doorstep, letting her senses reach out into the dark night around her, waiting for the cause of that flicker of unease to reveal itself.

She wasn’t waiting long.

Sure enough, there were soft sounds coming from around the side of the house… and as she listened, she heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.