The Accidental Bodyguard. Ann Major

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      She had opened her eyes and found their fearful, curious faces peering eagerly at her. She’d had no memory of who they were or how she’d gotten here.

      But she’d quickly learned that they were Lucas’s adorable sons, and that they looked endearingly like him.

      “She’s awake.”

      “Told you she’d live.”

      “We’ve got to feed her something or she’ll starve like your gerbil.”

      “What’s your name?”

      Her name? Blue lights flickered, and she shook her head and made a low moan.

      “Pete said she had amnesia, dummy.”

       Pete? Who was Pete?

      “You hungry?”

      “Maybe…some broth,” she whispered.

      Their heads swiveled and they stared at each other in round-eyed consternation as if they’d never heard the word. “Broth?”

      “Then water,” she managed weakly.

      That started a quarrel over who got to fetch it, each of them wanting to.

      For ten long days and longer nights those two wonderful boys had fought many battles over the privilege of nursing her. They had checked medical books out of the library. They had cleaned her wounds and doctored them with medicine from Lucas’s huge marble bathroom. They had painstakingly picked the slivers of glass from the soles of her feet with tweezers, plunking the jagged bits into a metal bowl. They had soaked her feet in pails of hot water, and she could almost walk without limping.

      They took turns pretending to be sick themselves so that one of them could stay home from school with her. They had given her the antibiotics they tricked their uncle into prescribing for them. For the first few nights they’d coaxed their father into buying and cooking the few foods she could keep down—chicken broth, Jell-O and boiled vegetables, which they’d smuggled up to her.

      At first she’d been too weak and ill to worry about the way her presence in their home had forced them to deceive their father. But as she’d grown stronger and more attached to her lively, affectionate nurses, she blamed herself for their burgeoning talent at duplicity. Nursing her wasn’t the worst of it. They were hard at work on a covert project they called Operation Nanny.

      The boys didn’t want Lucas to hire a new nanny. “Because,” as Peppin explained, “we couldn’t fool one of those nosy old bags so easy as Dad. A nanny’d be up here all the time—she’d probably find you the first day.”

      Thus, every time Lucas informed the boys of a home interview for a prospective nanny, Peppin, who could mimic Lucas’s voice to a T, phoned the woman and told her the job had been filled.

      At first the girl had been too ill and too grateful and too terrified of being thrown out of the house to care, but now she felt stricken that she had become a corrupting influence on their characters.

      Although Peppin and Montague bickered incessantly, they could be an incredible team. During the day, when Lucas was at work, the boys gave her the run of his huge house, with its soaring ceilings and skylights and views of Corpus Christi Bay. One wall of his bedroom was made entirely of glass. Sometimes she would step out onto his balcony and let the tangy sea air ruffle her hair.

      Sometimes she showered in his pink marble bathroom that had both an immense enclosed shower and a bathtub as big as a small swimming pool. Sometimes she spent a languid hour buried beneath mountains of foamy bubbles in his tub. Sometimes she would pick out old clothes from his abundant closets to wear. Always she would linger in his room, studying his things, running his slim black comb through her hair and brushing her teeth with his yellow toothbrush. She would open his drawers and run her fingertips over his undershirts and cuff links, marveling that one man could have so much of everything. But what she loved best was lying in his bed and hugging his pillow to her stomach and imagining him there beside her, holding her. She gathered flowers from his gardens and arranged them in crystal vases everywhere, taking special pains with those that she left on the white table beside his bed. It pleased her when he picked a pale yellow rose from that vase and pinned it to the black lapel of his three-piece suit one morning before he rushed to his office.

      She tried to think of ways to repay him for all that his boys had done for her. The endless stark hallways of his beautiful house had been strewn with everything from rumpled clothes, baseball bats, soccer gear and Rollerblades to newspapers when she’d arrived. Dirty dishes had overflowed from the white-tiled kitchen counters onto the ebony dining room table.

      When she’d gotten better, she’d convinced the boys that maybe their father wouldn’t be so anxious to hire a nanny or a housekeeper if he didn’t feel the need for one so strongly. She had made a game of cleaning the house.

      While they picked up, she would lie on a couch or a chair, perusing the tattered album that contained black-and-white pictures of Lucas’s childhood in India, wondering why he’d looked so unhappy as a boy. Wondering why the pictures of India especially fascinated her even as she prodded the boys to pick up.

      Every time Peppin or Monty touched something, the rule was that they had to put it where it belonged. She began talking them through the preparation of simple meals, using the cans in the pantry and the frozen dinners in the refrigerator, so that Lucas always came home to a hot meal. At first they complained bitterly, but she just laughed and tried to motivate them by telling them they were learning basic survival skills.

      Mostly they went along with her projects because she lavished attention on them. She walked with them on the beach, threw horseshoes with them and played games. The only thing she refused to do was to let them lead her into the tunnel that wound from the garage under the house down to the beach. When they had unlocked the doors to that weird, underground passage, and she had smelled the mustiness of the place, she had felt as if the black gloom was pressing in on her and she was being suffocated.

      Ghastly minutes had crawled by before the feeling of claustrophobia subsided.

      “I can’t go in,” she had whispered, clutching her throat, not understanding her terror as she wrenched her hand free of theirs.

      “Why?” they asked excitedly, the beams of their flashlights dancing along the wall.

      Suddenly she had some memory of being trapped in a box and knowing she was being buried alive. She remembered coughing as dirt sifted through the cracks of her coffin. She remembered kicking and clawing and screaming when the narrow box was black and silent.

      “What’s wrong?” the boys demanded.

      Blue lights flickered, and the memory was gone.

      “I—I don’t know.” She edged away from them toward the open garage doors and brilliant sunlight. “Let’s go inside the house…and watch a video or something.”

      How she ached for them when once more they were safely inside and they showed her their home videos and photograph albums with photos that had been taken of their family before the divorce. There were very few pictures of them. The boys told her that their parents had never had time for them, even when they’d been married. It was worse now, though, since their mother had run off and their father kept threatening СКАЧАТЬ