chapter 3

THE DOWAGER COUNTESS HIRES US the next day.

It’s her man who makes the call—that’s usually how it works with the titled ones—assistants and secretaries do the legwork. Her insisting on personally interviewing me and Logan was unusual, but once we were in the library of the Bumblebridge estate, it made sense. She had control-freak micromanager written all over her. And her granddaughter is a chip off the old tiara.

Abby Haddock.

Technically, Lady Abigail. Technically-technically, Dr. Haddock— which is hot and inspires a plethora of naughty fantasies. But I like Abby best. It suits her.

Christ, just thinking her name has me grinning like an idiot. One of those fools that go on about butterflies flapping in their stomach and walking around on cloud sixty-nine.

There’s just something so enticing about her. Fierce and fascinating and fuck-all arousing. On the outside, she’s straitlaced, buttoned up and proper, but beneath the surface there’s more. A sharp wit, a willfulness, a fire.

I remember the taste of it on my tongue—the taste of her.

And I could feel it yesterday reeling me in like a randy moth towards a slick, simmering flame. I can’t wait to see her again, tease her again—make those pretty, pouty lips tighten in that kitten-fierce scowl again.

And if I play my cards right—I’ll get to feel the scrape of her claws down my back, while I’m sliding deep inside, making her moan.

Abby’d be a scratcher—definitely.

That part will have to wait until after our job is finished, of course. I don’t mess around with clients. It’s a rule. While I’ve never put much stake in rules, in our line of work, messing around on the job is dangerous. If you’re getting off with the woman you’re supposed to be guarding, you’re sure as shit not paying attention to possible threats.

At least not if you’re doing it right—and I always do it right. So, clients are off-limits. But former clients? They’re fair game.

“Keep your left up, Harry!”

The private protection racket is not a huge industry. The clientele pool is small and there are only a few companies who can meet their needs.

“Oh! Nice shot, Owen!”

Reputation, word of mouth, is everything.

Because those who require our services need to trust that we can keep them safe—and more importantly, that we’ll do so discreetly. Old Winston, who first hired me to be on Prince Nicholas’s team, used to say personal security is like a wireless fence that keeps the pups in the yard— impenetrable and invisible.

“Somebody call the priest—Harry’s gonna need last rites!”

You’ve got your celebrities, entertainers—they can be particular about ridiculous things and get prickly if a bodyguard steps into their shot or bars the wrong person from sitting at their VIP table. But it’s the politicians and dignitaries—bigwigs with pristine reputations—when things get really interesting.

“Sweep the leg, Johnny!”

I’m talking clandestine meetings, shady deals, bizarre compulsions, illnesses, secret lives and entire second fucking families. Once in a while, we’ll get a disgruntled citizen gone mad or a run-of-the-mill assassin . . . but on an average day, the biggest threat to our clients is the press. They’re usually chomping at the bit to sniff out any speck of dirt and splatter it across the front pages. Journalists are relentless, unmerciful and smart.

We need to be smarter. And that doesn’t happen by accident.

“He’s making a comeback! I told you he was a scrapper. Go, Harry, go!”

I left school after Year 10 and Lo didn’t even get that far—but neither of us are stupid. Each round of new hires goes through seven weeks of training in defense, weapons and evasive driving. S&S Securities is housed in an abandoned warehouse that we refurbished into a reception area, offices and a full-sized gym with a shooting range and driving course out back.

“Aaand time!” I call from outside the ropes of the ring, where our newest crop of recruits is rotating through sparring sessions. I reset the stopwatch around my neck, while Logan claps Harry and Owen on their backs.

“Good match, boys.”

Harry’s a lanky fellow with shoulder-length dark hair and a careless, cocky attitude—nothing gets under his skin. Owen is stocky with fists like two bricks, but young. His ID says he’s eighteen, but the baby fat of his cheeks and smooth, hairless chin make me think he’s more likely two years shy of that age. They’re East Amboy boys—a rough, poor neighborhood— but with the right guidance, they’ll grow into outstanding guards.

Because when you come from nothing and belong to no one, you’ll do anything to protect something worth having.

We only hire people with a raw skillset—they come to us like soggy, sad lumps of clay—and we mold them into polished, sleek, unbreakable shields. Also—we don’t hire dicks. It’s the Golden Rule. If a rotten apple will spoil the bunch, a full-blown wanker will make us all miserable.

I scan the clipboard in my hands. “Beatrice, Walter—you’re up next.” Now this is going to be fun.

Bea is a tiny blond thing, but she’s got mad skills. Her dad’s American, former CIA—real covert operations shit that the general public will never hear about. Her brothers are Special Forces and from the time little Bea could walk, they taught her everything they knew.

“Are you joking?” Walter asks, gazing down at Beatrice like she’s an insect we’re asking him to swat with a sledgehammer.

“Threats don’t just come in large and ugly,” Logan explains. “You need to know how to take down the cute ones too.”

Walter could be the twin brother of Lurch from The Addams Family. He’s six foot five, in his fifties, and solid as a tank. He’s a retired cop—too old to still be walking the beat but too young to waste away on his wife’s couch drinking beer and watching television all day.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover, Walter,” I add, because I’m wise like that. “If you do, you’re just asking to get your throat sliced by a paper cut.”

He shrugs, giving me a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you kind of look, and moves to the center of the ring.

Bea hops side to side, fists up, chin down, threatening. “If you go easy on me, old man, I’ll rip your balls off and make them into earrings.”

Creative shit-talking is always appreciated.

Logan swings his arm down, starting the match, and I click the stopwatch. Bea immediately scurries up Walter’s back, wrapping her arm around his throat in a headlock, like a squirrel trying to take down a giant oak tree.

As Walter tries to shake her off, the door to the windowless back room of the shop—it’s basically a broom closet—opens, and Stella walks towards me. She’s thin and pale with straight black hair. The black lipstick on her lips matches her black clothes and she has several shiny piercings scattered across her body.

“The Haddock file,” she says in that reliably flat tone, handing me a thick binder.

Stella and her twin brother, Amos, are our super-sleuth research team. They compile files on each client—quirks, kinks, debts, phobias, friends, enemies and routines—all the information we need to know, and some we wish we didn’t.

I flip through the pages. “That was quick.”

“I wanted to get it done right away. You know . . . since I might not make it to tomorrow.”

Stella is a raging hypochondriac. But she’s also Goth, so the idea of dropping dead at a moment’s notice doesn’t perturb her.

“Thanks, Stell.”

She nods, turns around and walks straight towards the back room, closing the door behind her. I tuck the binder under my arm for some late- night reading—and when it comes to Abby’s section, possibly some late- night tossing off.

Shame is for losers—which is why I have none.

In the ring, Walter manages to flip Bea off, and tries to pin her down with his foot, but she rolls away lickety-split, evading his stomping foot to the raucous cheers of the sweaty spectators.

“Tommy—a walk-in just came in. You’re going to want to take this one.”

Rounding out our band of misfit toys is Celia, our receptionist and bookkeeper. She’s a brown-haired girl, with kitty-cat eyeglasses and a snug pencil-skirt vintage style that shows off her perfect hourglass figure. Celia’s an upper-class lass who took the job to get out from under her father’s thumb. She and I hooked up a whole lot when she first started—I think

knowing her father would be ticked about her fucking a bloke like me offered her an extra level of thrill. But eventually, it ran its course for both of us.

Which brings me to our firm’s non-fraternization policy. We don’t have one.

Fighting, fucking, competition and ribbing are good for morale. Trying to one-up each other keeps our people sharp, alert. As long as it doesn’t affect their professionalism in the field or infect the comradery of the team

—Lo and I don’t give a damn what or who they do, when they’re off the clock.

“Show them to my office, Celia. I’ll be right along.”

I handle new client intakes. While Logan has a more cheerful disposition these days, he’s not exactly chatty. And putting a stranger at ease, getting them to reveal the details of why they need our services, takes a certain amount of finesse. Charm.

I toss the stopwatch at Logan, who catches it one-handed without taking his eyes off the sparring pair. Incidentally, my money’s on Bea for the win. Walter may have the stats on his side—but she wants it more. And in my experience, when it comes to fighting—and life—desire kicks logic’s arse every single time.

Every country has that one couple that epitomizes relationship goals. The impeccable partners, the passionate love story, the pair that all the regular Joes and Janes hope to grow up to be. William and Kate, Beyoncé and Jay- Z, David Beckham and Posh Spice, Brangelina and their gaggle of children before that went to shit.

In Wessco, Prince Nicholas and Olivia, the Duke and Duchess of Fairstone, are the reigning power couple of perfection. But for a while, it looked like Reid Frazier and Hartley Morrow would usurp them.

Reid was the bad-boy, hot-shot footballer who’d finally found the right girl, and Hartley was the celestially stunning American movie star who gave up her career to follow his. They saturated the internet and celebrity magazines that Fiona gobbles down like sweets. The courtship, the

multimillion-dollar wedding, the Instagram polished pictures of the birth of their son—it was all a pretty fairy tale.

Until it wasn’t.

Eventually it spiraled into tale-as-old-as-time tabloid fodder—infidelity, drugs, domestic disturbances and a nasty custody war over a smiling three- year-old boy.

And now Hartley Morrow is sitting in my office. Light blond and tragically beautiful in that fragile, ashen way sad women are.

“Hello, Miss Morrow—I’m Tommy Sullivan.”

She stands, pushing her big round dark glasses to the top of her head and shaking my outstretched hand.

“Can I get you something to drink?” I ask. “Tea, water . . . whiskey?” She lets out a jittery laugh. “A whiskey would be good.”

At the minibar in the corner I pour myself a glass too, because no one likes drinking alone. Hartley’s hand trembles when she takes the glass from me, sipping it as I sit behind my desk.

“What brings you here, miss? What can I do for you?”

She slips a ragged piece of paper from her purse and lays it on the desk like it’s poisonous. “After I picked up Sammy from preschool today, I came home and found this. On my bed.”

I read the lines scrawled across the paper—it’s a fairly typical but nasty death threat. Bitch, whore, hurting her child while she’s forced to watch, are big themes.

“There have been threats, as I’m sure you can imagine. Awful online messages, voicemails and emails to my lawyer’s office . . . but this . . . whoever did this was inside my home, Mr. Sullivan. Where my son sleeps.”

“Where’s your son now?”

“At a hotel, with his nanny. I packed a bag and just left. I didn’t know what else to do—we couldn’t stay there.”

“You did the right thing.” I nod.

She breathes slow and takes another drink from the glass. “My friend— Penny Von—we did a film together years ago but we’ve stayed in touch. She recommended your firm.”

Penny Von is the stage name of Penelope Von Titebottum, sister to Lady Sarah—Prince Henry’s wife and the future Queen of Wessco.

“Reid’s had a terrible season and the fans, his teammates, the whole club blames me for it. Even his teammates’ wives . . . women who I thought

were my friends . . . the ones who’ll still

speak to me, just want the divorce finished so they can get back to focusing on winning games. My lawyer contacted the police about the threats, but they don’t really seem interested in investigating who’s doing it. They just add it to the file.”

“Who do you think is doing it?”

People should trust their instincts more. Nine times out of ten their gut already knows the answer and their brain is just standing in the way.

“I think it was Reid. It’s insane that I can say that about the father of my child—about a man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with—but I think it’s him. He wants to scare me so I’ll give in, sign the divorce papers, stop fighting.”

She scrapes out a bitter laugh, shaking her head.

“And the joke is, I don’t even want anything—he can have the houses, the cars—I don’t even want child support. I just want Sammy. Full custody. Between practices and games, Reid is barely home most of the year. He hasn’t seen Sammy in months. It’s just about winning for him. He can’t stand to lose—ever. And I think he’s doing this now because it looks like I might actually win custody and that’s just not acceptable to him.”

Doing this job long enough turns you into an amateur philosopher on the human condition. Not so much when it comes to women—they’re complicated, nuanced creatures. But men are simpler. There’s only a few types to us.

Some are like my dad—kindhearted and gentle, but strong in their own way. In the way they provide, and the way they teach. Some are slick, underhanded—they get their jollies from pulling a fast one and getting away with shit they shouldn’t. Some men are like me, like Logan—simple tastes and low maintenance. We don’t care about much—but try to harm what we do care about? We’ll rip your throat out without breaking a sweat or batting an eye.

And then there are men like Reid Frazier—possessive, with an undercurrent of anger and a desperate need to prove how big their cocks are. There’s something ugly inside them, and no matter how much they try to keep it in, eventually it spills out over everything.

I really fucking hate men like Frazier.

And they definitely don’t like men like me.

I pick up the phone on my desk and punch the button for Celia.

“Have Gordon come in, please. Tell him he’s on the clock.”

I replace the receiver and look into Miss Morrow’s soft blue eyes.

“Gordon is one of my more experienced bodyguards—he’s a good man. He’s going to go with you to collect Sammy and the nanny and then he’ll get you settled in a new hotel so we can be sure you aren’t followed. Then he’ll stay there with you until we have a team in place.”

Typically, teams of three are assigned to each client based on skills, personality and expectations. For example, old Walter’s first go in the field will be with the Dowager Countess—lucky him—because the threat level is low and he’s what a lady of her stature expects in a personal guard. If I sicced Harry on her, with his fresh mouth and fetish for pop music, it wouldn’t go over well.

“We’re not private investigators,” I tell her, “so I can’t promise to find out who’s behind this, but I can refer you to some PIs who can.”

Hartley seems surprised. “Just like that?”

My tone grows gentler, becomes reassuring, because I think she needs that.

“Yeah. Just like that.”

She sits up straighter, like she’s just recalling something important.

“Mr. Sullivan, Reid has frozen all the accounts. My lawyer has been working pro bono and our nanny’s been with Sammy since he was born. She’s practically family. I won’t be able to pay you until we sign—”

I hold up my hand.

“We’ll get that part sorted when things are more settled. Don’t worry about it now.”

Her eyes go teary and she bites her lip as she whispers, “Thank you. I just . . . I just don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

In real life, the opportunity to be a hero doesn’t usually come along, even if you’ve got the stuff for it. It’s like that David Bowie song—even just for one day isn’t attainable for most people.

But around here, we’re not most people.

“You don’t have to be afraid, Hartley. Not anymore. That, I can promise.”

After Gordon comes in and he and Hartley head out, Lo walks into my office. “We’re packing it in for the day. Was that Hartley Morrow?”

“Yeah, new client—I’ll fill you in. We should call James, see if he’s ready to come over full-time.”

James Winchester was the third guard with me and Logan on Prince Nicholas’s personal security team. He’s top-notch and still works with the royal family—on Prince Henry & Co. Though he likes the job, he’s been looking for something with less travel, that will let him stay home more consistently with his little boy, who he’s raising on his own.

“I think this one is just what James has been looking for.”

Later that night, after the shop is locked up and our new brood of hires has been sent on their merry way, and the Morrow situation is being dealt with, I get comfy in my bed. I settle in, lay back shirtless between the cool sheets, with the Haddock file perched on my lap, as I prepare to discover all of Abby’s filthy little secrets.

There’s a formal picture of her—white coat, delicate chin raised, brow relaxed, her smart mouth settled in a slight, refined smile. It was taken just after she finished medical school and began her residency, around the time of our first unforgettable meeting.

I looked for her, in the days after our kiss and slap. I asked around, tried to see her again, to get her number before they discharged me from the hospital. When she remained elusive, I figured maybe she was involved with someone. Unavailable. For a moment, I considered maybe she wasn’t even real—that she had been a seductive angel in my imagination, sent by God to bring me back from the pull of death. And then, after I’d fully recovered from my knock on the head, I got swept up in the rush of building the business, of starting something new that belonged to me and Lo alone, and the rough thrill of one dangerous job after the next.

I was a bloody fool not to have gone back for her, to have tried harder, looked more.

In my experience, second chances don’t come around often and I have no intention of wasting this one.

I can’t help but smile as I picture her in that swimming pool the other day—railing at an unruly frog, her wild mass of red hair glinting gold in the

sun, and her wet, snug bathing suit highlighting those lissome limbs, the fine curve of her hips, and scintillating swell of her perfect breasts.

I get to guard that beautiful body for the next two weeks, up close and personal.

Fuck—I love my job.