Page 27 of The Bodyguard

He frowned. “Oh.” And then he waited, like Who are you, then?

“I’m the primary Executive Protection Agent on your personal security team.”

He really looked baffled. “You’re the what on my what?”

I sighed. “I’m in charge of your security detail.”

“I don’t have a security detail.”

Well, this was new. “Pretty sure you do.”

At that, he clamped his hand around my arm just above the elbow—not so hard that it hurt, but hard enough that I couldn’t mistake the strength of the grip—and he led me back out the front door. In truth, it’s a grip I knew how to get out of, but I was so befuddled by what was happening, I just followed like a lamb.

Outside, he closed the door behind us and locked it.

Then, he got back to business. “You’re telling me you’re not the housekeeper?”

“Do I look like the housekeeper?”

Jack Stapleton shrugged, like Why not?

I should’ve let it go. “How many housekeepers show up for work in a silk blouse?”

“Maybe you were planning to change?”

Okay. Done with that. I gave a sharp sigh. “I am not the housekeeper.”

That’s when he held up his finger, like Just a sec, turned, and walked down the driveway digging his cell phone out of his pocket.

After a few steps, I heard him say, “Hey. A person just showed up here claiming to be personal security.”

Wait. Was he suspicious of me?

I couldn’t hear the response.

But I could hear Jack Stapleton loud and clear. “We decided against that already. Twice.”

He was kicking the crushed gravel on the driveway.

“But that was years ago.”

A pause.

“It won’t work. It’ll be a disaster. There has to be another way.”

Another pause.

Jack Stapleton and whoever he was talking to—His manager? His agent? His guru?—went round and round. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that I could hear him, or if he didn’t care… but he vociferously protested my presence in his life, right within earshot.

It stung a little. To be honest.

He argued for so long that I finally sat down on the little bench near the potted fiddle-leaf fig, noting that it could be used to smash the window behind it and should be moved, or sold, or thrown away. With nothing else to do, I half-heartedly assessed the property—distance from the street: adequate; lack of driveway gate: suboptimal; potential skull damage from one of those landscaping rocks: lethal—more out of habit than anything else.

Had I ever shown up for an intake meeting with a client who didn’t even know he’d hired me?

No. This was a first.

It was unsettling to think that he didn’t even want me there.