The Protector

Lone Wolf, Book 1

by Bridget Essex

Synopsis:

What would you do if the woman you loved was the one person you could never be with?

Elizabeth Grayson doesn’t want a bodyguard.  She’s worked hard for her normal life and her job as a violinist in the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and the last thing she needs is a reminder of how much power her father still has over her.  He’s a good enough man, but as the founder of a booming seafood empire—with a sizable fortune to his name—he’s a prime target for his less than ethical competitors.  And that means Elizabeth is a target, too.

She doesn’t quite believe her life is in danger until the day of the “accident.”  But when her father hires a bodyguard for Elizabeth, she still utterly refuses…that is, until she meets the mysterious Layne O’Connell.  Sarcastic, charming and secretive, Layne is hired to keep Elizabeth safe.  But protecting her heart wasn’t in the job description.

As Elizabeth’s life is threatened again and again, a strange mystery unfolds, and it seems that even her father is keeping secrets from her.  And when Layne reveals her true nature, Elizabeth’s world is thrown upside down.

Because Elizabeth has fallen for the one person she can’t be with:  the brooding werewolf who was charged with keeping her alive.

Part heart-pounding mystery, part epic romance, the novel The Protector, the first book in the Lone Wolf series, will leave you spellbound.  It is approximately 62,000 words (several days worth of reading or so).

“The Protector”

Lone Wolf, Book 1

© Bridget Essex 2014

Rose and Star Press

First Edition

All rights reserved

No part of this e-book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Rose and Star Press except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews.  Please note that piracy of copyrighted materials is illegal and directly harms the author.  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Dedication:

For the love of my life.

And for Ruby and Marian, two of the best friends I could ever have wished on a star for.  Thank you so much for believing in me.  This wolf’s for you!

Contents:

Chapter 1:  Close Call

Chapter 2:  Bodyguard

Chapter 3:  A Better Violin

Chapter 4:  Audience

Chapter 5:  Not Really a Date

Chapter 6:  The Ring

Chapter 7:  Knock ‘em Dead

Chapter 8:  Trust

Chapter 9:  In the Wild

Chapter 10:  Third Time’s the Charm

Chapter 11:  Instinct

Chapter 12:  An Invitation

Chapter 13:  The Choice

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Chapter 1:  Close Call

It was the day of my accident that my father hired the bodyguard.

I remember feeling the car shudder all around me unexpectedly as the sleek black SUV hit my SMART car’s rear.  I’d glanced in my rearview mirror, at the driver with the meaty, black-gloved hands on the steering wheel, the impressive, impassive sunglasses blocking out any emotion in his eyes, his thin lips in a tight frown as he laid into the gas pedal and slammed into me again, so fast that if I hadn’t been watching the SUV ram into me, I never would have thought such a big, bulky vehicle could move so quickly.

I don’t remember much after that except spinning and spinning, my head whipped against the unyielding window so hard that I saw stars and then darkness.  And then there was this gigantic, metallic crunch that I’ll probably be hearing in my nightmares for the rest of my life.

When I woke up in the hospital, my father was hovering over me.  Alexander Grayson, a staggeringly tall and usually intimidating (well, to anyone but me) man doesn’t hover.  But he was that day, his handsome face contorted in a grimace of pain as he stared down at me, brown eyes wide and actually tear-filled.  He was wearing his usual designer suit because he’d probably come right from the office, and his shoulder-length salt and pepper hair was swept back in a loose ponytail.  I teased him about that ponytail all the time, which I think just made him wear it more.  His eyes glittered as he took a quavering breath, and then I exhaled with a sigh, blinking as my eyes adjusted, and the boring white tiled hospital ceiling came into focus.

“Hi, Dad,” I croaked, then immediately wished I hadn’t spoken as my sides squeezed and my lungs ached like I’d inhaled a gallon of glass shards.  Everything hurt like a sonofabitch.

“Elizabeth?”  My dad seemed to crumple as he kneeled on one knee beside me, and then my father was really crying, bright, shining tears that snaked their way down the smooth skin of his face, getting caught in his trim mustache and tiny beard that—he insisted, much to my chagrin—made him look handsome.  “God, I thought this was it, sweetheart—I thought you were going to…going to…”  He trailed off, sinking down to both knees by the side of the bed and gripping my hand so tightly, I wondered if he’d bruise my fingers.  His eyes were fierce, flashing with a light I rarely saw in them, then, almost a red shimmer.  He growled, uncharacteristically low and savage:  “I’m going to get those fuckers who did this to you.”

I might have a dirty mouth, but I hate to tell you this:  I most certainly inherited it from my mother.  I don’t think my father would cuss out a mass murderer.  To the best of my knowledge, I was pretty certain I’d never heard him use an expletive in my entire life.

He…wasn’t really acting normal.

I sat up, then, which might not have been the best idea.  My head spun like a very sadistic carnival ride that won’t let you off, complete with flashing lights and stars sharpening their points on the corners of my vision.  I blinked, tried to swallow.  “Dad, it’s okay—please don’t worry.  I’m fine,” I lied to him, swinging my bare legs out from under the hospital sheet and over the edge of the bed.  In the background, machines began to beep in warning, obnoxious bursts of electronic protest, but I pushed myself up and stood anyway, trying to prove the point to him that I was “fine.”

My father had leapt up the moment I did, and was steadying me with a strong hand at my elbow, but even though he gripped me tightly, it’s mostly because I’m stubborn beyond belief that the floor didn’t rush up to meet me.  I ran a hand that was hooked up to an IV through my dirty blonde hair.  It was down and around my shoulders, sweeping against my back in long, lank strands, and I was wishing I could find a ponytail holder somewhere.  That was the last thought I had before black dots started poking around the edge of my vision, beginning to swarm.

Even I knew when I was overdoing it.

“So how cutthroat is that seafood business getting?” I joked weakly as I sat back down on the bed.  I’d done enough for the moment.  I slowly became aware that I was only wearing one of those incredibly sexy (hah!) hospital gowns the color of bad milk, and I absent-mindedly threw the scratchy, starched sheet of the hospital bed over my shoulders, drawing it close.  “Dad, that guy who rear-ended me…I think he purposefully rammed me,” I told my father, searching his eyes.

Again, something dangerous glittered behind his dark brown irises, but he schooled his features, adopting his usual indulgent grin that he always got when he was about to do something that would make me furious.  Like, you know, the time that he told me I couldn’t go to college across the country because I’d “be in danger” from “everything.”

My father has always been too overprotective, never with any sort of reason.  And it’s not as if I’ve not proven I can take care of myself.  I’m a tough lady, but I never seemed tough enough to face all of the dangers my father supposed were in the world and out to get me.

I guess he maybe had a tiny point, however, since my car had just been rammed by a stranger for no apparent reason.

“Did they catch the guy?” I asked after a long moment, when my father said nothing, his jaw flexing as he pivoted back on his heels and stared up at the ceiling.

“Elizabeth, sweetheart,” said Dad, shifting from foot to foot then.  He was so terrible at delivering bad news with his sad frown, and his tiny mustache drooping a little to go along with the frown.

“Dad, I can handle it,” I promised him, softening my voice as I drew the sheet closer.  “If the cops didn’t catch the guy, I’m sure they will.  He’s not dead, is he?” I asked, then, cold moving over my skin in waves that gave me goosebumps.  Yeah, the guy had rammed me, but I didn’t want him to be dead.  I didn’t remember what had happened after the second ramming.  Maybe his SUV had flown off the freeway into a guardrail, or…

“Sweetheart, I think it’s important to start at the beginning.”  He cleared his throat, throwing out his hands impressively, as if he was on a stage or behind a podium.  “As you well know, Grayson Seafood is the envy of the world,” said my father then, and I sat back with raised eyebrows.  He was taking the long-winded approach, using his very particular voice that he always rolled out at company holiday parties when he had to make a speech about how great the past year had been for the bottom line.  And the fishermen and warehouse workers and packers who worked for my dad were usually wasted at that point—as would anyone be at a work holiday party with a very generous catered banquet and open bar—and would cheer him through his dangerously long-winded speech about how Grayson Seafood was to be envied, and they were the biggest packers of seafood in the world and people across the globe were eating our fish every night, and…you get the picture.  Boring, feel-good stuff that would be applauded at the end as more booze was consumed in celebration at the amazing year they’d had.

But I’d just been in a car accident.  And as the daughter of the founder of Grayson Seafood, I was well acquainted with just how envied the family business was.  A little too well acquainted, considering how many of my father’s speeches I’d had to suffer through in my lifetime.

“Dad, what happened to the driver?” I asked pointedly.  He frowned a little with a sigh—he’d just been getting started, and if there’s anything my father loves, it’s a good speech—but then his lips tightened.

“Well, to put it plainly, the overseas fishing moguls have it out for us, sweetheart,” he said with a frown, spreading his hands.  “They’re targeting me, and since you’re my only family, they’re targeting you.”

My father was a bit of a conspiracy theorist, the kind who didn’t believe we’d actually landed on the moon, that the assassination of JFK was some sort of government murder, and that there have been a ton of UFO landings that the feds don’t want us to know about.  But this was pushing the envelope a bit, even for him.

“Since when is the seafood business as bad as the mob?” I chuckled, trying to turn it into a joke.  I grimaced as I shifted my weight and then wished I hadn’t.  My tailbone was sore—how had that even happened?  I sighed and leaned back on my wrists, staring up at my father with a long-suffering expression.

He took this as license to continue his speech.

“The seafood business has a long and illustrious history of being just as cutthroat as—” began my father, but then he saw the look on my face.  He swallowed and shook his head.  “Sweetheart, you know that we turned profits last year that were almost double every other seafood company in the world.”

“Dad, I love you—but I hate to remind you that I’m not in the seafood business.  So why would these supposed ‘overseas fishing moguls,’” I sighed and made air quotes, “be targeting me?  Frankly, why would they be targeting anyone at all?  These aren’t perfect diamonds or everlasting oil wells—they’re profits made from bulgy-eyed tuna and swordfish,” I told him with a shake of my head.  I glanced at the wall clock over his shoulder and felt the icy fingers of dread choke me a little.  “Crap, Dad—we have to finish this later.  I’m late for practice!”  I struggled to stand again, even as the black points began to swarm at the edges of my vision.  “And if I’m late again, Amelia is going to kill me, and I did just totally survive a near-death experience, so I don’t want another quite so soon,” I told him with as much of a straight face as I could muster.

My coping skills consist of sarcasm and humor.  And that’s pretty much it.  Which is probably why I’ve never been able to have a completely serious conversation with a girlfriend to save my life.

Which is probably why I’m single.

“Honey, you’re not letting me explain…”  My father looked like he was in actual pain as he held out his hands to me with a grimace, waving them to get me to lay back down on the hospital bed.  “Someone tried to actually kill you today.  I really don’t think you’re understanding the gravity of the situation, and you’re really not reacting like—”

“I’m a big girl, Dad” I sighed, straightening as I stood and winced.  Everything began to spin, but after a moment, the spinning subsided.  Which was about as good as I was going to get, it seemed.  “You know I love you, Dad.  But I think you have a tendency to believe I’m still five years old and need my rocking horse fixed,” I breathed out and smiled at him softly, shaking my head.  “But I’m thirty-three years old,” I reminded my father with another shake of my head as I squeezed his hands.  “And I have my own life, and you need to stop worrying about me, or you’re going to develop an ulcer.  The guy probably rammed me because of my rainbow bumper stickers or something.  I honestly can’t think of a single reason why overseas fishing moguls would even know I existed, let alone would want to make me sleep with the fishes.  Oh, God, that was such a terrible joke…”  I sat back down on the bed, holding my side and taking small, panting breaths.  I tried to focus on the problem at hand.  “Does Amelia know I was in the accident?”

“The whole orchestra knows—they sent you those flowers,” said my father, waving his hand in the direction of a few dozen roses on a side table with an impatient shake of his head.  “And the doctors say that if you take it easy, you’ll still be able to make your concert on Friday.”

“I’d better,” I groaned, casting my eyes heavenward.  “That one piece has been such a bastard, and I’ve spent far too much time practicing, and put in too much work not to—”

“Elizabeth,” said my father sternly, then.  Dad’s never been very good at stern, and the older I get, the mellower he becomes.  So this was surprising.

“Yes?” I asked heavily.

“Today, because of me, you were almost killed.”  His eyes were so pain-filled, I wanted to give him a tight hug, but I sat where I was, biting my lip.  “And that’s…that’s unthinkable to me that harm could have come to you because of me.  And it doesn’t matter if you think so or not, but the fishing business has gotten very cutthroat these past few years…”  He didn’t look at me as he was saying it.  He was examining the ring that my mother gave him, years ago, the blood-red garnet flashing with a real, raw fire against the pale skin of his hand under the sickly fluorescent hospital lights.  “I couldn’t bear to lose you, not like this.  So, I’ve taken matters into my own hands.”  He glanced up at me, his eyes narrowed, and his mouth in a thin, hard line.

That wasn’t ominous at all.  I swallowed, frowning.  “Dad?”

“They’re discharging you from the hospital now,” he said quickly, glancing back over his shoulder toward the hospital room door with that uncanny way he had.  No nurse had come by, but he knew I’d be discharged soon?  That’s my dad, psychic extraordinaire.  “I’ll take you back to my house, not your apartment…I wouldn’t hear of anything else—it’s closer, and you can rest for a little while, borrow one of my cars,” he said, raising his hand as I began to protest.  “And then we’ll discuss the measures that need to be taken to keep you safe.”

“Measures?” I practically squeaked, then began to shake my head adamantly.  “Dad, no measures—”

“Ah, Ms. Grayson, it’s good to see you up!” said the nurse, then, striding confidently into the room with a bright smile.  She was very pretty, with curly blonde hair swept up into a ponytail and a wide, comforting smile.  I’d just been through a major accident—I shouldn’t have been noticing how pretty she was.  But I did anyway.  She tapped a pen onto her clipboard and flipped through a few pages before glancing back up with another grin.  “Let’s see if you’re all right, then we’ll see about getting you discharged.”

My father gave me a smug little smile, and I groaned with a grin, glancing at the ceiling.  He was right again.  I’m telling you, psychic extraordinaire.

“One last thing,” said my dad, and he looked even more nervous about this one.  “Um…your car was totaled.  Smashed like a bug, actually—you know how I told you about SMART cars not exactly being that safe in accidents—”

I sighed, rubbing at the spot between my eyes with a suddenly tired palm.  “Just great.”  My poor, adorable, snub-nosed baby.  I’d loved that little car.

But then what my dad said next made me forget everything else:

“—And remember, honey, your violin was in the back seat?”

I stared at him, eyes wide, all of the blood draining out of my face.

“So it’s…I mean the violin was smashed into splinters,” said my father miserably, holding his breath as he watched me.

I felt a lot of things in that moment.  Waves of raw emotion moving through me as quickly as a storm.

To be perfectly fair, to be a violinist in the Boston Philharmonic, you tend to have a lot of violins.  And I do—I have about five or six.  But not all of them are concert quality, and I’m going to be honest here:  that violin sung for me like no other instrument I’ve ever held.

It felt like losing a limb.

I finally picked an emotion to settle on.

“Did they catch the guy?” I asked with a long, slow blink, the kind a crocodile makes before it strikes.  I think that took Dad by surprise.  He’d been bracing himself, I think, for a nice long bit of yelling and expletives by yours truly.  That I was calm and reasonable seemed to shock my father who stood there with his mouth open and slowly shook his head.

“Great,” I grunted as the nurse poked and prodded my middle.  I began to grin slowly, a little like the Grinch.  “Because I’m going to find that sonofabitch who destroyed my violin, and I’m going to kill him with these bare hands.”

“That’s my girl,” said Dad then, with a wide, toothy grin.

Chapter 2:  Bodyguard

I didn’t look like hell.  I looked worse than hell.  Like a cheap, warmed-over version that’s seen much, much better days.

I flipped the passenger side visor back up with a grimace, taking slow, shallow breaths because it was still hurting a bit too much to make sudden movements.  I had so much on my mind that even as I looked out of the car window, I didn’t even see the old buildings passing us by—I was just thinking of a seemingly unending list of things that Needed To Be Done.  For example, I really needed to take some more painkillers, and then I had to call Verity’s Violin Shop down by the art museum, and I had to make sure that—

“Would madam like the temperature a bit cooler?” asked Ben, my father’s chauffeur, shaking me from my thoughts.  He looked a little pained that I had to be riding up with him up in the front seat, but the nurses at the hospital seemed to think that sliding into the back seat of a limo wouldn’t be good for my stitches.

And yes, Dad has a town car and a few retro cars, but he insisted—much to my chagrin—that we drive back to his house in his limo because people would actually notice if someone tried to rear end it.  Which, I suppose, he did have a point.  It’d be impossible for an assailant to casually rear end a car about as long as an ocean liner.

“No, the temperature’s great, Ben,” I said, cracking him a lopsided smile.  He still looked pained, his bright blue eyes surrounded with worried wrinkles, but put his gaze back on the road, flexing his leather gloves against the steering wheel.  I tried not to think about the driver of the SUV who’d rammed me.  He’d been wearing leather gloves, too.

“So what’s this surprise you have cooked up for me, Dad?” I asked back into the interior of the limo.  My father sat in the very center of the leather back seat, his walking cane between his legs, and his hands resting on the top of the cane as if he was ready to break out into a music video.  He was grinning widely and that’s the exact sort of grin he gave me when he told me I couldn’t date until I was seventeen (at the time, he hadn’t even known that what I really wanted to date were girls…).

So that sort of grin always worries me.

“You’ll see!” he practically chirped.

I sighed and slumped against the seat as we rounded the familiar, graceful curve in the road, and the Grayson mansion came towering into view.

Our family has been in possession of that impressive, sprawling stone structure for about two hundred years, which goes to show you that certain things (like enjoying living in something that looks like a castle) run in the family.  It has actual turrets (one of which I took over when I was a kid and wanted to play “knights, dragons and princesses” with the maids’ kids.  I was always the knight), big wooden doors that would look more at home in a castle in Europe than in a mansion outside of Boston, and a big garden of roses surrounding the whole thing.  It was June, so the riot of roses were in bloom.

As we parked out front on the gravel drive and I opened the door, the wild scent of red and pink spilled into my nose as I inhaled deeply.  There was birdsong spouting from some of the ornamental trees, and the fountain out front—featuring a creepy little naked cherubim with a wry smile and tiny wings—was bubbling happily as the sun shone down, touching me with warmth.

In short, it seemed like everything was right with the world.  And I guess, in some ways, it was.  I’d just narrowly avoided becoming goo, smashed between my tiny car and a concrete barrier.  I’d say that, all things considered, I was pretty lucky.

But it was also pretty…well, unnerving that I had no idea where that attack had come from.

Or why.

And I had absolutely no idea if it would happen again—something I was desperately trying to not think about.

“Madam should really have let me get the door,” said Ben, his voice strained as he all but sprinted around the car to help me up and out of the passenger seat as I struggled to stand.

“Ben, you’re a peach, and I hope my dad realizes what an awesome guy he has in you,” I grunted, sweat breaking out on my forehead as pain ripped through me, Ben’s hand at my elbow as he helped me upright.  “I’m just not used to having a chauffeur anymore, I’m sorry,” I told him taking a quavering breath.  “You’re always been too nice to me,” I grinned up at him fondly.

He returned my smile, but shook his head.  “Madam does not look well,” he said succinctly, holding on to my elbow as I threatened to fall backwards a little.  I wrested my elbow out of his hand gently, smoothed the front of my skirt and took a deep breath as my father folded himself out of the back seat and glided over to the both of us, his cane crunching against the gravel as sharply as his Armani shoes.

“I’m fine, Ben,” I promised the hovering chauffeur with another smile.  I’d known Ben my whole life—this is the guy who’d taken me to every violin practice I’d ever had as a kid, every school concert, then every string quartet concert when I’d joined one in high school.  He’d waited patiently for me during endless music lessons, always had a bit of wise advice or kindness to give the gangly, awkward kid who was way more obsessed with music than with people.

“Alice probably has lunch on the table,” said my father, and Ben nodded, sliding my crutches out of the limo, handing them to my father, then hopping back into the driver’s seat to take the limo to the garage.  My father’s hand at my elbow replaced Ben’s, and then he was helping me steer toward the sprawling porch with its columns and marble and wide open front door where Alice stood, her hands on her hips, and her plump mouth in a round O of consternation.

“Elizabeth Grayson, what sort of trouble did you get yourself into this time?” she asked, striding forward and all but picking me up as she swung her arm around my middle to steady me, and propel me up the stairs.  Alice is a marvel:  the cook and housekeeper and, now, only maid for my father.  She also volunteers at about a thousand charitable organizations, sews costumes for the local children’s theater and still manages to find time to garden, her passion.  Her long brown hair, now sprinkled with shocks of gray, was drawn up into the braid that was looped around her head, and she wore her uniform of choice:  jeans and a flowy peasant blouse.

“I got into an accident, Al,” I told her as she helped me up the last set of steps and into the house itself, my father bringing my crutches behind us.  “It wasn’t my fault,” I amended quickly as she began to protest.

“Al, can you bring some coffee and possibly a baked good for our recently hospitalized Elizabeth?” asked my father, his mouth twitching with a grin as Alice, again, was about to go on a tirade after my statement.  She opened and shut her mouth, sighed with a very longsuffering roll of her eyes and turned, bustling toward the kitchens to do just that.

“Oh, so’s you know, that woman’s already here!  I put her in your study!” Al called before rounding the hallway corner.

“That woman?” I asked, one brow up.  My father grimaced, shaking his head, putting a gentle arm around my shoulders as he began to help steer me through the foyer.  It’s an impressive looking foyer.  All black and white marble tile, and pale blue walls and Greek busts of attractive women on pedestals.  My dad is kind of classical in style, hence the creepy looking cherub in the fountain outside.

“I don’t suppose you’d wait in the hall while I greeted her?” asked my father in a soft murmur as we approached his study.  The warm mahogany door was open, and I could already smell the scent of pipe tobacco and the old, deeply comforting aroma of thousands and thousands of books.

“I want to know what this is about,” I sighed, all of the fight leaving me as the pain began to burn through my muscles again.  I felt like an old woman as I considered the fact that, pretty soon, I’d eat a slice of coffee cake and then be able to take my pain pills.  They wouldn’t come a moment too soon—every inch of my body ached with an intense kind of pain I’d never felt before.

My father sighed too, for a long moment, casting his eyes heavenward, probably thinking to himself that there were other parents in the world who had had much less head-strong kids.  “All right,” he said then, in a normal tone of voice.

He helped me through the study door, the sunlight spilling through the tall ceiling-to-floor length windows with their many panes of glass, the leather binding on some of the older books soaking up the sunshine, the globe in the mahogany corner turning—an odd thing to notice, I realize, but I only caught a glimpse of that, because my eyes were drawn, instead, to the woman who’d set the thing spinning.

She was tall, impressively so, taller than my father, even.  She could have played for women’s basketball was the thought that asked for attention in the back of my head, but I hardly even registered that.  She was muscular, the kind of easy muscle resting beneath her jeans and leather jacket and too-tight red t-shirt that made me think she was a gym rat or maybe a trainer.  She looked like she worked for her body, and she enjoyed showing it off, which—I have to admit—I enjoyed looking at it.  She had a sharp, angular face that was handsome, devastatingly so, but not beautiful.  The lines of her chin, the planes of her face, were too hard, like she’d seen too much pain.  A perpetual worry line from frowning too often stood pronounced on her otherwise smooth forehead.  Her thick  black hair was spiked and curved forward—total butch—and her hazel eyes, too hard to pin down if they were mostly brown or mostly green or mostly blue, immediately glanced my way.  There was a small smile on her lips, the only soft thing about her, as she put her hands in her pockets, cocking her left hip in our direction and widening her stance as if she owned the place.

God, she was gorgeous.  My mouth was suddenly dry as I leaned against my father, taking in this magnetic creature and realizing that I really looked like hell.

Great.  What a lovely way to meet a devastatingly attractive woman: stitched up and barely alive and looking like a warmed over, cheap version of hell.

“Ms. O’Connell, it’s good to see you again,” purred my father, using the tone of voice that piles on the charm like a five layer cake, the tone he always pulls out when he’s at the office.  He helped me over to one of the two high-backed leather chairs in front of his too-big carved wooden desk.  It was an antique, and he’d once told me when I was a kid that Ben Franklin had used it for writing his letters.  I don’t know if I quite believe that, but it’s a pretty big, solid thing that I often pretended was a boat, and I was its captain, when my father was away on business trips.

Dad straightened and inclined his head, gesturing toward the other leather chair to the woman standing in the corner.  Ms. O’Connell.  My breathing was coming too fast, almost panting like the kind of reaction a cartoon wolf does as he first ogles a gorgeous hand-painted dame.  Who was this woman?

Her smile grew, and she stalked over to the chair, flopping down in it with a graceless ease.  My eyes were drawn to her with a magnetic pull—I couldn’t stop staring at her.  She had this aura of immense power and grace, like maybe she was a dancer as well as being a gym rat.  Normally women who work out a ton (and I’ve dated a few—I know) have too many muscles to pull off graceful.  Oh, strong they’ve got in spades, but graceful is a whole other ball game.

And this woman was winning at both.

“It’s good to see you again, sir.  It’s nice to meet you, miss,” she said, her mouth rolling up lazily at the corners.  But there was nothing indolent about her eyes.  They seemed to pierce me, pinning me in place as she stared at me.  It’s as if she was assessing me and she reached her assessment in a heartbeat or so.  She glanced back to my father who sat behind the desk, setting his cane against the side of it.

“Elizabeth, I’d like you to meet Layne O’Connell,” he said, nodding to her as he crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his leather desk chair.  “Layne, this is my daughter, Elizabeth Grayson.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Layne repeated, one brow up, a wide, easy smile on her face, the kind that makes you want to smile back.  But I was too tense for that.  There was something going on here, something that—despite the unspeakably attractive person sitting next to me—I was probably going to dislike.

“Likewise,” I told her, but I was watching my father out of the corner of my eye.  He had his fingers crossed on his stomach now as he leaned back.

“Elizabeth,” he said then softly, delicately, like he was about to tell me a very bad piece of news as he gestured toward Layne, sitting to my left.

And he was definitely about to tell me a bad piece of news.

He cleared his throat and then pasted on his most dazzling smile.  “Layne is your new bodyguard.”

I stared at him flatly, then turned to look at Layne, who was still smiling, but now she was watching for my reaction, her eyebrows up as she rolled her shoulders back, her head to the side as she considered me, a bit of her black hair sweeping in front of her eyes like an even more heart-throb-y female version of James Dean.

I could never have predicted this.

I’ve got a temper on me, a lovely bit of inheritance from my mother, and sometimes I can’t help my first reaction.

Which was this:

“Absolutely not,” I said, standing quickly, the leather chair squeaking in protest as it was shoved out behind me, its feet scraping against the old wood floor.  “Absolutely not, Dad” I said, shaking my head emphatically.  “Are you kidding me?” I practically yelled.  I was spluttering, but the anger ripping through me was a pleasant change from paying far too much attention to the pain I was in, so I stuck with it.  Layne was glancing up at me in amusement, her hazel eyes flashing as she tried to keep the smile from showing on her mouth.  And failed.

“Elizabeth, please,” said my father, eyes round as he gestured quickly for me to take my seat again.  An action I had absolutely no intention of doing.

“You didn’t even consult me—you already hired her?”  Smoke was practically spiraling out of my nose and ears, but I kept going.  “How could you make such an important decision without me?  I’m sorry, Layne,” I told her then, pivoting on my better leg, the one that didn’t have the stitches in the thigh.  I stared down at her, my hands on my hips.  She lounged back, meeting my gaze with a single elegant brow raised.  She could have looked at me like that all day, but I was in no mood to be paying attention to anything below my waist, which was stirring in spite of myself.  “I’m sure you’re wonderful,” I huffed, “and an excellent bodyguard, but we have no need of your services,” I said, all in a rush.

And then I sat back down, because the black pinpoints around my vision were starting to rush back.

“Layne, stay right where you are,” said my father, a stern quality beginning to leak into his words.  I stared daggers at him, but he wasn’t looking at me—not directly.  He was looking at Layne.

She shrugged, leaning farther back in the chair.  She looked like she was lounging at a dance club and not at her new employer’s office, a fact I rather liked.  But I wasn’t supposed to like anything about her.

My father knew how I felt about this.

And he’d gone ahead and done it anyway.

Once, when I was a teenager, my father had insisted I get a bodyguard.  I’d refused rather emphatically, with all the drama a teenager can muster.  After several long, drawn-out arguments (really the only time I can ever remember my father and I having a shouting match), he’d backed off.

I was already the weirdo in school, arriving with a chauffeur, and having a bodyguard hang around me was going to ruin any chance I had of getting even a single friend.  And eventually I’d outgrown most of my awkwardness, and I had gotten friends.  But it would have been impossible to do with a secret-services type man or woman following me around in tinted glasses, a serious frown and a sidearm.

I was, and will always be, grateful for the upbringing I had.  I was a rich kid.  I know that in the grand scheme of the world, that’s pretty darn lucky.  But I’d had my share of sacrifices, too, my freedom being the foremost of them.  Growing up being constantly watched, under lock and key and being fretted over like you’re some sort of emperor’s daughter makes you value your autonomy more than anything in the world.  And, to top it all off, I purposefully had wanted to make my own way in the world, and I’d worked my ass off to get where I was, one of the violinists in the Boston Philharmonic.  Which I’d like to point out is a really difficult job to get.

In short, my life was complicated enough without adding a bodyguard on top of it.  I valued my autonomy more than anything else—something I’d worked years at achieving completely and fully—and I loved my freedom just a little bit too much to have someone following me around all day, hovering at my shoulder.

I couldn’t imagine my world with a bodyguard in it.  It’d be demeaning.  Demoralizing.  Frustrating.  Terrible.  I would be followed everywhere, have to answer to someone else when making any minute decision.  I wasn’t answerable to anyone anymore.  I was headstrong, stubborn, fiercely independent.

I couldn’t imagine being any other way.

“No,” I told my father.

“Yes,” said my father, his brows raised.  “Elizabeth, please see reason,” he hissed then, leaning forward, his eyes flashing dangerously.  “You were almost just killed.”  Pain passed over his face, and I think he was weighing whether to say the next part or not.  But then he said it anyway:  “and I doubt that a single foiled attempt will stop whoever’s after us.  There are going to be more attempts.  And your life is in danger.”

I took a deep breath and let it out, doing my best to see reason.  My father, of course, was right.  I was already looking over my shoulder too much, and the “accident” had just happened to me.  Yes, it wasn’t my fault and really had nothing to do with me that someone was after me—it was because of my father, something he couldn’t really help either.

But it certainly didn’t stop the fact that someone was after me.

“What about you, Dad?” I asked then, a little of the fight gone from my voice.  “Don’t you need a bodyguard, too?”

“I already have one,” he replied mildly, not letting his gaze waver from mine.

“Really?”  I’d not seen any new employees around, and shouldn’t bodyguards be with the person they were guarding pretty darn often?  But that was neither here nor there.  My father had a bodyguard, and he hadn’t even been attacked yet.

At least, not that I knew of.

I glanced sidelong at Layne.

“I’m looking forward to working with you.”  She said it in a droll, almost sly manner, and her lips, twitching at the corners, were now completely incapable of masking her insolent expression.  She leaned back again, her head to the side, one brow up as she chuckled a little.  “I think we’ll make a great team,” is what she said, but the words had a bit of a sarcastic bite to them.

I opened and shut my mouth.  I thought about the man who’d rammed me from behind, his leather gloves, the lack of any human emotion on his perfectly blank face, like he felt nothing as he tried to kill me.

I thought about how he was still out there.  How, at any time, he could appear when I least expected it…

“For how long?” I asked, trying to make my voice hard.  “For how long would we have to…to require Ms. O’Connell’s services?”

The joy—and triumph—that passed over my father’s face was unmistakable.

“For as long as it takes us to figure out who was behind it, and bring them to justice,” said my father, then, masking his face back to its carefully neutral expression.  Layne, beside me, made a little snort in the back of her throat, and I glanced at her sidelong, but her expression was carefully neutral, too.

Bring them to justice?  I shivered a little.  There had been such an edge to those words.

All right, then.  Yes, I valued my autonomy more than anything in the world.  But I also wanted to keep living the life I’d built for myself.

I wasn’t ready to die just yet.

“Well,” I said with a very long sigh.  “It doesn’t seem like I have much choice in the matter.”

“Wonderful—just wonderful!” my father practically sang, clapping his hands together slowly with a triumphant smile.  “Ms. O’Connell, I am delighted to have secured your services.  I can finally sleep at night again.”  He leaned back in his chair and breathed out slowly with a wide grin.

I glanced at the magnetic woman sitting next to me, then.

Layne straightened, her head to the side a little as she offered me a hand.

My eyes widened a little as I glanced down in surprise.  She had long fingers; a broad palm; short, carefully trimmed nails.  I took her hand.  I guess I was expecting a strong grasp, and I think that if she’d shaken hands with my father, it would have been strong, the clasp of palm and fingers.  But it was gentle, now, as her fingers encircled mine, sliding around my wrist like she was holding something fragile, that could break.

Her fingertips were so warm, they were almost hot as they pressed against my skin.

She bent her head, then.  I watched in shock as Layne O’Connell leaned forward at the waist with that utterly magnetic grace, bent her head, and brushed her warm, soft lips against the back of my hand.

“I look forward to working with you,” she said, her voice low, almost a rumbling growl in the back of her throat as she gazed up at me through long, dark lashes, her hazel eyes never leaving mine, seeming to shimmer between blue and green and brown and back again.

“I have coffee!” said Al, just then, bumping the door with her hip as she pushed an antique teacart into the room, laden with still-warm blueberry turnovers (which happen to be my favorite) and a carafe of coffee.  She had a big grin on her comforting face as she glanced quickly from Layne to me, back to Layne again.

My father stood, still smiling hugely.

And Layne dropped my hand only after a very long moment, almost too long of a moment for any sort of normal greeting.  Her fingers had been so warm against mine.

The softness of her lips against my skin was an imprint that made my blood burn.

Yeah.

Despite my initial reservations, I guess I was looking forward to working with her, too.

Chapter 3:  A Better Violin

“You must take it easy, Elizabeth—doctor’s orders!” my father called from his front porch as I hobbled down the steps, Layne beside me, toward what would be my new car for the foreseeable future—a big black Cadillac something-or-other that sprawled almost as wide as a tank in the driveway, making me miss my sweet little SMART car fiercely.

“I will, Dad,” I said for possibly the hundredth time as I smiled tensely back at him, my hand on my side.  I had about a thousand errands to run, and time was against me—taking it “easy” wasn’t something I could exactly get behind.

It was Thursday.  That meant tomorrow was the night of the major Mendelssohn concert, and a pretty famous violin soloist (actually, let’s just be honest:  the most famous violin soloist on this whole wide earth)—Mikagi Tasuki—was flying into town for rehearsal to play with us this evening.  The rehearsal was, of course, in preparation for her joining us in concert tomorrow evening, and that left me very, very little time this afternoon before rehearsal to pick up a new violin.

Which meant we had to leave right away.

If you know anything about string instruments, you know I was practically certifiable to want a new instrument for a concert tomorrow.  Just like when you’re getting to know a person, it takes awhile to learn the ins and outs of every new violin’s sound.  But I’d been in talks with Verity Olsen, the owner of Verity’s Violin Shop, for months now because it had put me on edge that I only had one concert-worthy violin to my name, and I’d been hoping to get another instrument for back up purposes.

And finally, Verity had found a violin that she thought would work for me.

I suppose that if I was held at gunpoint to perform, I had a nice antique violin that if Amelia, our orchestra director, didn’t stare at too closely would be worthy of being heard with the rest of the string section.  But the sound didn’t do it for me.

And if Amelia singled me out, it wouldn’t do it for her, either.

The violin is the closest instrument to the human voice (though cellists will tell you that it’s the cello, don’t believe them for a second).  Even if you’re not a very musical person, you can hear the difference between the sound of different musical instruments.  Just like people, they have different “voices” when played.  And comparing my beloved concert violin, the one who had gotten crushed and crunched in the back of my SMART car (may she rest in pieces) to the antique violin that might possibly work in concert, was like comparing a blueblood Thoroughbred to a petting zoo pony.  If you’re small enough, each horse will get you where you want to go.  But there’s a distinctive difference between them.

As I approached the Cadillac, Layne stepped forward smoothly, the passenger car door in her hand as she held it open it for me.

“Uh-uh,” I said, folding my arms in what was probably a very petulant reaction.  I shoved my purse strap farther up my shoulder as I shook my head, narrowing my eyes.  “I’m driving.”

She raised a single eyebrow, cocking that narrow, gorgeous hip toward me as she leaned all her weight onto her left leg and placed a long-fingered hand on her hip.  My eyes were drawn to that elegant motion like she had magnets glued to her.

“I’m very sorry, miss,” said Layne, then, shaking her head.  “But Doctor’s—and your father’s—orders state that I’m to drive, at least until you’re a hundred percent again.”

Hot anger swept through me, and I tried to take a few calming, cleansing breaths.  But the anger still remained, lodged in my heart and twisting it.

Here was the beginning of the end of my freedom.  This is what it looked like when autonomy was taken from you—it started with little things, like driving.  I balled my hands into fists.  But how could I protest?  Yes, I’d finally just taken my pain pills, but the doctor was probably right.  I felt utterly rotten.  And I still had to get to rehearsal, and hopefully play very, very, very well, accident or no.

“Right,” I muttered, and Layne opened up the door, her head inclined to me, and her lips twitching as she tried to suppress a smile.

I folded and sat down in the passenger seat, holding my purse in my lap.

I felt like an eighty-year-old woman.

Layne sprinted around the side of the car, and then she folded herself easily into the driver’s seat, attaching her seatbelt and taking a pair of slim sunglasses out of her leather jacket’s breast pocket.  She unfolded them and slid them on as she started the car.

“So how long have you been a bodyguard?” I asked her as she pulled smoothly down the driveway.  My father, Al and Ben waved to us from the porch, and I waved my hand out the window before rolling it up with the press of a button.

“You’re my official first guarded,” said Layne with a little chuckle as she glanced at me out of the corner of her eye behind the shades.

“Oh, really?”  The disappointment was evident in my voices.  For some reason, she seemed like she’d been doing this all her life—maybe it was the confidence she exuded.  Knowing that I was the first person she’d ever, well, guarded, actually took the wind out of my sails a bit.

And it made me feel less safe.

“Don’t worry,” she said smoothly as the gates to my father’s estate began to open in front of us.  The elegant iron gates clicked back slowly on their mechanized runner, and she nursed the brake, slowing as we waited for them.  “I’m well qualified to keep you safe.  Your father, I assure you, hires only the best.”

“And you’re the best,” I said flatly, one brow raised.  I had just been through a major accident, which would, of course, add to my testiness.  But there was also something too smug about this woman.  Like she had everything figured out.  No one has everything figured out.

“Yes,” she said lightly, with a slight edge to her tone that brooked no argument.

“Huh,” I said with a mild tone, staring out the window, pursing my lips to a flat line.

“You’re a concert violinist, right?” asked Layne, then.  There was something a little too funny about her tone, and I glanced at her.  She was smiling at me, but there was a hardness to her eyes.

“Yes,” I told her.

“Well, you think you’re good, right?”

“The Boston Philharmonic thinks so,” I said, crossing my legs beneath the dashboard.  It was kind of a conceited thing to say, but it wasn’t conceit or luck or nepotism that had gotten me entrance to the Philharmonic.  It was the spectacular way I’d played the violin, the talent that I’d worked thousands of hours to achieve, had—in fact—worked my ass off to acquire.  Nothing had been handed to me, I’d had to work every step of the way to achieve that position.

“What makes you qualified to play in the Boston Philharmonic?”

I sat there, stunned at her question out of left field.  It took me a full minute to respond.  “I…I’m qualified because I won the audition years ago,” I told her, spluttering.  I mean, really, what kind of question was that?

“Had you ever been in an orchestra before?”

“No, but—”

“Then why did they let you in?”

I stared at her.  The anger was starting to cloud my vision, and I was a little worried about smoke coming out of my ears again.  “They let me in because I was the best candidate for the job, the best violinist in the long line of auditions they’d heard.  They chose me because I was the best.  I’m good at what I do,” I told her fiercely.

“Then I rest my case,” she said with a smirk, settling back against the seat a little more firmly as she flicked her right blinker on.

“What case?”

“Though I’ve never been a bodyguard, I assure you—I’m the best candidate for the job.”

“That’s not the same thing at all,” I muttered as she turned right, her sure hands gripping the wheel effortlessly as it guided the car onto the next street.  I tried not to watch her long fingers flexing over the wheel’s surface, her biceps moving under the supple leather jacket that drew my gaze like her entire body wore a coat of magnets—I was beginning to suspect it did.  “How did my father find you?” I asked, then, anger still making me a little terse.  I tried to soften it with sarcasm, not really the best softener.  “Is there a bodyguard yellow pages or something?”

“Something like that,” said Layne, her lips twitching as she chuckled a little under her breath.  “He found me through a friend of a friend, so he knew that I came highly recommended, and I knew that employment with Mr. Grayson would be a pretty good place to start my bodyguarding career.  By the way, where exactly are we headed, miss—I’m just headed in the general direction of downtown right now.”

“Call me Elizabeth,” I said serenely, trying not to let her know how curious I was about her.  It was hard to swallow down all of my follow-up questions, but for some reason, I didn’t want this cocky, gorgeous woman to know that she interested me, or exactly how much she interested me.  “And we’re heading to Verity’s Violin Shop, which is down by the Fine Arts Museum.”

“Gotcha,” she said, nodding and taking another turn.  Her shoulders flexed again when she made that turn, which is really not something I should have been noticing, and which I was trying really, really hard not to.  “So, you’re in the orchestra,” said Layne, which didn’t exactly sound like a question, but after a long moment of silence, I realized she was trying to draw me into conversation.  I cleared my throat.

“Yeah,” I said, worrying at my bottom lip with my teeth.  “I really love my job,” I tacked on lamely.  Wow.  I looked like crap and I was being incredibly inarticulate.  What a great start to this working relationship.

“That’s good, that’s good,” said Layne, glancing in the rearview mirror as she began to merge onto the highway.  “You’re luckier than a lot of people.  Very few nowadays can say they love their work.”

“What about you?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.

She grinned sidelong at me.  “Well, technically, it’s my first day on the job, so…so far, it’s pretty all right.”

I swallowed hard and grimaced.  “I probably ruined your first day.  I mean, I kind of blew up back at my father’s…I’m sorry about that,” I told her quietly.  “I was kind of a jerk.  It’s just…well, my father’s wanted me to have a bodyguard since I was a teenager, and my independence is very important to me.  But then there was the whole accident thing…”  Oh, my God, I was rambling.  I silently cursed at myself and bit my lip to shut myself up.

“Yeah, that had to be downright terrifying,” said Layne, shooting me a sideways frown.  “You came out pretty okay, though—you could have been squashed like a grape.  Fortunately, you’re more a bruised apple than a grape.”

I was laughing in spite of myself.  “What happens when my stitches and bruises are all healed up?”  I teased her.  “Do you have anymore fruit comparisons?”

I kid you not:  Layne glanced at me sideways, but she was absolutely, positively not looking at my face.  “Well, yeah.  But I think that’s harassment, and it’s my first day on the job, so…”  She tossed her hair out of her eyes and grinned wickedly, keeping her  gaze on the road.

Speaking of fruit metaphors, I think I blushed about as red as a cherry.

I didn’t know what to say.  I mean, what do you say to something like that?  From the moment I saw her, I figured she had to be gay.  She was such a butch, an incredibly attractive woman who knew exactly how attractive she was, who prowled like a wolf through the world, confidant and powerful and so magnetic I couldn’t take my eyes off her.  But did she know I was gay?  Was she just guessing, or was she fishing for info with that bit of flirtation, or did she get a vibe from me, or had I been staring at her a bit more than any straight woman would?

Or was she just, you know, harmlessly flirting?

The time for a sarcastic retort or a flirtatious response came and went, and I subsided into miserable silence.  I’d wanted, so badly, to say something funny or clever back to her, but this magnetic, gorgeous creature just made me tongue-tied.

Normally, I’m the one flirting with women, flashing a cheeky grin and cracking jokes and being a little inappropriate, but mostly giving out the kind of come-ons that result in me asking the woman out and the woman usually being a moderate level of charmed and agreeing to it.  This sort of thing—someone acting that way toward me—doesn’t really happen to me because I don’t usually let it.  I’m the kind of lady who gets out there and goes for what she wants.

Layne cast me a sidelong glance after several moments and cleared her throat.  She didn’t apologize, only made a sound, and then sighed for a long moment.

“Look,” we both said at the same time, then.  She chuckled at that as she turned off the highway.  We had to take city roads all the rest of the way now.

“You first,” she said, one brow up.

A really insidious thought had stuffed itself into my head, and now I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  It’d been awhile since I’d been out on a date.  I was, sadly, the kind of workaholic that can get into an orchestra—meaning, I was a pretty bad workaholic.  I practiced the violin for about eight to ten hours every single day, and then there were the orchestra rehearsals and life just seemed to be extra busy lately, which meant that I really didn’t have time for anything that didn’t involve strings, a bow and sheet music.

And my dad was the kind of person who liked to kill two birds with one really big stone.

“My father,” I said, chewing on my lip as I tried to figure out how to tactfully say this.  But there wasn’t really any sort of tactful way, so I went for blunt:  “did he choose you as a bodyguard because he was trying to set me up?”

Layne laughed out loud at that.  She had this rich, velvety laugh that seemed to roll over me, but I was paying too much attention to how red my cheeks were getting to really appreciate it.

“So, I’m what…a call-girl bodyguard?” asked Layne, wiping at the corner of one of her eyes under the sunglasses as she kept chuckling and sighed.  “Oh, my God, that was too funny.  No, Elizabeth—your father didn’t choose me for any other reason than keeping you safe.”

Now I just felt stupid.  I bristled at that.  “I’m sorry,” I said tersely, feeling my cheeks redden so severely, I wondered if they’d ever go back to being flesh-colored again.  “It’s just my dad is the type of person who would…who would do that.”

God, how could I possibly dig myself out from this hole?  And she was still chuckling about it, which didn’t help matters much.

“That’d be an awfully specific job,” said Layne, shoving her sunglasses up onto her head as we hit the city streets.  Here the sunshine didn’t even reach us—it was getting late in the afternoon and the skyscrapers and buildings hid the rays of sun completely.  Layne cast another mirthful glance in my direction, then shook her head.  “I mean, think about it.  A bodyguard call-girl for a fishing baron’s daughter.  That’s an awfully specific job.  I don’t know how many people like that exist in this whole big world.”

So from that…I guess she knew I was gay.  Exactly how she knew, I wasn’t certain, but at least we had that out of the way.

“I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you,” I said, my words sounding brittle and just the least tiniest bit prim.  “It wasn’t my intention.”

“Hell, that wasn’t an insult, sweetheart,” she said, casting me another sidelong glance.  Her voice had dropped about an octave at those words, and a shiver ran through me that I couldn’t control.  Oh, God, that voice.  It was pure, velvet sex.  She chuckled a little at my obvious, visible shiver, and then she was pulling into a parking garage.

She took the ticket the attendant machine spat out at us, and after ascending the very long ramp with all its sharp turns, she parked on the third level.  We hadn’t said anything more to each other, and I was feeling so frazzled and embarrassed that the moment we pulled into the spot, even before she threw the Cadillac into park, I had the door open, and was trying to push myself up and out of the vehicle as I fumbled with my crutches.

It was unreal how quickly she turned off the ignition and sprinted around to my side of the car.  I stared at her for a long moment, with the sunglasses perched on top of her head, her hair swept to the side.  I stared into those damnable flashing blue and green and brown eyes that seemed to never stop shifting color, and that also seemed to pin me to the spot with their bold intensity.

“Let me help you,” she said softly as she took the crutches from me, as she looped a strong arm around my middle, placing my arm around her neck.

She was so strong, the kind of strong that made me think she’d probably won every fight she’d ever gotten in, the kind of strong that is so obvious that you half wonder if she could bend steel girders around an arm, twisting them into pretzel shapes.  But she was so gentle, too, as she held me firmly about the waist, but with such a soft touch, and helped me limp across the parking garage and to the elevator, taking each step slowly and at my pace.

As I leaned against her, I realized that I was paying a really unfair amount of attention to how she felt against me, the firmness of her muscles, her hip bone pressing against mine.  There was something out of place in all those sensations, though:  I felt a slim, unnatural hardness against her side, close to her breast, in an odd shape.

I went cold a little when I realized it was a firearm.

The elevator dinged and opened, and Layne helped me into it, pressing the ground floor button once I was leaning against the back wall.

I stared at her for a long moment.  This woman was carrying a deadly weapon—a deadly weapon that she had been hired to use to keep me safe.  She tossed her jet hair back, running a long-fingered hand through it before taking off her sunglasses, folding them and sliding them easily into her back jeans pocket.

Layne caught me staring, and smiled roguishly, her head to the side as she leaned back on her heels.  “I’ve never been in a violin shop,” she said, her smile deepening as she shoved her long fingers into her back pockets, too.  “I never even knew there was such a thing.  Though I guess it’s kind of obvious that there’d have to be.  But there’s really enough people in the entire Boston area to keep a violin shop in business?”

“You’d be surprised how many kids take violin lessons,” I said, smiling a little, too after clearing my throat.  “And there are actually three string shops in Boston…the other two have cellos, basses, other stringed instruments—Verity’s is the only one that deals solely in violins.”

Layne whistled lowly, under her breath as she rocked back onto her heels again.  “Must be a lot of kids driving their parents crazy with screeching strings around these parts.”

I laughed at that.  “Sometimes, I give lessons—I like kids,” I shrugged when her brows went up.  “And yeah—there’s a lot of screeching with those bows dragging across the strings, them trying to find the right places for all of their fingers, learn the posture.  Though the screechy-string-stage doesn’t usually last long, believe it or not—kids are pretty quick learners.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think there’s enough money in the world that would make me put up with that,” said Layne with a shake of her head and a chuckle.  Then her eyes widened and her face took on a look of mock horror as she groaned.  “Oh, God—I’m your bodyguard.  This means that when you do lessons…”

I grinned smugly and chuckled as Layne stepped forward, looping my arm around her neck again as the elevator doors dinged and opened up to the ground level.  God, she was so hot—not in the metaphorical sense (though yes, she absolutely was), but more in the body temperature sense of the word.  Like, she was almost feverish to the touch.

“I’m not paid enough for this if you have to teach kids while I’m around,” she chuckled, and I gazed at her sidelong, listening to the deep smoothness of her laugh.

“I’ll get you some earplugs before I take on another kid for lessons,” I promised her.

“You’d be surprised how good my hearing is, earplugs or no,” she muttered mildly.

We walked across the pavement to the sidewalk outside.  Boston in June—It’s one of the most beautiful times of the year to come visit our fair city.  There were hotdog and taco vendors on the street corners with the scent from both wafting towards us and making my stomach rumble, women and men in their business suits and kids staring down at their cell phones at every corner and on every bit of the sidewalk as they moved through their lives.  College kids sat along the entrance to the art museum as we passed it, writing in their notebooks, or—most often—typing into their electronic tablets.

We walked about two blocks, and by the end of the second block, even though Layne was fully supporting me and all but helping me put one foot in front of the other, I was really feeling it.

Finally, thankfully, Verity’s Violin Shop came into view.

It’s in one of the older buildings in Boston, made up of pretty brick and Victorian embellishments, added well after it was built.  The sign out front has been hanging above the old metal front door for over fifty years, though it’s been re-painted many times.  The sign still looked vintage and beautiful though, with its looping, scrolling words, “Violin Shop,” a hand-painted violin nestled into the words on the sign, as if the letters had to grow around the painted instrument.

The front window had several violins on display—several regular sized ones, propped up against their cases and then some extra small fiddles for the really little kids.  The familiar, soothing chime of the front door bells rung when Layne pushed the door open and held it for me to enter.

The inside of a violin shop has one of the best smells on earth:  well-oiled wood and beeswax.  I inhaled deeply, and a warm smile came over my face as I spotted Verity behind the front counter.

She was in the middle of stringing a red child-sized violin, but stopped the moment her eyes flicked up to meet us, and she saw who it was.  Verity is a pretty impressive lady, with her shockingly (for the age she is—she’s only in her mid-forties) white hair drawn back into a smooth ponytail, and her bright blue eyes assessing every situation smartly behind the most retro-looking cat glasses you could ever see.  She was dressed in her usual chic black turtleneck and immaculate pencil skirt, black tights and black flats, and as she came from around the counter to greet me with a quick hug, her normally smooth and serene features contorted into a grimace as she stared aghast down at the crutches.

“Oh, honey, what happened?” she asked.  Verity’s eyes flicked to Layne, but she, thankfully, didn’t comment on the fact that an extremely attractive, never-before-seen woman was gripping me around the waist and practically holding me up.

“Oh, you know, just a little accident,” I smiled wanly at her, but returned the hug, looping an arm around her shoulder awkwardly.  “Sadly, I come with grave news:  my violin met with an untimely end,” I told her with a grimace.

Verity stared at me in shock for a long moment, her bright blue eyes wide, then she smoothed down her features again, and she became all business.  “Then it’s a very good thing I have something for you,” she said, tapping her finger against her nose as she grinned and rushed behind the counter, into her back room.

Beethoven’s pastoral symphony—his sixth—was being piped through the speakers overhead as Layne helped me to the front counter so that I could lean on it and “stand” without her help.  Then, curious, she began to roam through the shop, pausing to look at the back wall display, an entire wall covered in different violins and bows on pegs, ranging from the standard student model that was only around a hundred bucks, to some of the better concert-ready violins, in the fifteen hundred dollar range…and some higher than that.

I watched Layne, doing my best to be surreptitious about it.  She was genuinely curious as she crossed her arms and rocked back on her heels, whistling in a low tone as she stared up at a particularly pretty violin.  It was plain, but burnished so brightly, it seemed to glow.  I happened to know that that one was two-hundred years old, refurbished because it’d been in such bad condition when Verity had gotten hold of it.  I’d almost bought that particular violin off Verity a bunch of times, actually, because I’m a sucker for a violin with a past, but particularly a sucker for a violin with a past and a pretty juicy story.

“You know, that one has a story,” I commented to her then, leaning heavily on the counter with my elbows as I tried to ignore the pounding in my thigh’s stitches.  Normally, I wouldn’t offer to talk up a violin to any random person.  I mean, it’s kind of nerdy to be so obsessed with musical instruments, I fully admit it.  But the way she was looking at that violin—it seemed that she was at least a little bit interested.

“Really?” Layne asked, turning back to me.  There was a soft smile turning up the corners of her mouth that stole my breath away just then, and it took me a full moment to realize that she wanted me to go on.  I blinked, then cleared my throat, shifting my weight a little as I rested my elbows a little firmer on the counter taking all the weight off my leg as I placed my chin in my right hand and purposefully gazed past her.  I regarded the violin with a nod.

“That fiddle was made by a traveling music man about two hundred years ago, up in Maine,” I told her, jerking my chin in the violin’s direction.  “His name was Alfred McNalis, and he was self-taught in the art of instrument making, but he ended up making quite a few very impressive violins.  He just had a gift for it—and this was violin, in particular, was one of his finest pieces.  But legend has it that he bargained that violin to the devil to save his life.  There was a fire, and the house he was staying in burned down, everything completely destroyed, including everyone else who’d been staying in the house…but old Alfred and his fiddle were perfectly unscathed, not a horsehair missing from his bow, not a button out of place on his jacket, and he kept raving while he held up the violin, ‘the fire never even touched us.’  Later on, the fiddle was badly burned in another fire, but that was long after its creator had died.  Alfred was over the age of a hundred when death finally caught up with him, a feat practically unheard of in those days.  And everyone says it’s because he sold that fiddle to the devil.”

“That’s a pretty impressive story,” said Layne with a wink.  “Now how much of that is actually true?” she asked, but she was grinning lazily, indulgently, as she strode over to me and leaned her left hip against the counter, arms still crossed, and looking down at me with bright, flashing eyes.

“I…I don’t know,” I said, gulping at her nearness.  This close, the heat radiating off of her was something I could actually feel, even though we stood about two feet apart.  “There are a lot of legends surrounding music and musical instruments,” I said with a shrug after clearing my throat.  “Probably not much of it is actually true,” I said, all in a rush.  “But it makes for a good story, doesn’t it?”

“You know, come to think of it…why are there so many stories about devils and violins?” asked Layne, her face taking on a quizzical expression now as her eyebrows furrowed.  “I mean…that song, the Devil went down to Georgia.  That violin guy who sold his soul to the devil so that he could play perfectly.  Stuff like that.”

“Because,” I said, pushing off from the counter, and pressing my palms flat against the wooden countertop.  I didn’t even think about it as I said:  “the violin makes such a beautiful sound that people couldn’t explain it any other way than the fact that it must be supernatural.  How else could such beautiful music come from something that is, essentially, hollow wood and wire?”

Layne’s eyes narrowed as she watched me for a long moment.  Her jaw was clenched, and she looked like she wanted to say something very important, pain flickering behind her eyes, but Verity was pushing back through the door again, a beat-up violin case in hand.

“Sorry it took me awhile to get to—I was storing it in my safe in my back office,” said Verity in a hushed tone as she set the case down gently on the counter.  She was practically glowing as she leaned forward and murmured:  “I think you’re going to love it, Elizabeth.”

Verity always kept her eye out for violins for me.  She knew my style, knew what I needed in an instrument, and had a lot of connections in the stringed instrument world.  All I knew about this violin was that it was about a hundred years old, and masterfully crafted—she hadn’t told me anymore than that.  She knew that I needed it to play in the orchestra, so I knew the instrument would be of superb quality.

But I couldn’t have imagined it would be quite like this.

There are a lot of violinmakers who have copied one of the most talented violinmakers who ever lived:  Stradivarius.  You can tell in the slope of the body of the instrument, in the specific curlicues…it was Stradivarius-inspired.  I love a good Stradivarius-inspired violin, don’t get me wrong—he was a master, and masters should be copied.  But I also love a violinmaker who isn’t afraid to be himself.

The guy who made this violin wasn’t afraid in the slightest.

The instrument itself was of simple construction—there was nothing fancy or ornamental about the body of the violin.  But as I picked it up—freshly tuned by Verity—out of the case, I ran my fingers over the strings, and somewhere in the hollow cavity of the violin, a delightful thrum answered the sound of my skin connecting to the strings.

I ran my thumb over the strings again, purposefully plucking at them.  The cheerful sound of the notes sang vibrantly into the room as Verity picked up the bow from the case and rosined it for me, running the rosin up and down the horsehairs of the bow with the familiar swish sound, bits of dry beeswax flaking off into the air.  She handed me the bow with the same sort of smile that a cat makes after it’s devoured the canary.

I held the violin up and placed my chin against it, the movement so familiar but also so unfamiliar with this new instrument as I learned its new shape, bending my body in miniscule ways to connect better with it.  I held up the bow and placed it gently against the strings.

I played.

I closed my eyes.  I listened as the bow swished effortlessly across the strings, as a pure and radiant melody came from the violin, spinning into the air around us like magic.  It was so clean, those notes, so pure, that a surge of emotion moved through me, my throat constricted, and almost instantly, tears sprung up in my eyes.

I played across the strings, having chosen something simple to test the violin out with—the piece of music that was one of the first ones I ever learned that I really enjoyed playing on the violin, the Allegro movement from Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto.  It’s such a perfect baroque piece, almost textbook with all of its dainty, complicated melodies, the kind that you hear and immediately think “period drama,” but it has a very innocuous thrum of power beneath it—don’t be fooled by the piece.  It sounds like something made for kings and queens and court, but underneath the top melody, there’s this great passion moving like swift-flowing water far below a perfectly calm surface…

I finished the piece, raising the bow off the strings with a small flourish, grinning a little like an idiot.  The violin vibrated against my shoulder as I opened my eyes, like the instrument was something alive, and still singing.

I took a deep breath and glanced up at Layne.

Her mouth was slightly open, her lips parted.  Her chest rose and fell a little too quickly, and her eyes were wide and shocked, like she’d just seen something she would never be able to describe or explain.  She looked in awe.  Suddenly self-conscious, I set the violin down on the counter, clearing my throat.

“It’s superb, Verity.  I’ll take it, thank you.  Do you want to send me the bill?”

“It’d be my pleasure,” said Verity, practically glowing herself.  “You made it sing, Elizabeth…I can’t imagine anyone I’d want it to go to more.”

I breathed out, still grinning.  “Well, I’m a very lucky lady to have it.  Thank you so much for finding it for me,” I said, setting it gently back in its case and affixing the bow into the lid.  I shut the case and clicked it closed, taking a deep breath as my fingers pressed against the lid’s rickety old plastic.  I have a nice wooden case I could put it into, I thought.  Something classy enough for it…

When I gazed up at Layne again, her expression had shifted—it’d gone back to being more normal, more guarded.  But when our eyes connected, there was something that flickered across them, behind her gaze:

Wonder.

“You never disappoint, Verity—thank you, seriously,” I said, hugging the woman across the counter as I smiled widely.  She returned the embrace, smoothing a wisp of white hair behind her ear as she nodded at me with a slight shrug.

“It was my pleasure, truly.  And I’m really looking forward to seeing that Mendelssohn concert tomorrow—when is Mikagi Tasuki flying in?”

At hearing the famous violin soloist’s name, I shuddered uncomfortably and glanced at my watch.  “Oh, you know…in half an hour,” I groaned, placing the crutches beneath my arms and taking a tentative step back from the counter, leaning on the crutches and my good leg.  “We’ve really got to get going if I’m going to make the rehearsal in time.  Verity, you’re amazing, thank you so much—I’ll see you Friday?”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said with a bright smile.

I waved at her over my shoulder and began to hobble toward the front door that Layne, graciously, held open for me, the violin case dangling from her fingertips.  For half a moment, I considered asking her to be careful with the instrument, but then I realized that would be ridiculous—she had to know how much it was worth, and at the very least, she knew it was important to me.  She wasn’t a careless person.  And she did sling it gently under her arm once we were out on the sidewalk again, clasping the case close and tight to her leather jacket as she slid her hands easily into her pockets.

Layne glanced up, far up, and I followed her gaze, past the skyscrapers surrounding us, to the deep blue sky, the setting sun to the west making the sky dive to a deep, breathtaking shade of indigo.  And farther still above us, a slim crescent of moon made its pale thumbnail imprint on the sky.

Layne shuddered a little, flipping up the collar of her leather jacket as if the day had suddenly gotten colder.

We walked to the parking garage in unexpected silence.

Chapter 4:  Audience

I winced as I heard the dulcet tones of Amelia yelling at the top of her lungs.  Her angry words and several expletives were magnified immensely by the empty balcony seating in the concert hall, making the tiny woman sound like she was an ogre intent on destroying a village with a very large club…and not a diminutive orchestra conductor.

We weren’t even in the building, but her mood was projecting, loud and clear.  It was going to be one of “those” rehearsals.

“Hey, Liz!” said Bob, our principal flutist, as he stubbed out his cigarette in the brick side of the building and held the back door open for me with a grin.  His graying hair was combed back and to the side under a fedora that had a red carnation sticking out of it.  He whistled in a low tone and gazed down at my crutches as he tossed his lighter into his suit jacket pocket.  “I didn’t know the accident was quite that serious—are you okay?”

“Hey, I’ve still got all my fingers and toes, so I guess I’m doing pretty well,” I joked as Bob continued to hold the door open for Layne, his eyes growing a little wider as he gazed up at her.  Bob isn’t exactly the tallest guy, but Layne seemed to tower over him in the entryway with all her big-shouldered, leather-jacket-wearing charisma that seemed to fill the relatively small space.  “Bob, this is Layne…my dad hired her to…um.”  I bit my lip, searching for the right words and failing to find them.  “She’s helping me out with some stuff,” I said, finishing up lamely.

Layne practically flexed her muscles as she took off her leather jacket and draped it smoothly over her forearm, holding my violin case in her other hand.  Her red t-shirt was snug around her biceps, and I tried very hard not to stare at the pronounced curves of her chest or her impeccably chiseled abs that the t-shirt accentuated.  “Pleased to meet you,” she said, offering a hand to shake.

Bob shut the door behind him and came into the hallway with us, shaking her hand quickly.  He winced—obviously, she had a firmer grip with him than she’d had with me.  “Charmed,” he groaned a little, then chuckled as he jerked his thumb down the corridor and toward the concert hall as more of the angry yelling ricocheted down to us.  Amelia wasn’t just in rare form today: she was on fire.  “Amelia’s been impossible to live with all this week because Tasuki’s flying in,” said Bob with another wince as he shook his head at me.  “Seriously, Elizabeth, you should have taken a couple of sick days or something.  Look at you!  You’re in crutches, and you willingly come to submit yourself to this abuse!”  He shook his head and sighed, palming his lighter in and out of his pocket nervously, as if he needed something to do with his hands.  “You’re such a masochist,” he pronounced.

“Not so much a masochist, I promise—I just wouldn’t miss playing with Mikagi Tasuki for the entire world.  And a little bit of yelling has never scared me off, remember?”  I chuckled and continued to hobble down the corridor.

“This is the woman,” said Bob, his voice dropping to a stage whisper as he leaned his head toward Layne, who raised her eyebrows at him, “who auditioned when Amelia had just gone through four hours of traffic.  It’s legendary, how angry she was that day.  And Liz won the audition anyway!”

“It’s really not legendary,” I snorted and shook my head at Layne, who was grinning.  “I just really, really wanted to be in this orchestra.”

“Anyway,” said Bob, stopping off at the men’s room, “I’ll see you out there!”  He ducked inside, and I could hear him humming the melody from one of our harder pieces as the door swung shut behind him.

“Nice guy,” said Layne with a small smile.

“They all are—really, everyone in the orchestra is.  They’re very good people here,” I said, pausing for a breather, my hands gripping my crutch handles.  “Okay.  So, sometimes family members of musicians in the orchestra come in and watch rehearsal, so having you here isn’t really that unheard of—just take any seat you like out in the audience, once I’m set up,” I told Layne as we continued along the corridor.

“I’ll be quiet as a mouse,” she promised with a wink.  And then we were down the corridor and rounding the corner.

The concert hall was extra cold today I realized, as I hobbled across the stage toward the first row of violin chairs in the violin section.

Or maybe it was just Amelia’s personality making the hall just that much chillier.

Amelia Booth stood an impressive four feet five inches, but not a single person had ever looked at that woman and thought she was small.  There was just something about her that towered over you.  Maybe it was her out-of-fashion beehive hairdo that spiraled ever upward in a tall cone of brassy red hair, or her shoulder pads under signature blazers that continuously made her look like she was not, in fact, an orchestra conductor, but a football quarterback.

But it wasn’t her hair or wardrobe or anything that superficial that made Amelia Booth so intimidating.

It was her personality.

“Ah, Elizabeth, I see that despite my hopes, your near-death experience has not made you realize the important things in life—like punctuality,” said Amelia, one penciled-in eyebrow up over her thick, coke-bottle glasses.  She was tapping one of her ridiculously high patent leather heels on the wood floor of the stage, and her arms inside of their black and white checked blazer were crossed so tightly in front of her, she looked exactly like a caricature of an impatient person.

Layne glanced at me with both of her brows raised, but I was grinning and shaking my head.

“It wasn’t one of those near death experiences, Amelia—since when have you ever been that lucky?” I teased as I turned around, hopping on one foot as I hooked the crutches out from under my arm.  Layne handed me my violin case, and I nodded my thanks as she shoved her hands in her pockets, nodded to Amelia and trotted toward the far staircase that led down to the seating.

My second in the first string violin section, Tracy, looked me up and down and shook her head, her gray eyes wide as she plucked at her strings and began tuning them.  Her long, blonde curls were swept up in a messy up-do, and her pretty face wasn’t wearing a stitch of makeup, not that she needed any.  Tracy would have been gorgeous in a burlap sack half-full of potatoes.  “I’ve been so worried about you!” she hissed under her breath, resting the violin over her knees as she set up the sheet music in front of her on the stand, clipping it into place.  “Seriously, what happened to you?” she muttered out of the side of her mouth.

“I’m all right, don’t worry,” I promised her quietly, fishing my sheet music out of my shoulder bag.  “When is Tasuki supposed to arrive?”

“Frederic went to pick her up from the airport,” she said.  Frederic was our sound and lighting guy, and pretty much everyone in the orchestra agreed that he didn’t get paid enough to put up with all of Amelia’s requests, demands and idiosyncrasies.  But then, we all agreed that none of us got paid enough to put up with Amelia—a fact that she herself happily backed up.  “So they should be getting here soon,” she added, adjusting one of her music stand clips.  Everyone in the orchestra was supposed to use the standardized binder clips to hold their music to the metal frame—but for rehearsals, Tracy used clothespins that she’d painted flowers onto.  She was kind of crafty.

“I’m a little nervous,” I admitted, beginning to tune my violin, fiddling with the pegs as I thumbed across the strings and listened to the notes emanating softly from the body of the instrument.  “I mean first the accident, and then my violin got creamed in the accident—so I just came from Verity’s with this new baby.”

“I was gonna say—that’s a sexy new fiddle if I ever heard one,” said Tracy in hushed tones as she listened to the notes reverberating in the violin.  She wrinkled her nose and shook her head, stray curls flying.  “You’re brave, though, bringing a new instrument to rehearsal—especially this rehearsal.  Amelia’s been on fire today, she’s so nervous about Tasuki playing with us,” she said, grinning lopsidedly at me.

“I think I got knocked in the head in the accident,” I muttered dryly.  “So it’s not so much bravery as stupidity.”  Any musician knows that you have to learn the ins and outs of an instrument before you even think about publicly performing with it.

Ah, well.  Trial by fire.

We didn’t even have to be told.  Everyone filed into place with their instruments, busily tuning them, leafing through sheet music and taking sips from our bottles of water.  Some musicians had started to go exclusively electronic, and—to me—it still looked a little strange, with e-tablets propped up on the music stands.  Just as there was that perfect scent of wood and rosin, I would always associate happy things with actual paper sheet music.

Though, to be fair, while I didn’t think I could ever be one of those exclusively electronic musicians, when I dropped my sheet music or got coffee stains on important sections, had sheets scatter everywhere and occasionally completely lose a page or two, I very much saw the appeal of the electronic route.

Amelia loomed in front of us, nursing an extremely large, cracked blue mug of black coffee as she muttered crabbily into a smart phone, her mouth twisting from a grimace into something that almost resembled a smile.  “All right, gang!” she practically sang out as she ended the call.  “They’re in the building!”

Tracy and I exchanged a chuckle and grin.  I was pretty certain that we’d never seen Amelia look this happy—or this nervous.

I glanced up at the rows of seating.  Layne had taken a seat three rows back, leaning back in her plush theater chair, her chin in her hand as she gazed at the stage.  Her eyes were bright and focused, and for a moment, I thought she was glancing from musician to musician.  But when I gazed up at her, I caught her staring…at me.

I hoped to God that my blush wasn’t that visible, but I could certainly feel my cheeks redden under that intense gaze.  Tracy glanced at me and elbowed me a little with a chuckle as she placed her violin under her chin and sketched the bow across the strings.  “Who’s the cutie?” she muttered softly.

“Oh, you know…a bodyguard,” I sighed and groaned a little, glancing sidelong at her.  “My father finally did it—he hired one for me.  It’s because of the accident,” I whispered to her as she stopped playing, setting the violin in her lap again with an open mouth.  “We think the guy rammed me on purpose,” I breathed to her.

“Oh, my God,” said Tracy, her mouth in rounded astonishment, but then the entire orchestra was standing—me a little less quickly than the others as I tried to rise without the crutches—as Mikagi Tasuki (and Frederic, carrying her violin case and following close behind), stalked into the room.

As a violinist, I have to admit:  I was a bit of a Mikagi Tasuki fangirl—though, really, I think every single person in our orchestra would have confessed to the same love.  Mikagi Tasuki had, after all, single-handedly transformed violin music from a classical, kind-of-nerdy thing to listen to, to something anyone on the street would say they enjoyed.  She’d made violins, for lack of a better word, “cool.”  Her specialty was fusing perfectly executed classical music with punk, pop and rock, and pretty much everyone from any developed country would say that they knew of her and had heard her music, and had probably danced to a song or two of hers at any recent wedding they’d attended.

I’d never had the extreme pleasure of seeing Ms. Tasuki in person, but she looked much like she had on the Tonight Show, which was one of my favorite performances of hers, and one I had in my “favorites” folder on YouTube.  This afternoon, she was wearing all black, her chin-length black hair almost iridescent in the bright lights from overhead.  Her dark brown eyes were wide and expressive, and she was willowy and incredibly graceful in her knee-high riding boots, knee-length black skirt and jacket.  She paused next to Amelia, glancing at the rest of the orchestra with a small smile tugging at her full mouth.

Ms. Tasuki smiled widely, then, and did a little bow to us as silence fell across the stage.  “I’m so pleased to be here,” she said loudly, in her heavily accented, but high and charming, voice.  The words rolled out over us as she nodded.  “I am so excited to be playing with all of you, and I am so excited for the concert tomorrow!”

And my heart, already fangirling, began to soar.

I mean, probably she says that to every orchestra she plays with.  But Ms. Tasuki seemed so genuine, what she was saying so heartfelt…That, in fact, she did want to be here playing with us.

Frederic set her violin case down, and she had her violin out in a heartbeat, plucking at the strings and tuning them, drawing her bow across them in an effortless, graceful motion.

All of us picked up our instruments, too, and in short order, we began the rehearsal.

So I’ve got to be honest:  it wasn’t my best rehearsal, not by a long shot.  Being so close to Mikagi Tasuki had apparently shut down all of the really clever sections of my brain, and that meant that my hands played on autopilot.  Which wouldn’t have been a big deal during any normal rehearsal, though I always did my best to never phone them in.

But in this rehearsal, everyone was trying to do their best, but unfortunately, the combination of nerves (which we’re all really good at managing, usually), of being that close to a star…it was, apparently, a rotten combination.  And yeah, it was getting to a lot of us.

Though, to our great relief, because Mikagi Tasuki was there, Amelia couldn’t exactly yell her head off, like she normally would if we’d put in such a rotten rehearsal.  Instead, her face took on such a unique color of red that it appeared several of her blood vessels were breaking.

Mikagi Tasuki was, of course, perfection, every note perfect and so passionately played.  I’d seen enough of her performances on YouTube and on DVDs to know that she was a world-class performer, strutting and dancing across the stage while cradling the violin to her chin, playing it like it’s never been played before, but being able to watch her from behind was a rare treat, too.  Not in that way (though her rear was definitely gorgeous in an objective she-is-a-beautiful-woman kind of way), but because she kept throwing little glances and grins back to us, parading across the stage like she owned the place, but was also sharing it with us, too, cheering us on during the more difficult sections.

After the rehearsal, and after Amelia’s face took on a more normal hue, Ms. Tasuki introduced herself to everyone, demanding that we call her “Mikagi.”  Which, of course proved that she was even more of a class act than we’d thought.  When you’re a musician, you just assume that pretty much everyone with an ounce of star power is a stuck up narcissist.  But not Mikagi.  She was humble, down-to-earth and shook everyone’s hand like she meant it.

I sighed happily and hobbled away with my crutches and my violin case dangling from my fingers.  Tracy snatched the case up from my hand and walked beside me.

“That was euphoric,” she sighed happily, her voice cooing just a little.  “Though I think I missed about twenty notes.”  Her face screwed up and she sighed.  “I don’t think I even missed that many notes in my first jury test in music school.”

“Yeah, well, I think we were all just a little dazzled by playing with Mikagi for the first time—I know we’ll all be a lot better tomorrow,” I told her, confidence not exactly exuding out of my tone, but I still hoped it’d be true.  We couldn’t be worse than that rehearsal we just gave.

Probably.

“So, anyway,” said Tracy, her voice dropping down to a conspirator’s whisper as we wandered over to the coffee pot positioned near the coat room.  It was slowly spitting out coffee-smelling sludge, which several people were in line for quite happily.  “That cutie of yours was making eyes at you all during the rehearsal, if you hadn’t noticed,” she said with a wide smile, leaning closer.

“Cutie?” I muttered, one brow up after wincing at that word.  Then I blanched a little.  “Oh, God, you mean Layne.  Tracy, she’s my bodyguard,” I told her firmly, shifting so that my weight was taken off my bad leg.

“That didn’t stop Kevin Costner from hooking up with Whitney Houston that one time, I’d like to point out,” said Tracy, chuckling a little as the line for coffee moved forward by a person.  The familiar, comforting scent of black coffee wafted into the air, and I realized how thirsty I was.

“You just want me to turn into a Lifetime movie, I can see it coming,” I groaned, shaking my head with a chuckle.

“Maybe not Lifetime so much as Showtime.  Don’t they have lesbian shows and crap on?  I mean, you were meant for your own show.”  Her nose was wrinkled in that adorable way she got when she was teasing me.

“I’m cutting you off from making anymore jokes about this,” I groaned, rolling my eyes.  “My life is not the L-Word, Tracy, thanks for that stereotype.  And I’m not getting together with—”

“That was really good,” said Layne, one brow artfully raised as she cleared her throat behind me.  Tracy had suddenly turned as red as a tomato and was carefully watching the coffee pot with as much concentration as a nuclear scientist gives a test tube.  “You’re remarkable,” said Layne softly, just for my ears as she curved closer toward me, leaning her upper body so that her mouth was inches from my ear.  She was grinning wickedly, her hands shoved deeply in her leather pockets, her shoulders curving toward me, her whole body in an angle that seemed to point to me.

My mouth went suddenly dry as I gulped down air.

“You couldn’t possibly have heard me.  You can’t tell one musician from the others in an orchestra—that’s the point,” I chided her softly, but my lips were twisted in a grin before I could help it.  “Tracy, this is Layne—my new bodyguard,” I said, a bit louder, clearing my throat and sweeping a hand toward the gorgeous, brooding woman to my right.  “Layne, this is my friend and colleague, Tracy Conroy, also a violinist.”  I indicated Tracy, who was staring at Layne with wide eyes.

“Hello,” said Layne with another lopsided grin, her voice going a little deeper as she leaned closer, her full lips curving wickedly.  “You were quite good, too.”

Tracy giggled a little and blushed even deeper as she held tightly to her violin case she was now holding in front of her, a little like I’m sure she used to do in high school as she held her schoolbooks and was given a compliment.  “You probably say that to all the violinists,” she murmured in what I’d assumed was a joke, but her voice was a little breathy, and I stared at my friend with wide eyes.  She was staring at Layne with the kind of look she got when she was hitting on someone, all pouty lips and wide eyes and leaning forward her chest just a little.

Tracy was straight.  Admittedly not really arrow-straight, but she certainly liked men an awful lot.

But then, Layne was pretty impressive and gorgeous, and when she was training those intense hazel eyes on you, smiling her seductive little smile, and tossing some roguish hair out of her eyes while wearing the hell out of that leather jacket…yeah.  I could see being a little flustered.

Like I was, right now.

“You know what we should do?” asked Tracy then, blinking as if she’d just snapped out of a trance and grabbing my arm so hard I almost lost my balance on my left crutch.  “Oh, sorry,” she murmured penitently, helping to steady me with an arm around my shoulders.  “I just got the best idea!  Why don’t we all go out for drinks—we can celebrate Mikagi Tasuki playing with little old us, we can celebrate…your new bodyguard…”  She trailed off with a chuckle and inclined her head toward Layne and me.  “I’m sure we can think of a bunch more things to celebrate.  What do you think?”

I narrowed my eyes and raised a single eyebrow at Tracy, who was doing her best to appear completely innocent with her wide eyes, blinking those long lashes slowly with a soft, neutral smile.  Yeah, the innocent act wasn’t really working.  Either she wanted me to have some relaxed time with my attractive new bodyguard, or she wanted some relaxed time with my attractive new bodyguard.

“I’m up for it if you are,” said Layne, hands still deep in her pockets as she cocked her head and regarded me with a smile.  “If you’ve not overdone it, Elizabeth?  Are you getting overtired after the rehearsal?”

I hung there on my crutches and shook my head.  The pain pills were doing pretty well, and I purposefully hadn’t over-extended myself in the rehearsal that day.  “Yeah, drinks would be great,” I told Tracy with a grin myself.  “At McBride’s?”

“I’m insulted that you even had to ask,” said Tracy with a chuckle and an absurdly campy wink.

So McBride’s it was.

Chapter 5:  Not Really a Date

Fun Boston history fact:  McBride’s was a lesbian bar long before any of the other gay bars moved into town.  It’s been around since the nineteen hundreds.  How many lesbian bars can say that?  Way back then, of course, it was all pretty hush hush and something that no one but ladies in the know talked about, but nowadays, McBride’s wears its pride on its proverbial sleeve.  There’s a rainbow flag unfurled outside, off the side of the building by the front door, and inside, the air of be-whoever-you-want-to-be is as constant as the flowing booze, strobing lights and constant, thumping dance music.

As such, while there are a hell of a lot of lesbians here on any given night, there’s also a fair share of gay men and everyone else on the queer spectrum you can think of, and a lot of straight people, too, gyrating to the music on the dance floor and ordering as many beers, liquor and fancy drinks as the lesbians.  Because of the mixed atmosphere, it was usually our place of choice after a spectacularly good—or bad—rehearsal, where we went to celebrate, kick back and relax.  And to party, just a little.

Like tonight.

“You know, after a rehearsal that bad, I should really just turn in my fiddles and consider a career in housekeeping,” sighed Tracy.  “Who knows, maybe I missed my calling?”  With that, she swung back another shot.  She staggered in her chair a little after that one.

We were both getting pretty tipsy.  And Layne sat there, only taking occasional sips out of a club soda and grinning indulgently at the both of us.

“You don’t want to go into housekeeping,” I sighed, shaking my head.  “And let’s be honest—you weren’t nearly as bad as me today.  I missed a lot of notes.  Like, at one point, I played the measure from the next line.”

“You guys are speaking Greek to me,” Layne chuckled, signaling the bartender for another club soda.  Unlike how the bartender, a gorgeous woman with long, black hair that curled around her shoulders like she was about to pose for a shampoo ad, had treated us—mostly ignoring us and getting us our drinks occasionally, the same as everyone else at the bar—she sailed right on over when Layne called for her with a bright, dazzling smile, leaning on the bar so that her chest, quite visible in her plunging black v-neck tank, was impressively propped up on her arms, and breathily asked Layne if she was sure she couldn’t buy her a shot.

“No, I’m fine,” said Layne with a wry grin twisting her mouth sideways.  “But if you want to buy me that club soda…”  There was a subtle shift in her body.  Before, it’d seemed like she was lounging in the bar chair, like her body didn’t have a bone to it and had just pooled into the seat like pouring water in a glass.  Now, she leaned forward a little, her lips slightly parted, and shimmering, like she’d just licked them.  Her eyes went dangerously dark as her muscles tensed almost imperceptibly and you were immediately aware of the raw power in her, and suddenly, as I stared at this gorgeous creature, the bar had become much, much, much too hot for me.  I tugged at the front of my sweater, trying to remember how to breathe.

The bartender had apparently experienced a similar reaction, as her jaw was almost on the bar itself, and she poured Layne a club soda so fast, the glass almost catapulted off the counter when she slid it toward Layne.

But, of course, Layne caught it with a hand that moved too quick for me to even follow.

I’d had a few drinks at that point, but seriously…she was fast.

“Well,” said Layne, her rich, velvety voice moving in commanding waves over me.  I stared at her and breathed out slowly, conscious of the fact that, when she spoke, my heart rate began to skyrocket.  “For what it’s worth,” Layne practically purred, “I thought you were both perfect—you’re great musicians and shouldn’t be so hard on yourselves.”

“There you go again!  Liar, liar,” said Tracy, wagging her finger in Layne’s face, her speech a little slurred.  “Everyone knows it’s impossible to hear individ…indi…each musician in an orchestra separately,” she sniffed and shook her head, slurring her words a little more than she had a few minutes ago.  But then, she was knocking back the drinks pretty fast.  “You’re just trying to be all flirty, I know it,” she breathed in what she probably assumed was a sexy manner but what only ended up making her look a little asthmatic.

I coughed into my drink, but she didn’t get the hint that, perhaps, she was being a little unsubtle.

“Now see, that’s where you’re wrong,” said Layne, her head to the side a little as she leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table and crossing her arms on the tabletop, her muscles rippling beneath her skin from where she’d rolled up the leather of her jacket.  Her eyes flashed as she murmured softly, the words rumbling in her throat:  “I have impeccable hearing, and I can tell you:  you two are good at what you do.”

“Hah,” said Tracy, her nose wrinkling like it does when she meets a challenge head on.  “No one has that good of hearing.  If you think it’s that impeccable, prove it!” she said, waving her hand that happened to be holding a beer in it—some of the beer sloshed up and out of the neck, spattering onto the floor, but not much.  “Tell me what someone in this bar is saying, something you couldn’t possibly hear.  That guy.”

Layne glanced past Tracy’s shoulder to the man she’d indicated with her sloshing drink.  He was about ten feet away, murmuring something into a smaller man’s ear.  None of us could see his mouth, because the smaller man’s head obscured it.  They were both wearing tight-fitting t-shirts and skinny jeans, both had ultra-gelled hair, the color of which was hard to see in the dimly lit bar.  The taller man had his hand on the shorter man’s waist.

I only glanced at the men for a moment, though, because I had to turn back to look at Layne.  It was how she was tilting her head, her eyes unfocused but flashing in the dark interior of the bar.  Her handsome face took on an intense look of concentration, her full lips open just a little.  I stared at them, taking a deep breath and another sip of my martini as warmth began to grow in my belly.

After a heartbeat, Layne’s grin returned, her eyes focused, and she tapped the tabletop with a short fingernail.  “He’s telling his boyfriend that they’ve had enough to drink, and they should head out to Doctor V’s, because it has a better atmosphere for dancing.”

Tracy snorted, shaking her head.  “C’mon, you can’t fool us.  ‘Fess up:  you so just made that up.”

But then, as we watched, the taller man hooked his arm tighter around the shorter man’s waist, tossed a few bills on the bar top for a tip, and ushered his boyfriend past us and right out the door.

“That was just a lucky guess,” sniffed Tracy, though her widened eyes told me she wasn’t quite sure about that.  I glanced at Layne, my eyebrows raised, and she shrugged a little, sitting smoothly back in her chair, one lazy arm looped over the back of it, and her leather jacket open enough, and her red t-shirt tight enough, that I followed the path of her chest, and…

Oh, God, she’d caught me staring.

The blood rushed to my cheeks, and I ducked my head a little, taking a gulp of air.

“What about you, Elizabeth?” Layne murmured then.  She didn’t move—if at all possible, she lounged even more comfortably in her chair, but there was something about her face, about her single raised eyebrow and flashing eyes that made me shift in my chair, made me lean toward her across the table, as if she was magnetically tugging me in her direction.

“Yes?” I asked, biting my lip.

Her mouth quirked sideways, and she grinned, the grin deepening into a very wicked smile as she cocked her head a little.  “Pick someone for me to spy on,” she whispered, lowering her voice into a velvety growl.

I watched her mouth forming those words, a little spellbound by it, the drink slowing my reflexes and making me forget just a bit that staring at the body parts of my bodyguard was kind of unforgivably rude and inappropriate.  I cleared my throat, circling my martini glass with cold fingers as I gazed out across the bar.

I caught the glance of a woman leaning against the bar, talking with two other women.  She had short brown hair, stylishly cut, and was wearing a blazer and dress pants, like the two others she was with.  She was also drinking a martini, and as I glanced at her, she didn’t stop speaking to her companions, but she did raise her glass to me a little, her mouth taking on the tiniest of smiles.

“What about her?” I asked Layne in a stage whisper.

Layne sighed and gazed at the woman across the room.  Layne lifted her chin, met my gaze head-on as her lips flattened to a hard line.  “She’s asking her friends if she should come over and buy you a drink.  She thinks you’re hot, but she…”  Here Layne began to grin again, her mouth curling triumphantly at the corners as she tossed the hair out of her eyes and narrowed them.  “She thinks you’re with me.”

“You’re just guessing!” hooted Tracy, but she fell silent as quickly as if she’d been stung, because the woman was walking across the crowded bar toward our little table, then.

She reached us and leaned down toward me, a few wisps of brown hair haloing her face.  “Hi,” she murmured.  She smelled of expensive perfume and booze, and up close, her face showed worry lines around the corners of her mouth as she cleared her throat.  “I never do this kind of thing,” she said, biting her lip as she stared down at me, “but I’ll kick myself for it later if I don’t—so, I was wondering if I could buy you a drink?”

I stupidly blinked for a long moment—half because I was so shocked that Layne could possibly have heard this woman over the loud music, the incessant talking, laughter and clinking of glasses, and she’d been twenty feet away and whispering—and half because that sort of thing doesn’t usually happen to me.  I gulped.  “I’ve…I’ve had enough for tonight, but thank you—that’s very nice.”  I tried to think of some excuse as she began to frown.  “…I just got into an accident,” I said quickly, pointing to my crutches, positioned much like Tiny Tim’s as they leaned against the table.

I’d meant the words to indicate that because I’d gotten into an accident, I was pretty bushed.  But she stood quickly and took a step back.  It’s not as if I had the plague, but she retreated quicker than if I’d announced I was just diagnosed with dysentery, heading to the bar without looking back.

“That was a little rude.  She must not like reminders of her own mortality,” said Layne snidely, with a shake of her head, but her body language and her smug smile told me all I needed to know:  she was very happy that the woman had left us so quickly.

“Okay, so you really do have good hearing,” Tracy finally admitted, eyes wide.  “But, seriously, that was a little spooky—how the hell do you do it?  How the hell could anyone possibly have that good of hearing?”

Layne shrugged a little, lifting up her club soda and taking a sip.  I watched that motion, watched the inherent grace in it, could also see her bicep move as her arm moved, and I realized I hadn’t seen her very much without her jacket.  Even though it was warm in here, and even though I knew that she ran a warm temperature, Layne hadn’t taken off her leather jacket in the bar.  “Honestly, it’s not much of a trick—I just come from a family that has really great hearing.  Call it good genes,” she said firmly in answer to Tracy’s question.  But it wasn’t really an answer at all.

After another twenty minutes or so of booze and laughter, Tracy glanced down at her watch, bringing it up closer to her face with narrowed eyes when she couldn’t make out the time at first glance.  “Gosh, kids, I hate to drink and run,” she said, yawning hugely and covering it up with her hand, “but I have not only a concert tomorrow, but a stupid dentist’s appointment like…first thing.”  She winced and shook her head.  “I should reschedule, but…”  She trailed off as she blinked owlishly at us and shook her head again.  “I think I’m going to call a cab—I don’t think I can walk all the way to my apartment,” she said slowly, slurring every word as she stood unsteadily.

“Do you want me to call one for you?” I asked, reaching quickly for my crutches.  I was a little tipsy, yeah, but Tracy was pretty darn drunk and I was worried about her and her fiddle getting home in one piece.

“I got this,” she said with a wide smile, patting my shoulder.  “You two have fun!” she practically sang, then she pecked a kiss on my cheek, waved to Layne, and faded into the crowd as she headed toward McBride’s door.

And then it was me and Layne sitting there in the oldest lesbian bar in Boston.

I cleared my throat, taking another sip of my martini.

I realized just then that this…kind of felt like a date.

But it wasn’t.  It absolutely wasn’t, obviously.  Because Layne was technically my employee (wasn’t she?  Or was she my father’s employee?  Did it matter?).  Either way, we had a working relationship that sleeping with—or dating, or anything related to either of these things—would vastly overcomplicate.

And did I really need overcomplicated in my life right now, when someone had—allegedly—just tried to kill me?  Wasn’t that overcomplicated enough?

I stared at Layne across the table.  I couldn’t help but stare.  It was the way she bonelessly lounged back in the chair, the way she gazed at me with her bright, flashing eyes that could never decide what color they wanted to be, their hazel depths seeming to turn green one moment, blue the next, and then a deep, shimmering brown a heartbeat later.

Their color transformed again as Layne leaned forward, just then, her body language shifting as she curved toward me, her entire body a question mark punctuating an unspoken query.

She was going to ask that question.  Her beautiful mouth parted, and those full, perfect lips were going to ask me…something.  But then her face shut up like a boarded-up house, and she leaned back again, clearing her throat, averting her gaze from me.  The moment had somehow come and gone, and I didn’t know what had just changed, but something obviously had.  “I’m about ready to get going,” she said then, quietly.  “If you are.”

What had just happened?  What had she been about to ask me?  Maybe I’d imagined it…but no.  It’d seemed precious, that last moment, how she’d curved toward me like I, for a single heartbeat of time, had a gravity to me, too…and I called to her as strongly as she called to me.

“Yeah, that’d be fine,” I told her, realizing as I spoke the words that I was slurring them, too.  Okay, so maybe I was a little past tipsy.  And maybe, just maybe, I’d imagined that moment with Layne.

I stood and tried to grab for the crutches, but I had to grip onto the edge of the table as the world started to reorient itself around me, twirling and spinning like it was a carnival ride that would never let me off.

“I can bring the car to the front of the bar,” said Layne, standing in an instant and putting one strong hand under my right elbow.  The way her fingers curled around my arm made me lean toward her, but then I was shaking my head, grabbing at my crutches again.  I managed to get them under my arms as Layne lifted up my violin case from under the table with a questioning tilt to her head.

“No, no, that’s too much trouble to go to.  That’d just be silly,” I said, as practically as I could in the circumstances.  “We can both walk together to the parking garage.  And anyway, the night air in the city always makes me happy.”  God, did I really just say that?  I couldn’t put thoughts together long enough to voice them articulately.

“But it’s quite a walk to the parking garage,” said Layne softly into my ear, her warm breath brushing against my skin and making me sigh, my heart beating a little faster.  God, I hoped she hadn’t heard that happy sigh.  “And aren’t you feeling it after everything today?  Aren’t you sore?”

I mean, I was, but the booze was taking care of most of the worst of the pain.  Somewhere in my muzzy head, I remembered a warning label on the pill bottle saying you shouldn’t mix the pain pills with alcohol, but I was pretty sure that it was all right if I wasn’t driving.  Maybe.  I blinked again.  Layne had asked me another question, but I hadn’t remotely heard it.

“I’m sorry, I’m pretty gone,” I finally admitted to her, leaning heavily on the crutches, and a little on Layne herself.  God, she felt so good against me, her body so hard in all of the right places, sculpted muscles beneath the jeans and leather jacket and t-shirt, and soft in all the right places…  I wanted to touch her.

I wanted to kiss her.

I tried to hang onto the last shreds of inhibition as we eased out of the loud, bass-thumping confines of the bar onto the chill sidewalk outside.  The cool June night air brushed over me, waking me up a little from my stupor as I glanced around at the heavily populated road, covered in brightly lit taxis, cars and buses, and the equally packed sidewalk, swarming with people.

Much to my sadness, a lot of the closer parking garages had already begun to fill for the night (and it was a Thursday night!  But Boston loves to party any night of the week), so we hadn’t bothered to move the car from where we’d parked by the concert hall.

Layne was right—we had a long way to walk, though it was a beautiful night to do it in.  Layne carried my violin case easily with one hand, and placed her other strong, sure arm around my waist, bringing me close against her.

She smelled so good, I realized.  Not of cigarette smoke, like the crowd of smokers we’d just passed, or of alcohol, though there’d been a lot of booze sloshing out of various glasses and bottles at the bar.  She smelled…well, it’s absurd to describe it like this, but it’s the truth, so here goes:  she smelled fresh, like she’d just been out for a hike, and there’d been a really brisk, clear wind, and all the scents of the forest, of a bright, glorious day, had gotten stuck in her hair and against the warmth of her skin.  She smelled fresh, but she also smelled hot, like cinnamon and a dark, cool musk that was an added magnet to her.  I could have stood there all day and inhaled the old, sweet leather of her jacket, the musk of her skin, the fresh greenery of a wild hike, but we were moving through the city—my city—at night, and all around us people laughed and cried and talked and moved through the night on their way to many different places and experiences.

And Layne and I seemed to move through them all like we weren’t really a part of them.  Like everyone else moved in one direction, and Layne, with her warm arm wrapped tightly around me like she’d never let me go, moved in another.

It was like we were kept safe in our own little bubble, just the two of us, Layne and me.

That is, until we reached the block with the parking garage.

The crowds had started to thin out more and more.  If I’d been paying attention to the time, I would have noticed that it was really quite far past my bedtime, and if I’d been paying attention to the sparseness of the crowds—and, surprisingly, the almost complete lack of people on the only recently teeming streets—I would have realized we should probably be progressing to my car a little quicker than we were.

We had to pass a slim alleyway before the parking garage came into view.  I’d parked in this garage dozens of times when I drove to the concert hall instead of taking the bus to rehearsals, but I was never around here this late into the evening.  The parking garage was a few blocks away from the concert hall itself, which put it into an entirely unfamiliar neighborhood at night.

Which would explain why I never could have predicted what happened next.

If you’d ask me, I would have told you, yes—this was a safe part of town.  But it was very late at night, and I guess any part of the city can be unsafe at any time if the wrong people are there.  And the very wrong people were there just then.

Like it was a very bad dream or a scene from a dark, gritty movie, two men folded out of the shadows of the building of the parking garage and stood beneath the streetlight, their feet hip-width apart, their heads back, their hoods up.  They looked utterly menacing, and as the first one—a big, burly guy with a brown beard—stepped forward, I realized what was happening before the gun came out of his hoodie pocket.

“All right,” he said with a quick sneer.  “Empty out your purses.  Any rings, cell phones, anything of value, give ‘em to me.  Right now.”

My heart was in my throat.  I couldn’t quite breathe, and all I could really think about was the fact that I didn’t really have anything of value on my person—nothing but my violin, and really, not that many people in this world would know what that instrument was worth.  I wondered if they would shoot us if they knew that we didn’t have anything they could take.  I wondered what would happen if they became angry that we didn’t have anything…

All of these thoughts came to me in the flash of an eye, because the gunman took a step back, just then.  His eyes grew wide, and he lowered his gun.

He was staring at Layne.

I looked up at her.  I remember how fast my blood was pounding, like we were still back at the bar, and they’d just turned up the bass of an already pretty bass-impressive song, the music thrumming through the soles of my feet and into every inch of my body and bones.  Everything in the world faded to that deep thumping, and then I understood that the quick, fast bass was my heartbeat roaring through me.

Layne was snarling.  Actually snarling, her lips up over her very white teeth, her eyes impressively narrowed, and her body posture curling forward.  She was a very tall woman, but she seemed to suddenly be looming over the two men, which wasn’t exactly possible:  they were tall, too.

The gunman took another step back, but then his companion shook his head, nudged the gunman’s arm.  “C’mon, Larry,” he said in a strained whisper.  “Ask ‘em for their stuff again.”

It was strange, in that moment, the things that stood out to me.  Like how cold I’d suddenly gotten.  Like how this second guy didn’t have the typical Boston accent, but something a little softer and more rounded, almost southern.

And then the hair on the back of my neck stood up to attention as the first guy’s eyes widened, as Layne took one step forward.

As the gunman raised the gun and held it at shoulder-height, pointed at Layne.

“Back up, bitch,” he muttered, his eyes so wide that they were almost rolling in his head.

The gun fired.

There was a scream, but that was me, I realized after a second—I’d screamed.  Layne wasn’t falling backward, like someone who’d just been shot.  She was lunging forward, and then the two guys were turning and running down the alleyway as if the hounds of hell were on their heels.  They were headed back toward the rear of the building, and they were pretty fast, but even with their head start, Layne was hot on their heels.

Layne was so fast—impossibly fast, like the fastest track runner I’d ever seen, but somehow even faster than that.  She caught up with the gunman in a heartbeat, and then she was shoving down on his shoulder with her hand.  It was just a small gesture—it really shouldn’t have even broken his stride—but he crumpled to the ground as if his legs had completely given out underneath him, rolling three times over until he rested, possibly unconscious, against the side of a dumpster, the gun skittering across the ground and thudding up against the side of the building with a metallic clunk.

The second guy glanced back and picked up the pace, his heavy boots thudding against the pavement.  He rounded the corner as Layne did, too, and then the two were lost from my view.

There was a thin, piercing scream, and then a long moment of silence.

Layne strode back around the corner at a quick pace, her shoulders curled forward, her hands in her pockets.

Even at the distance she was from me, I took a step back.

Her head was bent forward, she was wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.

She wasn’t breathing hard.

“Layne,” I whispered as she reached me.  I clutched my violin case tightly to me—she must have given it to me before she ran after them, though I didn’t remember her doing it.  “Are you…are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said curtly, adjusting her leather jacket’s collar against her skin as she growled a little and spat.  “We need to call the police, get these men arrested.”  She took a slim black smart phone out of her pocket, dialed 911.

As she turned away from me, I stared at that leather jacket, my heartbeat roaring through me.

There was a ragged hole from the bullet, right over where her heart should be.  A hole on her t-shirt, right where her heart should be.

And beneath that hole was perfect, unblemished skin.

With no wound.

Chapter 6:  The Ring

It rained that night, the unhappy, torrential downpour of a violent June thunderstorm.  The wind raged outside my apartment window, making the glass rattle in its casement and driving the raindrops sideways into the glass, but though the storm raged outside, the lightning spearing the buildings around me, all I could think about was the woman in my guest bedroom, her leather jacket hanging on the peg behind the door.

The leather jacket with the hole in it.

I’d been a little appalled when my father insisted that Layne, as my bodyguard, should spend nights at my place, too.  I wasn’t unhappy really for reasons of my own independence or my own space, though that’s what I’d brought up when he’d mentioned it.  Mostly, I was appalled that Layne would have no downtime from me.

I had a pretty demanding job that took up all my time.  I really wasn’t that interesting of a person to spend twenty-four-seven with.

But Layne hadn’t seemed to mind in the slightest.  She’d nodded at my father, seated behind his desk with his happy grin pasted across his face because I’d agreed to all of this, and she’d nodded to me with a bright grin.  My father had, of course, brought up the fact that once the people who were after us were brought to justice, I wouldn’t have need of a bodyguard, so this arrangement wasn’t forever.  He’d asked me to be a good sport, and then Layne had glanced at me sidelong.

“It’ll be my pleasure to keep you safe,” she’d murmured to me, setting my heartbeat to racing.

And tonight she had kept me safe.

Apparently, she’d even been shot for me.

And there was not a single trace of that bullet anywhere on her person.

Okay.  So where could the bullet have gone?  The gunman had shot the gun at point blank range.  That bullet had very obviously gone through the leather jacket—the leather had been perfect just moments earlier, and there was no other way to explain that gaping hole through it now.  And then there was the gaping hole in the t-shirt, directly over where her heart should be, showing off perfect, pale skin.  Like the jacket, there was no other way to explain the hole in the t-shirt other than the fact that the bullet had gone through it.

But if all that was true, then how was it possible that the bullet had not hit her?

Obviously, I was pretty damn happy that she hadn’t had to take a bullet for me.  I was deeply relieved that she’d not been hurt on my account.  It just didn’t make any sense, no matter how many different times I put the pieces together.  The gun had been shot at point blank range.  It had ripped through her leather jacket.  It should have connected with her heart.  She very obviously (not that I’d stared at her for hours earlier to confirm this) wasn’t wearing a bullet-proof vest under that tissue-thin t-shirt of hers.

And then, of course, I kept coming back to the hole in that t-shirt.

And all that beautiful, bare skin beneath it that was unharmed.

My face burned in the dark of my bedroom as I thought about that skin.  As I thought about the fact that that gorgeous woman was a single room away from me.

For a moment, I let myself think about that fact—but only a moment.  My father had hired Layne to keep me safe, and already in the first day she had.  She’d been right.  She was the perfect candidate for this job.

But how had Layne gotten out of all of this unscathed?  And why had the gunman reacted so violently to her?  And how had she knocked them down?  She’d hardly touched them.

And the man had screamed…

And she’d been so brusque after the encounter, very unlike herself.  We’d gotten into the car, had driven the entire way to my apartment in silence, and when I’d shown her the guest bedroom she’d be staying in, she asked me if I was all right, I told her yes, and then she’d practically shut the door in my face.

That had hurt.  I’d tried to explain that away, too—she’d spent all day with me, and she’d just been shot at.  She was bound to be a little tired and needing a moment alone.  But there had been something flashing in her eyes—something like anger.

I took a deep breath and rolled over, listening to the crack of thunder and lightning outside, listening to the rain beat itself against my window.

When I closed my eyes, I saw Layne grinning at me, her mouth quirked sideways, that wicked grin making her eyes flash with bright fire.  But then I saw, too, the look in Layne’s eyes when she’d stared at the gunman.

The hair on the back of my neck had risen.  My skin had gone so cold.

There had been something there in her eyes.  Something I’d never seen before.

I turned over again and punched at my hot pillow a little with exasperation.  I had one of the biggest concerts in my life tomorrow and had given a really rotten rehearsal this evening, and I needed my sleep.

But there was no help for it.

I couldn’t sleep.

There was too much going on in my head and in my body with all its aches and stitches.  I flicked on my bedside lamp with a long sigh and poked around in my bedside table’s drawer.  No good books to read—the last one I’d finished was on my e-reader, and that had been a week ago, and I hadn’t kept it charged.  I pressed the “on” button a few times just to be sure, but the same message kept flashing on the screen:  “your battery is dead—please charge your device.”  I fiddled with the e-reader’s tangled charger cord, also in the desk drawer, and plugged it and the e-reader into the wall outlet behind the table, so at least it’d be charged for me soon.

As I went to shut the drawer, something made me pause.

I didn’t have much in my bedside table’s drawer.  Some pain medicine, two novels I’d finished a long time ago and should really just shelve in my living room, my e-reader and its charger.

And my mother’s ring.

I picked it up and turned it in the light with a small frown.  The blood-red garnet flashed, even in the low-wattage bulb from my bedside lamp.  My mother had had these rings made for her and my father on their ten-year wedding anniversary.  She’d been so happy with them, had wanted to give my father a sweet surprise.  I hadn’t been there to see it, wasn’t even alive at that point, but the way he talked about it…it was a gesture that meant a lot to him, though I never really understood the significance of the garnets, and Dad had never gotten around to telling me.

And by the time I could have asked my mother what they’d meant, she was already gone.

My father had asked me to keep my mother’s ring after the funeral.  I’d only been a kid, really, but it had meant a lot to me that something so precious had been my responsibility.  And even though she was gone…well.  It made me feel that some small part of her was still here with us.

My father’s ring was a more masculine construction, bright silver with high prongs and a very large square-cut garnet that glittered out of them.  He never took it off, so I didn’t know if the inside of his ring bore an inscription like my mother’s.

My mother’s ring was very different.  Though it was silver, too, the garnet was a round cut, set in high, fluted prongs that sort of resembled a tiara from the side.  The scrollwork all over the ring was so fine and pretty, very antique looking, though I knew the ring had been made not that very many years ago—certainly not in the Victorian era, like how it looked.

And on the inside of the band were the words in a looping, hand-carved script: our love is immortal.

My breath caught in my throat to look at those tiny, carved words in the silver, and I brushed the pad of my thumb over the inside of the band as tears pricked at my eyes.  I don’t remember much about my mother.  I remember the way she laughed, like everything was wonderfully funny.  I remember the way she looked at my father, like he was the only person in the universe besides me.

It’s really sad, I suppose, but I never thought about my mother that much anymore.  I was grateful for the fact that she’d brought me into the world, and I’d loved her very much when she’d been alive…but there was nothing really to remember her by.  I loved the memory of her, but it was such an abstract one:  laughter and the way she looked at my father.  I’d given up mourning her a long time ago.

I was, however, very sad for my father.  It had been so obvious that this was the love of his life.  After Mom had died, he’d become so extra over-protective of me, understandably so.  Mom had died in a car accident, and it was just one of those things that couldn’t have been prevented.  That’s what an accident is, isn’t it?  No one’s fault, but something’s gone terribly wrong.  But my father had labored under the belief, all these years, that the accident could have been prevented if only he’d been more vigilant.  He was obsessed with the idea, actually.  So he put all of those over protective worries on me.

He missed my mother with a fierceness that made your heart ache to witness.

Sometimes I thought about my father never dating, never even looking at another woman since my mother’s death, and though it was very sad, and I felt terribly sorry for him…I knew that it was the product of a type of union that was all-consuming.  My father and mother had loved each other so fiercely that my father hadn’t been able to consider another woman since she’d passed.  And I had my doubts he ever would.

Sometimes, I wondered if I could ever settle in my own life for anything less than what my parents had experienced.

I didn’t know if I believed in true love or one person being meant for someone since before they were born.  That was all sorts of fate, destiny and cosmic-juju stuff that, at the time, I’d had no experience with.

But if there was such a thing, I knew my parents had had it.

It had never stopped me of course, from dating the women I was physically or intellectually drawn to, and I would continue to date and try to find the woman for me.

But I wondered if I’d ever be content unless we had that same connection together as my parents had:  a bright, fierce, powerful love that could stand the test of time.

And even death.

I turned the ring this way and that in the dim bedroom light as the garnet flashed and winked at me.  I didn’t keep the ring in my jewelry box, though probably I should have.

I kept it in this drawer because I’d kept meaning to wear it.

The ring was pretty fancy for someone like me.  I like long, clean lines and a minimum of fuss with my clothing, including a minimum of colors.  My favorite color to wear is black, because it’s classic and classy, and orchestra members wear a heck of a lot of it.  In my down time, I wore black skirts and black turtlenecks and tights and shoes.  I wasn’t much like my mother in that regard.  She loved frilly, fancy, pretty things, the more colorful the better, the more frilly and fancy the better, exactly like this ring.  It was much too fancy for me.  I don’t even really like to wear jewelry, could hardly be coxed into the two slim silver hoops I put into my ears for performances.

But after the events of the past few days, after all the life-threatening crap that had recently been happening to me…it kind of felt like a good idea to put on my mother’s ring.  Maybe I was being superstitious and I thought this tiny piece of my mother’s would give me a little luck.

But, mostly, I just wanted something comforting to hold onto.

If the last few days had proved anything, they’d proved this:

Life throws a hell of a lot of surprises at you.  And things you could never, ever predict can change your life forever.

Like an accident.

And a bodyguard.

I held up the ring to the light and took a deep breath as I stared at the blood-red stone.  And then I slid the silver ring down the third finger of my right hand.  It nestled there comfortably against my skin like it’d been made for me, the garnet still flashing in the dull light.

I turned off the lamp.  I turned my pillow over to the cool, unrumpled side and placed my cheek against it with a sigh.  I closed my eyes, listening to the soft hush of the rain.  The storm was dying down, it seemed.

And, unexpectedly and peacefully, the ring growing warm against my skin, I drifted off to sleep.

—-

I woke up to the smell of scrambled eggs and perfectly cooked toast slathered in melted butter.  The smell was particularly strong, because these things were right in front of my nose.

Literally.

It was morning, it had to be, because the sun was out, and its bright, warm light suffused my bedroom, spilling over me and my comforter.  I opened my eyes and blinked at the sight greeting me.  The lamp on my bedside table had been pushed back, and a tray had been set on the table.  The tray, an old wooden one that I usually kept my potted begonia and watering can on, now held one of my china plates heaped with golden scrambled eggs, dark rye toast coated thickly with butter and blueberry jam, and a big, rounded spoonful of cottage cheese heaped neatly on a lettuce leaf.

The lettuce leaf was really what threw me.  It was something a diner would do, serving cottage cheese on a leaf of lettuce, but, somehow, here it was on my bedside table.

Layne stood in my open bedroom doorway, leaning against the door jam with a very smug grin on her face, her arms crossed, and her biceps curving just a little as she tilted her head at me.  She was wearing a skin-tight blue t-shirt this morning, which made her hazel eyes somehow look green.  The blue t-shirt, I would like to point out, was thin enough to show off her deeply toned abs like she was in a commercial for a local gym.  Her black hair was combed carefully to the side today, and she had on a slim leather wristwatch.

May I point out again that she was standing in my bedroom.

I drew the covers a little further up and found myself blushing.  I was no stranger to waking up to a woman in my bedroom—and normally, I didn’t care what she saw.  But Layne…wasn’t like that.  She wasn’t a one-night stand, and she wasn’t my girlfriend.

She was my intoxicatingly attractive bodyguard…

…Who had apparently made me breakfast in bed?

I was starting to get mixed signals.

“You don’t have to cook for me,” were the words out of my mouth before I realized that this was probably not the best first thing to say to her.

I held the comforter to me and painfully realized that I was only wearing a t-shirt and panties, and the t-shirt I was wearing was one from my teenaged years, and was therefore pretty ratty, but held nostalgia for me, which is why I kept it and wore it to bed.  It had a picture of Britney Spears on it, the cover of her very first album where she looks all innocent, before all her shit hit the proverbial fan.  Please don’t judge, I’m sure you have one embarrassing piece of clothing somewhere, too.

Or…maybe it’s just me.

“Eh, I was making myself breakfast, and I thought:  why not?  I thought that maybe it’d take the sting out of being held up at gunpoint last night,” she drawled, deepening her smirk.  “So have you always been a fan?”

Oh, God, she had seen the shirt.  I rolled my eyes and shook my head, drawing up my comforter so far that it rested beneath my nose.  “I swear, if you ever bring this up to anyone else ever—”

“You’ll hit me, baby, one more time?” asked Layne with a low, throaty chuckle that simultaneously made me blush a few shades redder, but that also gave me the realization that I was only wearing a t-shirt and underwear and that she was standing pretty darn close…

Something began to stir in me, uncoiling in my belly as I took a deep breath and bit my lip, trying to figure out a scathing, clever comeback.

“Hey, I don’t judge,” she said after a long moment in which I utterly failed to think up a scathing, clever comeback.  Layne spread her hands and shrugged as she grinned at me.  “Eat up—you have a big day ahead of you!”

I shot her a suspicious look, but she was already turning, her hands shoved deep in her back pockets as she whistled “Hit Me, Baby, One More Time” on the way back to the kitchen.

I stared at those hands in her back pockets.  Stared unabashedly, the blush deepening in my cheeks as I realized that I wished my hands were in those back pockets, not hers.

Oh, God, I really needed to get a grip.  I bit my lip and realized exactly how warm I was, buried beneath the comforter, and pushed it off, rising and hobbling over to the bedroom door before shutting it with a soft click.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the most appropriate thing in the world that my bodyguard had waltzed into my bedroom without knocking (or maybe she had knocked, and I was too deep asleep to hear her, I reasoned with myself) and brought me breakfast in bed while simultaneously seeing me in all my ratty t-shirt glory.  And had my comforter been pushed off my legs, too?  Had my rear been visible to her?  God, maybe she’d seen the whole shebang.  I blew a sigh and plunked myself back down on the edge of the bed.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t appropriate.  But hot?  Hell, yes.

And she’d made me breakfast.  In bed.  Not even my long-term girlfriends had ever made me breakfast, and I wasn’t even dating Layne.

I mean, okay, Elizabeth, get a grip.  I took a deep breath and threaded my fingers through my tousled hair.  Layne was a nice person, granted.  Like she’d said, she’d probably just been making herself breakfast—I’d told her last night that anything in the apartment that she wanted to use, eat, or etc., she could—and since she’s so thoughtful, she’d figured I might like something to eat, too.  It was probably that easy of an explanation.  She was making breakfast for herself and made some extra for me.  Case closed.

I twirled my mother’s ring around my finger and stared at the plate mounded with eggs, cottage cheese and toast.  But I wasn’t seeing the plate.  I was seeing her sarcastic smile as she teased me about once liking Britney Spears enough to keep this t-shirt for nostalgia’s sake, and her long-fingered hands shoved deep in those dark jeans pockets over her tightly toned ass.

I leaned back on my hands and let out of a very long sigh, the sunshine filtering through the window and streaming over me with as much heat as my blush.

Was she sending me signals, or was she just a really nice person?

Either way, I couldn’t come on to my bodyguard.

Could I?

I groaned in frustration and stared at the plate of food again.  I scooped up a few of the eggs on a piece of bread and gave them a taste.

They were practically perfect.

Chapter 7:  Knock ‘em Dead

“I’m going to chew off every fingernail.  There’ll be nothing left,” Tracy groaned, holding out her left hand to me.  Violinists have to keep our fingernails short anyway because our fingertips need to press down perfectly on the strings, but Tracy’s nails were pretty drastically short…and really did look like they’d been chewed on.  Her manicure—a glittery red nail polish—had almost been ruined.

“Don’t be nervous,” I told her soothingly.  “We’re going to do all right.”

“Yeah, exactly as we did in rehearsal,” she muttered, one eyebrow up as she massaged her temples and groaned a little under her breath.

We were partaking of our pre-concert ritual, which consisted in the both of us getting coffees at the sweet little coffee shop, “Thanks a Latte,” that was located around the corner from the fine arts museum.  Layne was sitting a few booths down from us, talking to my father on her cell phone about “the incident,” which was how she was referring to last night’s being-held-at-gunpoint.

I tugged at the ends of my pure-white sleeves.  We were going a tiny bit casual this evening in our concert, which was, for me, wearing a buttoned dress shirt, and a black pencil skirt with black tights and mary janes.  Tracy wore the same white shirt, but was in a pair of black slacks.  Her curly hair was swept up in a sophisticated bun with tendrils dangling prettily around her ears—mine was in a simple, high ponytail that I kept tugging at because I was nervous.

Tracy pressed her iced coffee to her forehead with a slight groan and sighed.  “I really shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night, and I really shouldn’t have gone to the dentist this morning.  He filled two cavities.  I mean, really, what was I thinking?”

I chuckled and shook my head with a shrug, trying to keep it light.  Since our concert was so soon, and I didn’t want to throw either one of us off our game, I’d decided not to discuss “the incident” with Tracy, because I didn’t want to worry her.  And, I mean really—how do you bring up that sort of thing?  You’ll never guess what happened last night—we were held at gunpoint!  I fiddled with the ring on my finger and cleared my throat.

“Layne made me breakfast in bed this morning,” is what I finally settled on telling her.  Tracy set her drink down on the table between us and raised both of her eyebrows, her hangover momentarily forgotten as a slow smile spread across her face.

“No way!  Breakfast in bed, seriously?  So was this after a night of wild and passionate—”

“Seriously, mind, get the heck out of gutter,” I said, jerking my thumb as I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

“Honey, I think your mind needs to jump into the gutter.  She’s so attractive that not a single person has been unable to look at her when they walk past her table,” Tracy hissed, leaning forward and tapping a bitten fingernail on the tabletop.  “Earth to Elizabeth’s lady parts, come in Elizabeth’s lady parts!”

“I really can’t take you anywhere,” I muttered dryly and sighed.

“Is it the whole employee thing that’s turning you off?  It’s probably totally that,” Tracy groaned, leaning back in her booth.  She groaned a little under her breath, her frown deepening.  “Seriously, Liz, she’s not your employee.  Your father happened to hire her to keep you safe.  If she keeps you safe on a couple of dates, or—you know—in bed, all the better.”

I winced at that and shook my head.  All of my misgivings about what could possibly happen between us started to bubble to the surface again.

“Okay, let’s say I do just that,” I muttered with a sigh.  “I ask Layne out, and Layne and I get together, go out for a couple of dates, end up in bed.  And then what?  What if it doesn’t work out?  What if we fail spectacularly together?  Does my father, put between the impossible rock and the terrible hard place of his daughter getting together with the bodyguard he hired for her tell Layne that her services are no longer required?  Does he fire her?  That’d be pretty shitty.  So say Dad doesn’t let Layne go, and we keep working together.  Then we’re stuck together, her guarding me while we sort-of try to avoid each other and the topic of dating or sex.  She’s staying at my apartment for goodness sake, Tracy, we’d never be able to get away from each other.”  I sighed, biting my lip.  “Just believe me when I say that it would never work, and it’s a terrible idea to even try it.”

Tracy frowned a little at that and sort of deflated.  “I’m sorry.  I just thought you were really attracted to her,” she murmured.

I am, I thought.  I’m desperately attracted to her.  But I didn’t say as much.  Instead, I stared past Tracy’s shoulder, at the intensely magnetic woman sitting a few booths down, her head bent and her shiny, expertly-gelled black hair sweeping over one eye as she softly discussed with my father how she saved my life.  Like it was no big thing, taking that bullet for me.

And that was another thing…

My insides twisted as I wrapped my fingers tightly around my to-go cup of coffee, trying to warm myself so I could stop the slight shiver that traveled down my spine.  No matter how hard I tried to put all the pieces together, the simple fact was that I still didn’t have any logical explanation for what, exactly, had happened last night.

When the police had come and we’d given the report, Layne had been so matter-of-fact, but when explaining the circumstances of the evening, she hadn’t exactly gotten the story straight.  She’d told the officer that the gun had discharged, yes, but that it had shot straight up in the air.

I hadn’t said anything at the time because I was so shocked at her…well, let’s be honest:  at her lie.  The gunman hadn’t shot the gun straight up into the air.

He’d shot the gun right at her heart.

It had been dark last night, obviously, and the streetlamps weren’t very bright, and she’d folded the collar of her leather jacket just so, so that it wasn’t obvious that there was a hole in her jacket.

I’d forgotten that part in the exhaustion and confusion of last night.  But I didn’t have any logical explanation for any of it.

And, for some reason, I didn’t want to question Layne about it.  Just the thought of bringing it up to her made me remember the expression she’d given the men last night.

Like she was hunting them.

Layne’s brow was furrowed now, and her dark head was bent as she spoke in low tones to my father.  Her dark hair was carefully gelled, and there was an attractive little pompadour on the front of her scalp that made my insides twist, made me feel so warm, and made parts of me flicker on.  She had such an animal attraction that when she glanced my way, just then, I actually felt my heart skip a beat.

There was something about Layne.  Something I couldn’t quite place my finger on that had made me spellbound with her from the very start.

But something else, too.

Something that made my insides flutter.

Something…dangerous.

Layne ended the call with my father and slid the slim phone into her jeans pocket as she rose smoothly and prowled over to us.  Tracy was right—she passed a man in his late forties, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans, and a woman in a gray pin-stripe suit, and both of them turned their heads to follow Layne’s progression down the aisle in the coffee shop, their eyes wide and glazed as they gazed at her with absolute and apparent attraction.  And, I guess, a little lust.

“How are you ladies getting on?” she asked in low tones as she arrived at our table, checking her wristwatch with a quick glance.  “Is it almost time to get going?”

“Almost,” I muttered, glancing down quickly at my steaming cup of coffee, the steam curling like a beckoning finger out of the hole in the lid.

It was best not to look up into Layne’s eyes, because when I did, I wasn’t sure about anything other than the fact that yes—I was incredibly attracted to her.

And there really wasn’t anything I could do about it.

Or, let me be clear:  anything I should do about it.

Tracy stood, taking up her empty cup and began to chew on another fingernail.  “I’m so nervous…I probably shouldn’t have had that cup of joe with those two shots of espresso.  Now I’m extra nervous and shaky and I kind of want to run a marathon.”

“You’ll be fine,” said Layne with raised eyebrows, shaking her head at the two of us.  She rocked back on her heels.  “You’re world-class musicians, aren’t you?”

“I mean…” began Tracy, but Layne shook her head with a wry grin.

“No—you have to be world class musicians, or you couldn’t have gotten into the Boston Philharmonic.  Right, Elizabeth?” she asked.  Her voice dropped down an entire octave when she addressed me, and I shivered a little—hopefully, it was an invisible shiver.

“Right,” I responded without much enthusiasm.  I lifted up my crutches from where I’d placed them in the booth beside me, and I slid out of the booth, trying to find my balance.  Layne was, of course, right there, with a smooth arm around my waist as she helped me stand.  “Thanks,” I murmured to her, and I made the utter mistake of looking up into her gaze.

She looked down at me with bright, flashing eyes, eyes that shifted color as I gazed into them, eyes that seemed to pin me to the spot.  But it was everything about her, really, that pinned me there—those beautiful, full lips that I wanted, more than anything to taste.  That gorgeous line of her jaw that I wanted to trail my tongue across…

God, I seriously had to get it together.  Maybe I was just having a logical reaction to being saved by her.  Of course you’re attracted to someone who saved you from a gunman.  Of course.

But I knew that wasn’t the case.

I was attracted to Layne.  Okay.  There.  I’d thought it.

And now I had a concert to get through.  And then I could think things through later.

Right now, it was show time.

I hobbled alongside Tracy and Layne as we began to make our way to the concert hall.  Layne kindly carried my violin, though I could have managed it myself.  When we crossed streets with the congested, Friday night rush hour traffic and all its blaring horns and crazy drivers, she thoughtfully held my elbow firmly.  I tried to think over and over that my father was paying her to do these things for me, but that wasn’t exactly true.  He was paying her to keep me safe from assassins, not be thoughtful and helpful in day to day life.

“Your ticket’s at will call,” I told Layne once we reached the hall and paused outside it in the milling crowds of concertgoers.  I glanced up at the brightly lit marquee overhead that declared Mikagi Tasuki was playing with us tonight, and then I glanced at Layne, who was watching me carefully.  I smiled softly at her.  “I hope you…I hope you enjoy the concert.”

Tracy’s eyes went wide, and she grinned as she sort of sidled away from us, making toward the back of the building and the musicians’ entrance.

Effectively leaving me alone with Layne in the crowd of people that were beginning to swarm the building.

“I’ve never been to a classical concert.  Or the symphony…whatever you call it,” said Layne then.  Her voice had gone soft, and the usual mix of strength and sarcasm seemed to fade away from her.  When she spoke those words, her eyes went a little wider, and her deep smile showed me exactly how excited she was about seeing this.  I was surprised by that.  Maybe it was the leather jacket or the tough demeanor or maybe none of those things, but I kind of thought she’d be bored out of her wits by this show.  Maybe I shouldn’t have assumed that.

I stared up at her and grinned a little.  She returned that grin and handed over my violin case with a nod.

“Break a leg,” she said, with one brow raised.  “Just not…literally.  It’ll be nice when you’re off those crutches for good, so let’s not keep you in them, okay?”

“If I break a leg while sitting in a chair and playing a violin, I have major, major problems,” I chuckled at her.  In the fading light of the day, and beneath the bright lights of the concert hall signs, she looked so beautiful.  She was utterly handsome yes, but it was a hard handsomeness.  But here, wide-eyed and eager about attending the concert…she’d become beautiful.

My heart skipped an entire handful of beats as we stood close to one another.  I didn’t know what to say, and she didn’t offer anything, so an entire moment passed with the fresh, hot scent of her in my nose, with the bright warmth of her along the length of my body.  We weren’t even touching, but the warmth of her body crossed the small distance between us and seemed to envelop me.

“I’ll be seeing you,” I whispered lamely, frustrated at myself that I couldn’t think of something better to say.  But as I turned, her hand darted out, and her fingers closed around my wrist.

I paused for a long moment, waiting expectantly for whatever it was she’d been about to say.  Her mouth open and closed, and something dark moved over her eyes, something shadowed.  But then the moment had come and gone again, and whatever it was she’d been about to say disappeared.  Layne shook her head, cleared her throat.

“Good luck,” she murmured, and moved away from me.  In an instant, she was lost in the crowd.

I stared after her, my heart pounding too quickly, the violin dangling from my fingers that were curled around my crutch.

She’d wanted to tell me something, and from the expression on her face, it was something important.  But then she just…hadn’t.

What the hell had that been about?

I limped backstage, so lost in thought that I almost ran into Bob, smoking like a chimney outside of the back door.

“I think Amelia’s going to have a stroke,” he remarked, shaking his head and stubbing the cigarette out beneath his toe.  He held the door open for me.  “Everyone’s got such a case of the nerves—it’s crazy!”  He followed me in, tossing his lighter into his suit jacket pocket.  “Seriously, I’m nervous, and I’m not a nervous person.  I wasn’t nervous at my own wedding, at the birth of my daughters, at the birth of my son, at their weddings, at—”

“Nerves are catching,” I interrupted his nervous chatter gently as I glanced sidelong at him.  “And, come on, it’s Mikagi Tasuki.  I can understand a little nerves.”

“No, it’s not like that,” he said, shaking his head and biting at a thumbnail.  I’d never seen Bob bite at any of his nails ever.  It was a strange sight to see.  I stared at him, my brows up.

“What do you mean?”

“I dunno,” he said, shaking his head again, a little more emphatically, and shifting his weight from foot to foot.  “I just dunno.  There’s just…just something in the air today.  Something not good.”

“Huh,” I replied, shifting my weight off my bad leg and leaning on my crutch.  Musicians aren’t nearly as superstitious a lot as theater people, but I have to be honest with you:  we are pretty superstitious.  If Bob—good, steady Bob—was telling me that there was something “not good” in the air today, that meant that pretty much everyone in the orchestra was thinking that exact same thing.

And that—pardon the superstition—was a pretty rotten omen for the concert itself.

“I need another cigarette,” Bob muttered, and walked down the hallway, back the way we’d come, toward the back door.

Swallowing down my worry, I continued to walk slowly down the hallway, limping along with my crutches, my violin case dangling from my fingers.

I found Tracy standing outside the bathroom, leaning against the wall with a paper cup of water in her hands, taking deep, calming breaths.  It was a pretty common occurrence to see her doing this before a performance—it was her habit to get in the zone for each concert.  But today her face was tight and hardly calm from the exercise.  The worry lines around her mouth were more pronounced, and she was holding her eyes shut tightly—she looked tense enough to snap.

My cell phone in my handbag began to vibrate.  I leaned against the wall next to her, propped one of my crutches between us and fished in my purse for the slim smart phone.  The screen was lit up with one familiar, comforting word on the caller ID.

“Hi, Dad,” I said warmly, pressing the phone to my ear after hitting the green button.  “Are you here yet?”

“Just got here,” he said on the other end of the line—I could hear the murmur of loud voices in conversation behind him.  He was probably in line at will call.  “I’m so proud of you, sweetheart!  Performing with Mikagi Tasuki is such an honor.  Almost everyone at the packing plant got tickets, even!” he chirped.  “This is going to be such an amazing concert.  Knock ‘em dead!”

I chuckled and shook my head.  “I’ll do my best, Dad.”

Ever since my very first concert with the Boston Philharmonic, he’d never missed one.  He always bought front row tickets, or as close to front row as he could get, and he always brought roses for me.  I’d like to point out that we do practically weekly, and sometimes bi-weekly concerts.  In the beginning, I was a little embarrassed by his overwhelming enthusiasm—I mean, he gave a standing ovation in the beginning when no one else did.  But, over time, I came to realize that this was the way my father related to me.  He was supremely proud of the fact that his daughter, while not having taken over the family business, loved her job enough to share it, and was pretty good at it.

So he was always there, always supportive.  And he called before every performance to wish me luck.

I ended the call and slid the phone back into my purse as I considered things.  I was a pretty lucky lady.  Yeah, there was the obvious negative of having been held at gunpoint last night.  Yeah, there was the fact that someone had tried to ram my car off the road and, effectively, murder me because my father made a bit too much in profits from fish last year—a really rotten motive for murder, if you ask me.

But I had a father who really gave a shit about me, even in his older age.  Enough to stand in line once, and sometimes twice a week for tickets his daughter could have given him for free.

It was a little embarrassing, mostly sweet, and wholly love-filled.  But that was my dad, in a nutshell.

But the smile slipped from my face when I glanced sidelong at Tracy who was shaking her head, crumpling the now-empty paper cup in her hand as she grimaced and bit her lip.

“Something’s wrong,” she muttered.  I raised my eyebrows.

Granted, the latter half of last night wasn’t exactly my cup of tea, and it hadn’t been fun.  But even after all of that, even after being held at gunpoint, I didn’t have any sort of bad feeling—just general nervousness of performing with a star of Mikagi’s caliber.

Whatever everyone else was feeling, whatever “bad feeling” permeated the air…I couldn’t sense it.

“I think we’re all just feeding into one another’s nervousness,” I told Tracy soothingly.  “Honestly, Tracy—what could possibly go wrong?”

The lights flickered overhead.  The sign of five minutes to curtain.

“Crap,” I muttered, shoving the crutches under my arms again.  “We’ve got to get going.”

“I’m not even tuned yet,” muttered Tracy, cursing under her breath as she dashed down the corridor.

Then it was just me and my violin and my damnable crutches, trying to hurry down the hallway as quickly as I could.  Everyone else was, of course, already in their seats.  Leave it to me to be late.  I muttered some expletives under my breath, too, and kept hobbling as quickly as I could, which I would like to point out wasn’t quick at all.  God, I was going to catch it from Amelia…

The hair on the back of my neck began to stand up, the skin on my arms rising into gooseflesh.

I had the feeling that I was being watched.

This was ridiculous.  I was in an empty corridor, yes, but I was in a packed concert hall.  I wasn’t even going to dignify that creepy little feeling with the response of glancing over my shoulder.  The events of the past few days were just making me a little jumpy, that’s all.

But then I did dignify that feeling because I couldn’t help the instinct.  I glanced just a little behind me, ducking my head as I turned.

I went cold.

There was a figure, all in black—a black trench coat, no less—standing in the center of the hallway behind me as the lights flickered overhead.

I hadn’t been expecting anyone, but in the flickering lights and with the shadows and the trench coat and the distance…my heart was in my throat.  Yes, the events of the past few days were definitely getting to me.

“Hello?” I called, cursing myself wordlessly for my voice being so shaky.  “Can I help you?”

The lights came on fully again, and the hooded figure—it was wearing a hood, I realized—began to stalk toward me.

It was so fast, the black trench coat flaring out behind it, the hood eerily big and wide, like a monk’s hood, but completely shadowed so I couldn’t see a face…the figure seemed to race toward me, without its feet really touching the ground.

It stopped right in front of me, was taller than me, and even though we were a foot apart, I still couldn’t see a face.

The flickering lights steadied overhead.

And then they went out.

I stood my ground.  My heart pounding through me, my good leg shaking like a leaf, but I still stood my damn ground.

And the lights came back on.

Mikagi Tasuki removed the hood from her head, the trench coat flaring out around her as she stared at me with narrowed, dark eyes, her head to the side a little.

“Ms. Grayson, is it?  Violin?”  Her heavily accented English was so soft, I had to strain to hear her.  I gulped and nodded, my heart still thundering through me.

She smiled at me a little as the lights flickered overhead again.  She had a very wide smile.  A very bright smile.  But it didn’t exactly reach her eyes.

And, for a moment, it had seemed that her eyes had flickered somehow, too, just like the lights…but I wasn’t exactly certain what I thought I’d seen behind them.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, unbuttoning the top few buttons of her trench coat as she raised her chin.  Her short black hair swept against the back of her neck, reflecting the lights overhead brightly, like every strand of her hair practically glowed.  “I am afraid that I am dreadfully late,” she said slowly, carefully, as she folded the coat over her arm and watched me with her chin up, her eyes unblinking.  “We will go to the stage together?”

“Yes,” I managed, taking another deep breath of air.  God, I was getting so easily spooked.  It was only the star of the entire concert.

So why had I thought that there was something not quite right about her?

My skin still had goosebumps as we began to walk down the corridor together, me hobbling, her striding easily with her long legs, as graceful as a predator as her high heels clicked against the linoleum floor.

We reached the stage just as Amelia’s face was beginning to turn the same shade of red as a cherry.  Her expression went from pure, potent rage, upon seeing me, to incandescent bliss when she spotted Mikagi.  The buttons on her blazer practically popped right off as she puffed up with happiness and pride, lunging at Mikagi to draw an arm around her and propel her toward the stage.

For once, Amelia’s rage was perfectly justified, by the way.  It was terrible to show up right when the curtain is about to rise.  I should have been in my seat for at least the past half hour, tuning my violin, setting up my sheet music and focusing on having my instrument and me ready for the performance—and instead, I’d been getting spooked down in the hallway.

Normally, we don’t use a curtain at the concert hall—the audience files in and listens to us getting ready, which is part of what makes the symphony so intimate.  But because of Mikagi, we’d wanted to make the show a little more…showy, and we’d brought our old curtain out from storage just for the occasion.  This was wonderful, because as I did my best to hobble across the stage quickly, I was shielded from view by the audience.

The billowing red fabric of the curtain shut out the scene of the packed concert hall, but it did nothing to shut out the noise.  We had soft mood music piped in over the loud speakers as everyone was getting situated, and it was practically drowned out by the ambient roar of murmuring voices and laughter from the audience.

They sounded really excited to be here, and that excitement was catching.

My violin out of my case, held tightly against me, and the crutches left back stage made for an interesting trip across the wood floor, but I managed, limping heavily, to finally get to my seat.

Mikagi got out her own violin, a beautiful black instrument that had probably been custom-made for her (it looked like the kind of instrument a rock star would have), and she began to pluck quietly at the strings, tuning it expertly, a little off center of the stage as she held her head to an angle and glanced sidelong at the orchestra behind her.

We took our places.  We held our instruments expectantly.

And the curtains rose as the first note sounded out, mournful and plaintive and sweet, summoned from Mikagi’s bow as it dragged almost violently across her violin.

We began to play.

We drew music out of our own instruments, at times mournful, at times jubilant.  As the concert progressed, Mikagi strutted wildly across the stage, pirouetting and dancing along to the music that was all but conjured from her violin.  I had never witnessed such a beautiful performance in my entire life—she embodied the music she was playing.  As Mikagi moved, my eyes couldn’t help but follow her, even though I was supposed to be keeping close attention to my sheet music, to Amelia who conducted us, and to Mikagi…but I could really only watch Mikagi.

But we played flawlessly, all of us.  The rehearsal may have been a bit botched, but the concert itself seemed to be going off without a hitch.

During a lull in the string section, I glanced toward the front row.  The lights were backlighting the audience for this number, and I could make out some familiar faces out there.  I scanned the first row, and then the second—I couldn’t quite remember where my father said he’d be sitting.

Ah, there he was—in the third row.  I listened to the music building in intensity and glanced from my sheet music back toward him.

Huh.  That was strange.  He was sitting next to a woman, and he seemed to be in deep discussion with her.  His face looked clouded, and he tensely whispered into his companion’s ear.

She was gorgeous, though I couldn’t tell what sort of age she was from my furtive glance.  She had long, white-blonde hair that curled down and around her shoulders.  She was wearing a stunning black dress that showed off plunging décolletage.

I wondered if my father had brought a date.  If he had, good for him—it was about time.  I hoped that was who his companion was, but somehow, I didn’t think that was the case.  This was a woman who looked really familiar to me—I’d seen her at my father’s parties over the years, I realized, which meant that she was probably a colleague of his, and my father would never dream of dating someone in his extremely rich friend group.

The music began to build, and I skated my bow across the strings, closing my eyes as the humming of the violin, the great passion of the melody, began to build in me.  All around me were masters of their craft, playing their instruments for all they were worth.  Before me danced and played a star of our generation.

I still remember how happy I was in that singular moment…

And then the lights went out, plunging the world into darkness.

The lights in our hallway backstage were timed with the performances and manually flickered to announce that we’d better have our butts in the chair right that instant.  The lights for the stage and the concert hall itself were run by Frederic, the sound and light guy who’d picked up Mikagi from the airport, and who ran all sorts of odd errands for Amelia.  The lights were, of course, supposed to go out at the end of the performance.

But this was in the middle of the last song.

It was pitch black on the stage and in the audience—not even the emergency running lights along the edge of the stage were on.  The audience knew something was wrong, and a frantic murmuring was spreading like a virus across the rows of seating before us.  The music had cut off when the lights went out because all of the musicians had stopped playing almost at the same time from the shock of the anomalous darkness.  But now a few thrums from shifting fabric against strings or a thumb against harp made for an odd backdrop, and a very eerie soundtrack, to the beginning panic in the audience.

I sat in my chair in the dark patiently and waited for the lights to go back on.  It must surely be something technical.  It was bad timing, but there was nothing wrong.  There couldn’t be anything wrong.

But the lights didn’t go back on.

And, in the dark, something brushed against my hand.

I was surrounded by people—of course someone would touch me by accident if they were moving about on stage.  It was crowded with an entire orchestra’s worth of people on stage, so of course you would run into someone in the dark if you were trying to make your way toward the exits.  I’d had my violin on my knees, and my hands resting against the instrument, but I drew my violin up closer to my chest to protect it in case anyone ran into me again.

But that same feather-light touch followed my hand.

My ponytail at the back of my neck was brushed aside, then.  Instantly, I was covered in gooseflesh as a skating of fingertips brushed down the skin of my neck.  I shuddered against that touch, so light, so ephemeral, I wondered if I was imagining things.

But no, I wasn’t imagining it.

I gasped as I felt a mouth press against the skin of my neck.

I couldn’t be imagining this.

I turned my head quickly, bending forward and brushing my hand against my neck, like you do when you’re brushing away cobwebs.  It was an instinctual reaction, something I didn’t even think about.  But there was nothing and no one there.

Could it really have been a mouth against me?  A kiss?  I was so confused, and as the hair on the back of my neck stood to attention, I began to feel…well…

Afraid.

Out in the darkness, the furtive voices were completely silenced when a snarl echoed around us.

It was a snarl, a snarl like a vicious animal makes.  It echoed in the silence, and my entire body shivered.

And then, at that instant, the lights came back on, stuttering and flickering to life.

I turned quickly to look behind me, but there was only Tony, holding tightly to his violin and several feet behind me in the next row of violinists.  Tony was still sitting with wide eyes, talking to Emily, next to him, with fear blatant on both of their faces.

There was no one there who could have touched me, who could have kissed me.  I must have imagined it, the lips against my neck, the caress along my hand.  But it had felt so real.  How could I have possibly imagined something so real?  I brushed my fingers up to the back of my neck and grew cold again as they encountered a bit of dampness…exactly as if someone had placed a kiss against my neck.

I furtively glanced around, trying to find and place everyone in the orchestra.  But I knew everyone here.  They were my friends and my deeply esteemed colleagues, people who would never randomly plant a kiss on me, and anyway—everyone was distracted, upset and tense.  No one had grappled toward me in the dark to kiss me.

So, then…what the hell had just happened?

Audience members started to stand and try to make their way to the exits, but they paused as Mikagi strode to the center of the stage.  Where had she been?  I hadn’t seen her when I glanced across the stage a heartbeat ago.  She’d completely disappeared…

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said with a wide, gleaming smile, holding up her violin in one hand, and her bow in another as she held her arms out to the audience in a gesture of sympathy.  “Please return to your seats—it was just technical difficulties.  We would now like to give you the finale of a lifetime!”

There was a smattering of lukewarm applause, but at least the audience members were obeying her request, and were actually returning to their seats instead of swarming the exits.  They even seemed to be warming back up as they sat down, the panic from being plunged into darkness forgotten when Mikagi pressed her bow to the strings.  People began to applaud her as she started the last song of our set again.

But Mikagi hadn’t waited to see if the rest of the musicians were ready to continue.  She’d just started without us, plunging headlong into the song as we were still adjusting our sheet music or taking our own seats.  Again, I glanced around furtively as everyone scrambled to accompany her, adjusting their instruments and launching into the song somewhat unceremoniously.

My eyes were drawn back to an incongruous spot in the orchestra.  That was odd.  The wind section didn’t look normal.  I glanced again as I raised my bow to the strings.

Wait.  Bob wasn’t there.

I stared in shock at his empty seat and missed an entire measure before my body switched to autopilot and kept playing the violin.  I wracked my brains trying to think of the last time I’d seen him.  Yes, that was right—Bob had gone back outside for one more quick cigarette when I’d come into the building.  But surely he’d gotten up to the concert hall since then.  Surely Amelia wouldn’t start the concert without him, that would be ludicrous.  He was our principal flutist.  You couldn’t have a concert without the principal flutist.

I glanced at Maria, one of our other flutists.  Her face was screwed up with concentration as she played her heart out.  I hadn’t been paying much attention to the wind section in rehearsal, but I remembered that she didn’t have much of a part.

It dawned on me with a cold realization that Maria was playing Bob’s part.

Bob had not shown up to his chair.

Okay.  There was a perfectly logical explanation for this.  Maybe he’d had a family emergency, one of his kids had called him, something important or terrible had happened.  But unless one of his kids was dying—and I desperately hoped that wasn’t the case—I couldn’t imagine a strong enough reason that Bob would miss such an important concert.

Dread began to fill my heart as the music swelled around us.

He’d had a bad feeling.

No.  That was just a superstition.  It couldn’t mean anything.

I gulped air and swept my bow across the strings.  Around me, everyone put their heart and soul into the music.

The crashing waves of sound were silenced as the last note was played together.

The audience roared in applause.  We achieved a standing ovation almost instantaneously as Mikagi glanced back at the orchestra, beaming, sweeping her violin and bow up in each hand and turning back to bow low to the audience.

The orchestra members stood, too, but as I held my violin under my arm, all I could think about was getting off this stage as quickly as possible and going to figure out what had happened to Bob.  Figure out where he was, if he was okay.

Because of course he was okay.  Why wouldn’t he be okay?

The audience began to time their clapping to an insistent beat, practically demanding an encore.  We’d prepared one of Mikagi’s most iconic songs for this eventuality, “The Dream Suite,” and as we began to play the piece—it begins with a mournful bit of strings and builds eventually to something triumphant involving the whole orchestra—I shivered a little as I drew my bow across my violin.

We played through three encores.  By the fourth demand for an encore, Mikagi only blew kisses to the audience, bowed low, and the curtain was mercifully dropped.

“Tracy.”  I turned to her immediately, my heart in my throat as she glanced up at me, her eyes widening at my expression.  “Have you seen Bob?” I asked her.

Tracy was grinning from ear to ear, and that expression faltered for half a heartbeat as she tried to compute my response to the standing ovations and multiple encores…as fear.  “Um…”  She glanced to the wind section, and then her eyes got wider.  “What the hell—he didn’t play with us?  Where is he?”

“I don’t know…”  I tried to rise, but the multiple times that I’d stood and sat back down after the performance and during the encores had made my leg begin to scream.  I needed to get back stage to where I’d set my crutches leaning against one of the walls, but the wide floor separating me from backstage was suddenly looking very daunting indeed.

Mikagi turned and glanced at me.  It was a surreptitious glance over her shoulder, one I might not have even noticed if I wasn’t looking in her direction.  I caught her gaze and held it for half a heartbeat.

And she came over to me, gliding over the floor like she was grace personified, her high heels clicking impressively against the hardwood.

She held her violin and bow effortlessly in front of her.  I hadn’t had a chance to really appreciate her outfit before, as it’d been under the trench coat, but she looked so flawlessly beautiful this evening, wearing a daring black dress that clung to her upper arms and chest, but plunged incredibly low in the back.  The collar was a boat neck, and the skirt itself was a very pretty knee-length a-line.  It looked like the type of dress that an actress from the forties would wear.  With her severe chin-length haircut and her flawless pale skin, wearing so much black made her look like she was glowing.

Her eyes flashed as she took me in, as she smiled widely at me.  “What a lovely concert!” she said, tossing a glance back at the curtain.  Then the euphoria seemed to fade away from her, because she was looking back at me, her chest rising and falling quickly as she licked her lips.  “Would you…like some help?” she offered, holding her elbow out to me, like she was a gentleman in a top hat from another time, ready to escort me down the boardwalk.

“That’d be lovely, yes,” I winced, threading my arm through hers.  I held my violin against my body and did my best not to lean on her as we began to walk across the stage.  She was a slight woman, but even though I’d wanted to try and support my own weight as much as possible, by the time we reached back stage, I was leaning heavily on her.  But she didn’t even seem to notice.  She strode confidently forward, practically holding me up.

“Did you enjoy playing?” she asked me, then.  It was a hushed question that she practically whispered in my ear.  I glanced up at her quickly.  Her eyes were unreadable.

“I did very much—it was very wonderful of you to come play with us,” I told her distractedly, all in a rush.  I should have been deeply flattered that Mikagi Tasuki, world class violinist, was helping me to my crutches, but really—all I could think about was Bob.

That was odd…there should have been a clatter of voices, of laughter.  When we reached the back hallway, there should have been a hubbub of activity, flowers being delivered, family members allowed backstage, the press…

But there was only silence.

“Oh, my God, Elizabeth…oh, my God,” said Tracy, running up to me and flinging her arms around my neck as she buried her face in my shoulder and began to sob.

There was a stretcher, out by the back door to the hallway.  The flashing lights of an ambulance made the corridor glow as red as hell as two of the ambulance crew helped each other lift the body that was lying on the back steps up and on the stretcher instead.

Even though I was quite a ways down the corridor, even though it was now dark outside, the light from the ambulance and the light from inside spilled over the concrete steps.

They illuminated, clearly, the blood spattering the sidewalk and the steps.

Bob lay on the stretcher as they buckled him to it.  As they drew a sheet over his face.

I went cold as ice, my heart in my throat.

“He’s dead,” Tracy moaned, dissolving into sobs against me.

Chapter 8:  Trust

It’s hard to describe what it’s like, staring at a murdered man’s dead body.  Especially when the murdered man was someone you knew, someone you cared about, someone who showed you all of the five-hundred photos from his Caribbean vacation every year, beaming over the pictures of his kids—even though they were all grown up—because they were the most important parts of his life.

Someone you shared jokes and coffee with, someone you worked closely with.  Someone you’d known and laughed with and shared parts of your life with for years.

And now he was dead.

Bob was dead.

I think I was in shock as I stared at the grisly scene before me.  We were far enough down the corridor that extreme, close-up specifics evaded me, but the blood was still so evident on the concrete steps, on the door, no matter how far away we stood.  There was too much blood.

Tracy sobbed against me so hard, I was almost pushed off my crutches.  Absent-mindedly, I brought an arm up to her shoulder, tried to rub my hand in small, soothing circles against her as she wept, but I was a million miles away.

The corridor, though it was full of people, was eerily silent.

There were several police officers down by the door, talking in low, hushed tones with Amelia, who had her arms folded and a stony expression on her face, and a few men in plain clothes, suits, jackets, staring down at the blood with frowns…I guess they were detectives.  One of them, an older man possibly in his fifties, with a graying handlebar mustache and bright blue eyes, stepped forward, then, edging past the blood to stand in the center of the hallway as he cleared his throat.

“Folks, if you’d indulge me for a little…” he began, his voice booming down the corridor.  “I’m just going to ask you a few questions.  I realize you were all just up there—” he pointed with his pen to the ceiling, and to, presumably, our concert hall, “—playing your little hearts out, and I realize you’re tired and want to go home after a job well done.  But this’ll only take a moment.”

“Elizabeth!”  I turned just in time for my father to fold his arms tightly around me and pull me close.  He smelled so comforting, like his expensive cologne and coffee, that I buried my nose in his shoulder and, for a moment, I was worried that I’d lose it, start crying and never stop.  But I took a deep, quavering breath, and then I stepped back from my father’s tight embrace.

“Hi, Dad,” I said woodenly as he searched my eyes, gripping my shoulders tightly with strong hands and holding me out at arm’s length, as if he had to look me over to make certain I was still there, still standing right in front of him.

Still alive.

In the back of my head, an odd thought surfaced:  his companion that I’d seen him talking to in the concert hall’s seats, the beautiful woman with blonde hair, was no longer with him.  Maybe they hadn’t even come together, had only been talking together because they knew each other.

“I’m all right, Dad” I told him quietly when he drew me in for another embrace.  “But Bob…”  My voice quavered on his name, and I took another deep breath.

“We need to get out of here,” said my father flatly, in a strong growl that brooked no argument.  “You’ve been through a lot these past few days, and you need to rest.”

I was about to protest a lot of that:  I could take care of myself, it wasn’t me who’d been murdered, I was fine, and anyway—we’d been told to stay put for questioning.  But then the man who’d told us to wait to be questioned, the man with the large handlebar mustache, strode up the corridor and stopped beside us.

He was just as tall as my father, which meant that I felt a little dwarfed in that moment as I stared up at him.

“Mr. Grayson!” the man practically boomed, holding out a hand for a shake.  “I’ll be damned—been seeing a lot of you lately.”

“Chief Potter,” said my father with a wide smile, taking the man’s hand and shaking it briskly.  “Chief Potter, this is my daughter, Elizabeth—she’s a violinist in the orchestra,” he said, pride dripping off every word as he put a hand at the small of my back.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Layne striding down the corridor toward us, from the direction of the concert hall.  She had her hands shoved deeply into leather jacket pockets, and she was glowering fiercely, power radiating off of her as she practically stalked down the hallway of bright lights, past confused, milling groups of orchestra members and the families and friends of the musicians who’d rushed backstage to congratulate us on a job well done…

To be confronted by all of this.

My father and the chief were discussing something in low, muted voices, their heads bent together, and the chief toying with a smart phone, flipping through brightly glowing screens and obviously in the middle of a private conversation.  Tracy had gone to get a drink from the water cooler, situated between the rest rooms, and was talking in low tones (and occasionally sobbing) with a few more of our violinists.  I cast a glance over my shoulder.

Mikagi Tasuki, who’d been with me just a mere moment ago, was nowhere in sight.

Layne reached me, curling a hot hand around my upper arm, her nostrils flaring as she stared down at me with flashing eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked hotly, her voice low and aggressive enough to practically be a growl.  I shivered under her intense gaze and angry tone, my brows furrowing.

“I’m all right,” I told her, my voice low as I searched her face.  “…Are you?”

She didn’t seem to be.  Layne, in fact, seemed incredibly agitated as she shifted from foot to foot, leaning the weight back on the balls of her feet as she scanned the milling orchestra members with a quick frown, taking a deep breath, her head to the side a little, as if she could sniff out the trouble that had caused all this.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said quickly, waving her hand with dismissal before raking long fingers back through her jet-black hair, upsetting her carefully gelled strands and causing a few of them to stick straight up.  But she was too distracted to notice as her eyes darted through the crowd, and she stepped closer to me, her fingers tightening on my arm.

“…Thanks, chief,” said my father with a broad smile as he took a backward step from the chief then, holding out his arm to the both of us.  “We’ve been cleared to go, Elizabeth, Layne, so let’s get a move on.”

“Cleared to go?  But I haven’t been questioned,” I began to protest, but my father widened his eyes, shook his head almost imperceptibly as Chief Potter turned from us and began to stride toward a milling group of cellists.

“We’re cleared to go,” said my father again, his brows up.  He had the same look on his face that he always got when he was playing poker with me, and he’d just bluffed terribly.

But I was too shaken up to argue, and anyway—who really wants to be questioned by the police?  So, in a daze, my father and Layne helped me hobble away from the blood-spattered steps and up through the concert hall, to take the same exit as our audiences do.

The night outside was warm and muggy and utterly devoid of stars.

And when I closed my eyes, all I could see was the blood of my friend, his too-white hand falling out from under the sheet the ambulance driver had tried to pull over him.

I couldn’t stop shaking.

–

My father wanted us all to go back to the Grayson mansion, have a couple of cocktails to relax and order about two tons worth of pizza.  Which, in theory, sounded like a great idea, and was a very sweet offer, but I was too shaken to eat anything (and, trust me, after witnessing so much blood, pizza sauce starts to look a lot less appealing), and I needed some time after the performance to wind down.

I needed some time by myself.

But, of course, “time by myself” now meant “time with me and Layne.”  I couldn’t be by myself, even if I wanted to.

There were so many unanswered questions.  I’d gone my whole life without witnessing or being the brunt of, much violence, and then in the span of a couple of days, I’d been rammed from behind, held at gunpoint, and a friend of mine had been brutally murdered (my father had told me the chief was definitely considering it a homicide…it couldn’t have been a suicide, he’d said).  I knew that, logically, none of these horrific events were connected.  They were all just horrific, random acts of violence.

But didn’t it seem odd that they had happened so close together?

Everything about this seemed odd.

So Dad went home, and Layne and I drove back to my apartment, where she helped me up the stairs to my front door, through it and then I immediately hobbled to my couch and collapsed on the old blue cushions, lolling my head back against the pillows and staring at my perfectly neutral tile ceiling that seemed so pristine, so calming after the terrible moments of the night.

But when I blinked or closed my eyes, I could still see the spatters of Bob’s blood, how dark they looked against the cool gray of the concrete…

“Here,” said Layne, pressing something cold and icy into my hands.  It was a bottle of craft beer she’d pulled from my fridge.  She was flipping the cap up into the air—had she just pried it off with bare fingers before she’d handed it to me?  She seemed to be full of surprises.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and put the cold mouth of the bottle to my lips.  This beer was supposed to taste a little like blueberries, and it actually did.  I took a couple of gulps, letting it fizz all the way down my throat and blossom coldly in my stomach.  It made my thoughts, dangerously looping on Bob’s body and blood, calm down just a little.

I watched as Layne sat down on the couch beside me, sprawling backwards with her legs spread in front of her, one foot propped up on my coffee table in the perfect picture of relaxation.  She had another craft beer in her hand, and—as I watched—she flicked the cap off of the bottle off like it had just been sitting there.  She took a very long gulp of the beer, and with a long sigh, she leaned her head back against the top of the couch, staring at my ceiling, too.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Layne told me then, in a low, husky tone.

I’d thought I was numbed to everything, that I could feel nothing but that cool, detached numbness after the image of Bob’s blood had been burned into my brain forever.  But the gentleness in Layne’s voice seemed to open up a flood gate inside of me, and slowly, quietly, hot tears began to trace down my cheeks, plunking softly against the fabric of my shirt as I took another long sip of my beer, my heart opening up to a great ache that almost made me double over with the sudden pain that seemed, at once, almost unbearable.

I didn’t know how to respond to her.  I didn’t have to—she wasn’t waiting for me to make a great, big speech about Bob or even tell her “thanks.”  I could have said nothing, but I needed to speak, just then, or the ache inside of me would crush me.  “He was just a really good guy,” I said simply then.  It seemed to encompass everything I could ever have told her about Bob, anything I ever could have come up with to eulogize him, and the sad, small words lingered between us, sinking into silence.

“It’s been a hard couple of days,” said Layne then, after clearing her throat.  “When’s your next…”  She spun the hand not holding the bottle of beer in the air as she searched for a word.  “Practice?”

“Rehearsal,” I said automatically, biting my lip as I picked at the edge of the beer’s label with my thumbnail.  “We have rehearsal on Sunday morning for the Sunday matinee concert.  Sometimes we get Saturdays off—‘free Saturdays,’ we call them—and tomorrow’s a free Saturday.”

“Really?” asked Layne, her head to the side.  I was suddenly aware that her shoulder and arm were pressing against me, that her hip and thigh were against mine, too, and that everywhere she touched me, my body tingled with her warmth.

Somewhere, deep inside of me, I felt warm feelings begin to circulate, too, slowly beginning to ease the tremendous ache in my heart.  I shouldn’t have felt anything but sadness right then, I knew, but she was so warm, so close, her muscles so sculpted beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt…

I was beginning to realize that I couldn’t help some of the ways that my body reacted being so close to Layne O’Connell.  It was all pure instinct.

“…did you have plans for tomorrow?” asked Layne, and I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to what she was saying, only paying attention to her body and all of the places it touched mine.  I swallowed, trying to focus, realizing my face was hot and flushed, my cheeks especially too warm.  I took another pull at the beer, trying to clear my head from the cobweb wisps of desire that had begun to form in me so quickly.

Honestly, it usually takes more than half a beer to get me drunk.  What was wrong with me?  I sighed.

“Did you have plans for tomorrow?” Layne repeated, grinning sidelong at me as she turned the beer cap over and over in her long fingers, like she was running a coin over her knuckles.  I shook my head as I took another sip.

“No, nothing,” I told her, one brow up.  What was she getting at?

“Well,” Layne said then, drawing out the word long and low as she worked her jaw to the side and stared at the ceiling again, leaning her head back against the couch.  “You’ve been through quite a lot these past few days.  It’s kind of been a rough week.  So how would you like a day off?”

I chuckled dryly at that, shook my head a little.  “Don’t you know anything about musicians?” I found myself teasing.  “We never take a day off.  It’s in the contract—practice from sunup to sundown.”

“All right, all right, suit yourself,” Layne said, flipping the cap up into the air with a smirk.  “But all work and no play…”  She trailed off into silence as she took a drink.

My curiosity got the better of me, which she obviously knew it would from her cat-who-ate-the-canary grin.  “Why do you ask?” I finally said.

“Because I thought you’d like to get out of the city for a day,” she said mildly, brows up.  “You know, it’s spring in Massachusetts.  Aside from fall, obviously,” she grinned widely, “it just so happens to be the prettiest time of the year around here.  And I thought you might like to get out, take in the scenery or something.  You know…have a little fun.”

My brows were up too as I stared at her.  “Well…what exactly did you have in mind?”

She leaned forward a little, her head to the side as she turned to consider me.  My heart began to beat a staccato rhythm against my ribs.  “Do you trust me?” she said with a soft, velvet smile.

I nodded, trying to remember how to breathe.  Her face was so close to mine that if I leaned forward just a little, too, then I could kiss her.

Did I want to kiss her?

Oh, God…I think I wanted to kiss her.

In one smooth motion, she folded herself upright, her beer bottle at her lips again as she drank down the last of it.  “Good,” she said with a wink, and a stretch overhead.  “If you trust me…then you’ll see what I have planned for tomorrow.  Goodnight, Elizabeth,” she told me, and then she turned on her heel and—without looking back—stalked toward her bedroom with long strides.

I sat alone on the couch with my half-finished beer, trying to calm down my heart.

And trying not to be desperately disappointed that she’d gone.

And I hadn’t had the time to work up the courage to kiss her.

Chapter 9:  In the Wild

“Realize that I’m on crutches,” I reminded Layne for, possibly, the tenth time that morning.  And what a morning it was.

It had dawned uncharacteristically gray, with looming, angry-looking storm clouds along the horizon, up and over the ocean.  But even with the threat of rain (or, rather, the threat of torrential downpour) we’d still gotten up, showered and gotten dressed (“wear something comfortable and outdoors-y,” Layne had warned), and we were now on the road anyway, heading north up the coast.  Well, after we’d stopped at a Starbucks for coffee and coffee cake (it was my day off), and then we’d driven along the coastline, keeping the ocean to our right.

“I know you’re on crutches,” said Layne soothingly, taking another sip of her coffee and making a face like it’d burned her, screwing up her nose with a shake of her head as she set the Styrofoam cup back into her cup holder.  “By the way, I think they served us lava, not coffee.  I’m going to need reconstructive surgery on my tongue.”

“Well, normal mortals usually have to wait for it to cool,” I teased her, blowing into the hole on my lid as I watched steam curl up from it in an inviting spiral.

For some odd reason, she stiffened a little at that, circling the steering wheel tighter with her fingers, the knuckles standing out against the black of the wheel.

I frowned, shook my head, cleared my throat.  “And, anyway,” I continued as her face relaxed a little.  “I just have this terrible feeling that all of this is leading up to you taking me hiking, and I just wanted to remind you that I’m on crutches, and can’t exactly power over the trails like I would normally.”

“Do I look like the kind of woman who forces hikes on others?” she asked, arching a brow and casting a sidelong glance at me.  A grin tugged at the corners of her mouth, and her devastatingly handsome eyes—flashing more blue and green than brown today—seemed to sparkle with laughter that she was suppressing.

“I mean…”  I waved my hand in her direction, taking in the entirety of her.  She was wearing her leather jacket, as usual, today, but it was paired with stone-washed jeans, and a t-shirt with a screen-printed face of Marilyn Monroe.  Layne’s jet-black hair was teased upright.  Honestly, she looked like she’d recently escaped from a time machine from the eighties.  “Not exactly the hiking type,” I amended.  “But I know there’s a lot of hiking to the north of Boston—”

“Unh-unh.  No guessing,” said Layne, holding up a finger and practically shaking it under my nose.  “You said I could surprise you, and I’m damn well going to do just that.”

“I said I trusted you,” I corrected her, placing my coffee cup back in its holder near the vent.  “Not that you could surprise me.  I mean, who knows where we’ll end up?”  I had one brow up, but I was still teasing her.

Across the distance between us, Layne casually offered her hand, palm up, to me.  It was the kind of gesture you make when you want someone to slap you five.  But somehow, I didn’t think that’s what she was going for.  I realized that my face was red almost immediately as I questioningly placed my hand, palm down, on hers.

Her fingers wrapped around my hand as if they’d done it a thousand times before.  Layne held my hand tightly, squeezing with a gentleness that made my knees melt.  Thank heavens I wasn’t standing.

The heat of her palm, the softness of her skin, was far too intense of a sensation.

“No matter what,” Layne said softly, her velvet voice pitched in a low growl that sent a shiver down my spine. “I’ll keep you safe,” she whispered.  “So don’t worry.”

My breathing was coming too fast when she let go of my hand.  I rolled down the window of the car, just a crack, so that the chill air over the sea could rush into the car and blow against my face just a little, cooling down the blush.  I took great gulps of the salt breeze and tried to forget how hotly her palm had burned against mine, how soft her fingers had felt entwined with my own, like our hands fit together, puzzle piece perfect.

My heart beat so loudly against my ribs, I was absolutely certain she must be able to hear it, my pulse racing through me and my ribs practically vibrating from the thud of my heart in my chest.  And she did cast me a sidelong glance, her brows raised, but maybe it was because the air in the car was getting much colder since my window had been rolled down.  I rolled it back up slowly and took a deep breath.

Only people without a pulse would not be attracted to Layne O’Connell.  She was funny and sarcastic and ridiculously graceful and intense and more handsome than my heart (and other body regions) could grasp.  There was such a deep, magnetic pull to her, so that your eyes had to find her in a crowded room and follow her movements because her body tugged your gaze in like the sun holds earth in orbit.

Part of me wanted to tell Layne that I was incredibly attracted to her, and then take it from there.  Part of me wanted to make that first move.  But I wasn’t certain if Layne was attracted to me—she treated me like everyone else, that I saw.  So if she didn’t find me attractive or return my feelings in any way, shape or form, I really didn’t want to make a fool of myself in this working relationship.

And, let’s be honest, it was a working relationship.  I’d been truthful when I told Tracy my reasons for not exactly pursuing Layne:  it would be such a complicated mess if we did try something out (if, after all, she had feelings for me, too), and then it didn’t work out, and we were stuck together whether we liked it or not.  She, effectively, worked for me, and that made things so much more complicated than they would normally be.

But there were…other things.  Other reasons that I hadn’t told Layne how I felt about her yet.  I couldn’t have put them into words, exactly, other than the fact that, sometimes, Layne felt dangerous to me.  There were too many unanswered questions surrounding her.

Still, a little mystery can be incredibly captivating.

I cast Layne a sidelong glance.  She had her chin up, her shades down, and a wry smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

I couldn’t so much as look at her without my heart flip flopping all over the place, my heartbeat starting to come a little quicker, and my breath coming a little faster.  I promise, I’m not this hopelessly smitten around most women.  And even if I feel attracted to someone, I’m much more smooth about it, usually.

But when it came to Layne, that all went out the window.

I wondered how much longer I could go without telling her I was attracted to her.

If she kept grabbing my hand like that, squeezing it, and promising to keep me safe…my best guess was not very long at all.

Soon after that, we arrived in Gloucester.

I hadn’t realized how long we’d been on the road, but it had apparently been an hour or so since we left Boston proper.  For awhile, we’d been on the highway only surrounded by thick green trees, their branches tossing about since the storm over the ocean was picking up speed and bringing the wind with it.  But then the trees parted, and the ocean had come back into view.

I was pretty familiar with Gloucester, because it’s where my father has one of his biggest shipyards, and one of his largest seafood plants on the east coast, so he often brought me on trips he took to them, bringing me into the airport sized packing plant that I really should have been disgusted by, even as a kid.  But the men laughed and whistled while they worked, telling each other dirty jokes while they through around halves of tuna and crates of shrimp, and it’s kind of odd to say that shipyards and packing plants are comforting to a kid…but they had become that way to me.

The little seaside town of Gloucester has been known for its brave fishermen since the pilgrims sailed over on the Mayflower.  It also has the saddest history of shipwrecks and men lost at sea.  One of my father’s own ships, the Pretty Godiva, was lost at sea about fifteen years ago, full of Gloucester fishermen.  Only one man was drowned, the rest were rescued, but still.  Whenever I come here, see the storm-washed fronts of the houses along the main street that wraps around the little bay, I’m reminded of what the town has lost.

It’s not as bad as all that, though.  Gloucester is a bustling little town with a thriving tourist industry now.  Even though the skies were still threatening inclement weather, big, gray clouds rolling over the sea, the main street that ran along the bay with its two famous statues was bustling with tourists.

Because of the traffic, we drove slowly past the two famous statues of Gloucester, one after the other, and I watched the people clustered around them taking pictures.  There were the most people, of course, around the very recognizable “They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships” statue of a fisherman in all his rain gear, holding on to a steering wheel for dear life as an invisible storm threatens his invisible ship.  Fewer people, but still a crowd, had gathered around the slightly less recognizable statue of the woman and her children, waiting for her fisherman husband to come back from sea.

But Layne wasn’t headed toward the bay.  She turned the car away from it and kept going along the road that wound up toward Rockport, the next town over.

“I grew up in Gloucester,” said Layne suddenly, her voice unusually quiet.  I glanced at her in surprise.  She was staring out the front window at the red light we were stopped at, her eyes soft and actually a little misty.  “My dad worked in your dad’s packing plant, believe it not, after a scare out on one of the boats,” said Layne with a soft snort.  She accelerated when the light turned green.

“Your father was a fisherman?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

“He was on the Pretty Godiva,” said Layne, casting me a sidelong glance.  My brows rose, too.

“The ship went down in March,” I said, remembering all of the details as if it was yesterday.  I’d been a teenager, and my father had taken the loss extremely hard.  I still remember him weeping brokenly and openly behind his desk, his face buried in his hands after he’d had to tell the wife of the fisherman who hadn’t made it, that he’d been lost at sea.  “The ship went down in March,” I repeated after licking my lips, my mouth suddenly dry, “the ship sunk completely, and the fishermen aboard had to stay afloat in the wreckage on the ocean’s surface for six hours before help could get to them because of how bad the storm was.”

“Yeah,” said Layne curtly, her jaw working as she cleared her throat.  “He survived that.  But it affected him pretty bad.  PTSD, the doctors said.  He couldn’t go back out on the boats.  So then he went to work at the plant for your father instead of fishing.  The ocean…I mean, it’s kind of cliché, but it’s true:  the ocean was dad’s life.  After that, he was never the same.  I mean, he still had his sense of humor about stuff, but he started drinking.”  She breathed out for a long moment through her nose.  “He’s gone now.  He died last year.”

“I’m so sorry, Layne,” I said quietly.  I didn’t even realize I was doing it until my hand was half-way across the space between us, but then I just went ahead and placed my palm against her arm.

She half-smiled at me as she shook her head.  “No, honestly…it’s all right.  Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s happier than he was those last few years.  He had pretty bad survivor’s guilt.  But yeah,” she said, clearing her throat and nodding her chin out the window at the rows of salt-worn houses.  “I grew up here.  Down that street, actually.  The little blue house on the corner.”

I looked out the window at the tiny blue house, some of its shutters missing, and its darker blue door so worn, it looked like it was original to the house, and hadn’t been repainted since.  It looked too small for even two people to live there comfortably.  The street itself was pretty worn and broken up, potholes and chunks of pavement making it look hazardous to drive down, and down toward the end of the bend in the street, there were a couple of kids running in the middle of it, a big black dog tight on their heels, its long fur straight out behind it as it ran with the children.

“Anyway,” said Layne with a tight smile, “I didn’t bring you here to show you my old house, I promise.  I have a few tricks up my sleeve yet.  I want to show you something.  One of my favorite places.”

The way she said it, the passion that ran through her voice in those few words, made my heart skip a beat again.  It had already skipped a dangerous amount of beats that morning because of Layne, so I was beginning to feel a little lightheaded.  I took a great, big gulp of coffee for good measure as I turned Layne’s story over and over in my head.

Rockport is pretty close to Gloucester up the coast, and that’s where I thought we were headed.  But a few miles before the town center of Rockport, Layne slowed down a little.  The highway between the two towns is so dense with trees, I often imagined when we drove down it when I was a kid, that this is what the “new world” must have looked like when the pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower, this wild and impossibly green.  Now that I’m a little older and have a bit more history under my belt than I did when I was seven, I know that this isn’t really what New England must have looked like to the pilgrims.

But it’s pretty damn close.

Layne pulled into a strange little parking lot I hadn’t even seen was coming up on the right.  The spit of parking lot was situated in a grove of tightly packed trees that seemed to tower over us.  Overhead, and rolling in off the ocean, the clouds were growing darker still, darker than I’d thought was possible.

As dark as night.

Layne rolled to a stop by the far corner of the lot, threw the car into park and pulled the keys out of the ignition.  She stretched, rolling her shoulders as she turned to face me.  “Welcome to Dogtown,” she said, sweeping her hands in front of her to take in the densely packed underbrush and the trees that stood shoulder to shoulder.

I’d only heard the name before, and never really with any sort of definition to go along with it.  I peered through the underbrush, a frown tugging at the corners of my mouth.

“Is this where you tell me that we’re going hiking?” I hazarded after a long moment of seeing absolutely nothing but criminally choked underbrush and crowded trees.

“Well,” said Layne, drawing out the word again as she opened her car door.  “Not exactly.”  She was grinning mischievously as she stood up and came around the side of the car almost in an instant to open my door for me.  “I’ll help you around,” she promised, and then she reached into the car after I undid my seatbelt.  She reached in much too close, her face an inch or so away from mine, and for a full, startled heartbeat, I wondered if she would kiss me.  But no, her eyes were pointed down.  And then there was an arm under the backs of my knees, and an arm around my waist…

And Layne was lifting me out of the car.  And holding me.  And carrying me.  The sort of carrying that usually happened to damsels in distress, or Victorian women who had fainted because their corsets were just a pinch too tight.  The kind of carrying that a guy usually did to someone half his size.  Not that it mattered with Layne.  She was stronger than most men, or really, a lot of men combined, I was learning.

So she stood there, outside the car, toeing the car door shut gently with her foot.  She stared down at me with a wide grin and held me tightly and gently like I weighed nothing more than a to-go cup of coffee.

“This is a little undignified,” is what I managed to say.  Really, I was doing my absolute best not think about how tightly she gripped me around my waist, or how my arm had gone up and around her neck like it was absolutely meant to be there, like my arm had gravitated to this position a million times before.  Or how her hand was against my thigh soundly and securely, like she was never, ever, ever going to let me go, her palm burning-hot, even through the fabric of my jeans.

“Undignified, maybe,” she said, her mouth set in a sideways smirk, “but easy for you to see some pretty amazing things instead of hobbling around on those crutches and probably re-injuring yourself something fierce?  Definitely.”

“Hey, miss, I like hobbling.  It may be slow, but it gets me where I want to go,” I managed to banter back.  Layne was already taking easy, long strides across the patchy gravel of the parking lot, still holding tightly to me.  I felt like I was floating on water.  “And…what the heck is Dogtown?” I asked, after clearing my throat.

“How can you be a Boston native, born, bred and raised, and not know about Dogtown?” she asked mournfully, shaking her head.  “Don’t worry,” she grinned, then, hefting me up a little as the gravel path began to change to one made entirely of the overgrown grass, patchy and tall as meadow weed.  “You’ll find out what it is today.”

I waited patiently for her to continue as she navigated up a pretty steep grassy hill.  I realized that even beneath the overgrown grass, weeds and wildflowers, there were still a few patches of gravel.  This place kind of looked how I imagine the world would look in a “Life After People” special.

“So, way back in the day,” began Layne, “and I mean, we’re talking sort-of pilgrim era, is where this story starts,” she said, reaching an even part of the path that leveled off.  The trees overhead curved their thick, leafy branches down toward us, and it felt a little like we were in a forested tunnel.  Or, you know, a fantasy novel, and elves were about to start singing up in the trees somewhere.  I stared up, entranced by the intense, woven greenery overhead.

“So, obviously back then, people settled in Gloucester and Rockport,” continued Layne, ducking under a particularly low-hanging branch that brushed along my arm with leafy fingers.  I shuddered against her and picked an acorn out of my hair.  “And most of the people who settled in those towns were fishermen, and merchants and trades people.  But there were, of course, also farmers who wanted to make their living at farming the land.  And obviously, this is way before grocery stores,” she chuckled, “and people needed vegetables—they couldn’t live off a diet consisting entirely of fish or trapped game.  So some people moved inland from the towns and started a settlement that was farther away from shore and the really bad storms the ocean can churn up, which would apparently have wreaked havoc on fields.  These people built homes, tried to till the ground into fields.  The problem,” she said, jutting her chin forward, “is that—as everyone now knows—the New England soil isn’t necessarily conducive to farming since it’s full of rocks.”  Ahead of her, rising from between the trees like sleeping beasts, came an entire host of boulders that stood some as tall as Layne was—some twice as tall as she was or more, towering above us like the trees.  I stared up at their gray, jagged enormousness with an open mouth.

“They tried to farm here?” I asked, indicating the boulders with my free hand.  They really looked like elephants, sleeping on their sides between the trees.  “Didn’t they see all of these when they got here?”

“Well, yeah—but you know the folks who settled around here, true New England folk.  They’re almost as stubborn as those boulders,” laughed Layne.  “So even though they knew it’d be challenging, they still thought they could conquer the land.  They tilled the soil and tilled the soil, broke their plows and backs on it, but hardly any crops came out of the rocky ground, of course.  And over the course of a few years with no success at all, most of even the most stubborn people gave up and moved back to Gloucester and Rockport, or kept going further inland into Massachusetts, or went to other portions of this brand new world where they thought they might have better luck.  And then came the Revolutionary War.  And, over time, the town began to…well.  Change,” said Layne, her voice dropping to a velvety whisper that sent a chill up my spine.   Especially since the sky had suddenly gotten a whole lot darker.  The brooding storm clouds were moving in quicker now, the wind picking up and creaking the branches overhead eerily.

“All that was left of the people who had settled here,” said Layne then, pausing at the crest of another hill to take in the stony, verdant view, “were a few of the most stubborn or poorest women.  And a whole lot of dogs.  See, when the men went to fight in the wars, they left big dogs to protect their women and children.  And of course, those wars had terrible casualties, and most of the men—poor farm folk who wouldn’t have a chance in any war—never came back.  So some of the dogs went wild, and some of the women kept their dogs for protection.  And because there were so many packs of dogs around, wild or otherwise, people started calling this place Dogtown.  But you see,” said Layne, a smile tugging at her mouth, “people started to come up with a whole heck of a lot of rumors about this place, too, since it was full of just women.  And a rumor started to circulate—unsurprisingly, when you consider where we are in Massachusetts—that the town was full of witches.  Of shapeshifters.  Of lesbians, even,” she chuckled a little, and I realized I was staring at her with rapt fascination.

I had to bite the hook she was dangling in front of me.  “Well,” I said slowly, carefully.  “Were any of the rumors…”  Overhead, a roll of thunder began to rumble from far away.  I bit my lip.  “I mean, were any of them true?”

“Well,” said Layne in a hushed tone.  She set me down gently so that I was putting all of my weight down on my good leg and leaning against her almost fully.  We stared out at the dense trees, and as my eyes adjusted to the gathering gloom, I began to realize that there, among a particularly dense copse of trees, rose a very old stone wall, created from long, flat stones heaped on top of each other, and with a sharp stone border along the top from sharp bits of shale stacked on their sides.  The skin on my arms began to rise into goosebumps—I wondered how old this wall was, wondered if it might be from the original Dogtown.  It probably was.  “The best rumor,” continued Layne, one brow up as she watched my expression change, “was what ended up happening to the women in Dogtown.”

She had me hook, line and sinker.  She was also holding me tightly so that I could stand upright without my crutches, and the intense warmth and closeness of her body was making my good leg as limp as a noodle.  I gazed up at her beautiful, changing eyes, now mostly brown against the verdant greenery of the woods.  Her long, lean body was pressed in quite a lot of places against mine, which I noted while my heart began to beat at a faster rhythm.

I took a long, deep breath, trying to steady my erratic heartbeat.  “So what happened to the women in Dogtown?” I said, a playful smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.

“Well, the history books agree that with all of the conditions stacked against them they probably all died of starvation, disease…bad winters,” said Layne, her head to the side as her gaze shifted from me and peered out, into the trees, and her voice took on a deeper, darker tone.  “But we don’t actually know for sure—no one knows for certain what happened to the last stubborn women here.  But they did all disappear without a trace.  Odd, when you consider that bodies should decompose, there should be skeletons…”  She gazed back down into my eyes intensely, searching them.  “But there was nothing.  They were just…gone.”

A chill breeze picked up in power and goosebumps popped up along the skin of my arms as I shivered under that intense gaze of hers.

“But there is, of course, a legend about Dogtown.  It says that on one full moon night, all of the women went out of their houses and stared up at the sky,” Layne whispered, ducking her mouth close to my ear, close enough that her hot breath made me shiver against her.  She had one hand, palm planted firmly on the tree behind my head, and her body was practically leaning against me, her other arm firmly tucked around my middle.  “And, together, on that on that night of nights, all of the remaining women of Dogtown threw back their heads and howled at that moon.  And together, they transformed into sleek gray wolves, and ran off into the wilderness together, finally free of all of the bad luck of this place, and finally free to be together.  But the legend says, of course, that they don’t always remain wolves.  Only once a month during the full moon do they take their beastly form, but the rest of the time, they look just like you…human.”

I paused for a long moment, searching her face.  “Werewolves,” I finally murmured, one brow up as I glanced sidelong at her.

Layne nodded almost imperceptibly, her wild eyes flashing.

All around us, the wind had grown into a monster, rushing through the trees, and making them creak and grown dangerously.  Branches thrashed overhead, and leaves, twigs and other flotsam were beginning to rise all around us, hurled about by the might forces of the gale.  But it was as if Layne didn’t even notice.  She leaned against me, over me, and with her strong, feverish body shielding me from the beginning of the storm, I was perfectly safe.

Just like she’d promised I would be.

She was hot against me, physically hot to the touch, and I found that, in that moment, I was moving on instinct.  Maybe it had been her story, about women who were wild enough to become wolves if left to their own devices.  Maybe it was her nearness.  But either way, I found then that my hand was rising and that I was powerless to stop it.  My fingers curled tightly to her belt, then, my fingertips drifting under the edge of her shirt.

They met with the heat of her skin, the softness of it, with the ripple of muscles on her belly that seemed to shiver against my touch.

I shuddered against her, staring up into her eyes as my lips parted, as a rush of air escaped me.  She was staring down at me with wide, dark eyes that were full of such uncontained want that my body responded likewise.

I arched back my head, stood up as tall as I could on my good leg, and I brought my mouth to hers.

Her lips were feverish, her mouth so warm against mine that it contrasted brightly with the cold wind—unusual for a June morning—that roared around us.  And for a single, perfect moment, her mouth met mine every bit as intensely as I kissed her, opening and drinking me in like she’d wished for this moment as much as I had.  For that single, perfect moment, her hand against my waist held me tighter, pressing down with ferocity, and then she was pressing me fully against the tree, the bark biting into my back, but I hardly even noticed that, because her hips were hard against mine, she was standing between my legs, and I hooked my fingers into her belt loops and pulled her to me, holding back a moan as her hand pushed up under the edge of my shirt at my back, her hot fingers raking over my skin, the world spinning and utterly…

Layne stopped.  Her mouth went hard against mine, and she took a single step backwards, licking her lips, her hand stilled against my back, her gaze planted somewhere above my right shoulder.  She took another step back completely.  She was no longer touching me.

I was left to hold myself up against the tree, my legs still apart from where she’d stood between them, feeling disheveled and more upset than I wanted to be.

“What is it?” I asked, tugging at the hem of my shirt and pushing my braid back over my shoulder with a frustrated shove.

She shook her head, raking her long fingers through her carefully teased hair so that it stood up in all directions again.  She pushed her hands deeply into her jeans pockets, shrugging her shoulders forward, her gaze still distant and not looking at me.

“I can’t,” was all she said, as simply as if it were written in stone.

I felt my face redden more than I thought was possible, flushing feverishly.  I tried to stand tall on my own two feet, but since I couldn’t put any weight on one of them, it wasn’t nearly as cool and detached as I’d been going for.  I leaned against the tree heavily, feeling its coarse bark beneath my back.

My heart hurt like it’d been crushed beneath her boot.  I hated that.

“Why?” I asked, trying to make my voice even.  But it cracked at the end of the word as I leaned back against the tree, pressing my full weight against its solid bulk as I tried to take a deep breath.

She shook her head, her eyes steely as she leaned back on the heels of her hiking boots.  “I just…I just can’t.  I’m sorry, Elizabeth.”

The words were so cold, and they made me so angry.  No explanation.  I wasn’t even worth an explanation.

My mind spun through everything I knew or thought I knew.  Maybe she was already with someone—though I would have assumed I’d have heard of her.  Maybe she wasn’t attracted to me in the slightest.  Maybe she didn’t want to date the daughter of the guy she was working for, the woman she was trying to keep safe.  Maybe she didn’t want to get involved with someone who people were trying to kill.  Maybe a million things, but without any sort of explanation, I couldn’t know.

I felt desperately embarrassed, made worse by the fact that desire was ripping through my belly, a red haze of lust and longing making it difficult to see.

Or maybe it was the unshed tears at her cold refusal.

I blinked, rubbing the back of my hand angrily across my eyes.  “Sorry,” I bit off curtly.

She looked surprised at that, and she actually shifted her gaze back to me, back from the cool, detached spot she’d been staring at, over my shoulder, back to my eyes.  For a moment, something flickered in her own eyes, which were now a deep, dark brown that seemed to have an odd sort of depth to them.  She swallowed audibly, shook her head again and leaned back on the balls of her feet, bowing away from me.

“Elizabeth, I…”  She worked her jaw, glancing upward, as if the words she was searching for were written on the dark, brooding storm clouds overhead.  When her gaze came back down to earth, her eyes had taken on a hard glint as she looked at me.  “There are things you don’t understand,” she said softly, working her jaw.  She fell silent and watched me.

“Things I don’t understand,” I repeated, the words brittle.  “Really?  Like what, Layne?” I asked, the words coming out knife-sharp.  “What could I possibly not understand?  What is obviously too far beyond me for me to comprehend?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Layne snapped, and then she pursed her lips together, her eyes flashing dangerously.  “It’s going to start storming soon,” she said, raising her voice as a particularly epic burst of lightning touched down some ways away from us, crackling probably a mile or two out to sea—but still, the shadow of the lightning bolt was still brightly lit behind my eyelids when I blinked, and I considered that the storm was probably going to hit shore much sooner than I thought it was.

But I wasn’t done with this.  Not yet.  It was too important.

“No,” I said impetuously then, drawing myself up to my full height and shaking my head.  Frustration coursed through me hotly.  “What could I not understand?”

For a long moment, I wondered if she’d actually tell me.  Her gaze softened almost imperceptibly, and the same look came over her face as before, her brows furrowing, her eyes becoming gentle and concerned.  I remembered that expression.  She’d been about to tell me this important thing a few times in the past few days, something so important, something so absolutely and completely essential…

But just as quickly as her gaze softened, it hardened again, her lips curling down into a deep frown, and she shook her head.  “I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” she said, almost formally, with a curt bow to her head.  “But I’m not under liberty to discuss this.”

She sounded like she was addressing a jury or a board meeting, not speaking with a woman she’d just kissed passionately, pressing between her legs and pushing her against a tree.

Wow.  I wasn’t even worth an explanation.  I’d never felt so embarrassed, humiliated or more stupid in my entire life.  There was no way that I could extricate myself from this situation with even a scrap of my dignity left intact.

Dignity and humiliation aside, however, I was simply and plainly hurt.  She’d wanted to kiss me, she’d kissed me with so much fervor, it had melted every bone in my body.  That kiss had been everything I could have dreamed of from a kiss with Layne O’Connell.  But in my dreams and fantasies, the kiss hadn’t ended like this.

I’d wanted this kiss for so long, and so deeply, I hadn’t even understood my want or need.  I’d felt a complete attraction to Layne from the very first moment I’d met her, like we were two opposite magnets, pulled together by forces we couldn’t understand or control.  And then, when she’d kissed me, for a single, pure moment, I’d known that all of those things I’d felt?  She’d felt them, too, and she answered them with the same want that I possessed.

But for some reason, some inexplicable reason, none of this seemed to matter, because there was something Layne wouldn’t tell me:  something that was keeping us apart.

“Please take me home,” I managed to say, my voice cracking.  But the lightning and subsequent rumble of thunder overhead hid the break in my voice.

“Of course,” said Layne, not meeting my eyes, a steely cast to her own, and her jaw set stubbornly as she turned.

Overhead, the heavens opened as she lifted me in her arms as if I was weightless.

The rain was cold and relentless and hard as it beat against us, as she effortlessly carried me back to the car, not gazing down at me once.

The torrential downpour matched my mood perfectly.

Chapter 10:  Third Time’s the Charm

We drove home in complete and excruciatingly painful silence, the windshield wipers dashing back and forth at full speed, trying to make the view out the windshield even partially visible.  But the wipers could do little against the onslaught of the gale-force rain, driving into the front of the car like it was hell bent on pushing us off the road.  I didn’t know how Layne was seeing out that window, but at that point, I was too numb to care, looping over the kiss and her subsequent—and unexplained—refusal until I was too upset to consider anything else.  And anyway, the pouring of the rain and the explosive thunder rumbling around us would have made it impossible to talk, even if we’d wanted to.

When we got back to my apartment building, Layne parked the car on the street and helped me hobble to my building, then to the elevator, down the hall and through the apartment door.  We were both completely drenched, actually leaving a wet trail behind us, but still, even exhausted and with the both of us resembling drowned rats, I rounded on her with as much strength as I could muster.

“I think it would be best,” I said coolly, as I’d practiced it in my head about a thousand times on the last leg of the drive, “if you took the afternoon off.”

Her eyebrows rose at that.  I think whatever she’d been expecting from me, it wasn’t this.  She shifted her weight, narrowed her eyes.  “I’m your bodyguard,” she growled, as if I wasn’t already painfully aware of that fact.  “I don’t get ‘the afternoon off’ unless your father permits it.  Which, I hate to point out, he hasn’t.”

Perhaps she didn’t mean for the antagonistic edge to be in her tone, but it was there all the same.

“Well, I’m your client, aren’t I?” I hissed between clenched teeth, my hands balled into fists at my sides to keep them from shaking with emotion.  “Which means that if I tell you your afternoon is off, it’s off.”  I opened the door and pointed to her bedroom.  “So come in, get a change of clothes and go enjoy yourself.”  Since she obviously didn’t enjoy her time with me.

Her face had taken on a stony expression, and she hadn’t budged a muscle.

“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, Ms. Grayson,” she said, every inch the professional, her tone practically oozing professionalism.  “But I was hired by your father to keep you safe, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“It’s not exactly raining poison or armed men,” I said, my tenuous grasp on civility snapping.  “I don’t want to see you right now, Layne.  Take the fucking afternoon off.”

She winced at that, visibly winced, but I held my ground, my heart twisting in me.

“Fine,” she said, drawing herself up and setting her jaw, her eyes flashing in the darkened hallway.  “I’ll be back tonight.”

“I’ll wait with bated breath,” I snapped.

Layne turned on her heels and she stormed back down the hallway.  She hadn’t come in for a change of clothes, and would probably get pneumonia from the unseasonably freezing rain.  I was about to call after her to stop, but then I was too angry to voice anything.

So I slammed the door.

But I didn’t get any sort of satisfaction from that.  I’d seen her hunched shoulders just before I’d shut that door.  She had maintained the coolness in front of me, the professional exterior, but for a fraction of a section, that mask had slipped, and genuine pain had been made evident, her body curling forward like she’d been kicked in the stomach.

I pressed my back against the door, leaning against it as I covered my face with my hands, pressing the heels of my palms against my eye sockets, willing the tears to stay inside of me and not spill.

But I began to cry anyway, great, big, fat tears that ran down my cheeks with abandon as I felt my heart cracking and aching inside of me with an acute pain I was fairly certain I’d never felt in my life.

What a terrible day.  What a horrific day that I wished I could wipe from my memory forever.

How could I have been so stupid?  I took a great, ragged breath and shook my head, pressing the heels of my hands harder against my eyes as a wracking sob escaped me, and I sunk down a little against the door, my good leg shaking.  Maybe this entire time, she might not have been attracted to me, and I’d just hurled myself at her like I was desperate.  And maybe I was desperate, just a little, but it was desperation for her.  There was something about her that made my blood run hot, that drew me to her, and I couldn’t explain it away, and I couldn’t stop it from happening.  Each day that passed, I knew in that honest moment with myself, I was falling more in love with Layne O’Connell.

And, God, how I wished I wasn’t.

There are things you don’t understand, she’d said.  What could I possibly not understand?  I knew I’d drive myself crazy if I went over and over and over every moment of the morning again, but I couldn’t help myself.  Had my father made Layne sign a contract that said she wouldn’t date me or sleep with me?  Was Layne already with someone?  Was I simply ridiculous to ever have hoped she would be attracted to me, too?

I found my thoughts looping over and over on possible explanations for the sudden and intense passion she’d shown me in that kiss to her extreme shift of cool detachment.  How she kept saying “I can’t.”  What did that even mean?

And, oh, God, how could I have been so stupid?

All of my worst nightmares of it “not working out” between us, what I’d told Tracy I feared, had happened without even anything nice to remember it by.  We hadn’t dated, we hadn’t gone to bed.  We’d simply kissed, and now it was as bone-achingly sad and terrible as if we’d done all those things, and it had gone bad in the end, anyway.

I took up the crutches from the side of the door where I’d left them, and I pulled myself up.  I used the crutches to hobble over to the couch where I sat down, not caring that I was pretty drenched, and my couch would now sport an Elizabeth-sized wet spot.

I undid my braid and ran my fingers through the long, dripping strands of my hair and tried to think about anything that could take the painful weight off of my chest, could take the pain from my heart.  I contemplated, briefly, having a nice, long, hot shower, ordering pizza, and then watching about two dozen of my favorite comfort movies, or practicing for the concert tomorrow in my pajamas, but all of those actions required a tiny bit of effort on my part, and it was infinitely easier to stay sprawled on the couch and feel utterly and completely pathetic and sorry for myself.  Which, I finally decided, is exactly what I would do.

Which was, of course, exactly when there was a knock at my apartment’s door.

I wondered if it was Layne, back already.  But she had a key to my apartment, and for some reason, I didn’t think she’d knock, not even after the argument we’d had.  But maybe it was Layne.  I really wasn’t expecting anyone else.  Maybe she’d come back to apologize, to tell me that it had all been a mistake, that it had been, in fact, a silly reason that she’d broke the kiss off.  Maybe she’d come back because she wanted to kiss me again.  Maybe she’d push me against the wall in the entryway, and…

Before I could get too far along in the fantasy, I stopped myself.  I knew I was torturing myself now.  I shook my head, feeling my cheeks grow pink at the very thought of Layne pressing me against anything, and I struggled to get up.  It probably wasn’t Layne at the door.

And it wasn’t.  Through the peephole, I saw a woman in what looked to be dull gray jumpsuit with the apartment company’s logo, Stellar Suites, embroidered on the lapel, along with an embroidered nametag that read “Sheila.”  The woman was a little shorter than me with bright red hair that was carefully pinned to her head, and an astoundingly pretty face, with full lips, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes that were a sparkling green.  She was carrying a toolbox.

I threw the security latch open and opened the door.

“Hello,” said the woman brightly, her smile deepening when she saw me.  “Are you Ms. Grayson?”

“Yes,” I said, finding myself returning her smile, though a little strained—I had to smile because hers was purely infectious.

“I’m Sheila—I’m from Stellar Suites,” she said, her brows furrowing a little.  “I’m so sorry, but there seems to be a leak coming from your kitchen pipes, and effecting your neighbor downstairs.  I know this is terribly inconveniencing to you on a Saturday, but I really must get that leak fixed—could I come in for just a little while?  I’ll be super quick.”  She held up her toolbox and grinned again.  “I promise.”

“Oh, of course, don’t even worry about it,” I assured her, hobbling backward and holding the door open for her.

“Oh, my goodness, are you all right?” she asked, stepping smoothly through the door and cocking her head to the side as she took in my foot that I was holding above the ground a little—I’d failed to grab my crutches from the couch.

“It’s nothing, I was just in a little accident,” I said with a shrug, shutting the door behind her.  I was suddenly acutely aware of the fact that I was dripping, that there was, in fact, now an Elizabeth-sized wet spot on my couch, clearly visible, that I was standing with really no great balance on one foot, and wobbling like I’d had one beer too many.  “My kitchen’s over here…”  Since I’d left the crutches back on the couch, I now found myself hopping on one foot in the general direction of my kitchen, praying with all my might that I could keep my balance.

My face, I realized, also probably looked like I’d just had a really good cry, all splotchy and red like it usually gets.  This day really couldn’t get any better.

I hobbled for another step, but then was stopped by a hand on my shoulder.  “Please, let me help you,” said Sheila softly, and then a firm, strong arm was around my waist, her hand against my stomach, and she was propelling me toward the kitchen.

Normally, a pretty woman holding me tightly around the waist would do an awful lot for my morale.  But I found, strangely, that I wasn’t really in the mood for this sort of thing, as friendly and helpful as it was.  Also, I’d like to point out, I was soaked.  “I’m all right,” I managed, flashing her a smile as I disentangled myself from her arm.  I paused beside the couch, leaning over and fishing up my crutches from where I’d left them, precariously tossed against the right couch arm and right next to that enormous wet spot.

“Of course,” said Sheila, her bright, wide smile staying firmly planted on her face.  Wow, she must use a lot of whitening strips to make her teeth that damn…white.  They could probably be seen glowing white from space.  Or maybe she was a model in her spare time.  She was ridiculously beautiful, like the kind of beautiful you see on television, in the movies or in magazine ads.  She was too beautiful, really.  I’d never been more aware of the fact that I was dripping a puddle onto my living room rug, that I’d just cried a river, and that I’d never felt more sorry for myself in my entire life.

Not the best day to have a model-gorgeous repairwoman stop by on a surprise house call.  My confidence was currently in need of life support.

“The sink’s through here,” I said, hobbling toward the kitchen, then, in my crutches, Sheila following close behind.

She was actually following pretty darn close behind me.  When I paused again, her hand not holding the toolbox actually brushed against my rear.

I wouldn’t have probably even noticed if her hand hadn’t remained on my rear for about a minute.

“Uh…”  I said, trying to sidestep her.  It was such an odd moment.  She wasn’t wearing gloves, which I felt would probably make it easy to accidentally touch someone’s rear—it was her bare hand against me, she must have known what she was doing.  But when I turned to glance behind me at her, her eyes were wide and innocent.

Though maybe her smile had taken on a tiny bit of a mischievous slant.

To be perfectly honest, it kind of felt like a porno was about to break out in my kitchen.  Wasn’t it the perfect setup?  A devastatingly attractive woman came to “fix” a “leak,” but really came to get it on with the apartment’s inhabitant—wasn’t that the totally cliché way almost every porn got its start?  A repairwoman or a pizza delivery woman or something like that?

But it wasn’t exactly an attractive feeling I was getting from this woman, oddly enough.  Yes, she was beautiful, dazzlingly beautiful, with the stray curls of red bouncing along her perfect skin and gently sculpted cheekbones, the way her jumpsuit strained against her chest and hugged her hips tightly.  But there was something about the fakeness of her smile, and the sheer wideness of it, like she’d pasted that grin on the first moment she’d gotten up in the morning, and had kept it on, and now it was causing her face extreme strain to keep smiling.  But she kept smiling anyway.

“So,” I said, my brows furrowing together when she didn’t move toward the sink, her hand still on my rear.  I hobbled to the right, and her hand fell away from me.  I felt so flustered for a long moment that I didn’t even know what to say, but then I gestured toward the sink.  “There…it is.  The sink.”

“Oh.  Oh, yes,” she said, her smile not faltering for a second as she knelt down and deposited her toolbox by her left knee.  I was actively relieved that she wasn’t touching me anymore.  She gazed up winsomely at me and practically batted her eyelashes.  “I’m sorry to ask this of you, but do you, ah…have a drink of water?”

I blinked.  “Yeah, sure.  I mean, there are glasses in that cabinet there,” I said, nodding toward my glassware cabinet.  “And, I mean, the sink’s right there…help yourself.”

But she didn’t move from her position, kneeling on one knee in front of me.  Her hand was still gripping the toolbox handle, and her smile—her really creepy smile, I was now realizing—hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch, had in fact grown wider, it seemed.  In movies, someone who smiles this much is usually about to kill you in fun and interesting ways, usually before the opening credits roll.

I stared at her for a long moment.  Maybe she’d just had jaw surgery or something, and she wasn’t very good at moving her facial muscles yet, I thought, inching past her just a little.  I’d like to point out that my apartment kitchen is kind of tiny, and when I moved past her, where she was still kneeling on the floor and not budging an inch, I had to brush my body right past her, and practically against her, my left thigh connecting with her shoulder in a much more intimate gesture than I would have ever liked.

Her hand snaked out and grabbed my wrist.  It was as if she hadn’t even moved, it was so quick, but where she’d just been kneeling there before, now she was kneeling there and holding tightly to my left wrist, her fingers encircling it like steel bands, still staring up at me with a wide, bright smile that now made her eyes look a little cold…

It was strange.  Her teeth hadn’t seemed quite so pointed before.  I stared down at them, feeling my heart begun to thunder in me.  Something was wrong.

“You are Ms. Elizabeth Grayson, yes?” asked Sheila, the words coming out soft and clipped as her unblinking eyes pinned me to the spot.

“Yes?” I muttered, trying to tug my arm out of her grasp.

It was as if her hand was made of solid steel.  It was completely immovable.  I glanced down at her hand, clasped tightly around my wrist, then back up at her face.

“Good,” whispered Sheila, her smile widening, a feat I happened imagined could be possible.  “It’s nice to know I have the right person.”

She drew me closer to her, a little bit like a fisherman, reeling in a catch.  I’m not a weakling, but I couldn’t move her fingers an inch, couldn’t twist out of her grasp, and she was squeezing her fingers tightly around my wrist now, squeezing so tightly that it was beginning to hurt.  White hot pain sprouted from my wrist as she twisted my arm then, a cruel expression beginning to overtake the smile.

“I think you should leave.”

The words were a dark, rumbling growl, and I knew that voice.  There, in the entrance to the kitchen, stood Layne.  She was still just as wet and disheveled as I was, but there was something about how she stood there, her body angled toward us and a sneer of anger on her face, making her lips go up over her teeth.

Her shoulders curled forward, but not in dejection anymore.  They curled like she was carrying a huge weight on her back, and she was about to throw it off, perhaps violently.  Her leather jacket seemed to be too small for her muscles, for a long moment, and there seemed to be a pulse of heat and power coming from her form that radiated across the short distance of my kitchen to roll over both me and Sheila in one dizzying wave of aggression.

The repairwoman let go of my hand, standing in one quick, jerky motion, like she’d just been bitten.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, wide eyes glued to Layne, hands spread in front of her, and her palms up to Layne in the universal gesture of please-calm-down.  “I think I have the wrong apartment.”

Layne took one step forward, Sheila took one step backward, and then Layne, who’d had her head bent, lifted her chin, raising her gaze and staring at Sheila.

From somewhere far away, I heard a gasp.  I’d made that sound, I realized in a detached sort of way, like it was someone else making it, not me.  Because this moment?  It felt like a dream.  It didn’t feel real in the slightest.

Because Layne’s eyes were no longer perhaps brown of perhaps green or perhaps blue.

They were as red as blood.

“Get,” she whispered, the air shimmering in the air among the three of us like it was carved of solid ice, “out.”

Sheila stayed frozen for a long moment, her entire body quaking, and then she bolted faster than I thought any human being could move, past Layne and out of the kitchen and through the living room, and the door slammed shut behind her, making the walls of the apartment shake like an earthquake was beginning.

Layne stared at me, her nostrils flaring, her eyes narrowed, and her hands clenched into such tight fists at her side that it looked like she was braced and holding back a falling wall.  But she was just standing there in the middle of the entrance to my kitchen, still as drenched as she’d been when she’d left, just moments before.

But now, the air seemed to shimmer around her like waves of heat were radiating off of her body into the colder air.

“Did she hurt you?” said Layne, getting each word out with some difficulty.  I stared at her, knowing that my heart was beating too fast, but this time, it wasn’t from attraction.

It was from fear.

There was something wrong with Layne, the Layne who was standing in my kitchen right now, the Layne who was completely different from the Layne who’d walked down the corridor just a handful of moments before.

This Layne was dangerous, I knew.

“What’s wrong?” I managed, the words small and hardly audible.  I stared at her tense form, her tense form that shook for some reason, shook like she was holding back an avalanche, a mountain, a moon, with only herself between the object and something she was trying to protect.  I cleared my throat, tried to make my voice stronger.  “What happened to you?” I asked.

She shook her head, growled a little under her breath, swallowed.  She took a very long breath and visibly straightened, raising her head again, relaxing her shoulders to curve downward instead of hulking forward.  Her hands went flat against her thighs, and then she assumed a more relaxed position, sliding her hands slowly and carefully into her leather jacket’s pockets.

When she raised her gaze to me again, her eyes were their normal, captivating hazel.

Had I imagined the red?  But no, I’d seen it.  I’d seen her eyes, and they were red like blood and any other cliché comparison you can think of.  But they weren’t red anymore, looked like they’d never been red.  I had to have imagined it.  Right?

I leaned against the sink, suddenly drained of the energy to even hold myself upright.  The adrenaline that had been pouring through me left as quickly as it’d come, and now the distance to the couch, someplace that would hold me while I slumped down onto it and curled myself into a ball, seemed practically overwhelming.

I tried again:  “What happened to you?” I asked, my words soft and small in the space between us, but there all the same.

I really needed some answers.

But it didn’t seem like I’d be getting any anytime soon.  Layne simply shook her head at me, stepped forward smoothly.  As if she knew how suddenly exhausted I was, she scooped me up and carried me, just like she had on our hike earlier today, back to the couch.  I didn’t protest.  With her overly warm body tight against mine, I carefully did not think about what had happened earlier, in Dogtown, about the kiss she’d stopped.

I thought, instead, about the Layne who had stood in the entrance to my kitchen just moments ago, the Layne with her lips up over her teeth, the red eyes that had seemed impossible.  But I’d seen them.

“I forgot my car keys,” said Layne simply, as if that was any sort of rational explanation for why she’d come back to the apartment apparently just in the nick of time to stop…what?  What had that fake repairwoman been about to do?

Really, what had just happened?  My logical mind told me that a woman had just been in my apartment intent on harming me, and Layne had arrived just in time to stop it.

But my instincts were telling me that there was a lot more going on under the surface of things than what I was seeing.

Layne crossed to the little table by the door and scooped her key chain up from the bowl there.  She turned to look back at me over her shoulder.

“Keep the door locked.  Don’t let anyone else in,” she said, one brow up and a grin tugging at the corners of her mouth.  “Though I don’t think anyone will be back.”

She looked practically smug.

“What the hell?” is what I managed to say, then.  It seemed to encompass everything I was feeling quite nicely.

Layne grinned at that, actually grinned, shrugging her shoulders, and with that gesture, shrugging off the last bits of her tension.

“I hope you know that I’m not going to let this go—not until I get some answers,” I told her as she shut the door behind her.

“I didn’t think you would,” she muttered, right before the door clicked shut behind her, leaving me alone in my apartment, confused, a little afraid, but mostly angry that something unspeakably strange had happened, and I had no explanation for it at all.

But I would sure as hell get one.

Chapter 11:  Instinct

“Who the hell is Layne O’Connell, Dad?” I asked, trying to keep my tone steady as I held the cell phone tightly and narrowed my eyes.  “I mean, really?”

“She’s your bodyguard!” said my father cheerfully on the other end of the phone.  It was early Sunday morning, and every early Sunday morning was when my father went into the office, made a very good, strong cup of coffee, and created a game plan for what he would tackle in the coming week in the company.  I knew I was interrupting some of his prime working time, but—to be frank—I didn’t give a damn today.  For some reason, I felt that my father and Layne were pulling the wool over my eyes, and I was sick of it.

There was something going on, and I needed answers.  Now.

“So I think some strange repairwoman came into my apartment last night and had some sort of nefarious plan,” I said, waving my arm about as my tenuous grasp on politeness snapped.  “Seriously.  A repairwoman.  But, somehow and magically, Layne knew that there might be trouble and sort of just appeared out of nowhere to save the day, but not as the Layne we know!  Nope!”  I was practically shouting now.  “She had red eyes, Dad.”

“Kids these days and their colored contacts,” said my father indulgently, smoothly steamrolling right over what I’d been about to say next.  “Elizabeth, shouldn’t you be getting ready for your concert?”

“I am ready for my concert,” I replied hotly.  “And you are evading my questions.”

“Elizabeth, sweetheart,” said my father then with a sigh, “I want you to go to your concert and have a really wonderful time.  I want you to forget about all of the fishing moguls that are currently making your life—and, I’d like to point out, my life—a veritable living hell.  Go play your music, sweetheart.  Do what you were born to do.”

If he was gearing up for one of his inspirational speeches that he gives his plant workers, he had to know I was in no mood to have it work on me.  I sighed for a long moment, pressing a fingertip to my forehead to stave off the headache that was beginning to pound in my skull.  My father was beginning to throw the words “fishing moguls” at me anytime anything was—and you’ll have to forgive my pun here—fishy.  And I was starting to not buy it any longer.

“Dad,” I said then, my voice small.  I went for broke: “I just want some answers.  People are trying to kill me, and I don’t know why.”

His voice swelled with emotion.  “Honey, I’m doing everything I can to make certain that stops, okay?  Please believe me, sweetheart, I’m doing everything in my power that I can.  There’s nothing in the world that I want more than to keep you safe.  They’re after you because of me.  And that’s unforgivable.  I’m going to make it right.”

There was so much raw emotion in his words.  I knew them to be true.  My father loved me with all of his heart, and he did want to keep me safe.

But I also knew my dad through and through.

And there was something he was keeping from me.  Had, perhaps, been keeping from me for a good, long time.  His answers were too evasive, his voice taking on that certain distant quality that he used when he told me what he’d always called a “white lie” to keep me in the dark from something that might hurt me.

I turned my mother’s ring over and over on my finger absent-mindedly, staring down at the garnet glinting in the morning sunshine that streamed through my kitchen window.  I would never forget that he’d taken on that distant tone the morning of my mother’s funeral.  His eyes couldn’t meet mine that entire day, always looking over my shoulder as if he was waiting for my mother to stride into the house behind me, waiting for her to come back from the grave, like she’d never really gone.

I shivered a little and sighed.

“Is Mikagi Tasuki going to play in the concert with you guys this afternoon?” asked my father mildly.  I could hear papers shuffling on his desk and his laptop making the boot-up sound.  I knew he wanted to get on with his work, and I should really run through today’s concert pieces one more time before I got ready.  My fingers were practically itching to pick up the violin.

“No, she’s not playing,” I said, pouring myself another glass of orange juice and setting the pitcher back in the fridge.  “Mikagi’s supposed to fly home tonight, but we thought she would come to the concert to watch.”

“That’s great, sweetheart,” said Dad, his mind obviously millions of miles away.  “Hey, are you coming over for dinner tonight?”  We usually had Sunday dinner together, if we could swing it.

“Well, yeah, but, more importantly, what are we doing for your birthday on Wednesday?” I asked, my lips pursed as I took a sip of juice.  “Celebrating on a weekday is just always so disastrous.  Let’s be honest:  you’re always thinking about fishing projections, I’m thinking about the new piece of music I’m working on for the Friday concert.  We’re too distracted.  So, I was thinking why don’t we celebrate your birthday next weekend instead?  Say…Saturday?”

“Sure!” said my dad in his far-off voice that meant he was looking at reports and no longer listening to me.

“I’ll talk to Al about it,” I said with a grin, invoking the name of his housekeeper who would absolutely make certain he didn’t miss his own birthday celebration.  “I love you, Dad,” I told him.

“I love you, sweetheart,” he said, and meant it.

I ended the call and set my phone on the counter, next to my glass of juice, glancing over my shoulder at the shut door to my guest bedroom, where Layne was evidently still sleeping.  She’d come home late last night and had entered that room, and she hadn’t left it yet.  I wanted to talk to her about what had happened yesterday, but that was going to be a long, involved conversation, because there were two things, really, that we needed to discuss:

One:  How the hell had she known I was in danger?

And, two:  what the hell was happening between us?

I probably would discuss both of those things without mentioning “hell,” however.  I smoothed the front of my skirt, took a deep breath and tried to imagine the way the talk would go.  But I couldn’t, really.  I’d been trying to coach myself on how to open up each of those conversations all night—and trust me when I say that I didn’t get much sleep.

As if she knew I was thinking about her, Layne opened the door to her bedroom.

Instantly, the hair on my arms stood to attention, I had to suppress a shudder, and my heart began to beat like I’d just narrowly avoided a head-on collision with a semi.  She was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a white tank top, her hair sticking up in every direction like she’d slept on it and hadn’t even run her fingers through it yet.  Her eyes were half-lidded and sleepy, but even sleepy, she exuded power.  She wasn’t, I hate to point out, wearing a bra under that tank top.  And it was a kind of an old, threadbare tank top, the kind that gets gauzy with excessive wear and is the least, littlest bit see-through.  I stared at her and tried not to, feeling my cheeks flush bright red.  I leaned back against the counter, ducked my head down, stared at the tile floor of my kitchen.

Her feet shuffled into my view, and I had to stifle a chuckle.

Layne O’Connell, the sexiest and most captivating woman I’d ever met…was wearing white bunny slippers.

“Hey, don’t knock ‘em—they’re really comfy,” said Layne with a companionable growl as she glanced from my face, down to her slippers, and back again.  She stifled another yawn as she pulled open the fridge door and stared at the shelves as if she was looking for the lost continent of Atlantis.  “Are we really out of milk?” she finally groaned.

It was such an incredibly idyllic scene, the kind of thing that would happen to an old married couple on Sunday morning, or to two women who were dating and were ridiculously in love and had just had a rather passionate morning and were now famished.  This sort of banter wasn’t what sprung to mind when you thought of a single woman’s Sunday morning conversation with her bodyguard.  I tried to quell the ache in my heart but failed to, swallowing and shaking my head.

“We’ve been out since yesterday, I’m sorry to say.”  I shrugged.  “I usually make my grocery store runs on Sunday.”

“We should put milk down on the list, then,” said Layne with a nod and another yawn.  She shut the fridge door and stretched overhead, rolling her back and her shoulders in the most graceful undulation I’d ever seen.

My mouth went as dry as a desert, and my heart began to experiment with its own rhythm section.

“I…I don’t shop off a list,” is the first partially-articulate thing I could think to say.  “I just buy…whatever looks good at the store…”  I trailed off because Layne was staring at me, her mouth open a little, and her eyes as wide and shocked-looking as if I’d told her the sky was green and the moon really was made of cheese.

“You don’t shop off of a grocery list?  I mean, are you human?” she asked, her mouth still open a little.  Paired with her hair sticking up in all directions, it looked unbearably…cute.  I never thought I would use that word to describe Layne, but no other word would fit in that moment.  Layne shook her head, her jet-black spikes of hair swaying as she walked over beside me, reaching past me to grasp a pad of paper and pen that I kept in my wire bill rack, next to the toaster.  But Layne was awfully close to me in such a big kitchen.  She stood right in front of me, reaching past me to get the paper, but her hand came to a stand-still, palm flat on the counter as she stared down into my face, searching my eyes with her own brilliant flashing ones.  Today they were more blue-ish, like the bright blue sky outside my kitchen window.

She was so close, and she was so warm.  Even though our bodies weren’t touching, the heat coming off her radiated across the little space between us, making me shiver from the sudden change in temperature.

Layne placed her other hand on the countertop to my right.

I was boxed in between the counter and her, her arms around me but not touching me as she stared down at me, her face unreadable.

My heart ached so much, I felt crushed by it as I stared up at her perfectly impassive gaze as she searched my eyes, her lips pursed, the corners of her mouth tugging down gently into a beautiful frown.

“We can’t do this, Elizabeth,” she finally growled.

But she didn’t move an inch.

I didn’t even think.  “What’s this?” I asked her, pain sharpening my words.  “What are we doing?  And why can’t—”

Her hands moved so quickly that if you’d ask me, I would have told you that they had been gripping my waist all along, her hot arms along my sides, wrapping around me like she’d conformed her body to mine a million times.  But no, this was only the second time she’d held me so tightly, like she was afraid I’d disappear right in front of her, like I could dissolve at any moment into nothingness.

She held me like she was doing something wrong.  Like she was about to get caught.

But that she had to do it anyway.

Her stomach against my stomach, her hips against my hips, her breasts against my breasts, the heat and sensation from it was dizzying, but not nearly as much as the closeness of her mouth to mine, as much as the intensity in her gaze as she stared down at me before kissing me so tightly, I forgot how to breathe.

You ever have one of those kisses?  You’ve wanted it for so long, and you’ve imagined it so many times, but imagination can only do so much.  And then the kiss happens, and it’s true:  it’s so perfect, so savage and powerful and beautiful, that you forget everything else, how to breathe, how to stand, how to feel anything other than the connection that makes you not a single person but this perfect tandem thing that proves that, in that moment, you’re one body, not two.  You’re so connected that you have no real knowledge of where you begin or where she ends.  You’re just one together.

It was one of those kisses.

She held me so tightly against her that I felt drowning people, dragged up from the sea, feel like this, feel so saved and inherently safe.  She savored me not in a soft, sweet kiss, but in a powerful devouring of me, her mouth hot against mine.

But, let’s be honest:  I devoured right back.

For the first few seconds, I was in pure, blissful shock.  But that didn’t last long.  My body responded to her not only with every bit of instinct I possessed, but with all the raw want and need that I’d been torturing myself with since I first met her.  I was leaning against the counter, and—frankly—I was leaning against her, so I didn’t even have to worry about maintaining my balance with my bad leg.

All I was, in that moment, was that kiss, was that connection to Layne O’Connell, the woman I had been drawn to, driven to, from the first moment my eyes met hers.  We were meant to be drawn together, I knew.  There was something so ancient and instinctual about how much I wanted and needed her.  I could never have predicted that want.  If you’d asked me even a week before that moment, I would have told you I wasn’t even sure two people could be pulled to one another like this.  This wasn’t purely physical attraction.  This was the attraction of one heart to another, two hearts beating together in the same perfect rhythm.

I would never have believed I’d be saying it, but there it was, as plain as day, and I have to say it if I’m being truthful:  this was a soul attraction.  And I wasn’t even sure I believed in souls.

So all of this connection, all of this feeling, it all happened in an instant.  Her body against mine, her mouth devouring mine…all in a single, perfect moment.  And then Layne pressed her palms flat against the countertop again, and she bent her neck, placing her forehead against my shoulder as she breathed quickly, practically panting against me.

“We…can’t…” she growled, her breath hot against my skin, her body wherever it touched mine making every atom in me spring to attention.  I was no longer shivering.  I knew what I wanted.

And it was her.

“I don’t understand,” I managed to tell her, burying my mouth in her hair, inhaling the scent of her deeply, that beautiful, rich aroma of wild air and the remnants of cologne.  Even the scent of her drew me in.  “I don’t understand,” I repeated as she bent away from me, and it was my turn, this time, to grasp her waist.  And I did.  I held tightly to her as she stared down at me with wide, upset eyes, frowning so deeply now.  “But I don’t care,” I told her, the words breaking as she took a step away from me.  “Layne, don’t…” I said, as she took another step back, and I stood, leaning against the counter, and she stood, several feet away from me, no longer touching me.

But though there was no physical contact, I could feel something stretch between us.  Something that felt like a bright line between our hearts.

She had to feel it, too.  Didn’t she?

“I don’t understand,” I repeated woodenly, but she shook her head, running her fingers through her hair then.

“There’s too much,” she said then, which I didn’t understand, not even a little.  She searched for the words, rocking back on her heels as she curved her shoulders forward, like she’d been punched.  “There’s too much keeping us apart, Elizabeth,” she finally managed, her voice a low, aching growl.  She ran a hand through her hair again, shaking her head, her eyes so pain-filled that everything in me called out to comfort her.  But I stood where I was.  She cleared her throat, brought her gaze up to mine.  “There’s so much at work here…it’s so much bigger than just the two of us.  There’s too much keeping us apart,” she repeated.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” was my incredibly articulate response to that, though the hurt was apparent in my words.  “Is it because you’re my bodyguard?”

Layne shook her head and kept shaking it, rubbing at her arms as if she was cold.  Again she leaned back on her heels, curling away from me.  “Please believe me,” she said then, her words a soft growl.  “You wouldn’t want me if you knew everything about me.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said instantly.  I already knew—there wasn’t anything that Layne could tell me that would make our connection any less.  I wanted her, felt bound to her, and there was something deep and instinctual inside both of us that made me feel that way.  “Give this a chance,” I told her softly, gently.  She looked like a wild animal about to run, and I used my most soothing tone, holding out my hands to her.  “You feel something between us too, don’t you?” I asked, trying to placate her, even as she took another step backward.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her eyes held me as if I was pinned into place.  “But I can’t do this.”

Raw pain began to flow through me, and I took a deep breath.  I’d learned long ago that I couldn’t get so upset right in front of a concert.  It would mean the loss of my focus, and then I’d mess up during a piece, not be able to find my place—it’d become my veritable worst nightmare on stage, me missing entire measures of the music, the swelling violin cut short because I’d lost my place.  I couldn’t do that.  I was a professional, and the concert was mere hours away.

But we needed to figure this out.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, that there’s stuff keeping us apart.”  I squared my jaw.  “But we’re going to discuss all of this in detail later.  And we’re also going to discuss,” I said, taking another deep breath as Layne’s nostrils flared, as her frown deepened and her eyes narrowed, “about what exactly happened yesterday with that repairwoman and your arriving in the nick of time to save me from certain doom.”

“No,” said Layne, one brow up, “we’re not going to discuss it.  It’s not open for discussion.”

It took me a full moment to process what she’d said because it was so uncalled for.  My hands were clenched into fists now, and I folded my arms in front of me, lifting my chin.  There were daggers in my voice.  “Is that so?”

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” she said, and for a moment, her confidant demeanor faded, and I saw the pain in her face.  But then her expression shifted back to arrogance.  “There’s nothing more to talk about.  We both have jobs to do, and we’re going to do them well.  I have my orders.  And you have yours.”

“And what are mine exactly?” I asked, my voice sharp.

She glanced away from me, strode back to her room with her long legs like she was a predator, stalking her prey.  She didn’t even look at me as she growled back to me, over her shoulder two simple words:  “stay alive.”

Chapter 12:  An Invitation

“Why won’t Layne sit with us?” asked Tracy, glancing behind me at Layne, seated several booths back, staring down at something on her phone with an angry, brooding look on her face.  Layne sat hunched in the booth as if, at any moment, she was going to crumble her phone in her hands.  “We don’t bite,” said Tracy a little wistfully.

“Yeah, well,” I muttered, poking my straw up and down in my frozen coffee as I gritted my teeth, “I guess you’d say we’re having a kind of…off day.”

The atmosphere in the relatively empty “Thanks a Latte” coffee shop was a sleepy one.  There was one kid off in the corner, typing furiously on a laptop with big headphones lost in his super curly brown hair.  Other than him, Layne, Tracy and me…the shop was deserted.  Not unusual on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, but I sort of wished there was a general hubbub going on to distract me from the fact that Layne and I hadn’t spoken until that intense moment in my kitchen that morning.  She’d driven me to the coffee shop in stony silence, had situated herself in that booth and hadn’t moved a muscle since.  She was situated far enough away that she couldn’t hear our conversation, but close enough that if something bad broke out in the sleepy little shop (highly, highly unlikely), she could spring to action.  In other words, she was doing her job to the letter, and absolutely not a bit more.

“Honey, people who date have off days,” Tracy told me with a sniff and a shake of her head.  “I’d like to point out you guys aren’t dating.”  But then her gray eyes got wide, and she leaned forward with a huge grin, planting her palms open on the tabletop as she slapped it.  “Oh, my God, or are you?  Did something happen—”  Her voice in the empty coffee shop practically echoed, bouncing off the coffee-brown walls, and I grimaced, waving my hand.  But Layne didn’t raise her head when I stole a surreptitious glance over my shoulder.  If anything, she stared with an even fiercer frown down at her phone.

“No, no, nothing like that,” I said with a frown of my own and a shake of my head.  I pressed a palm against my forehead, wishing I’d thought to remember to take a pain pill.  I’d run out of the course of pain pills for my leg, sadly.  “Can we talk about it later?  Maybe go out for drinks or something?” I asked hopefully.

“On a Sunday afternoon?  Oh, honey, if you want to go out drinking on a Sunday afternoon, I think you have it bad,” said Tracy, leaning forward and searching my face.  “But seriously, are you okay?  You’ve been pretty quiet.  What’s wrong?”

“Nothing a night with my best friend and a whole heck of a lot of booze can’t cure,” I promised with a smile.

“I want to go out with you, I really do,” said Tracy, her head to the side and her eyes narrowed as she sighed.  “But I…think I have a date.”

I stared at her in surprise, momentarily distracted from my own problems.  “Wow, really?  That’s wonderful!  Who with?”

“Yeah,” she said with a wrinkle of her nose.  “But don’t get so excited—trust me, I really don’t think it’s going to be that great.  I’d ditch him and the whole thing to go out drinking with you, but I was set up on the date by Phyllis, and, well…you know Phyllis,” she muttered, intoning the name of our primary harpist.  Yes, I did, in fact, know Phyllis—and she’d never forgive Tracy if she ditched a date that Phyllis had set her up with.  “So can I take a rain check?” asked Tracy, checking her watch and standing, grabbing her to-go cup.  “Come on, we don’t want to be late.”

“All right,” I said, both to the offer of the rain check and getting out of the coffee shop.  I took up my cup, too, and when I stood, grabbing the crutches from the booth beside me, Layne, those few booths down, stood as well, rolling smoothly up and stretching overhead, her leather jacket and shirt lifting to reveal a line of ridiculously sculpted abs.

I hated that I glanced at them, and I hated that that simple glance awoke that same want and need that I’d been busily trying to squash for the past few hours.  Seriously?  A mere inch of skin and I was ready to throw myself at her?

I didn’t want to be that desperate.  Connection or not, I wasn’t going to beg Layne O’Connell to be anything more than what she already was:  my bodyguard.  But still, as Layne finished her stretch with a yawn, as she raked her fingers through her hair unthinkingly…it was a difficult promise to myself to keep.

What I wanted, what I wanted so fiercely, was something that Layne was refusing to allow to happen.  So what was I supposed to do?  Fight for her against herself?

Layne stopped me as we walked past.  Well, Tracy walked past—I continued to hobble.  I’d been promised that I’d only need the crutches for another day or two, but I was already very sick of them and wouldn’t really miss them when they were gone.

I waited a long moment for Layne to say something.  Her jaw was working, and she was refusing to look at me, instead planting her gaze somewhere over my left shoulder so she wouldn’t have to look me in the eye.  “I’ll be in the audience,” Layne finally told me stiffly.

That rankled me.  If there’s one thing I didn’t want, it was Layne watching a performance as if it was an obligation.  “You don’t have to,” I pointed out, gazing up at her with a frown.  “Why don’t you go…I don’t know.  Catch a movie or something.”

Layne’s eyes narrowed.  “But—”

“Look,” I sighed, “I’m with everyone in the orchestra the entire time.  I don’t go out for a smoke like Bob.  He was alone when he was attacked, and trust me—in the orchestra, I’m never alone.  I’m surrounded by people.  I’m safe,” I told her.  What I didn’t put into words, but what was slightly obvious from my tone was that we probably needed a little more time apart.  That it would probably do both of us a world of good.

It was ridiculous was what it was.  But it couldn’t be helped.  We weren’t even dating, but we needed time apart?

But Layne didn’t want to discuss anything with me.  I needed answers and they weren’t forthcoming.

I was frustrated and crabby and heartbroken and shaky, now, because I’d downed two frozen coffees on an empty stomach.  What a terrible combination for a performance.  What a terrible combination to be staring down someone you had deep feelings with.

“Maybe,” was what Layne said then, sliding her hands deep into her leather jacket’s pockets.

I didn’t look at her, leaning a narrow, gorgeous hip against the table, gaze smoldering and burning into me, finally, as she turned her attention on me.  She gazed down at me for a long moment, but now it was me who couldn’t meet her gaze, because I was too frustrated, and I was afraid I would say something angry that I’d regret.  So I turned away, and I continued after Tracy, out of the coffee shop, leaving Layne leaning against the table, alone.

But I could feel her gaze, burning into my back.  I could feel her gaze on me as strongly as if her warm fingertips were brushing over my skin.

I was so angry at her for not discussing what kept us apart.

But I was angrier at myself for wanting someone so much.  Wanting someone I couldn’t have.

On the way to the concert hall Tracy fell into step alongside me, shifting her cup to the other hand as she pulled her cell phone out of her purse.  “These Sunday matinee concerts are really so damn stupid,” she huffed, half to herself, half to me.  “Hardly anyone shows up to fill those seats unless we have a big name playing with us, because everyone’s recovering from church or at dinner.  We really need to talk to Amelia about shifting the concert’s start time to later in the afternoon.  Maybe four-ish.”

She held the back door of the concert hall open for me, and I gingerly shuffled over the concrete steps that no longer were stained with Bob’s blood.  But I couldn’t help seeing the blood in my mind’s eye when I looked at them.

Tracy continued to talk, half to me and half to herself about concert times as I glanced back at the steps with a long sigh.  Bob had really loved the Sunday matinees.  His kids usually came to them, and it made him really happy.

The investigation was still well underway on Bob’s murder.  There were, unfortunately, very few leads to go on.  No one had seen Bob outside of the concert hall when he was supposedly killed, there were no security cameras in the vicinity, no evidence left at the scene of the crime, not even a fingerprint or a tissue sample, oddly enough…it was all a mystery.

As far as motive, Bob was beloved by pretty much everyone who knew him.  There was no reason that anyone would have murdered him.  It could have been a random murder, but it was such a gruesome one…none of it made sense if you put the pieces together, and with so little to go on, the police were becoming frustrated at the dead ends.

As we walked down the hallway toward the stage, I wondered who we’d get to replace Bob.  As we drew our instruments out of their cases, tuning them subtly, listening closely to the strings, I kept glancing at the wind section…it seemed so empty without him.  Bob was a funny guy.  Usually for Sunday matinees, he wore a top hat that his kids, long ago, had decorated with ribbon.  It’d become a sort of hallmark of Sunday concerts.  It was such a silly thing, but not seeing that top hat in the wind section…there were a million times a day that I realized that Bob was really gone.  But it hit me particularly hard at that moment.

Amelia was in her usual rare form, and was barking orders about something or other, when I saw a movement backstage.  It was almost as if a shadow fluttered around the corner, but the slight movement drew my eyes nonetheless.  And there, standing in the center of the hallway, with her hood up, was Mikagi Tasuki.

And she was staring straight at me.

She caught me glance her way.  And then she tilted her head and beckoned me forward.

What the hell?

I glanced sidelong at Tracy, but she was doing a quick, quiet run through of scales—not something orchestra members usually do, but I knew that it was her ritual calming exercise before any concert.  I stood as quietly as I could—orchestra members were still coming and going at this point—and hobbled across the stage toward the back hall.

“I don’t have long,” said Mikagi the moment I got close enough to hear her throaty whisper.  Her eyes were narrowed as she gazed at me, and she wrinkled her nose.  “You’re in trouble.”

“Excuse me?” I said, leaning against the wall with my shoulder.  This really wasn’t what I’d been expecting her to say—frankly, I hadn’t even been expecting her at all.  When I saw her, dressed all in black, from her black mary janes to her black tights to her black dress and hooded jacket today, I realized, she looked exactly like the person I’d seen on all those videos.  But this wasn’t the Mikagi Tasuki I’d thought was a great star.  She wasn’t at all how I imagined her.

She stared at me with unblinking eyes.

“You’re in trouble,” she repeated, lifting her nose and grinning at me, her eyes practically twinkling.  “But you play well.  It’d be a sin to lose you.  Don’t trust anyone, all right?” she asked me, her head to the side.

“What are you talking about?” I asked her, mouth open.  The time for politeness was over.

She leaned forward, her smile deepening.  “Trust me when I say we’ll see each other again,” she said.  I straightened at that, frowning.  And then Mikagi Tasuki walked past me, trailing her fingertips over the back of my neck.

Exactly like…during the concert…

My jaw dropped open, and I turned to ask her if it had been her who’d kissed my neck in the darkness of the unlit concert hall…

But somehow, impossibly, Mikagi Tasuki was no longer in the corridor.

She was gone.

I limped back to my chair in a daze.  What the hell had she been talking about, trust no one?  It was a bad line from untold numbers of movies, it didn’t actually work in real life.  And what did she mean that I was in trouble?

The concert passed by as quickly as a summer’s breeze.  As much as I wanted to be wholly consumed by the music, I found that my attention kept drifting, looping back onto painful subjects that not even the hum and vibration of the violin could quell.  There was too much for me to think about.  Mikagi’s warning.  Bob’s murder.  The attempts on my own life.  Layne’s red eyes.  Okay, let’s be honest:  everything else about Layne.  Layne herself.

As my bow swept across the strings in the last song of the afternoon, I found myself staring at my mother’s ring as it drew close to my face and then away, born in a rhythmic back and forth from the music that I made with my new instrument.  The violin sung in my hands, the strings vibrating with life and music, and the garnet flashed in the overhead lights.  I’d guess that little superstition that I’d had about the ring possibly keeping me safe wasn’t very accurate.  Bad things, very bad things, had happened since I’d put it on.  But that’s all it had been:  a silly superstition.  It still made me happy to have my mother’s ring against my skin, the reminder that somewhere in this world, good things really had happened.  My mother and father together had been wonderful.

As the music swelled around us, my heart skipped a beat.

The connection that I’d felt for Layne…I wondered if my father had ever felt that for my mother.

The music ended, and I was still turning that new idea around and around in my head as we held our instruments, drawing out the last note.  There weren’t many people in the crowd, but the ending applause was warm and robust, a few of the older members in our crowd actually standing and applauding enthusiastically.  I grinned at that, resting my violin’s base on my knee.  It was another concert done, and—despite my thoughts being in a million places at once, despite Mikagi’s warning turning over and over in my head—it was a concert done well.

The audience members smoothly exited their seats and poured out of the hall pretty quickly, and I thought the hall was perfectly empty.  I’d swept my eyes over the attendees, and I hadn’t seen Mikagi—she must have really left.

As the orchestra members began to pack up, I felt a gaze on me, and as I was folding up the last of my sheet music, I saw a hand wave from the edge of the stage.  I glanced up, eyes drawn to the motion, and then my eyebrows furrowed.  The beautiful woman with long, wavy blonde hair who stood at the foot of the stage looked familiar.  She was also staring straight at me, her friendly grin deepening when she saw me glance up.

“Elizabeth Grayson?” she called out to me.  I nodded and stood a little unsteadily, hopping across the stage toward her.

I remembered why I’d thought she was familiar now as I drew closer. This had been the woman sitting with my father at the concert with Mikagi Tasuki, I remembered now.  As I got closer, able to see the shape of her face, I inwardly sighed.  Drat.  This was Magdalena Harrington, a friend of my father’s.  That’s why she’d seemed familiar at the concert then, too.

It’s not that she was super forgettable, but my father had a lot of high powered friends, and they all ran in the same crowds and cliques.  Magdalena, like many of them, always came to my father’s large New Year’s party that he threw every year, and I only remembered her name because I’d thought it was very pretty when I was a kid.

I’d also thought, when I was little, that she was one of the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.  She hadn’t changed much, over the years, which I thought was criminal.  She had long, white-blonde hair that flowed over her shoulders in elegant waves, and her petite form was encased today in a gorgeous, rich plum dress that was sleeveless, and timeless with its boat neckline and attractive shade of purple.  She smiled up at me as I approached the edge of the stage, her impeccably make-upped lips stretching into a pretty, ruby-red curve.

“How are you, sweetheart?” she asked me, then, leaning forward and enunciating the term of endearment like she’d last talked to me a week ago, and not years ago.  She’d always been a little overly familiar with me, I remembered.  I saw her once a year, and I hardly ever talked with her, often forgetting her name, but she was a colleague of my father’s, and I always tried to be as polite as possible to any of my dad’s friends, even if they were overly familiar and fake.

“I’m doing fine,” I told her with a grin.  “How are you, Ms. Harrington?”  There was always that second of terror after I used a name with Dad’s friends that I’d remembered it wrong, somehow, and that would be an almost unforgivable faux pas among the elite who believed, utterly, that the world revolved around them.  But her smile deepened even further, and it seemed I was in luck.  This was Ms. Harrington after all.

“I’m delightful, just delightful,” she said, clipping the words smartly.  “Now look, dear,” she said, wasting no time to get to her point.  “Your father is turning sixty this week.  Sixty!  That’s a big number worth celebrating, and several of his old friends got together…well, we’re throwing a party for him tonight,” she said, leaning forward, her bright eyes unblinking.  “I know it’s dreadfully short notice, but do you think you could attend?  He’d love that so much.  It wouldn’t be a proper surprise party without you!  You know how much you mean to him.”

This, I began to realize with slow, cold dread, was going to be one of the most bone-crushingly boring nights of my entire life.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to make an appearance at a surprise party for my father.  That was a very sweet idea, and it had been very nice of whoever had taken the time to organize it.  But it was going to be a bunch of extremely rich people being pretty snobby with each other, my father keeping the peace between old rivalries, and everyone being nice to me and asking about the orchestra, but it would all be extremely fake, because of course they didn’t care about me or the orchestra, and most of them were only at the party to put in an appearance so that they could be seen to somewhat care for my dad.

To be fair, there would definitely be people at the party who were my father’s actual friends.  People who genuinely cared about him.  But I’d been to enough of these stale, mind-numbing functions to know that there were many more people who went to these sorts of things to look good than those who genuinely cared about what they were attending.

So, yes, God—it would be boring.  It would be extremely fake, and involve a lot of holding a drink in one hand and trying to be polite to everyone while swallowing my nausea at the casual mentions of millions of dollars being thrown around so that they could try to outdo each other in the richest pissing contest imaginable.

But this was for my father.  And I would do it because I loved him.

“Absolutely!  It sounds great,” I told her in what I hoped to be my most sincere voice.  I glanced down at my slim wristwatch.  “When is the party?”

“Well,” she said with a frown and a sympathetic, embarrassed chuckle.  “Would you believe it’s pretty darn soon?  Within the hour, actually.  Dear, I know this absolutely dreadful short notice,” she said quickly when I blanched.  She put on her most soothing expression and checked her own wrist watch, a gold number with inset diamonds around the face.  “And I really wish I could have given you more notice, but I was only informed of it myself just this morning by Jerry.  You know Jerry, right?”

I didn’t, but I shrugged, glancing backward at my violin and somewhere metaphorically miles away—but only leaning against the far wall in the back hallway, I knew—were my crutches.  I was getting pretty tired standing on only one foot.  The crutches, of course, wouldn’t look good against the clothing I’d have to wear for such a function.

“I didn’t bring a change of clothes—” I began, realizing that I would need a cocktail dress at the very least to attend this thing in, but Magdalena shook her head, her smile deepening.

“Don’t even worry about it,” she tsk-tsked.  “You look stunning.  What you’re wearing is perfect.  It’s much more a casual thing, really, than a big party.”  I grimaced at that.  I was dressed in a pencil skirt and a really nice blouse—it was hardly casual.  “We just wanted to surprise your father, show him a good time,” she said, inclining her head toward me with a wide smile.  “Please tell me you’ll do it?  It won’t be the same without you!”

She was pretty insistent—and she was right.  It wouldn’t be nice for me to show up—it was just something a daughter should do to support her dad.

“Well, then, I guess I could come,” I said, hoping my voice was still even a little bit enthusiastic.  I glanced out across the now empty seating.  Layne had obviously taken me up on my offer to go see a movie.  She’d come back here afterward, though, wondering where I was.  I’d have to text her so she didn’t think I’d been kidnapped or something.  “I just have to get my violin and my bag,” I told her, straightening.  “Oh,” I said then, realizing that Layne had the car.  I grimaced again—at this point, it just sounded like I was coming up with a million excuses not to go, which wasn’t really true.  It just seemed that there were a million little things that were stacked up against my going.  “I don’t have a ride, I’m afraid I—” I began, but again, she cut me off as smoothly as a knife.

“My dear girl, I came in a limo big enough for the both of us, I assure you,” she said, her eyes glittering.  It was an almost classless thing to say, but when people have enough money, even classless things sound a little classy to them.  I bit my lip and sighed again, nodding.

“All right, just let me get my things,” I told her, hobbling back across the stage toward my violin.

Magdalena waited patiently at the edge of the stage, examining her nails while I gathered up my violin, placed it in its case, then grabbed my crutches and my purse.

I air-kissed Tracy on the way past her.  “Good luck on your date tonight!” I told her, squeezing her arm.

“Thanks.  God, I’m nervous,” she said, fanning herself with a stack of her sheet music.  She leaned a little closer to me with a grimace.  “The way Phyllis was describing this guy—I mean, he might be really nice.  Possibly, this could actually be a good date, but I don’t want to get my hopes up.”

“Don’t worry,” I promised her with a small grin.  “You’re going to be fine.  And get your hopes up.  I mean…isn’t that what life’s for?”

She gave me a funny sort of luck as I grinned sidelong at her and shrugged.  “I’m going to be spending the rest of my evening at a birthday party for my father,” I told her, then.  “So maybe it’s good that we took that rain check for drinks.  Maybe tomorrow, yeah?”

“On a Monday night?  God, you’re killing me,” she grinned and winked.  “And yeah, I’ll probably—hopefully—have a lot to talk about with the date.”  She wrinkled her nose again, but she looked so genuinely hopeful.”

I grinned.  “A lot of good, surely.”

“Yeah, I like that.  Positive.”  She grinned at me, and then I was hobbling away from her.  I met Magdalena at the edge of the stage stairs.

In the back of my mind, I’d tried to figure out things to talk about with Magdalena on the limo ride over to…well, wherever the party was being held.  But I really didn’t have much of a head for dull, pointless conversation and couldn’t think of a single subject that would be good fodder for discussion with someone I hardly knew.  I seriously hoped that Magdalena could carry the entire conversation and was still the talker I thought I remembered her being.

And she was.

Once we were seated in her limo, which had waited, parked illegally out front with a very bored looking driver thumbing through his phone and leaning—actually leaning—against the post that warned people not to park there since it was a fire lane, Magdalena launched into a soliloquy about how her various stocks were doing, and how my father and her had a little rivalry going on about something-something probably stock-related, and my eyes had glazed over before we’d reached the first traffic light.

I was tired.  Actually, that’s not an accurate word:  I was exhausted.  And I was frustrated.  I wanted to sit down with Layne and understand why, exactly, she thought we couldn’t be together.  But we were both too stubborn, it seemed.  She wouldn’t discuss it, and I wouldn’t let it go that we needed to discuss it.  My mind looped over the terrible recent events.  I thought about the repairwoman who had been…about to do what?  I wasn’t certain.  Had she been after me?  And where, exactly, do you hire a hit woman these days?  Who is willing to dress up as a repairwoman?

My mind wandered to the kiss in Dogtown.  It wandered to the kiss that morning in my kitchen.  It wandered to Layne’s flashing eyes, her arrogant smile, the way her hands felt, fingers curling around my waist…

Layne.  I snapped to attention somewhat guiltily and cleared my throat as I pulled my phone out of my purse.  “I’m sorry, Ms. Harrington, I have to text my…my friend,” I said with a slight grimace as I’d tried to find a word for her.  “She was supposed to pick me up after the concert,” I explained, holding up my cell phone, “and she’s probably worried about me.”

“But of course,” said Magdalena, her smile deepening.

But as I unlocked my phone to send a message, the screen was already lit with a text from Layne.  I frowned a little as I brought it up.

ran into a friend going to bar to catch up left car for you see you tonight

I blinked and read the text a few more times, just to be sure, feeling a little lightheaded.  Layne had left me to drive the car back by myself.  I took a deep breath.  Well, I’d wanted more autonomy.  And I was the one who had told her to go see a movie.  To leave for the afternoon.  She didn’t have to be around me all the time.  And anyway, I was going to this party, so she wouldn’t have been able to be “on duty” anyway.  It would have been too obvious that she was my bodyguard if I’d brought her to the party, because I certainly couldn’t bring her as my date considering the disaster of that morning.

But still, even with all of these perfectly logical bits swirling in my head, there was a thick twist of foreboding in my gut.  Maybe Layne hadn’t really run into a friend—maybe she was just sick of me asking her to disclose secrets she wasn’t comfortable telling.  Either way, to simply leave the car for me to make my own way home wasn’t very Layne-like.  Something was up.  Something having to do with not wanting to be around me, probably.  My heart flip-flopped in me as I read the text again, and then slowly, carefully, I locked the screen and slid the phone back into my purse.

Also, Layne always used punctuation and capital letters when she texted me.  Maybe she was already a little drunk?  Either way, it wasn’t like her at all.

I frowned and tried to stifle a sigh.

“Trouble in paradise?” Magdalena, seated across from me, practically purred.

I glanced at her, brows furrowed, but her smile remained firmly in place, and she crossed her legs, leaning back against the plush leather seats of her limo with a deepening smile.

“No,” I said, clearing my throat.  The word sounded weak, even to me.

“Ah,” said Magdalena, nodding knowingly, but not remotely looking convinced.  “You just…you looked distressed is all.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly and steadily, resting my suddenly damp palms flat against my thighs.  “No,” I repeated.  I carefully slid a mask of a smile on, realizing it was probably as fake-looking as could be, but not really caring anymore.  “So,” I said, clearing my throat and desperate to take the focus off of me.  “Where is this party being held?”

“At my mansion,” said Magdalena with a shrug, carefully rolling her shoulder and letting a perfect wave of white-blonde hair fall behind her against the seat.  She glanced out the tinted side window, her blood-red lips pursed.  “Your father hasn’t been by in a while, and I think my new remodel will really impress him and can’t wait to show it off.”

My brows furrowed at that, putting together in my head what very little I knew about this party, but what she’d already told me.  “But…”  I began, biting my lip.  “Did you say that Jerry was throwing the party?”

Actually, now that I thought about it, hadn’t she said she was unaware of the party until that morning?

“Oh, well, you know Jerry,” she chuckled smoothly, her grin deepening.  “His head’s just full of stuffing!  So very scattered.  I mean, seriously, if the party wasn’t at my place, it’d never happen.”

“Ah,” I said, leaning back in my seat, too.

I don’t know why, but the hairs on the back of my neck were standing to attention, my skin felt a little cold, and I had begun to feel overall…uneasy.

Not that Magdalena Harrington would inspire comfort on even her best days.  She was the kind of woman who had obviously fought, tooth and nail, for everything she’d built in her probably vast empire of stocks and whatever else it was that she’d built her money on—though she’d been going through her entire roster of dividends that year since we sat down in the limo, my eyes had glazed over on the first few words.  It was because of the hardness to her facial expressions.  Don’t get me wrong, she was absolutely gorgeous, and she had a beautiful face—she was utterly beautiful in the kind of way that most women would envy to be, a flawless, almost perfect sort of beauty that you see in a magazine, but not usually in real life.  But even with her beauty, her eyes glinted with hard edges, and her smile was one of the fakest I’d ever seen.  Her legs were made almost entirely of muscle and sinew.  She must have a great personal trainer.

Her outfit was impeccable.  There wasn’t a hair on her head out of place.  She didn’t strike me as the type of woman who lazed around the table on Sunday morning with the paper and still in her pajamas.  She struck me as the type of woman who wore a power suit one hundred percent of the time, lived in the office, ate protein bars out of her desk and took odd but complete satisfaction out of giving someone a terrible performance review, eating them up in a few perfectly placed savage words.

As if she knew I was considering her, Magdalena’s eyes blinked slowly at me, and her smile deepened as she uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way in one easy motion, lounging further back in her seat as she tapped her red fingernails on her skirt, plucking away an invisible speck from the fabric.  “So tell me, Elizabeth,” she murmured, her words low and velvety as her lips curled, “how is that new bodyguard of yours working out for you?”

I went a little cold almost instantly—how could she possibly know I had a bodyguard?—but she tilted her head to the side, reached out and with freezing fingers, patted my knee slowly.  “Don’t look so shocked, dear.  Your father found Layne O’Connell through me, after all,” she chuckled.  “And I realize you want to keep it all hush hush.  But don’t worry.”  She leaned forward a little, the smile not wavering a millimeter.  “Your secret’s safe with me,” she told me in a stage whisper.

“Oh.  Ah…”  I trailed off, trying to compute the fact that this meant Layne probably knew Magdalena.  They didn’t really strike me as compatible people.  “How do you know Layne?” I asked then, my curiosity getting the better of me.

“I knew her father,” said Magdalena, glancing down at her nails again with a small frown, as if she’d just noticed that her blood-red nail polish had a tiny chip on her pinkie nail.  “Temperamental fellow, which Layne takes after quite a bit.  Moody.  Aggressive.  Perfect bodyguard material, though, if you ask me,” she said, her head to the side when she glanced back up to me.  “Once she decides that you’re worth protecting…”  She trailed off, raising her brows.  “Well.  I think she’d stop at nothing to keep you safe.  Good musculature, very strong.  Yes, I think she’s great bodyguard material.”

For some strange reason, I didn’t like Magdalena talking about Layne like that.  Like she was some sort of commodity like a nice new designer purse or designer dog, mentioning her musculature.  And frankly, I couldn’t imagine Magdalena having even the most cursory knowledge or acquaintance of a hard-working fisherman, like Layne’s father.

I was about to ask how she could have possibly known him when her face brightened, and the limo slowed down.  “Ah, perfect timing…we’re here!” she all but chirped.

Out of the tinted windows of the limousine rose a very sizable mansion.  It was actually a little bigger than my father’s—which is, apparently, something that you’re judged on in those types of well-to-do circles, believe it not.  Yes, they do actually compare the size of their mansions.  I glanced up at the sprawling, five-story house that had turrets, too, and looked pretty old, like it’d been constructed at least a hundred years ago, if not more, with the Victorian extras like the curling brackets along the doorways and arches.  It was a lovely house, built of thick, red stone blocks and wide windows with a lot of diamond-pane glass.  It was close to the street, and was situated more in Boston than my father’s house, so there wasn’t room for a lawn out front.

Magdalena’s driver pulled up to the edge of the curb, threw the limo into park and ran around the side quickly to open the door for us.

When the door was open, Magdalena unfolded her long legs and rose out of the limo effortlessly, glancing back at me with a small, unimpressed frown as I tried to grapple with my violin case, my crutches and my bag, and was the exact opposite of her:  all pretty graceless and a little clumsy as I tried to angle my crutches under my arms and still hold the violin case without banging it against the side of the crutches.  Magdalena seemed to be impatient with my efforts, and leaned down and peeked back into the limo, offering me a hand with a wide smile that she pasted on a second too late for me not to see her frown.

“Thanks,” I managed, and, despite the fact that I didn’t want to accept her help—there was just something about her sneer-turned-smile that made my stomach sour—I leaned forward and took her proffered hand.

She was as cold as ice.

She was so cold, in fact, that it felt like she was burning my fingers with chill when she closed her hand around mine, grasping it tightly and pulling me up so quickly I practically fell like I’d flown up to a standing position.

“James,” said Magdalena to her driver, “take her things, please.  And then with an apologetic smile, Magdalena leaned a little closer to me after dropping my hand.  “Can I help you in?  Those look a little unwieldy…” she murmured, her face full of fake concern as she held the crutches out to me as if they were more than a little repulsive to her.  Her nose actually wrinkled while glancing down at them.

I took a step backward, trying to gain balance on my one good leg as my thoughts whirled.  She was as freezing as Layne was hot to the touch.  I stared at her, brows knit together, but she took a step forward then, laughing as she secured a freezing arm around my shoulders and helped me toward the red stone steps.  “I really have to talk about getting that air conditioner fixed,” she said, still laughing like it was the funniest thing in the world, when it was really just awkward and uncomfortable.

It was ten steps up to the front door.  I counted them, because steps were still pretty difficult to navigate with the crutches—I really couldn’t tell you how ready I was to be done with crutches altogether.  But her help wasn’t actually all that helpful.  By the time we reached the top of the steps, I was shaking from how cold her skin was against me.  The cold was insipid, had seemed to burrow into my body, taking up residence in my bones and my blood.  It was that deep type of cold that makes you wonder if you’ll ever be warm again.

“James,” said Magdalena coolly to her driver.  “Can you get the door?”

As he moved past us, I was struck by the fact that on this relatively sweltering day—the chill of Magdalena aside (and the inside of the limo, whatever she might say about the air conditioning, had actually been warm)—he was wearing leather gloves.  He unlocked the front door and held it open for us, staring straight ahead.  I couldn’t make out his eyes from beneath the glasses, but I had this weird thought that I knew him from somewhere.  He looked familiar.  I couldn’t shake the strong feeling that I’d seen him before…

As we passed from the sunny day into the cool darkness of the entryway, it felt strange.  The warmth of the day faded away and was replaced only by the insipid cold as my brain kicked into overdrive, trying to shake the bad feeling that had been growing within me on the entire limo ride here.

But the bad feeling didn’t leave.  It deepened.

And it dawned on me with sick, stark realization just as Magdalena ushered me into the foyer, and the door was shut behind us.

James, the man who had driven us here in the limo, looked exactly like the man who had rammed me from behind.  It was an odd thing to remember, the man who rams you, but I’d seen his face in the rearview that perfect, split second before everything had happened, and that face was one that if I lived to be a hundred, I could never possibly forget: his face was forever outlined in the darkest corners of my head and popped up in my nightmares where I was driving a car, and suddenly it was spinning out of control and hitting the guardrail because I’d been rammed from behind, over and over again all through the night because the nightmare would keep repeating, of course, as all bad nightmares tend to do.

I turned back, horrified, gulping down air, but Magdalena’s arm was wrapped securely and too tightly about my shoulders, and I couldn’t glance back.  Her grip was actually a little too familiar for comfort, and as I politely tried to disentangle myself from her grasp, I stopped trying to look behind me, and actually glanced forward at the impressive entryway.

And I stopped cold.

My very first thought was that this couldn’t possibly be real.  That maybe I’d had another accident, and what I was currently experiencing were the odd hallucinations and half dreams that come with being knocked unconscious.  But no—Magdalena’s cold arm around my shoulders brought me back to reality with a crash when she tightened my grip.

What I was seeing was real.

The entryway was beautiful.  Perfect, really.  It was classic in design, with Roman columns and a bright, sweeping oaken spiral staircase up to the second level.  There were old paintings on the walls, taller than a person, with gilt gold frames and filled with bored looking men and women in Victorian garb and very large hats.  There was a bust of Beethoven by the entrance to another open room that that had an antique piano in the very center of the room and an old oriental rug.  The tiles underfoot in the entryway were black and white—very classic.

But all of that didn’t matter.  It faded into the background like it was sketched in or the background of a painting.

Because the very first thing I noticed was Layne.

She was wearing her white tank top and jeans, but that’s where the normalcy of the moment ended.  Because Layne was standing spread eagled between two of the Roman columns.  There was silver rope tying her arms to each column, and her feet to each column.

And she looked very, very hurt.  There was bright red blood flowing from her nose, from one ear and from a gash in her head that looked fresh and jagged and utterly ugly on her handsome face.  She also had two gashes along her neck that slowly and almost silently dripped blood onto the pristine black and white marble floor.

She was staring across the space between us with a grimace, staring into my eyes with such vibrant intensity that I took a step backward and collided with Magdalena.

The spell of horror and silence was broken, and I found my voice.

“Layne,” I whispered, and then I was yelling my head off:  “Layne!”  Her head bowed forward like she’d momentarily lost her strength, and then it raised and her eyes flashed with fire as she took in the sight of Magdalena’s arm clamped around my shoulders, and me suddenly struggling against her.  Because I was struggling—but Magdalena didn’t let me go.

Instead, Magdalena’s hand darted up, and then it was deep into my thick hair, tugging my head backward.  My violin case fell out of my hands with a thump, along with my bag and crutches, and when she pulled me backwards, I crumpled, screaming in agony as her other hand darted out and gouged the wound in my leg that had been carefully stitched and partially healed.  She dug her fingernails deep into the wound like they were daggers.

“Be quiet,” said Magdalena companionably, and then she dropped me, crumpling to the ground, and left me writhing on that beautiful black and white marble tile as she clicked in her high heels and stood with her hands on her hips in front of Layne, who hung limply between the columns, staring at Magdalena with bright, unreadable eyes.

Magdalena clucked her tongue, shaking a head and wagging a finger at Layne as the smile spread across from face.  “Really—and after you gave my girls such a fright, too—you were really so easy to bring in,” she purred, and quicker than I could imagine anyone being able to move, her hand darted forward and slowly, caressingly, she traced her finger over the blood on Layne’s neck in a long, sensual motion.

Was I currently in an episode of the Twilight Zone?  Through the haze of pain at having my wound torn at with impeccably painted and wickedly sharp nails, I clutched at my leg and I stared at the bizarre scene in front of me.

I stared, my eyes widening, as Magdalena brought that bloody finger away from Layne’s neck, and then slowly, carefully, as if she were tasting a dollop of cream, she licked the blood off her finger.

Layne stared at her, breathing slow and long and deep into her gut, staring up at Magdalena still with those unreadable eyes, bright and unwavering and glittering in the darkness of the entryway.

“Disgusting,” said Magdalena mildly licking the blood off her lips with a long sigh and shaking her head.  “But then, I’ve always found the blood of animals repulsive.”

Layne began to breathe heavily, the silver ropes holding her up beginning to creak as sweat sparkled on her forehead.  She gazed at Magdalena through her jet-black hair that had fallen in front of her eyes, then lifted her face further, tilting her chin up.  Her voice came out like a croak:  “What are you going to do with the Grayson girl?  Hold her for ransom?”

The Grayson girl?  Me?  What the hell was she talking about?  Frustration eating through the haze of pain, I managed to pull myself up to one knee, grabbing one of the crutches and propelling myself up to my feet with a series of awkward tugs of my leg.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked then, my voice a little shaky, but loud enough to get Magdalena’s attention.

She turned a little, leaning back and pivoting on her left heel, her head to the side like she was a puppy trying to understand a very difficult command.  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head and wagging a finger at me like I was a kid.  “But you’re to be seen and not heard, young lady.  This is your final warning.”

“Elizabeth, don’t,” said Layne quietly.  Her face was serene and cool—she even had a little arrogant sneer on her lips as she gazed back at Elizabeth, but the sheen of sweat on her forehead had grown more pronounced.

She was in tremendous pain.

I took a step backward, and then another one, angling toward the door as I felt for my cell phone in my pocket.  It was a tiny, half-formed plan, but I was going to dart outside, press “911” and hope that someone picked up before Magdalena caught up with me.  But the plan disintegrated before I could even put the first step into action.  James walked through that door at that moment and shut it closed quietly behind him, standing impassively in front of those wide, double doors and staring straight ahead, his sunglasses making it impossible to see his eyes.

And out of the shadows, like it was an odd family reunion or something, stepped the repairwoman, rounding one of the Roman columns.  The name stitched on her jumper had been Sheila, I remembered distantly as she smiled at me that terrifying, incredibly fake smile.  Her teeth were razor sharp, all of them, like a nightmare.  She wasn’t wearing a jumper anymore, but black slacks and a pretty black cardigan that was buckled around her waist, her hair pinned perfectly in place and completely incongruous with her horror-movie mouth.

I glanced from James to Sheila.  And then I stared at Magdalena with wide eyes, my heart racing inside of me.

“Unfortunately, my dears, I didn’t call the both of you here today for my own amusement,” she said, then, her head to the side again as she grinned back at me too widely and smugly.  “I’m afraid it’s taken long enough for this to happen, what with the idiocy of those beneath me.”  Both James and Sheila visibly winced at that, but stood to attention again, staring forward, their shoulders back as if they were soldiers, and Magdalena was their general.

Magdalena stalked toward me, her heels clicking on the floor.  I stood my ground the best that I was able, standing tall, my good leg shaking beneath me but still holding me up.  I didn’t know what to expect—a blow?  I braced myself waiting for impact, but when Magdalena reached me, she simply stood in front of me, smiling at me widely.

It was then that I realized that her teeth were pointed, too.  Sharp and glittering in her mouth like diamonds.

I took a deep breath.  My entire body was shaking now, but I still managed to stand, still managed to glance over Magdalena’s shoulder at Layne, hanging between the Roman columns like she’d been beaten and hung up.  I shuddered, my heart aching, wishing I could reach her, aching to touch her, comfort her.  I stared Magdalena down.

“Is this some kind of sick joke?” I managed weakly, my words growling in my throat.

“No, no joke,” said Magdalena with a soft chuckle.  “Sadly, it isn’t, dear.  Well.  Maybe it is a little.”  She leaned forward, and she searched my eye with her own wide, unblinking ones that narrowed as she tiled her head back, then, and laughed, laughed like she’d just been told the funniest one liner in the universe.  It was bizarre, and my heart had risen into my throat.

But her laughter stopped, and her teeth, right in front of me as I watched, grew longer.  Sharper.

“Hold still,” she said quietly, her eyes glittering.

“Magdalena,” Layne growled out into the perfect stillness.  She choked out the word, blood dripping over her lips as she shook her head, panting.  She leaned toward us, against her ropes.  “Magdalena, don’t.  There’s no reason for you to.  You know that a ransom makes more sense, it’ll get you exactly what you want anyway without…”

She trailed off as Magdalena paused at that, paused and turned to look inquisitively at Layne.  My heart was pounding so quickly in my chest and I still half-believed this was a dream, even as I heard the soft drips of Layne’s blood falling to the marble floor, even as I watched Magdalena’s teeth glitter in the half-light of the entryway.

But I couldn’t convince myself this was a dream.  I was in too much pain.  All of this was too real, too hard and horrible.

That would mean, if this was real, that the only explanation that could possibly exist for Magdalena and her ridiculous mouth of razor sharp teeth would be…

“Vampire,” I whispered into the stillness.

Somewhere, far away, I could hear the general commotion of Sunday afternoon traffic in Boston.  Somewhere, a cabbie (probably) laid on his horn, and the tinny sound of it echoed in the streets.  But here in the unnaturally cold, dark entryway, my breath came out in front of me like a ghost as I sighed out, and the sound of blood dripping was the loudest thing in the room.  The world was bustling far away.  The world was safe far away.  And it was not safe here and now.

Magdalena turned a little, her eyes bright as she gazed back at me with her unnaturally wide smile.  “Yes,” she said like she was speaking to a very small child.  “Vampire.  What’s so terribly funny about all of this is that you’d have to hear it from me, dear,” she said, grinning wickedly.  “And not your own father.”

“Magdalena,” said Layne again, keeping her voice steady and low.  “He’ll give it to you if you give Elizabeth back in exchange, unharmed.  You know he will.”  And then, she said, low and soft, the world desperate:  “Please.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,” said Magdalena, steamrolling right over Layne’s words and smiling without a single trace of warmth at Layne as she took a step toward me, her high heel making a smart click against the marble.  Magdalena held out her hand to me, her blood-red nails long and glinting wickedly sharp in the sunshine that drifted down through the wide, diamond panel windows far above us.  “I don’t want it as a gift.  I will take it as it was always meant to be taken.  With brutal, violent force.”

I had no idea what they were talking about.  But Layne was standing there, tied to some columns, bleeding all over the pretty floor, and Magdalena—a woman I’d known since I was a kid—was sprouting teeth a vampire bat would be pretty envious of, and I was trying to stand upright and failing, because the pain from my wound was making it difficult to see straight…and everything, just then, seemed vastly over my head.

Through the thin fabric of my slip and skirt, blood began to seep, leaking down my leg.  Great.  I took a deep, lightheaded breath, hung on for dear life to the crutches as I drew courage from…somewhere.

“What about my father?” I asked then, drawing myself as tall and upright as I possibly could.  I held my head up defiantly as Magdalena took a few steps closer to me with a wide, bright smile.

“It’s because of him,” she said slowly, carefully, “that I’m going to kill you.”

My heart roared through me as I glanced past Magdalena at Layne.  Layne hung there, between the columns, but she held herself up, her chin lifted and her jaw set.  Her head was raised in arrogance, there was a hard glint to her eyes, and even as the blood gently plinked off her neck and her forehead and her face against the marble tile below, she held my gaze unwaveringly with bright, glittering eyes.

Where the silver ropes cut into her hands and ankles, it looked as if her flesh was burned, blood seeping down from them.  There was so much red in the sterile black and white of the room.

“Elizabeth,” said Layne slowly, carefully, gritting her teeth together from the pain.  “Run.”

“There’s nowhere for her to run to, silly girl,” said Magdalena as she glanced with mild interest back at Layne.  “And it’s all your fault she’s in this predicament anyway, so this should be even more enjoyable, to kill her in front of you.”

Magdalena reached out between us, and she brushed her fingertips over my skirted thigh, bringing up her now red fingers to her mouth and licking them, holding my eyes as she did so with a wide, wild grin.

“Don’t you touch her,” Layne snarled, and she jerked forward, pulling at her restraints.

A few things happened, all at once.  Just like yesterday in my kitchen, just like when we were held up at gunpoint, power and heat seemed to radiate off of Layne now in a big burst of energy.  Sheila and James both took a step away from her, staring at her with trepidation before resuming their stony looks forward.

And the ropes creaked ominously, the Roman columns actually shifting a tiny bit.  They were solid marble and huge.  It wasn’t possible…

“I’m afraid I’m too old for your tricks to work on me, Layne dear,” Magdalena purred, turning back to me and licking one of her still bloody fingers slowly as she considered me.  “And I’m afraid to tell you that this ends now.  I’m tired of waiting.  And I’ve been waiting so long…”

Magdalena reached for me.  Like a snake, her upper body darted forward, encircling my waist with one arm, and my shoulders with another, her thin arms as strong and sinewy as steel cables.  She threw back her head, and somehow, impossibly, her sharpened teeth grew even longer as she licked them, as she breathed out in euphoria, her eyes rolling back in her head.

And behind Magdalena, there came a thunderous growl.

It was as if there was an earthquake.  But that’s impossible—there are never any earthquakes in Boston.  But still, the two Roman columns that were currently holding Layne seemed to start to waver, back and forth, back and forth as Layne lunged against them and the constraints that bound her to them, the silver ropes—metal ropes, I was beginning to realize—screaming in protest as the columns shifted back and forth.  Layne lunged forward again and again, blood dripping from her wrists, from her ankles, but Magdalena ignored her utterly, held me tightly, and breathed out again.

Magdalena lowered her head down as sensually as if she was about to kiss me, but she went past my face, past my mouth and brushed her lips against the skin of my neck, her cold mouth making a violent shiver move through me as fear, cold and insistent, filled me entirely.

There was a bright blossom of pain so intense and piercing against my neck.  I felt myself falling backward into darkness.

And somewhere, as if far away, there came a…howl?

I fell hard against the floor, my body thudding against the cold marble like I’d fallen from stories above, not a few feet, and I saw stars, but, somehow and miraculously, I didn’t black out.  Confused, and with the planet seeming to spin beneath me like it was trying to rid itself of me, I pushed myself up to my hands and knees, even as my leg buckled beneath me in a riot of exquisite pain.  I lifted my head, blinked about a hundred times and tried desperately to understand what I was seeing.

Because this is what I thought I was seeing:

Magdalena was pinned to the floor on her back, thrashing and snapping her too-sharp mouth up at what was pinning her.

Which was a wolf.

The wolf on top of Magdalena was massive, with a shaggy silver-gray pelt and a beautiful lupine face that tapered down to intensely long, sharp white fangs that were now very much exposed and snapping at Magdalena’s face, just as Magdalena was comically snapping at her.  The wolf’s large paws were pinned against Magdalena’s shoulders, claws digging into the exposed skin there, and the wolf’s bushy white tail curved over them both at attention.

The wolf’s eyes flicked to me.  I stared at the scene in horror, my heart roaring through me.

But everything seemed to stop when the wolf gazed my way.

Her eyes shifted from blue to green to gray.

I looked to the Roman columns.

The silver ropes swung from them, limp and torn at the ends and empty.

Layne was gone.

I pieced everything together, even as the wolf put her attentions back on Magdalena.  Magdalena, despite the fact that she was small and lithe, screeched in protest, and managed to throw the wolf off of her, using her thin arms to push against the shaggy beast’s chest like the wolf weighed nothing more than a tiny dog would.  The wolf leapt backwards and landed from that shove upright, still snapping her teeth, and when Magdalena rose to her feet, the wolf and the woman squared off, the wolf growling savagely, all of the hackles on her back risen, and Magdalena crouching, snarling herself, teeth comically long and wickedly sharp flashing in the light.

James and Sheila were nowhere to be seen.

Pure adrenaline pumped through me as I backed away from the wolf and Magdalena.  I lifted up my crutch, realizing I was close enough to hit the woman in the back of the head.  I’d often wondered, before this moment, if circumstances were terrible enough, if I could harm another living being.  But as Magdalena snarled an inhuman sound at the wolf, an inhuman sound that made every single hair I possessed stand to attention, and a violent shiver move through me, I didn’t even think about what I was doing.  I hefted up the crutch and let it swing through the air with all my strength.

After all, I’d never thought to consider what I might do against an opponent who wasn’t necessarily human.

The crutch connected with that woman like she was a brick wall and bounced off her, the impact roaring through my arms and making me drop the crutch as I fell to one knee, crying out as my wound twisted and opened more.  Magdalena remained standing in front of me as solidly as if I’d brushed a feather against her, and hadn’t battered her with a crutch as strongly as I could.  So instead of falling to the side unconscious like I’d hoped she would, Magdalena turned her attentions on me, deepening her smile, which looked freakishly terrible with her long fangs.  She raised an arm with sharp nails as if to backhand me.

The wolf stepped between Magdalena and me with a deep, guttural snarl.

“You can’t protect her anymore,” the vampire snarled.  “She is going to die, and then you after her, and then…”

But the wolf had leapt forward, and in a single, terrible instant, had her large jaws clamped firmly around Magdalena’s neck.

There was a snapping sound.

Magdalena crumpled in a bloody heap, and the wolf sprang to the side, shaking herself.  She landed heavily on her paws, licking her blood-flecked snout as she breathed out, shaking herself again.

Magdalena made a bubbling, wheezing sound from the ground and then fell utterly silent.

The wolf lifted her lupine head and gazed at me with those beautiful blue and green and gray eyes.

My breath came fast in my throat, my heart roared blood through me as I said in the smallest voice:  “Layne?”

The wolf hung her head, her eyes leaving my gaze.  And, as I watched, the wolf became a little smaller, the nose a little shorter, the fur became a little more impossibly like clothes…

And there, kneeling on the ground in front of me, was a bloody, battered Layne, dripping blood onto the black and white tile again.

Beside her, the heap of body that had once been Magdalena twitched.

“That won’t hold her long,” said Layne gruffly, rising and striding quickly toward me with only the slightest of limps as she left a trail of blood drops behind her.  She held out a hand gently to me, letting out a deep breath.  “Elizabeth, we have to go.”

I winced away from her as she reached my side.  But Layne seemed not to notice, or did because she set her jaw, and then shook her head slightly, leaning down and picking me up again just like that day in Dogtown.

Carrying me, she stalked past Magdalena toward the front door.

But she paused before she opened the door.  She leaned down a little and shifting me in her arms, she picked up my violin case in her right hand.

Chapter 13:  The Choice

It must have been an odd sight, a bloody woman carrying another bloody woman down the street, their clothes disheveled, Layne’s hair matted with blood and her arms and legs leaving a trail of blood drops behind us as I clung to her neck and concentrated on breathing as the wound in my leg finally, finally seemed to seal.  But if we looked strange or visiting directly from a nightmare, at least there weren’t that many people out to see us, and we mercifully made it to the parking garage without much incident other than an old man staring at us from a café chair, folding his paper in front of him and holding his mouth open and his eyes wide as if he’d seen a ghost.

We didn’t say anything to each other until we were safely in the car, the doors locked and the peaceful silence falling between us.

“Elizabeth…” began Layne, taking a deep breath and tightening her hands on the wheel, the keys still in her jeans pocket and not in the ignition.  There was so much dried blood and grime on her hands.  I stared at them and blinked.  “I’m…very sorry you had to see that,” she whispered, then.  And she glanced at me, her eyes glittering and dark and sympathetic.

“I just…I just don’t understand what’s going on,” I said, my voice breaking.  “Was she…?  Are you…?”  I didn’t know how to put everything into words, and my broken syllables hung in the air between us.

Layne bit her lip, shoving a blood-caked bit of hair out of her face and shook her head.  “I can’t,” she said simply.  “It’s at your father’s discretion to tell you or not.”

“Tell me what?  What are you talking about?  Why does everyone keep bringing up my father?”  I knew I was nearing hysterics, but if I didn’t get answers, and soon, I didn’t know how much more of this I could possibly take.

Layne’s cell phone, in her other pocket, chirped at the both of us.

“Your ring tone sounds like a chickadee?” I asked her incredulously.  With a sheepish grin that was absolutely incongruous in her blood-stained face, Layne tugged her phone out of her pocket and pressed it to her ear.

“Yes, sir.  She’s safe.  Right away,” she said between pauses.  She glanced at me as she ended the call, and then she carefully reached across the space between us.  “Your father wants to see you,” she said, searching my face.  “And I think he’s going to tell you.”

“Tell me what?” I asked miserably.

But she shook her head and started the car.

The drive to my father’s passed in an almost instantaneous blur.  When Layne pulled up to the building, there was no one to greet us on the porch, the wind making the hanging baskets of pansies swing back and forth in the ominous, graying sky.

When we came in through the entryway, there was no one there waiting for us, no Al with her cart of tea and baked goods, no Ben with his driver’s cap on backwards and a big grin on his face.  The room was empty and cold.

Layne had helped me hobble up the stairs and into the entryway, but now, again, she picked me up effortlessly and I made no protest.  Through the long hallways she carried me, until we’d reached my father’s study.

The massive wooden door was shut, and Layne set me down gently against it.  She lifted up her hand and once, twice, three times, Layne knocked lightly on the door.

From the other side came my father’s voice, impossible to read.  “Enter,” he said quietly.

Layne paused for a long moment, her hand still folded and resting against the door.  She didn’t reach for the door knob, but stayed, her hand against the wood, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath as she lowered her face, bit her lip.

I turned to her like she contained gravity that I had to answer to.  She was so close, so warm.  Blood still dripped down her face, and she was probably in so much pain, but still, still…she turned, lifted her chin, and Layne stared deeply into my eyes with her own flashing ones, her jaw set in a hard line.

“Elizabeth,” she said simply, softly.  I’d never heard her voice so quiet.  “You know now.  About me.  But you don’t know,” she whispered, searching my face.  “About yourself.  You don’t know…”  She swallowed, and then she was actually blinking back tears.  She rubbed the back of her hand angrily over her right eye, shaking her head as she growled deep in her throat.  “I’m sorry,” she said then, and the two words sounded so broken.

I wasn’t entirely certain what had just happened.  I wasn’t entirely certain what I’d just seen.  It seemed so utterly impossible.  But here I was, and here Layne was, and we were standing together.  Broken and battered, but whole and somehow, impossibly alive, and we were together.

I moved purely on instinct when I put my arms around her shoulders and tugged her closer to me.  I didn’t think as I stood up on my one good leg, on tiptoe, and pressed my mouth against her bloody one.

She tasted salty and warm, metallic and feverish.  But we kissed anyway, the two of us, pressing tightly against each other because we’d been through hell together that afternoon.

And I supposed now that I knew her secret.

Even if I didn’t quite know mine yet.

Layne broke away from me, her strong arms around my waist as, again, she bent her handsome head and pressed her forehead against my shoulder.  She breathed out brokenly, choking down a hoarse sob, tears standing clearly in her eyes.  “When you go into that room,” she whispered, “your father will tell you everything.”  She said the words so softly, so brokenly, and my heart ached inside of me.  “And it will change everything,” she said.

“It won’t,” I told her fiercely, but she straightened, stiffened, shook her head.  She rolled back her shoulders, and she took one step forward, past me.

And slowly, Layne opened the door for me to my father’s office.

I clenched my hands into fists, but I couldn’t put off the inevitable.  I took a deep breath and stepped inside my father’s study, Layne sliding in behind me.

Alexander Grayson sat behind his desk.  The desk I used to use as an imaginary ship when I was little.  Now, he sat there, pale as a ghost, face contorted in worry, and he stood quickly, coming around from behind the desk to gather me in his arms and hug me tightly.

“You’re not all right,” he said, glancing all over me and taking in the blood leaking down my leg, dripping from my thigh.  “You’re not all right!”

“Dad, I’m fine, I’m fine, please don’t worry—I’m okay,” I told him, patting his shoulder, and trying to take deep breaths.  I was losing a lot of blood and starting to feel light headed, but I considered that the least of my troubles.  Instead, I plopped down in one of his chairs in front of his desk and gazed up at my father with a frown.  “Now…please.  What’s going on?”  I asked simply then.  My voice sounded so tired.

He glanced sidelong at Layne, his eyes widening when he took in her appearance, and then my father—my incredibly sweet father—pulled out the other chair for her, which Layne gratefully took, depositing herself down in a heap of limbs, resting her head on the back of the chair and groaning as she stared upright at the ceiling like she was perfectly comfortable and felt no need to ever get up again.

My father folded his hands nervously in front of him, and then cleared his throat. “I’m going to say this as simply as I can,” said my father then, leaning back against his desk as he looked at me with grave eyes, all traces of nerves gone, and resignation apparent.  “Elizabeth, sweetheart, you need to know…you almost died today because of a promise I made to your mother.”

I watched him, my heart starting to turn inside of me, even as I turned my mother’s ring on my finger.

“Your mother died because she made a simple choice,” said my father then, his face contorted in pain.  “She had that choice.  She asked me to keep that from you, to spare you from it.  To let you live a normal, happy life.  And you have, Elizabeth, haven’t you?”

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

“This is so much harder than I thought,” he groaned, threading fingers through his hair and rubbing at his chin.  He gazed at me thoughtfully.  “Elizabeth, your mother died because they were trying to get to me.  I couldn’t protect her, and she was killed.”

I stared at him.  “By the fishing moguls?” I managed weakly.

“No,” he said, and then my father gazed down at me with such a sad expression, I could feel his heart breaking from where I sat.  “By vampires.”

Hearing the word made me feel sick.  And though my dad was a funny kind of guy, I knew that he absolutely, positively wasn’t joking.

“I’m a vampire, sweetheart,” said my father with a small shrug and a wince.  “And for many, many years I have kept that fact from you.  And I have kept from you that I am the leader of the Nocturne Council of Boston.  Which means that I’m the leader of this whole area.  And that others don’t particularly like it, and have been trying to oust me for a very long time.  They got your mother, because your mother didn’t want to change, and because she was human, she was an easy target.”  He gazed at me meaningfully for a long moment.

“What are you saying?” I whispered.

“They won’t stop until I am destroyed.  And now they have discovered that I have a weakness.  They think it is easiest to destroy me through…well.  You.  Your mother made me promise not to tell you the truth.  She wanted a normal life for you, and I respected that.  But now that you’ve almost died…I hope she forgives me.”  My father crouched down in front of me, searching my face.  “Elizabeth,” he said softly.  “There’s only one way to keep you perfectly safe now.”

Layne glanced at me, a single tear running down her cheek, across her clenched jaw and falling onto her arm and mixing with the blood there.

“I can change you, sweetheart, and you’ll be safe forever,” said my father, searching my face.  “I can turn you into a vampire.”

To be continued…

Elizabeth’s life is in danger, but can Layne keep her safe?  And will the choice Elizabeth must make tear them apart forever?  Experience this star-crossed romance as it unfolds in the second Lone Wolf book, The Guardian, coming soon!

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If you enjoyed The Protector, you’ll love Bridget’s Sullivan Vampires.

The following is an excerpt from “Eternal Hotel,” the first novella in the Sullivan Vampires series, a beautiful, romantic epic that follows the clan of Sullivan vampires and the women who love them.  Advance praise has hailed this hallmark series as “Twilight for women who love women” and “a lesbian romance that takes vampires seriously!  Two thumbs up!”

…So this was the staircase from last night, next to the front desk.  The Widowmaker.  It must be.  I’d never seen a steeper set of stairs.  From up above, they looked simply like the rungs of a ladder in a barn—so steep and so tall and almost impossible to even think of taking.

It’s not that I don’t like heights—I’m pretty okay with them.  But these stairs were something else.  I wasn’t taking these steps—I’d have to circle back somehow and find the other spiral staircase down to the first floor

As I turned, I caught the first floor out of the corner of my eye.  Because of the cathedral ceilings of that first floor, it seemed much farther away then I’d thought it was.

It was then that something strange happened.

The ground seemed to spin under me for a moment, bucking and heaving like I was trying to walk on waves of carpeting, not good firm floor.  Or did it really?  Was it just a trick of the eye?  Either way, I took a step backward as a shadow fell in front of me, but there was no floor beneath that foot stepping backward, then, and I was tumbling backwards, shock cold enough to burn me flooding through my body as, impossibly, I began to fall down the stairs.

A hand caught my arm.  I hung suspended over the abyss of the air, my back to the emptiness, and in one smooth motion, I was pulled back.

Saved.

The hand was cold, and the body I brushed against as I was hauled out of the air felt as if the person had stepped out of a prolonged trip through a walk-in freezer.  I looked up at the face of the woman who had saved me, and when I breathed out, I will never forget it:  my breath hung suspended in the air between us like a ghost.

She was taller than me by about a head, and I had to lean back to gaze into her eyes.  They were violently blue, a blue that opened me up like a key and lock as she looked down at me, her eyes sharp and dark as her jaw worked, her full lips in a downward curve that my own eyes couldn’t help but follow.  She wore a ponytail, the cascades of her silken white-blonde hair gathered tightly at the back of her head and flowing over her right shoulder like frozen water falling.  She wore a man’s suit, I realized, complete with a navy blue tie smartly pulled snug against her creamy neck.  She looked pale and felt so cold as her strong hand gripped my wrist, but it was gentle, too.  As if she knew her own strength.

I saw all of this in an instant, my eyes following the lines and curves of her like I’d trace my gaze over an extremely fine painting.  And, like an extremely fine painting, she began to make my heart beat faster.  That was odd.  I was never much attracted to random women, even before I dated Anna, even before Anna…well.

But this wasn’t just my heart beating faster, my blood moving quicker through me.  This was something else.  A weightlessness, like being suspended in the air over the staircase again, the coolness of her palm against my skin a gravity that I seemed to suddenly spin around.  When she gazed down into my eyes, she held me there as firmly as if her hands were snug against the small of my back, pressing me to her cool, lean body that wore the suit with such dignity and grace that I couldn’t imagine her in anything else.

I was spellbound.

She said not a word, but her fingers left my wrist, grazing a little of the skin of my bare forearm for a heartbeat before her hand fell to her side.  I shivered, holding my hand to my heart, then, as if I’d been bitten.  We stood like that for a heartbeat, two, the woman’s eyes never leaving mine as her chin lifted, as her jaw worked again, her full lips parting…

“Are you all right?”  I shivered again.  Her voice was dark, deep and throaty, as cool as her skin, as gentle as the touch of her fingertips along my arm.  But as I gazed up at her, as I tried to calm my breathing, my heart, we blinked, she and I, together.

I knew, then.

I’d heard that voice before.

I’d seen this face before.

“Have we…met?” I stammered, eyes narrowed as I gazed up at her in wonder.  We couldn’t have.  She shook her head and put it to the side as she looked down at me, as if I was a particularly difficult puzzle that needed solving.  I would have remembered her, the curve of her jaw and lips, the dazzling blue of her eyes.  I could never have forgotten her if I’d only seen her once.  It would have been impossible.

I took a gulp of air and took a step back again, unthinking, and her hand was there, then, at my wrist again as she smoothly pulled me forward, toward her.

“The stairs,” she said softly, apologetically.  I’d taken a step closer to her this time, and there was hardly any space between us, even as I realized that my hand was at her waist, steadying myself against her.  I took a step to the side, quickly, then, my cheeks burning.

“I’m sorry,” I managed, swallowing.  “And…thank you…”  Her head was still to the side, but this time, her lips twitched as if she was trying to repress a smile.

“I’ve been meaning to remodel these steps.  Not everyone knows how steep they truly are,” she said, and her lips did turn up into a smile, then, making my heart beat a little faster.  I took a great gulp of air as she held out her cool fingers to me, palm up.

“I am Kane Sullivan,” she said easily, her tongue smoothing over the syllables as the smile vanished from her face.  “You must be Rose Clyde,” she said gently, the thrill of her voice, the deepness of it, the darkness of it, saying my name, the way her lips formed the words…I nodded my head up and down like a puppet, and I placed my hand in hers.  Her fingers were so cold, as she shook my hand like a delicate thing, letting her palm slide regretfully over mine as she dropped my hand with a fluid grace I had to watch but still couldn’t fully understand.

I was acting like an idiot.  I’d seen beautiful women before.  But Kane wasn’t beautiful.  Not in that sense.  She was…compelling.  Her face, her gaze, her eyes, an impossibility of attraction.  I felt, as I watched her, that buildings, trees, people would turn as she walked past them, unseeing things still, somehow, gazing at her.

I knew her, then.

The painting.  The woman in the painting from last night, with the big, black cat, lounging and regal and triumphant and unspeakably bewitching.  The naked woman, I realized, as my face began to redden, warming beneath her cool, silent gaze.  She was the woman from the painting.  But as I realized that, as we silently watched one another, I realized, too, that that would have been impossible.  It had been a while since college, it was true, but I could still tell when a painting was a few hundred years old.

The woman in the painting could not possibly have been Kane Sullivan.  And yet, it couldn’t possibly have been anyone else.

“I’m…I’m sorry,” I spluttered, realizing—again—how much of an idiot I must look to this incredibly attractive creature.  Her lips twitched upward again, and her mouth stretched into a true smile this time, the warmth of it making the air around her seem less frozen.

“You’re fine.  It’s not everyday that someone completely uproots their life and charts a course for places unknown,” she said, turning on her heel and inclining her heard toward me.  As she turned, I caught the scent of her.  Jasmine, vanilla…spice.  An intoxicating, cool scent that was warm at the same time.  Unmistakable and deeply remarkable.  Just like her.  I stared up at her with wide eyes as she gestured gracefully with her arm for us to walk together, like she was a gentleman from the past century.  True, she was wearing a sharp man’s suit (that I was trying desperately not to stare at or trace the curves of it with my eyes—and failing), but there was something incredibly old fashioned about her.  I kept thinking about that at that first meeting.  Like she was from a different era, not the one of smart phones and the Internet and fast food french fries.  No.  The kind of era that had horse-drawn carriages, corsets and bustles and houses that contained parlors.  We began to walk down the corridor together, in the opposite direction I had come, me sneaking surreptitious glances at her, her staring straight ahead.

The spell of the moment was broken, but a new spell was beginning to create itself, weaving around the two of us as we walked along the corridor.  As she spoke, I stared half up at her, half down the hall stretching out in front of us.  All of my actual attention, though, was on this woman.

Every bit of it.  She was just like that.  So…compelling.  She was a gravity that pulled me in, hook, line and sinker.  I didn’t know then how much of a gravity she had yet to become to me.

You can get Eternal Hotel, the first in the Sullivan Vampires series, available now!

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Acknowledgements

I’m incredibly lucky in the fact that most of my closest friends are writers, and really amazing ones at that.  Without their support, feedback and constant “you can do it’s!” I can tell you right now that none of my stories would exist.

Special thanks to P.J. who reminds me why I love these stories so darn much when I’m having a really rough writing day.  She always gives me the strength and courage to write my heart out.  You’re a daily inspiration to me and I’m so blessed to know you!

Marian and Ruby, to whom this book is dedicated, are two of the best friends I could ever have wished for.  Thank you for always being there for me, for asking for more stories, for loving my wolves and vampire ladies.  Thank you for your unwavering support and love.  I love you both so much!

R.M. is an unwavering support and an inspiration and this incredible person who I’m really blessed to call my friend.  Thank you for loving and supporting my vampires, and loving and supporting me.  I’m grateful every day for your friendship!

My fans are incredible and so supportive.  Thank you so much for your kind words, thank you so much for reading my stories and for loving my vampire and wolf ladies as much as I do.  Special thanks especially in this volume to Terri, who’s been really vocal in her support of me, which I appreciate so much!  Thank you to everyone who’s read my books—you make this journey so much better by being on it with me, and I appreciate you so much!

Special thanks to everyone at Rose and Star Press.  You are all amazing women, and I’m so grateful to know all of you, and for the opportunities Rose and Star Press has given to me and my stories!

My love forever to the woman who loves me and completes my heart.  You are the best and most beautiful part of my life, sweetheart.  Thank you for loving me.  Every story I write is because you give me the strength to tell it.  I love you with all my heart.

About Author Bridget Essex

Bridget Essex has been writing about her beloved vampires for almost two decades.  She has a vast collection of crochet hooks and teacups, and likes to listen to classical music when she writes.  Her first date with her girlfriend was strolling in a garden, so it’s safe to say she’s a bit old fashioned.

Bridget has a black cat she loves very much, and a brown dog who actually convinces her to go outside.  Her little house is often much messier than she’d prefer, but she has the perfect excuse:  she’s a writer.  This excuse doesn’t work nearly as well on her girlfriend as she’d like.

You can find out more about her work at http://BridgetEssex.wordpress.com

Learn more about Rose and Star Press, publishers of lesbian romance and fiction of distinction, at http:///www.LesbianRomance.org

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Close Call

Chapter 2: Bodyguard

Chapter 3: A Better Violin

Chapter 4: Audience

Chapter 5: Not Really a Date

Chapter 6: The Ring

Chapter 7: Knock ‘em Dead

Chapter 8: Trust

Chapter 9: In the Wild

Chapter 10: Third Time’s the Charm

Chapter 11: Instinct

Chapter 12: An Invitation

Chapter 13: The Choice

Acknowledgements

About the Author