Dr. Bodyguard. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ on the narrow slice he’d carved into his thumb, Nick looked up to see Genie, wrapped in a thick terry robe, standing at the threshold. Her hair was a damp waterfall across her narrow shoulders. Her eyes were shadowed, wary, and the bruises on her cheek forcibly reminded him of her vulnerability even as his heart thumped at the sight of her. She needed his help, nothing more. His protection. Besides, he didn’t even like her.

      “You cook?” Her voice was stronger, as if the shower had distanced her from the afternoon’s events, and he was grateful for that, since he wasn’t feeling particularly distant himself. In fact, he was fighting the insane urge to cross the room, scoop her off her feet and take her back to the shower so he could protect her. Naked.

      “Yeah, I cook.” He waved the thumb in her direction. “If you don’t mind the occasional miss.” Giving her a wide berth, he placed two plates on the granite breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area.

      “But I thought—” She hitched herself up on a stool, seeming not to notice that the robe had fallen open across one rosy, damp thigh.

      Resisting the urge to pull the robe closed—or off, whichever she preferred—he sat opposite her so he couldn’t see her pink-painted toenails. Never in a million years would he have guessed that Genius Watson painted her toenails pink.

      “What? That a rich boy like me wouldn’t know how?” He shrugged. “Well, when you get along better with the help than with your own family, you pick up a few useful domestic skills.”

      Most women would choose that moment to comment on his father’s wealth and position, or ask him what the campaign had been like. Genie did neither. She popped a forkful of egg into her mouth, made a sexy “Mmm” sound when she swallowed and said, “Poor baby. Do you do windows, too?”

      He relaxed the tension he hadn’t even realized had crept into his neck and shoulders, bit into the toast and nodded toward the full-length windows surrounding the ground floor. “Yeah, but I’d charge you extra for those, particularly if you wanted me to polish the stained glass.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind.” After a few minutes of oddly companionable silence, she stared at her empty plate. “I guess I was hungry. Thanks.”

      He got up and dished out seconds, grateful that she was lucid and eating. He added a couple of prescription pain pills and a glass of water to her place setting before he sat back down.

      She scowled at the pills. “They’ll knock me out. I need something that won’t make my brain fuzzy.”

      Without a word he leaned across the breakfast bar and grabbed the ibuprofen he’d put there earlier, popped the cap and handed it to her. “Kind of thought you’d feel that way.”

      She swallowed four of the pills dry and chased them with a bite of egg. Gesturing again with her fork, oblivious to the fact that her terry robe was now gaping at the top, she said, “So what happened? I don’t remember much, but the darkroom was trashed, wasn’t it?”

      Nick tore his attention from the hint of smooth, round flesh at her widening neckline and glued his eyes to her face, which was looking worse by the minute as the bruises darkened to the color of rotten eggplants. Protect, he reminded himself, not ogle. “Yeah, the cassettes were opened and the films thrown around, and it looks like he went after the developer with that pipe wrench we use to change the chemical tanks. He, uh, must’ve done that before you got there.”

      “How do you know that?” She grimaced and pushed her plate aside.

      “Well, from the amount of—” Nick cleared his throat and willed the image away “—blood on you and in the room, he’d have been too hurt to demolish anything afterward.”

      Genie shook her head and her drying hair shimmered in the light of the stained-glass lamp. How had he ever thought her hair was a nondescript brown? The metallic threads of bronze and gold glowed as she moved, and the natural waves washed almost to the place where her breasts pushed against the rapidly loosening terry robe.

      Ordinary she was not. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a pain in the neck.

      “That doesn’t make any sense. I would’ve known something was wrong if the developer wasn’t running properly. And besides, how did he just waltz back down the hallway, onto the elevator, and past security? Wouldn’t someone have thought it strange? I mean, sure it’s a hospital, but bleeding people tend to stick to the E.R., not the research buildings.

      She had a point. “Well, there was blood in the sink. Maybe he washed some of it off.” Nick closed his eyes and tried to picture the ruined room. What was he missing? “How about clothes? A lab coat or something he could’ve put on over his other stuff? A baseball cap to cover a scalp wound?”

      “A scalp wound would work,” Genie agreed, her eyelids drooping and her words coming more slowly now. “It’d bleed like hell but not do too much real damage. The clothes make sense, but where would he get them? Bring them with him? Why would he do that unless he was planning on getting hurt? And why was he in there in the first…” She trailed off and would have fallen asleep face-first in her leftover eggs if Nick hadn’t seen it coming and reached over to catch her chin in his hand.

      Why indeed?

      He stared at her face, at the translucent skin, the bloom of violent bruises, the obscene line of black stitches above her swollen eye. She looked like an angel who’d gotten the losing end of a bar fight. Why would anyone want to hurt her? Hurt their research? They found disease genes, for heaven’s sake. They didn’t clone dinosaurs, they didn’t work with embryos and they didn’t use lab animals in their experiments.

      They tried to cure people. Why would anyone want to hurt researchers who were only trying to cure people?

      Nick had no idea. Nor, it seemed, did either of the detectives working on the case. At least not yet.

      Sighing, he picked up Dr. Watson and manfully rearranged her robe so it covered as much as possible. He carried her up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, flicked on a faux Tiffany lamp that lit the room in bits of sparkling color and laid her on the big brass bed. She didn’t wake when he slid her between the covers and tucked them all the way up to her chin, but she murmured and curled up with both hands beneath her cheek.

      Her two cats, which he had previously noticed only as flitting shadows at the edge of vision, appeared on the bed as if by magic. The big black shorthair curled itself behind her knees and the tiny gray tabby, maybe two months old or so, purred like a locomotive as it marched up to her face and sniffed at the line of stitches. It licked her chin worriedly.

      The kitten looked directly at Nick and mewed a question. He stroked its little head with the back of a finger, and said, “Yeah, I hear you. She’ll be okay though.” He stared down at the motionless woman, barely a lump beneath the bedclothes. “She’ll be okay,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her.”

      He paused and said to nobody in particular as he stared down at the woman in the bed, “I’ll protect her. God help us both.”

      Chapter Three

      While Genie slept, her brain, that precocious organ that had dictated much of her life up until this point, churned and spun in its liquid-filled housing and tried to make sense of the day’s events. A difficult task considering there was a large piece of that day tucked away in the back recesses of memory, protected by a twist of neurons and a few subconscious Keep Away СКАЧАТЬ