Page 6 of Dangerous Obsession

JADE

An hour later, Jade was upstairs in her private rooms on the second floor. Maxim and their guest were both downstairs talking away as if they were old friends. She tried not to be annoyed or overly distrusting. Although that was her job.

Her room was rather Spartan. She liked things clean, with lots of space and not a lot of clutter.

A second-floor room had drawbacks for a security professional.

But Maxim’s bedroom suite was up here, and she had more than one way to descend to the first floor within seconds.

The large room did provide a view of most approaches to the house.

She paced to the door and listened, hearing their conversation drifting up the stairwell.

Part of her liked that Maxim was a gracious host and very generous, but she didn’t exactly want this Cole guy here, making her life tougher. Besides the obvious security threat, the guy was handsome, and handsome meant distracting, and distracting was bad for focus.

She had it tough enough with Maxim.

Jade muttered a curse in Greek and slammed her butt down in her padded leather chair.

She picked up her binoculars and began to scan the boats gathering around the island in the distance.

People liked to dive off the coast of Patroklos.

The water was clear, and there were plenty of caves, wrecks, and geographical features that divers found fascinating.

She worried one of those boats was observing them, waiting to see how their new “guest” managed to worm his way past Maxim’s defenses.

Besides, she was paid to be paranoid.

She didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn’t mean they were out of the woods yet.

She glanced at her computer. When she’d gone to get the water for Cole, she’d run the man’s name and an image from the villa’s security cameras through a bunch of databases, looking for a hit.

They’d come up with nothing. No criminal history or known associates.

That was the only reason she’d left Maxim alone with him.

Briefly. Because as soon as she was done with her task, she’d be right back downstairs. This time she was bringing the pistol.

She frowned, suddenly uneasy. For some reason, she felt like things were changing too fast to control. Too her, Maxim Hawthorne wasn’t simply her boss. She loved him. She never said it aloud anymore, but it was still true.

From the moment she’d first laid eyes on him, she had wanted him.

If she closed her eyes, she could still remember the feel of his hands on her body and remember the scent of his skin.

Remember the way he kissed her. So tenderly at times, and with such fire and passion at others.

She remembered the love in his eyes when he smiled at her…

She had destroyed that. Her . She’d sabotaged her own love life for her job.

It was crazy but true. Bodyguards weren’t supposed to be intimate with the people they protected.

It made them sloppy, made for errors in action and judgment that could get them both hurt or killed.

After it became clear there really were bad people who wanted to steal Maxim’s intellectual property—and probably hurt him in the process—she’d made the impossible choice.

No more kissing, touching, sex. No more love.

Pushing him away had hurt him. At first, he hadn’t given in. He told her how badly he wanted her. How he needed her. But after she threatened to leave him, he finally acquiesced. Sometimes she could still see the desire in his eyes…and the pain.

She was an idiot. She’d thought it would be easier than this. But it had been hell.

A sob nearly escaped her throat. She choked it back. None of that mattered. Not the way it felt to be held in his arms or the way it felt to be touched by him, kissed by him.

If she lingered on these thoughts for too long, her mind would begin to spin fantasies of Max coming to her as he once had.

The way he would take utter possession of her, cupping her head in his hands and sifting his fingers through her hair before he devoured her mouth in a kiss filled with such longing and desire that she could never deny him—

No. All of that was in the past. She’d made her choice. It was the right one. The one she owed Max. He needed someone to protect him from the very real threats to his safety. She had taken the job. She needed to be a professional. She cared for him too much to let him down.

Enough. Get this task done and get back downstairs.

She turned toward the electronic safe built into her wall.

There were several layers of security on it.

First, she used the scanner for her biometric thumbprint.

Once that was accepted and the lights turned green, she entered the security code.

The heavy outer door opened, and she had to enter yet another code for the inner safe. She opened that heavy metal door too.

Inside there was nothing but a hard drive.

She picked the drive up and moved it to a tablet computer that had been locked down, stripped to its core, and modified so it couldn’t connect to the internet or install new software.

At the prompts, she reset the shredder program on the encrypted hard drive per Maxim’s instructions.

If the program timer was not reset once every six days, it would systematically destroy every byte of data on the drive.

High-end encryption kept the shredder program from being shut down too.

When the hard drive was accessed in any way, the program locked everything down demanded the password.

Fail to enter the password and boom. Shredded data.

A fortune’s worth of computer code gone.

Keeping track of this was an important part of her job. An annoying one too. She wished he would delete the whole thing and toss it in the ocean. He didn’t need the money. Why keep this around?

Maybe she shouldn’t wish for that too hard.

This little drive was a big reason he still needed her around.

The advanced-learning protocol AI stored on it was genius, worth billions to every government on the planet, and highly dangerous.

She could still remember the first time she’d done this task.

It hadn’t seemed like such a chore then.

It had seemed like some kind of sacred duty or something.

That sounded stupid to her now. But of course, she and Max had been hot and heavy back then.

They’d been screwing each other’s brains out and enjoying themselves so often and so thoroughly that everything in her life seemed filled with excitement and edgy thrills.

She went through the process in reverse, returning the hard drive to the safe and locking it away again.

After that, she took one more scan with the binoculars to watch the boats and the approaches to the house.

Their guest had come up from the cliff trails.

Wasn’t it strange that a man who was supposed to be recovering from cancer at a health spa decided to leave the trail and endure a difficult climb?

No. She didn’t trust Cole, no matter how cute he might be. Attractiveness was protective camouflage.

With that in mind, she put on her shoulder holster with her service pistol. She knew Max wouldn’t be happy about the gun, but it was her job to keep him safe.

If he didn’t like that, he could damn well fire her, and she’d finally be done with him.

* * *

COLE

It was late afternoon when Cole finally got a few moments to himself. He’d faked feeling a little tired. Nothing was wrong with him except he was still sore from Jade’s kick. But Maxim had immediately urged him to lie down in the guest room if he needed to.

So Cole had taken him up on the offer, trying to get out from under Jade’s watchful eye.

He’d overheard them talking together. Maxim was headed back outside to finish his meditation, and Jade was concerned that she couldn’t be at two places at the same time.

Protecting the house and protecting Maxim.

Maxim had laughed and told her to stay in the house in case Cole needed anything. He’d be fine out on the terrace. Jade had obeyed, but he got the feeling she didn’t like it.

For Cole, it was a setback. He needed her out of the house so he could search the place.

The next phase of his mission was locating and securing the computer code.

It was a strange damn world they lived in, where a computer program could be more valuable than diamonds and gold.

Actually, he hated this new world. Sometimes he suspected computers were more dangerous tools than guns.

Hyperbole, maybe, but still, at least everyone knew a gun would destroy you. No one ever suspected a computer.

Staying in the guest room wasn’t accomplishing the mission, so he decided to recon the grounds. He wanted to see if he could learn the house layout and maybe spot something interesting through the big upstairs windows that might point him in the right direction.

Jade was loitering nearby in the kitchen. He knew she was listening for him. So he stuck his head in and gave her his most charming smile.

“I’m feeling better, but I’m a little restless. If you don’t mind, I’m going to walk around outside a for a while. You have such beautiful gardens and patios here.”

She watched him, unfazed by his smile. Oh well. You couldn’t win them all. She was pretty enough to be hit on all the time by men. He idly wondered how many of them she ended up kicking.

“Do you want a tour?” Jade finally asked.

“I wouldn’t want to impose. I know you have important work to do. I won’t be long.”