His Bodyguard

“And when he finds out it was all a setup?”

“The plan is mine. I’m the one who’ll have to answer for it.”

The whole idea was crazy. Meg had gained a reputation as the methodical one in her family because her life seemed to have been drafted on the principles of Murphy’s Law. Everything that could go wrong did—and frequently.

She could keep Amos Pike safe. She was sure of that. But she was worried about her ability to attract him in the first place, to convince him to take off with her for a week in the wilderness.

And even if he did go with her out of a sense of duty, she knew her own limitations. Her mother died when she was ten and she’d grown up in a family of men. While she wasn’t entirely unattractive, she didn’t know how to make the most of her attributes, partly because she never thought about them.

She worked for her father, and she spent her spare time teaching martial arts and other classes in the Women in Transition program at the community college. She lived her life in sweats, watching for trouble. Not the best way to meet men.

“Of course,” her father prodded as he swirled the contents of his glass, “if you think you’ll need backup, I could get Ben or Brian to...”

“No. Thanks.” That was dirty. He’d done it deliberately to force her hand. Meg’s brothers were the kindest, dearest men on the face of the earth, and the bane of her professional life. They were incapable of believing she could handle an assignment without one of them looking in on her. She hated that. And her father knew it.

“And I’m supposed to outbid wealthy women,” she asked him, “on what you pay me?”

Boradino straightened hopefully in her chair and Paul smiled. “Ms. Boradino’s taking care of that with the help of the rest of the administrative staff and other...undesignated company funds.”

Meg could imagine how much Pike must mean to this woman if she was willing to risk his wrath by tricking him with a bodyguard and using “undesignated” company funds with which to do it.

Somehow, Meg couldn’t find it in her to fail this woman. She picked up her wineglass. “To Ms. Boradino’s plan.”

“Bless you!” Boradino said, touching her glass to Meg’s, then to Paul’s.

Meg’s father smiled fondly at his daughter. “You’re going to have a good time with this, Meggie.”

“Mmm,” she replied. “I can hardly wait.”

CHAPTER TWO

“RED OR BLACK?” Becky Winston, director of the Women in Transition program at Wild Hills Community College, opened her wardrobe closet and pulled out two cocktail dresses. The red one was slinky and sequined, the black layered in chiffon and hanging from spaghetti straps.

Meg sat on the foot of her bed and shook her head. “They’re beautiful, but it’s not a formal occasion. It takes place in the afternoon and outdoors in an arena at the Lost Springs Ranch for Boys.”

Becky, a half inch shorter than Meg’s five-seven, and just as slender in build, had offered Meg the pick of her wardrobe when she’d complained of having nothing to wear to the auction.

She put the dresses away and pulled out beige twill trousers and a brown silk shirt, then a denim jumper that would fall just above the knee. “This looks really cute with a T-shirt. Want to try it on? You’ll wow him with your legs.”

Meg was about to deny that she wanted to wow Amos Pike, then remembered that she did. She had to make him want to go away with her for a week or the whole Boradino plan fell apart.

She pulled her slacks and sweater off. Becky dug in the drawer of her dresser and handed Meg a crisp white T-shirt.

The shirt and jumper on, Meg studied her reflection in the mirrored wardrobe doors.

Becky combed her fingers through Meg’s curly red hair. “What kind of impression do you want to make? Sexy? Powerful? Vampish?”

Meg remembered what Boradino had said. “I don’t want to strike any poses. I just want to be me.”

Becky winced. “No, you don’t. Let’s face it, Loria. What you are right now is Chuck Norris in a skirt. What we want him to see is the woman inside the security specialist, the part of you that would have blossomed if you’d had a mom as a teenager. You have it all—the sweetness, the nurturing qualities, the tenderness. But you’re always thinking like a bodyguard.”

“I am a bodyguard.”

“But the body you’re guarding is yours. And we want this guy to find it.”

“No, we don’t. We just want him to find me appealing enough to come away with me for a week.”

Becky rolled her eyes. “And you don’t think your body will have anything to do with that?”

“I just don’t want him to think I bought him for a week of sex, you know? Or I’ll have more trouble than I’ll know what to do with.”

“He’ll want to think that’s why you bought him, whatever your reasons are. Now, come on. Where’s your hair clip? I swear, I’ve never known a woman who carries one around so faithfully and never wears it.”

“I want my hair to look neat,” she said, watching Becky rout through the jeans Meg had tossed onto the bed. “But the clip always bothers me after a while, so I take it out.” She caught her hair at the back of her head and held it there as Becky applied the filigree clip.

Becky stood beside her and frowned into the mirror. “Earrings,” she said, then went to her jewelry box on the dresser. “Silver and turquoise. Where... are they? Ah!”

She handed Meg a pair of large chaste silver buttons with a beadlike turquoise inset. “There you go. Now you look like a page out of an Eddie Bauer catalog. What do you think?”

Becky was right. She looked like a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company Monday through Friday and on weekends frolicked on a ranch with a handsome man in plaid flannel.

But it was a lie. And she remembered what Boradino had said about Pike appreciating honesty in a woman.

“Do not look like that,” Becky ordered, pulling several shirts out of her closet and tossing them onto the bed. She put an arm around Meg’s shoulders and pointed to the mirror. “This is the real you, Meg. Not the woman who fell for Daniel because he was the first man to notice you. He wanted the vulnerable part of you, not the strong part. You want a man who’ll appreciate all of you.”

Meg spread her arms and blew out her breath in exasperation. “The problem is I don’t know who I am. I like men, generally, but in our work with Women in Transition we hear so much about the bad ones. And when my other job is to protect people from those out to harm them, you start to see everyone as a threat. So I tried to loosen up about that, fell in love with Daniel, and look where that got me.”

“Free in the nick of time, if you ask me,” Becky said without apology. “Where’s your backbone? You weren’t the problem, he was.”

“Becky.” Meg put her hands on her friend’s shoulders and squeezed gently, apologetically. “You realize what Daniel changing his mind might do to Grandma Rooney’s endowment to your program?”

Becky nodded philosophically. “I like to think she’ll listen to reason when you explain that Daniel left you.”

Meg gave her a little shake. “Reason? Becky, we’re talking about the woman who offered blue-chip stock to Kenny Kaiser in high school so he’d take me to the prom.”

Becky smiled. “So, she’s a little...wacky. When’s she due back?”

“Next week sometime.”

Guinevere Rooney Ross, Meg’s maternal grandmother, was currently in Africa buying art for a small museum in northern California. She was in her early eighties and in good physical health. But she suffered from a form of age-related dementia that caused her to confuse and sometimes connect unrelated facts until her reality existed on a separate plane from everyone else’s.

For the past two years she’d pleaded with Meg to spend less effort on Becky’s program and more time trying to find the right man. In her mind, a woman’s happiness depended upon husband and family.

When Meg introduced her to Daniel and told her they were engaged, her grandmother had said that since Meg had done what she’d asked, she would do something for Meg. At Meg’s request, she had promised a substantial donation to the Women in Transition Center Becky had been dreaming of building for years, a place where young women without guidance or those starting over for any reason could stay until they found employment and felt secure enough to be on their own again.

“I don’t know, Becky.” Meg checked her reflection in the mirror and smoothed the jumper’s short skirt. “Grandma told me she wouldn’t do it if I chickened out.”

“But he chickened out.”

“Do you have any idea how hard it’ll be to make her understand the difference? Especially since he left with a woman fifteen years older than I am? She’ll blame me. I know she will.”

Becky put the shirts inside a black plastic suit bag. “He found her money more appealing.” Then she giggled. “And he never could get over the plate-glass window episode.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “I’m an Amazon with an inferiority complex.”

“You’re beautiful, Meg,” Becky corrected her, handing her the bag. “Remember what we’re always telling the women in the program. The past doesn’t matter. It makes no difference who tells you you’re stupid or you can’t do it, or you’re never going to make it, or it’s more than you should try for. Everything you need to succeed is inside you. You have to believe in you.”

Meg nodded. “I know that, Becky. I have faith in my ability to support myself, to make friends, to live a good life. I’m just not sure I’m destined for love and marriage.”

“That’s ridiculous. Of course you are.”

Meg decided there was little point in arguing. Becky would believe what she wanted to believe, and Meg knew what she knew. After so many years of frightening men away with her physical strength and dexterity, she’d attracted a man who’d walked away less than two weeks before the wedding.

“Well,” she said, taking a last look at herself in the mirror. She did look far more confident than she felt. “This week isn’t about love and marriage, anyway. It’s about making myself appealing enough to Amos Pike that he’ll come away with me. Then, I suppose if I have to keep him locked in a room until the toy show, I can do that.”

“You won’t have to,” Becky said, walking her to the door. “Trust me. And don’t worry about the center. I’ll just keep dreaming about it awhile longer.”

* * *

AMOS FOLLOWED the brightly lit streetlights down Main Street in Lightning Creek, Wyoming, population fifteen hundred and something, and looked around him in disbelief. Time had stopped. That was the only possible explanation. Everything he remembered was still here—the general store on the east side of the street, Ellie’s Dress Shop, Western Savings and Loan, the post office.

Across the street was Reilly’s Feed Store, Twyla’s Tease ‘n’ Tweeze—wait. The beauty shop might have been called something else back then, but it had been there. The Main Street Grill. The aroma of barbecue drifted out to him and he had to stop and breathe in a deep gulp of it.

It was twenty-five years ago. He was nine years old.

He felt a little shudder deep inside him that recalled that time even more sharply than the old familiar storefronts. It had been dark then, too, and he’d been driven into Lightning Creek by Barbara, his caseworker.

Barbara had already been working with him a year when she’d brought him to Lost Springs Ranch for Boys, a few miles out of town. She’d been kind and done her best to be supportive, but she hadn’t known what to do with him after a year of moving him from one grandmother to another, from aunt to aunt.

She’d pulled the car over right about where he stood now. He could remember staring at the floodlit statue of Wyoming’s famous cowboy on a bucking bronco that dominated the town’s center.

“Amos, please try to hear me this time,” she’d said. “You have to start helping yourself now. I know what happened to your mom and dad was a terrible tragedy, and it’s not something you can get over quickly—even a smart, strong boy like you. But you have to make a start. You have to decide you want to go on. You can’t keep running away and doing things that you know will get you hurt. That radio tower thing, Amos, was crazy! If you had fallen, they wouldn’t have found enough of you to bury. Now, I know that sounds harsh, but it’s time you...”

He could probably remember the rest of it if he put his mind to it, but he had finally found his footing here after a few rough months, and what had gone before was put away somewhere inside him with the memories of the parents he’d loved so much and had wanted so desperately to join.

It was surprising—and also humbling—to discover that despite all his hard work and success, he could still feel the loneliness that had swamped the little boy he’d been.

He pushed his way into the café, needing coffee. The square room was quietly lit to take advantage of the stone fireplace on one side. Booths lined the walls and tables and chairs were grouped in the center.

A score of tempting aromas mingled with that of barbecue, filling the air with a welcoming familiarity. Red meat had been considered a man-builder when Amos had been a boy, and the Lost Springs residents had eaten well.

When he’d been a young teenager, he and Bill Bartell, another resident of the ranch, would ride their bikes to town to spend the money they’d earned chopping wood for old Mr. Ferris, whose property had bordered the ranch. They would never miss treating themselves to a burger, fries and Coke at the café. While they ate, they would boast about their dreams for the future.

“I’m going to be a country-western star with babes following me everywhere I go,” Bill would say.

Amos had envied Bill’s single-mindedness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Amos would say. “Be an architect, maybe. Something like that. And I’m gonna get rich. Yeah. Really rich.”

Like Bill’s dreams of stage-door babes, Amos had been sure that success in business would mean the company of women. And as a fifteen-year-old boy with raging hormones, he’d been convinced that would make up for being alone in the world. He just needed women.

The court had emancipated him at seventeen so that he could go east to college on a scholarship. He’d earned his degree in psychology with a minor in engineering—an odd combination of interests that had served him well when he turned his fascination with toys into a business.

In the years since then, he’d made friends, money and love to a number of women, but the heart of him still felt disconnected from the rest of the world. Set apart. Lonely.

The sound of country-western music and the buzz of conversation punctuated by loud laughter brought him back to the moment. He headed for the counter when he heard a voice call out from behind him.

“Pike?”

He turned to find a tall man in jeans and a Western shirt standing by a table in the middle of the room, a cautious grin on his face.

“You are Amos Pike?” the man asked. Everyone was staring at him, women particularly.

It took Amos a minute to connect the tall, broad-shouldered man with an air of celebrity to Bill Bartell, the childhood friend with whom he’d shared hamburgers and dreams of the future.

Laughing, Amos changed direction and walked into his old friend’s back-slapping embrace.

“Hell!” Bill exclaimed, taking a step back to admire Amos’s well-cut suit. “You did get rich, judging by the look of you.”

“And you got famous. I saw your duet with Alan Jackson in the video for Farm Aid. I suppose you do have babes following you everywhere.”

They sat down on opposite sides of the table. For the first time Amos noticed another man seated at a right angle to him.

“Well, Amos,” the man said, his aristocratic features elusively familiar. “Cutter Brown. You and I had kitchen detail together one month, remember? We were fencing with the brooms and managed to break all the juice glasses.”

Amos laughed again, remembering the incident clearly. “We were grounded for a week.”

“Yeah. As I remember it, we spent most of the time under the big table in the laundry room playing Lego.”

Amos remembered that. The smells of detergent and fabric softener had made it an unusually sweet-smelling construction site. “What are you doing now?”

“I’m a developer,” Cutter replied with a dry glance in Bill’s direction. “Not the babe-magnet job our buddy has. I know you’re the ultimate toy maker. I read about you in Forbes. How’d you get into that?”

“Completely by accident. Titus Toys offered me an internship after college because I had a degree in psychology and they were planning to revamp their personnel tests and evaluations. One slow afternoon I was talking baseball stats with one of the designers, who happened to mention a problem he was having with the movement on an animated tiger. I helped him rework the structure, got a friend to help on the circuitry, and that was it. They transferred me to design.”

Bill raised a hand for the waitress. Amos ordered a burger and fries. His only concession to the intervening years was coffee rather than Coke.

“Well, I can’t imagine you city slickers are going to make half the money in the sale barn that I am.” Bill punctuated the boast with a tauntingly disdainful look at his companions. “I mean, you might look good in the society pages, but in the clinches, let’s get real. Women want sex appeal and muscle. And you just don’t find that in a three-piece suit.”

Cutter sent Amos a challenging look across the table. “We going to let him get away with that?”

Amos rolled his eyes. “He’ll get set straight when we earn twice what he does. Poor man doesn’t even know that women appreciate style and polish as well as muscle.”

“Probably because he’s never had any,” Cutter added.

“Yeah.”

Bill dug into an inside jacket pocket and produced a hundred dollar bill. “This says you’re wrong, and I earn a higher bid than either of you. Can you match it?”

Amos found two fifties and slapped them on top of Bill’s hundred. Cutter wrote a check and added it to the pile.

“Who holds the bet?” Cutter asked.

Bill handed it to him. “Give it to Lindsay Duncan in the morning.” Lindsay was the daughter of the man who’d founded Lost Springs Ranch for Boys and was its current owner. “Whoever wins donates it to the cause in his name. Deal?”

They mounded hands in the middle of the table as they used to do when they were boys.

“So.” Cutter tucked the money into his pocket. “Nobody’s been married?”

Amos and Bill shook their heads.

“Engaged?”

Two more noes.

Amos leaned back in his chair as the waitress arrived with their food. When she left again, he pounded out a blob of ketchup and passed the bottle to Bill. “How have you managed to avoid the groupies?”

Bill grinned slyly. “I don’t avoid them entirely. The right one hasn’t come looking for me yet.”

Cutter frowned as he accepted the ketchup bottle. “Aren’t you supposed to go looking for her?”

Bill shrugged. “Too busy rehearsing.”

Cutter put the ketchup aside. “And you, Amos? I can’t believe toys are more fun than women.”

“They’re not. But they’re easier to deal with. I haven’t found the right woman, either.”

“And the right one would be?”

“Beautiful, amusing, nymphomaniacal—and a great cook.” He dipped a french fry into the ketchup. “I’m sure she’s just around the corner.”

His companions laughed at his prerequisites, then sobered.

“She sounds perfect,” Bill said.

Cutter nodded. “If we’re lucky, she’s a triplet.”

* * *

LORD, IT WAS HOT. Meg, accustomed to breezy San Francisco, walked the grounds of the Lost Springs Ranch for Boys and looked around desperately for shade.

The place was filled with people. Children wielding water guns ran across the grass with barking dogs in pursuit. Meg would have welcomed a good soaking herself. There were booths and tables offering crafts for sale and advertising services. The air smelled of ribs and chicken grilling on an open pit, and something fresh and wild—some herb or grass she wasn’t familiar with.

Her father looked up from a display of leatherwork, but except for a brief double-take at her appearance, he pretended not to notice her. He’d insisted on coming along to be certain everything went according to plan so that he could report back to Ms. Boradino.

Meg put her hands in the pockets of her jumper and walked on, liking the freedom and comfort of her short jumper—or, rather, Becky’s short jumper—and her low-heeled white sandals.

She’d caught her hair back in the clip and put on the silver-and-turquoise earrings. Laboriously following directions in a magazine dedicated to glamour, she’d even made a serious effort with makeup. After receiving several second looks, she was feeling a little giddy with success.

Then she reminded herself that she had yet to meet her client, Amos Pike. As far as the Boradino plan was concerned, Pike’s opinion was the only one that mattered.

A sudden attack of nervousness threatened to overtake Meg, and she headed for the shade of a spreading oak tree. She was immediately distracted by the sight of a beautiful quilt attached with clothespins to the tree’s lower limbs.

A raffle table with tickets had been set up under the tree, and a banner proclaimed Converse County Hospital—35 Years of Sharing and Caring. Behind the table, a redhead with a bright smile looked up at Meg.

“Here to take a chance on a quilt or a bachelor?” she asked.

Meg handed her a ten-dollar bill. “Both. The quilt is gorgeous. I suppose the men are, too.”

The woman handed her ten tickets. “You mean you haven’t seen them yet?”

“No.” Meg slipped the tickets into her purse.

“Well, here. Somebody left a catalog.” A glossy folder was slipped under Meg’s nose. On the cover was a picture of the ranch and bold letters that read Bachelor Auction. “You’d better hurry if you’re going to pick one out. They’ll be starting in a few minutes.”

Meg straightened and looked at the photos and accompanying bios, pretending a casual perusal. At last she found Amos Pike. And gasped.

“Aha!” The woman laughed. “You found one. I’m Twyla McCabe, by the way.”

Meg tore her eyes from the brochure and shook Twyla’s hand. “Meg Loria,” she said.

Twyla shooed her toward the deeper shade. “You’re looking a little flushed. You know we redheads can’t tolerate too much sun.”

Meg smiled and glanced once again at the photo of Amos Pike. She felt the same emotional punch to the gut she’d experienced a moment ago when she’d seen it for the first time.

She knew this man!

Oh, no one had ever introduced them, but he had Kevin Costner eyes and a George Strait smile, and she’d dreamed about him since she was twelve and the boy next door had called her a scrawny geek and told her she was too puny to grow boobs.

She’d have loved to find him to prove to him that he’d been wrong. But he hadn’t been that wrong, so she’d never made the effort.

“Lord,” she whispered to herself. “Look at him.”

He’d been photographed in a tux, dark hair side-parted and neat, eyebrows dark slashes on a broad brow, nose nicely shaped. His jaw was strong, but his smile softened it.

Her pulse began to accelerate. She had to appeal to this man, who probably had every heiress in the country and several international ones clamoring for his attention. She couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t do it. She would have to find her father and explain that this just wasn’t...

“Favorite Song,” the bio read, “‘All for Love,’ by Bryan Adams. Best Come-on—‘May I have this dance?’ Biggest Achievement—‘The smiles on children’s faces.’”

Okay, maybe she could do it. If this bio was true, they were made for each other. He sounded like everything she’d ever wanted—and maybe a few things she hadn’t thought of.

Twyla came to put a hand on her arm. “Are you all right?” she asked in concern. “Is the heat getting to you?” She looked at the page Meg was studying, then up into her eyes. “Or is it the man?”