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Protect Me Love
Protect Me, Love
by
Alice Orr
MY BODYGUARD
Years ago, a mysterious woman changed her identity and started a
company providing just one thing bodyguards!
SILHOUETTE
BOOKS
Delia's first Urge was to make a run for it... through the restaurant
and out the door before Nick Avery arrived. There were lots of exits
from Rockefeller Plaza--whoever was following her couldn't be at all of
them, unless he wasn't alone. Still, she'd be playing Russian roulette
with escape routes.
She tried to think what would be the best, the safest alternative, but
her mind refused to co-operate All she could think about was how Nick's
voice on the phone had thrilled her.
She reminded herself that she was in trouble ... she needed help ...
she needed protection... But did she need Nick Avery?
Dear Reader,
Sometime, somewhere, any woman might need protection. And who could be
more sexy--or dangerous--than her bodyguard? You're about to meet
another bodyguard employed by Protection Enterprises, Incorporated.
This month Alice Orr brings you Protect Me, Love, the third and final
book in the MY BODYGUARD series. It is set in New York City where
Alice lives and towards which she feels both affection and trepidation.
Both are apparent in this story of passion and danger.
In addition to her writing life, Alice is a literary agent, wife and
mother. She also lectures nationally on writing and publishing. You
can write to her at Alice Orr Agency, Inc." 305 Madison Avenue, Suite
1166, New York, NY 10165, U.S.A. You may also E-mail Alice at
<orragency@ aol.com).
We know you'll enjoy Protect Me, Love, and hope you have enjoyed all
the titles in the MY BODYGUARD series.
The Editors
SILHOUETTE Intrigue
DID YOU PURCHASE THIS BOOK WITHOUT A COVER?
If you did, you should be aware it is stolen property as it was
reported unsold and destroyed by a retailer. Neither the author nor
the publisher has received any payment for this book.
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the
imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone
bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired
by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents
are pure invention.
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Protect Me Love
All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in
part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with
Harlequin Enterprises H B.V. The text of this publication or any part
thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the
written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.
Silhouette and Colophon are registered trademarks of Harlequin Books
S.A." used under licence.
First published in Great Britain 1997
Silhouette Books, Eton House, 18-24 Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey
TW9
1SR
Alice Orr 1996
ISBN 0 373 22398 6
46-9712
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Machays of Chatham PLC, Chatham
CRsTmI5 --To my husband, Jonathan, always my romantic hero. To Ed
Vesneske, my beloved son.
To my precious confidant, Kathleen Zea, also my dear daughter.
To my editor, Julianne Moore, a true jewel.
To my agent, Rob Cohen, a savvy voice in a wacky world.
Prologue
Becky Lester of Denver, Colorado, woke up with Nick Avery on her mind.
For the first time in four years, she felt almost completely happy.
Because of that, she didn't let herself return to consciousness fight
off. She kept the feeling of Nick in her heart, as if she were still
dreaming of him, the way he'd looked that day in the study of the main
house of the Lester estate. She'd seen him many times before, of
course, when he'd first started working as a bodyguard for her father.
She simply hadn't noticed Nick as a man--as a highly desirable
man--until that particular moment, maybe he-cause she needed to notice
him, because now she needed a fantasy.
She'd been rushing past the study, late as usual to some hot evening
that wouldn't turn out to be so hot after all. Nick was talking to
Mortimer Lancer, the Lester family lawyer and chief trustee of the
estate. Becky had passed the open doorway before she registered what
she'd seen. She backtracked then, and Nick must have heard her because
he turned around. That was the moment the dream of him began. He was
built exactly the way she liked a man to be--tall and rangy with
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long-muscled thighs, tight in the hips, wide and hard at the shoulders.
He also obviously didn't mind letting that show. Otherwise, he
wouldn't have had on close-fitting jeans and a blue chambray shirt that
stretched taut across his ample chest. And that was only his body. His
face was just right for fantasy, too--dark brows over eyes arrogant
enough to be a challenge; a mouth that all but said out loud, "I want
to kiss you right this minute," and thick, somewhat overlong, dark haft
that was meant to be tousled on a woman's pillow.
Becky took all of this in, that particular day, along with the way her
knees were threatening to forget their function of holding her upright.
In response she locked those knees tight. She did her best most of the
time to make people think she was all fluff between the ears, but she
drew the line at actually feeling that way herself. Yet, at that
moment, she'd have sworn she had cotton candy for brains. All of a
sudden, Nick Avery had made her feel like that, and she wasn't sure
whether this was good or bad.
Meanwhile, he'd been giving her the once-over, too. She was decked out
in one of her deliberately bimbo id outfits--too tight, too short and
too black for a sensible woman to wear. He slid his gaze over her. She
all but shivered, and not because she had too few clothes on in the
still chilly Colorado springtime. Of course, he probably thought she
was on the skinny side. Most men told her so, but she couldn't help
that. It had been well over three years since she was able to get a
full meal down and keep it there. She hoped Nick might think she was
pretty anyway. Or, maybe it was enough for her to look at how gorgeous
he was and daydream about it, obsess over it, hang on to it.
Over the several weeks since, she'd played that fantasy out like a
Colorado River fishing line. It gave her something to think about
besides the way, three-plus years ago, her beloved father had died, her
stepmother along with him. There was nobody left now, except maybe
Morty Lancer, the housekeeper Penelope Wren and her caretaker husband
Tobias, to care whether Becky had a dream in her head or not. She had
a brother, Samuel, but he was tucked away in a mental institution. She
wasn't allowed to see him much because of how upset he got when she was
around, and she could barely remember the time before he was put away.
He resented her so intensely that she couldn't in-elude him in the very
short list of people who gave a damn about her anyway. The last time
she saw him, he'd scowled like he wanted to kill her, then chucked a
vase at her head. Luckily, he'd missed, but she hadn't missed the
hatred in his eyes. She'd decided right then that she didn't have a
brother, not really, and she wrote him out of any corner he might have
claimed in her heart.
All of which made Becky feel even more alone and ripe for an imaginary
infatuation with the heartthrob bodyguard. She'd flirted with Nick in
the weeks since that day in the study, but even her most vampy smiles
and teasing comments got her nowhere. He was too much of a standup guy
to get involved with the boss's daughter, even when the boss wasn't
around any longer. Still, just thinking about him made her stretch
long and lazy like a cat as she gradually awoke to another Colorado
morning. She was coming out of that stretch when her arm hit something
hard beneath the sheet on the other side of the bed. For a delicious
instant she wondered if her fantasy had come to life and Nick was
beside her. She rolled toward that impossible dream with her lips
parted to receive a kiss as her eyes drifted open.
What Becky saw froze her to stone. She sat up fast, too shocked to
scream. A man's arm protruded from under the sheet and dangled off the
opposite side of the bed. She could tell just from looking at the
angle of the arm that he was dead. She could also tell by the
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flabbiness of the skin that he wasn't Nick Avery. She reached over and
grabbed the sheet, flipping the fabric aside to reveal what lay
underneath. It was a man's body all right, and he was nude. His skin
was so white it would have been pallid even while he was alive, with
rolls of extra flesh under his arms and around his waist where Nick was
lean and hard. This man's back was to her. Still, with the first
lucid thought she was able to piece together in her paralyzed mind, she
realized. that she knew him.
She would have rolled him over so she could see his face, but she
couldn't stand to touch what she sensed would be a cold corpse. She
could get up and walk around to his side of the bed, but she was too
frightened to move that far just yet. Instead, she eased herself up
onto her knees, clutching her side of the sheet to her chest, suddenly
modest in the presence of this poor, lifeless man. She leaned over far
enough away not to touch any part of him but sufficiently close to see
his face. She clamped her hand over her mouth. The sheet slipped from
her body as a muffled scream made a strangled sound behind her fingers.
As she'd thought, the dead man next to her was Morty Lancer. His eyes
were open and staring at the opposite wall. His mouth was open, too,
as if in surprise, and there was a bloody gash in his chest.
Becky doubled over with her head between her knees and gulped mouthfuls
of air to fight the spasms in her stomach. Those spasms wrenched
through her for a long, tortuous moment, until her stunned psyche began
to comprehend the significance of Morty being dead and naked in her
bed. Gradually, she straightened into a kneeling posture. Her hand
moved from her mouth and drifted out in front of her as if on
marionette strings. That was when her brain finally unscrambled what
might have been the scariest message of all. Her hand and forearm were
spotted with blood. She allowed herself the fleeting, desperate
conclusion that she had touched the bloody body just now and that would
explain the stains on herself, but of course that didn't make sense.
She hadn't allowed herself to touch him.
Becky rolled slowly off her knees to a sitting position on the bed. She
stared at her hand till her stomach started to retch again and she had
to look away. That was when she saw the knife. It was lying on the
pale peach rug at her side of the bed, the thick rug she liked so well
on winter mornings when this huge stone house could be' chilly as a
tomb. The pale rug fibers bore the same stains that marked her hand
and arm.
Becky leaned over to see the knife more clearly. The blade was long,
and the wooden handle showed a distinct palm print in crimson. She
stared at that palm print for a moment, then down at her own hand while
thoughts formed themselves in her head, like titles on a movie screen.
The words were stark black on a white background as her mind snapped
with a jarring jolt from its shocked state into sudden alertness. She
realized then, with undeniable certainty, that the print on that knife
was hers.
"My God," she blurted out loud. "I killed him." The sound of her
voice lurched her to an even sharper level of alertness, and she knew
at once that what she'd said wasn't true. She'd gone to sleep alone
last night,
and she hadn't awakened till a moment ago when her idyllic dream of
infatuation ended and this horrible nightmare began. Her next thought
was even clearer. If she hadn't killed Morty, then she was being set
up to make it look as if she did. The pieces fell together into what
might have been a paranoid conspiracy theory if she hadn't suddenly
been so sure it was true. She'd had an argument with Morty just the
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other day about letting her borrow on her trust fund because she'd
overspent her allowance. They'd had that same argument at least a
hundred times before. This time, however, they happened to be outside
the pool house with several people listening in. Becky had even said
Morty made her so exasperated that sometimes she wanted to kill him.
That, along with the generally reckless way she lived her life these
days, added up to pegging Becky as number one suspect. She sighed what
was nearly a sob and nodded her head. Somebody was setting her up, all
right. She even knew what their motive would be. Her full inheritance
was coming to her in a few months when she turned twenty-five. With
Morty no longer around to protect her legal interests and with her out
of the way in prison or on death row, a lot of people were destined to
make out like bandits. Especially one person, who was crazy enough to
think up a deal like this one and maybe smart enough to carry it out,
too. But there was no time to think about her brother Samuel now. She
had to get herself out of this mess. Becky swung her feet over the
side of the bed and stood up slowly. She was dizzy, and her legs
quivered under her. She was also standing very near the knife blade.
She suppressed the urge to leap away in disgust. She had to steady
herself all over. If she didn't think straight now, she could spend
the rest of her life, he ever short a duration that might be, paying
for it. S had to depend on herself now, not even her fantasy Ni could
help her. He was an ex-cop, after all. He'd lo at this room and her
and come to one conclusion, tl she was guilty as sin. He'd think she'd
lured Merry her bed then murdered him. Becky was definitely on own
with no more time for daydreams; She needed a plan, a plan for her
escape. From tl morning on, Rebecca Radley Lester and the life she
known would have to be history. As she walked shakily across the
carpet to her bathroom to wash the blood, from her hands, Becky could
already feel the emp ness of loss widening inside her--the loss of her
hen her friends, her identity, and of Nick Avery, too.
Chapter One
Five years later
Delia Made Barry enjoyed Christmas in Manhattan. Everybody was always
in a hurry here, but at this time of year there was a happy, expectant
quality to their haste. When she let herself be swept along by the
crowd on Fifth Avenue, the lightness of her feet lifted the weight from
the part of her that had been heavy-hearted for the past five years.
She could almost believe she was a normal person again, with a family
to buy gifts for and a full life awaiting her at home. The images that
haunted her dreams were replaced for the moment by the red, green, and
gold of the season. She opened up her usually carefully guarded self
and let in the bright storefronts and the glitter of moving display
windows populated by bustling elves and sky-treading reindeer. She let
herself believe she was a child again and Santa would he coming very
soon. In Delia's five years as a New Yorker, she hadn't seen many
white Christmases, though the cold was certainly sharp here in winter.
This was one of those frigid days. She was glad she'd worn her long,
heavy COat, the one that made her look like a version of King
Wenceslas.
She held the hem closed to shield "her ankles against the wind, knifing
down Fifth Avenue as a reminder that December was in full tilt and
Christmas only days away. Still, this wasn't the winter she'd once
known, roaring off the Rocky Mountains onto the Colorado plateau,
burying the world in deep white as pure as the holiday promise of a new
beginning each year. Delia ducked her head and told herself the sudden
stinging in her eyes was from the wind. That was the trouble with the
holidays. They made her remember, and memory was not her friend. She
was an Easterner now, with her previous history submerged beneath an
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