Page 46 of Nothing More

The stranger approached the desk – swaggered toward it, really, and everything inside Raven recoiled. He stuck a hand across it. “Hey, there, doll.” His smile was all teeth, and nothing of friendliness. She noted the Sgt. At Arms patch on his cut. “It’s arealpleasure to meet you.”

On a different day, under different circumstances, she would have laughed in his face; even now felt a bubble of it in her throat. But it took little effort to meet his smarmy grin with her flattest, least impressed look, and say, “I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting you.”

She had the pleasure of watching his expression freeze for one bewildered moment. He recovered quickly, but a new edge crept into his already razor-sharp smile. She had him pegged as a bastard straight away, but the minute shift in his expression confirmed it.

She leaned to the side to peer around him. “Anatoly,” she called, “what’s going on?”

He was typing something on his phone, and held up a finger telling her to hold.

She cleared her throat, pointedly, but the finger remained.

The stranger said, “I’m Shep, by the way. Shepherd.”

“Lovely.Anatoly.”

He pocketed his phone and approached the desk – but stopped halfway, lingering behind one of the chairs. His expression was completely cool: detached, without any of the bristling intensity he’d been flashing her way the last forty-eight hours. “I’m taking a step back,” he said, flatly. “Gonna do some outside surveillance, ask around, see what I can find out on the street. Maverick sent Shep to be your shadow.”

She looked at “Shep” – grinning wickedly – and at Toly, already turning away. Panic tasted metallic on her tongue, chased closely by a hot, full-body flush of anger.

She shot to her feet and charged around the desk. “One moment,” she told Shepherd, and then headed for Toly. When she reached him, she pinched his jacket sleeve between two fingers, and marched him toward the door.

He could have resisted, and she expected him to, really, but he followed along readily enough. Through the door, which she kicked shut.

She caught Melanie’s gaze. “Could you–”

“Check on the copies? Yes, ma’am.” She seemed happy to scramble away and leave them alone in the hallway.

Toly’s gaze was no warmer up close. If anything, he seemed even less interested, withdrawn and uncaring. It stung more than she expected.

Well, she wasn’t going to care, either. She donned her most cutting, falsely polite tone, her nastiest smile, tiny, and razor-edged, and the killer of hundreds of egos over the years. “I’ve not been sleeping well, so there’s a chance I heard incorrectly in there, but it sounded like that grinning hyena was saying he’s going to take over as my security detail, and that you’re going to go play in the street.”

He exhaled slowly, nostrils flared, bored, annoyed by her, and had the audacity to check his phone again.

She snatched it away from him and held it behind her back. “Answer the question, Toly.”

He looked disappointed, now, mildly so, still largely indifferent. And here she stood breathing raggedly and two seconds from smashing his phone to the floor.

“You didn’t ask a question,” he deadpanned. “And you already seem to know what’s happening.” When she glared at him – the really good, laser-focused, hope-you-die glare – he nodded and relented…a fraction. “Yes, Shep is taking my place. I’ll be surveilling from a distance – not playing in the street.”

She didn’t know which made her more furious: the idea of spending her entire day – and night, oh God, that man asleep on her couch, eating her food, ogling her little sister, because he just had that vibe – withShep. Or knowing that Toly couldn’t bear to be around her anymore.

“You coward,” she hissed. “I’m not a child: you can turn me down and I won’t collapse into tears. Just say ‘no,’ next time, instead of all” – she gestured toward the closed office door with his phone – “this.”

He plucked his phone from her hand without difficulty, and slipped it away. Stood with hands on his hips afterward, staring her down without a shred of interest. “This has nothing to do with you, or what happened last night,” he said. “I was never the right person to guard you. I’m not a bodyguard.”

“Then why did Maverick assign you to me in the first place?”

He shrugged. “Dunno. I fixed it. You won’t have to put up with me anymore.”

Then, to her amazement, he turned, and strode off down the hall.

Raven tried and failed to remember a time when a man had willingly – eagerly, even – walked away from her. When a man had been the one to end a conversation, dismissive and in too much of a hurry for her.

Too late, she called, “Wanker!” And then he was around the corner and out of sight.

“Urgh!” She pressed her face into her hands. “Stupid,” she scolded herself. “Bloodystupid.”

“Miss Blake?”