Chapter 9
Diana
THE BASEMENT PARKING garage is quiet at eight. My heels are the only sound, and even those are softened by the rubber mat between the elevator and the row of black SUVs.
I watch my bodyguard from my periphery, watching but not really watching, else he’d think I’m a creep, and can’t have him thinking that.
Kai Romero is a walking temptation. That’s the most honest way to put it. Buzz cut, dark. Skin that holds a gold tint even when the sun’s been gone for hours. A mouth that hardly moves when he talks, but does unspeakable things when it’s somewhere on my body.
I toss him the keys without warning. He catches them without looking. His reflex is always two seconds ahead of his brain, and that never fails to turn me on.
Kai is a great cut of steak, the type that ruins you for everything else on the menu.
My taste has leveled up since him. He’s what my appetite expects these days, what gets my blood moving in the morning before coffee does.
The eye candy a woman could have every day for the rest of her life and never once get bored with.
And I say that with the palate of a woman who has sampled the entire menu.
His future girlfriend doesn’t know what’s coming for her. A man this physically gifted, this grounded, this sensible. A man who listens when you speak and answers with weight behind the words, not the empty filler most men offer to fill the silence between their own sentences.
I am surrounded by men. My entire career is a parade of them. Sharp men, wealthy men, men with opinions and agendas. There is no shortage of men in my life.
But Kai is different.
Talking to him relaxes me. Not the way the sex relaxes me, though the sex with him relaxes me in a category that deserves its own filing system.
But talking to Kai is something else. His company, when the work is done and the suits are off and we’re drinking whiskey in my office, is a quiet I haven’t had since I was a girl on my grandfather’s porch.
My grandfather, he spoke in slow, measured sentences and treated every question I asked with the seriousness of a Supreme Court appeal. Kai has that. That old soul weight. The feeling that when he looks at me, he is seeing me. Not the title. Not the legs. Not the figures on the bank statement.
It’s funny because Kai is so much younger than me. Or I’m so much older than him. Depends on whether the glass is half empty or half full.
A soul connect. That is the only phrase I can find for it. Two frequencies that happen to match.
I catch myself.
My hand is on my chin. I am staring at the side of his face from the backseat with an expression I would mock in any other woman.
I laugh at myself quietly. This is the old woman talking. Getting sentimental over a young bodyguard because he has nice eyes and listens well.
I am forty. I am not old. I am not sentimental. I am a woman in the peak of her life.
So I take the musings, the porch, the old soul, the soul connect, and I put them in a bag with all the other useless things I have collected over the years, and I sink the bag in the Marianas where nothing ever comes back up.
Kai pulls the SUV out of the garage and into Halo City. The skyline is a wall of glass and light ahead of us, and the streets are still humming with foot traffic and the slow crawl of cabs.
His energy tonight is off.
There’s a weight in his shoulders that wasn’t there this morning, and I know exactly where it came from.
I let the silence sit for a few blocks. When I look back at him again, I notice his left wrist on the steering wheel.
“Where’s the watch?”
His eyes don’t leave the road. “I’ll wear it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’ll wear it on a special occasion.”
I laugh. “I want you to wear it every day. I want to see my gift on you.”
He changes lanes. The turn signal ticks in the silence, and he doesn’t say anything more.
“Kai.”
Nothing.
“I’m talking to you.”
Still nothing. His hands are steady on the wheel, ten and two, his face the closed door of a man who has decided the conversation is over.
I watch him, and this time my gaze catches his right hand. The angle makes it difficult to see clearly, but his knuckles, there are thin cuts running across them.
I don’t ask about the watch again. There is a bruise in his composure, I can sense it, and I have been pressing on it without knowing its shape.
I don’t know his story. I don’t know what money means to him, or what a gift from a woman who has everything means to a man who has…
what? I don’t know what he has. I don’t know where he comes from.
I know his military record and his employee file and the sound he makes when he finishes, but I do not know a single other thing.
I pull my gaze forward, and I leave it there.
“There’s a liquor shop on the right,” I say. My voice is easy, light. “Pull over. I need to grab a few things.”
He nods once and guides the SUV to the curb.
The shop is called Tinder Box. The sign is gold leaf on black, and the windows are tinted.
I step out. The night air is cool, and I can smell the harbor three blocks away. Salt, traffic, the start of a Halo City night that is still deciding what it wants to be.
Kai is already at my door, closing it behind me, his body between mine and the street like always. I reach the entrance. My hand is on the brass handle.
Then a crack.
My body doesn’t get the chance to process the sound. Kai’s arm is around my waist, and I am being hauled forward, through the door, off my feet, and then I’m inside, and he’s inside, and the door is swinging shut behind us.
Two more cracks.
Kai shoves me down behind a display shelf. His body is over mine, and his voice is in my ear, low and hard.
“Stay down.”
The woman behind the counter looks up with a polite, confused smile. The shop is so beautifully insulated, thick glass and soft jazz coming from a speaker hidden somewhere in the ceiling, that the gunshots outside are muffled pops.
Nobody inside heard.
I don’t have time to marvel at the soundproofing because Kai’s hand is on my arm, and he is moving me toward the back of the shop. Past the whiskey aisle. Past the restrooms.
“Storage,” he says, and he’s already testing the handle of a steel door on the left. It opens. A small room full of boxed inventory and the smell of cardboard. He pushes me in, follows, and locks the door behind us.
Then he turns, and I see his right shoulder. The charcoal suit fabric is dark, but under the bare bulb, I can see the wet shine. A stain is spreading from a tear in the fabric near the top of the deltoid.
“You’re hit.” I can already hear my panic.
“It’s a scratch.” He’s pulling the phone from inside his jacket, dialing.
“Kai. You are bleeding!”
“It’s a scratch, Diana. I need you to sit down and stay calm.”
The phone connects. His voice drops into a register I have never heard from him. Clipped. Stripped of everything personal.
“Line 13. This is Romero. Detail for Jensen. We’re at Tinder Box. Shots were fired from the street, at least three rounds. Vehicle’s tires are hit. One graze on me, non-critical. Client is secure. We’re locked in a back storage room.”
A pause. I can hear the voice on the other end, rapid and male.
“Copy,” Kai says.
He lowers the phone. “Backup’s on the way. We stay here.”
I nod and lean back against the wall of boxes. My heart is slamming behind my ribs. The call is over, and now the only sound in the room is me, my breathing.
Nobody has ever shot at me before. I have been sent a dead rat in a Tiffany box once, by a man who lost a custody case. But nobody has ever pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger.
My hands won’t stop shaking. I press them flat against my thighs and will them still and they refuse to obey me. My breath is coming faster now, short, shallow pulls that aren’t filling my lungs.
I can feel the adrenaline turning into panic, and I hate it. I hate the helplessness. I hate that my body is betraying the composure I have spent years perfecting.
Kai crouches in front of me. His face is level with mine. Those blue-gray eyes. His hand reaches for my face. Warm against my cheek.
“Don’t be scared. I’m here.” His voice is low, and it is the most certain sound I have ever heard from another human being. “Nobody’s getting to you while I’m around. Remember that.“
I look at him. This young man with a bullet in his shoulder and no fear in his face.
I reach for him. My arms go around his torso and I pull him into me until he’s kneeling, his good arm coming around my back. He holds me tight. I press my face into the curve of his neck where his skin is warm and his pulse is steady, and I breathe him in.