Protecting Her Heart (Seals Security Book 3) (5 page)

Luke entered his office and sat down in his chair, digging through his papers looking for the estimates he needed to fax. After the confrontation with his new assistant, he was on edge. He frowned, remembering the bulky suit she wore that fit her poorly. Her red hair had been pulled up in a tight bun and she was very average looking but something about her got under his skin. Maybe it was the determination he had seen in her green eyes or the way her lips had looked so kissably soft.

He leaned back in his chair waiting on the report to run through the fax machine still thinking of his new assistant. He knew he’d been a total dick to her a moment ago but at the moment he didn’t care. He was in a bad mood and she irked him for some reason. Laney had hired her and she sung her praises. Only he wasn’t putting too much stock in that yet because Laney knew he would settle for halfway competent after nine assistants.

Evie jumping in front of him like she was going to bodily prevent him from entering his own office was ridiculous. Didn’t she realize that he could take her out with one hand tied behind his back? He snorted—as if she would be able to stop him—she was five feet two at best and he’d bet she didn’t know anything about defending herself. She’d vaulted in front of him like she was going to take him down and then had the nerve to look frightened when he’d stepped closer. What the hell had she thought he was going to do, smack her or toss her out of his way?

That made him wonder if someone had smacked her or tossed her out of their way and he found the idea didn’t sit well with him. He had always hated violence against women; it was his hot button in fact. Actually, violence towards women was the reason he’d founded Seals Security in the first place.

Back when he was in the Navy he’d met a woman and after they discovered they weren’t a good match as lovers, they’d become friends. Luke visited her when he wasn’t out of the country on assignment. It was about seven years after his first tour that she’d changed from the happy friendly woman he knew into an introverted shut-in. At first he’d thought finding a boyfriend was the reason she’d begun to pull away from their friendship and it hadn’t really concerned him.

Until one night about fourteen months after she had started seeing the man, she’d called him crying and begging him to help her. She’d told him that her boyfriend was trying to break into her apartment and she was frightened he would hurt her again. He’d rushed over to her place and found her lying in a puddle of her own blood. Apparently the reason she’d been pulling away wasn’t as he’d thought—that she was happy—and was instead because her boyfriend was beating her into submission. After calling the paramedics and making a statement to the police, he’d gone to the hospital.

Kate had thankfully survived and she explained to him what she’d been going through for the past year. She’d reported the boyfriend twice but the police weren’t able to arrest him; she didn’t have proof of his abuse because he’d left no marks on her. They’d put a restraining order on him the second time she’d come to them but it hadn’t prevented the third attack.

Luke ended up helping her change her name and her entire life in order to get away from the crazy son-of-a-bitch who’d hurt her. Kate’s abuse and the asshole that fucked with his sister’s head and stalked her when she broke it off with him had prompted him to start the company. Thank God Laney didn’t know that two months after he was discharged from the Navy Craig had nearly beaten the man to death because the fucker was stalking her. They’d never told her because they’d known at the time it would have only served as a setback to her recovery from the abuse the man had already rained down on her. He was glad that Craig had found out and put a stop to it so he wasn’t going to question how he knew she had a stalker. Luke had a sneaking suspicion it was because his friend might have been stalking her himself. It didn’t matter anymore because Craig made Laney happy and if he had been stalking her, it was only to protect her.

His experience with Kate had started the idea but Laney’s stalker had solidified it and Seals Security had been born. They specialized in private security for people like Laney and Kate as well as for celebrities and public figures. About a year later they’d started taking on corporate security jobs working on making those more secure as well and they were currently the top east coast company for any type of personal or business security. Going into business with Eric and Craig had been one of the best decisions he’d made and he was proud of the company they’d built together.

As of last year as part of Laney’s and Tina’s charity efforts they were able to offer their services to several local abuse shelters at a huge discount. The annual gala had always been to fund those shelters but the funds were now used to pay for private security helping to make those abuse shelters more secure for the people who were living there.

The sound of the fax machine startled him back to reality. He watched the fax start pulling in the paper his thoughts slipping back to Evie’s reaction to his anger.
Was someone hurting her?
A dark scowl covered his face as that thought filtered through him. If he had the full background check that Laney said was delayed, he would be able to assess the situation better. It was odd that it wasn’t back yet because they typically had them back within twenty-four hours. Frowning, he stood, grabbing the acceptance printout and tossing it into the trash, then texting Eric to be sure it was coming through.

Getting a confirmation that Eric had the papers Luke grabbed his keys. He needed to call that company to see about the background check at the first opportunity.  He stalked out of his office still wearing that dark frown because he didn’t like not knowing anything about Evie when he normally had a full background on all his employees. He waved curtly at her and Monica as he went by. Evie glanced at him and gave a slight tilt of her head while Monica waved back. Luke paused, watching Evie for a second before he continued walking.

Evie was just starting to type out the security brief when her phone buzzed. She lifted it to her ear as she glanced down to see if it was an external or internal call.

“Yes, Mr. Stewart?” she asked, seeing it was his line. She wanted to roll her eyes because he was in a mood today and he’d been making her insane. Every time she got going on one thing, he would call her about doing another and it was getting on her last nerve.

“Evie, do you have that report for the Stine office I told you to type up yesterday?” Luke’s husky bedroom voice cut across the line sending a little shiver of desire down her spine. Over the last few days she had settled in nicely at Seals Security and being Luke’s assistant wasn’t difficult. It was, however, hard to concentrate whenever Luke was anywhere near her because his sexual appeal was like a wine that went straight to her head. His arrogance, however, knew no bounds.

Shaking off the dark desires his smoky voice invoked, she hit save on the report she’d started typing because after four days of working with him, she knew that he wouldn’t be able to find it on his desk and she’d have to go get it. He wouldn’t admit it but he was always losing things and then insisting that she’d lost them.

“It’s on your desk, sir,” Evie informed him.

“No, it’s not. I wouldn’t have called you if it was,” Luke barked.

“I’ll be right in.”

“I don’t need you to come look, I need–” She hung up knowing that whatever he had to say wasn’t going to be necessary when she pulled the report he was looking for out of the pile of misplaced papers she knew was sitting on his desk. Entering his office, she wasn’t surprised when he continued his speech.

“It’s not in here so go out there and type it up like I told you to or reprint it because it isn’t her–” he stopped talking when she handed him the report, having unearthed it from the pile of papers on the corner of his desk.

“Will there be anything else, Mr. Stewart?” she asked as he stared in apparent fascination at the report in his hand. Evie felt a little smile tug at the corners of her lips at his adorably shocked expression.

“No, that will be all,” he finally stated, looking a bit frazzled.

“Very well then.” Evie turned to head out the door but paused in the doorway, turning to look back at him before she asked, “Do you need me to order lunch for you or are you going out?”

“No, I have a lunch meeting with Craig and Eric today so I don’t need anything,” Luke said, not even looking up at her, already going over the report in his hand. Evie nodded despite his not paying attention and exited the office to head back to her chair.

Evie liked her job. Getting Luke organized was a little bit of a challenge. He wasn’t messy exactly, he just had trouble organizing his paperwork. She was sure that little fault was the reason he’d had such trouble finding a competent assistant. If the person wasn’t highly organized themselves like she was, they would have had issues trying to help him stay structured.

Evie sat back down and began typing the proposal again so that she could fax it over to the company like Luke had asked her to. Her mind wandered to her home situation and she mentally calculated her funds. She had rented a storage unit to store her stuff and she’d checked out pricing for the local motel that took weekly stay reservations. If she stayed there it would take her two months to come up with the funds for her and Rory to get a place. But if she stayed in her car and parked it at Rory’s mom’s house, she would be able to use their bathroom to get ready for work and would be able to afford it in three weeks.   

If Rory’s mother wasn’t already freaking out about her daughter living at her place, Evie would ask to stay there. However, Rory’s mom was not happy with Rory staying with her and Evie moving in wasn’t going to make her attitude any better. Rory would be able to sell Evie living in her front yard and using the bathroom to get ready for work as a way to get Rory out of her house faster.

Evie finished the proposal she was working on and sent it to the printer before leaning back in the chair looking up at the white tiled ceiling, her mind still wandering. Luke’s office door opened and he stomped out, a stack of papers in his hand. Evie looked at the scowl on his face and the way his lips were flattened into a straight line.
Uh-oh,
what the heck had happened in the last ten minutes to piss him off.

“Evie, these are the reports from the Haverson job. Make them into that–that thing you did the other day and get them back to me. I’m headed to the meeting in an hour and Eric and Craig are being big-assed babies and insisting that it be done like the last one was,” Luke said, frustration clear in his voice, and Evie hid the tiny smile that tugged at her lips by biting them.

Luke was staring at her intently as he slapped the huge pile of papers into the bin on the edge of her desk. She was amused that Luke was so frustrated by the fact that Craig and Eric had liked the way she’d put together the last report so that they could tell what they were looking at. Laney had laughingly told her that Craig had almost kissed Evie when he had received the last one she prepared for Luke.

Apparently Craig and Eric spent ten minutes every time he gave them one of these reports trying to figure them out because Luke had the information out of order, making it confusing. She’d labeled the information and put it into a spreadsheet after she’d found it on his desk in a jumble of messy paperwork that had made her eyes almost cross. She had prepared three copies and put them in binders and given them to him on his way to the meeting. He’d glared hotly at her and demanded his original report back. She’d told him that she threw it away and there hadn’t been time for him to reprint the information so he’d take the reports she’d made instead. It looked like Craig and Eric had put their foot down and insisted that she do them from now on.

“No problem,” Evie said, allowing the little smile to spread over her face.

“And I guess since they’re being like this I will just have you make those up for all the company jobs. I’ll send the information directly to you next time rather than print it out and you can make me one too,” Luke said, his hand waving in the air. Her insides shook with laugher that she held in because despite his casual act, she knew from his request that he’d liked the information being easily readable too.

“Of course, Mr. Stewart,” Evie replied.

“And stop Mr. Stewart-ing me, damn it. Just call me Luke like I told you to,” Luke growled, his scowl bringing his brows together.

“Okay,” Evie said, shifting in her chair. She wasn’t comfortable with calling him Luke because it seemed too intimate and she was already having a hard time not fantasizing about him. Calling him Luke all the time wasn’t going to help matters.

He nodded, staring at her for a long moment before he stomped back to his office, shutting the door with a little click. Evie sat in her chair breathing heavily, her eyes glued to the door he’d stepped through. She didn’t know why the intent way he watched her made her so hot and bothered but it did. Evie’s hands shook a little as she reached over to grab the messy stack of papers from her inbox.
She’d better quit thinking about her boss and get busy.
Her heart was still pounding in her veins and her insides trembled with desires she had no business feeling for her boss.

Luke climbed out of his SUV, grabbing his coffee before he slammed the door. He was in a bad mood this morning because he woke up late and missed his morning workout. It didn’t help that over the past few weeks Evie was driving him slowly insane. He really needed to get his fixation with her out of his system. Hell, yesterday he’d found himself staring at her ass for about twenty minutes while stuffed envelopes at her desk. He’d become a damned voyeur watching her through the one way frosted glass in his office almost constantly.

His cock was constantly hard lately and it was getting damned inconvenient. Although after three weeks of her in his outer office, his workflow had finally smoothed out. Besides those reports she did—which he’d never admit made his security briefs so much easier to read—she’d also organized his desk, taken over his calendar, and just generally whipped his office into shape.

He found that he had more time than he did even when Maria was working for him. He actually left the office at four every day, which rarely happened in the past and certainly not every night. He was able to check in with his six teams before he headed home at night, ending his day at six rather than seven or eight. Seeing the teams in action several times a week allowed him to anticipate problems and assure himself everything was running smoothly. 

Eric and Craig were both threatening to attempt to steal
his
assistant but Luke’s growl and the dark glower he’d worn had stopped that teasing in its tracks. Not that either of them really needed an assistant because Luke was the one who did most of the office work for the company. When they’d started Seals with so few teams, he’d allowed Craig and Eric to shove him into an administrative position and he had never left it. Not that he minded because it allowed him to be sure the company went in the direction he wanted it to go, which was why they were able to expand a year earlier than planned.

Only lately it was hard to focus on work. Luke grunted; he was slowly going nuts. He wasn’t sure what it was that bothered him about Evie. She wore bulky suits that hid her body. Suits that made him itch to remove them for some strange reason. He found himself thinking of bending her over her desk or his at least once a day. He didn’t know why he was so attracted to her and having her near was beyond distracting for him when he was at the office. He would walk out to ask her something and his cock was suddenly hard. It was frankly inconvenient and more than a little frustrating because he didn’t like being attracted to her. She wasn’t his type.

It wasn’t like she was an amazing beauty. She had a slightly off-center nose with freckles on her cheeks and a scar on the left side of her chin, but all he could think about when he was with her was how much she turned him on. It was like she had a direct line to his libido and every time he was near her she would turn up the heat. His lips tightened and his hand clenched on his coffee cup. The whole thing didn’t make a damned bit of sense to him. He’d dated a supermodel less than a month ago and she hadn’t turned him on as much as Evie did. Why his frumpy-looking assistant made him feel like a randy schoolboy with his first crush was beyond him.

He took a sip of his coffee as he moved past Evie’s little Pinto but his eyes caught on a dent in the passenger door and he paused, frowning.

Why was there a dent in her door? 

He racked his brain trying to remember if it had been there a few days ago. He couldn’t remember but he was pretty sure it hadn’t been. He moved toward her car, his hand running over the dent in the door, frowning in concentration as he inspected it. There wasn’t a paint transfer so it wasn’t from another car hitting it.

His mind raced around with ideas of where the dent might have come from but he couldn’t think of anything that might have made a dent that size. Upon closer inspection, he noted that it looked like a round object had hit the door pretty hard. Frowning, he leaned in, trying to see it better despite the darkened interior of the garage. His mind suddenly flashed back to the incident that first day when she’d seemed scared he would hurt her, making him realize he’d never seen the background check on her. Evie hadn’t reacted like a frightened rabbit since and he’d dismissed the idea that someone might be hurting her. This dent in her door made those thoughts come flooding back. His jaw tightened as he stood back up and glanced into the back seat of the car, a dark scowl on his face. Why was there an unrolled sleeping bag in the back seat?

Was she
living
in her car?

His fists balled and he felt like his teeth would snap as he stomped towards the elevator, tossing the half empty coffee cup into the bin beside the elevator as he waited on it impatiently. When it arrived, he jumped inside and began hitting the close button repeatedly. When the doors finally shut, it seemed to take forever to get to the lobby floor.

Exiting the elevator, he headed towards Laney’s office, likely looking like a charging bull but he didn’t care. He was going to have that background check in his hand in the next ten minutes or someone over at the company they used for those checks was going to get an earful. Luke was concerned that she was living in her car because someone was after trying to harm her. If Evie was running from someone or just homeless, then it was going to get resolved today. No way in hell was he letting her live in her car.