"Excuse me?"
She grinned and hitched her chin toward a trio of high-school girls who were well into ogle mode and making no bones about it. "The little beach bunnies. They're flirting."
He grunted... and turned beet red. "And they would be all of fifteen. Does the term 'jailbait' mean anything to you?"
Janey chuckled. Bait was exactly what she was doing. It wasn't nice to bait the bodyguard, but it sure was fun— especially since he was giving her so much trouble with her previously dormant libido.
"You got a girlfriend, Wilson?"
"No, ma'—" He cut himself off mid-"ma'am." "No. No girlfriend."
She wasn't sure why that little tidbit of information pleased her. Like hell she wasn't. The thought of him getting it on with some little sweet thing actually made her a little jealous.
Talk about juvenile.
She concentrated on her run. On the freedom of it. She owed him for that.
"It's really great not being the one attracting the attention," she told him. "I'd forgotten what it felt like to move freely without turning heads. You might be worth keeping around after all."
"I'll sleep easier tonight knowing that."
She chuckled. "You make me laugh, Iowa."
"We aim to please."
Sure we do.
"How you holding up?" she asked after they'd run another quarter of a mile. "Got another mile in you?"
The look he gave her said,
You've got to be kidding!
"I just broke a sweat."
Boy, had he. He'd stripped off his T-shirt a quarter mile back and stuffed it in the waist of his running shorts, showing off his incredible physique.
"Ripped." "Buff." Pick an adjective. He was calendar material—and he didn't exactly look seventeen anymore. Not with that American eagle tattooed across the breadth of his chest. It was an amazing piece of work. About a hundred times the needle work of all four of her pieces put together and ten times the color.
Ouch. But then, he'd been a Ranger. They were supposed to eat glass for breakfast and nails for lunch.
Maybe knowing his military background had altered her perception of him, she thought as they made their way at a steady clip down the sand. Maybe she'd just had an opportunity to finally study him in depth without security issues pulling first priority.
At first glance he
had
looked like a baby. But when she looked, really looked, at his eyes—framed not only by character and experience lines but also by the thickest sun-kissed lashes—she'd seen the measure of his maturity. Yeah. If a boy wasn't a man when he went to Afghanistan or Iraq, he would be when he got back. If he lived through the experience, that is.
Jason Wilson had. And she suspected it had changed him. There was a look that came over him sometimes that was almost scary. Like now when a group of kids came running toward them and he went on full alert. His jaw hardened. His muscles bunched and the fingers he wrapped around her upper arm to steer her in a wide path around them made it clear he was in complete control. And capable of doing things to ensure her protection that gave her both confidence and pause.
What had he seen? What had he done?
She wondered if she'd ever ask him. Wondered if he'd tell her if she did.
When the group didn't veer but kept running in a straight line past them down the beach, he let her go. But he didn't drop his guard.
They'd passed the last lifeguard tower and were running out of beach. They had to either turn around and head back or stop and cool off. Frankly, she needed to cool off. As much from the good workout as from some genuinely intriguing thoughts about her bodyguard. She hadn't been around this much beefcake in a long, long time.
Not that beefcake was her thing. In her experience, beefcake always came with ego and ego equated asshole and she could live just fine without that kind of fly in her ointment. Been there. Hated that.
Nope. She was just fine on her own. While the gossip rags loved to pair her up with Derek—yeah,
that
was gonna happen—she'd been celibate for over two years. She hadn't met anyone who had given her a reason not to keep it that way. Or to stick her neck and her heart out the way she had with Kevin—hard lessons learned were often the most valuable.
Celibacy had certain rewards—and, of course, certain consequences. Her reaction to Jason Wilson seemed to be one of the latter. Not to mention confusing.
She barely knew him. In the interest of keeping it simple, she decided, it was probably best not to change that. And to quit baiting him.
"I'm going in," Janey said, deciding she'd take advantage of the opportunity to enjoy her freedom and to cool off in the process. She tossed her dark glasses and cap onto the sand. "How about you?"
He shook his head, watched her walk backward into the surf. Again, she couldn't see his eyes behind his dark glasses, but she got the impression that he was suffering her impulsive decision in disapproving silence.
The guy really was too much.
"You always this vigilant, Iowa?" Standing knee-deep in the water, she had to shout to be heard above the roar and rush of the surf as a wave slapped her hard around her thighs.
"Don't go out too far," he said.
"Guess that answers
that
question." He did
not
return her grin. Big surprise.
"There are riptide warnings posted at the lifeguard stations."
"Noted." Ignoring his dark scowl, she turned toward open water and, holding her breath, made a shallow dive.
Thanks to her kindergarten teacher, she was a strong swimmer. Her mother never had it together enough to enroll her in the summer Red Cross swim classes, but Mrs. Buttons had taken a special interest in Janey. She'd seen to it that Janey got to her lessons.
And thanks to those lessons Janey had great breath control. She could hold a note forever, and that particular ability, along with her range, was one of the things that had gotten the attention of talent scout Lee Haversham and landed her the gig at Dollywood where Jack Swingle had discovered her.
She pushed herself farther under the water, relishing the tug and pull of the warm Atlantic. The freedom of absolute solitude.
And then freedom turned to terror when she felt a hard bump against her hip.
What the hell?
There hadn't been anyone within fifty feet of her when she'd gone into the water. She felt another bump along with the slam of her heart as a hard pressure at her waist dragged her through the water.
"What the hell do you think you're doing!" a winded voice growled in her ear when she broke the surface. "I told you not to go out too far!"
Gasping for air, Janey shoved her wet hair out of her eyes. And found herself pressed belly to belly and hauled up tight against her bodyguard. "Jesus. I... thought you were a shark."
He shook his head, sending water in a spray around them as the surf slapped against their bodies and rocked them closer together.
"You scared the hell out of me!"
"Guess that makes us even. I thought you'd drowned!"
Another wave hit and she lifted her hands to his shoulders to keep from going under.
"Drowned? For God's sake. I wasn't going to drown."
"Damn right you weren't. No way in hell was I going to lose a client the first week on the job."
She didn't know who was angrier. Her or him. Didn't know whose heart was beating faster, either. But she did know she wasn't the only one aware of the rocking motion of the surf bumping and locking their bodies together. The bunchy muscles of his thigh wedged between hers. The unmistakable thickness of a very healthy erection pressed against her belly.
At the moment, she was too ticked off to dwell on it.
"Fool woman," he sputtered, abruptly shifting her weight so she was cinched up beside him and well away from whatever was happening down there.
"Macho man," she fired back as he trudged his way toward shore, dragging her with him.
"Woman doesn't have the sense God gave a rock," Jase sputtered under his breath when they reached the hotel half an hour later. It had been a long, quiet jog back to the Hilton.
She was pissed. He was pissed. It had made for a damn pissy trip back.
He couldn't wait to hit the shower to wash away the sand and the salt and the sweat. And the memory of her compact little body hitched up against his in the water.
A hard-on. Lord Jesus God, he'd gotten another hard-on. And she had to have felt it.
She stood beside him in the hallway, her arms crossed over her breasts, her foot tapping with impatience as he slipped the key card in the slot. He opened the door to the suite—and shifted from pissed to red alert when he saw what was waiting inside.
Jesus. Jesus Christ.
"Don't." He clutched her arm, blocking her way when she would have shot around him. Then he shut the door. "You don't want to go in there."
Like rain washing down a windowpane, all the color bled from her face. Wide brown eyes met his—frightened and far too wise. She let him steady her with a hand on her arm.
"It's him, isn't it? Grimm was here," she said so softly that if he hadn't read her lips, he would have missed it.
Between setting up security ahead of the tour's next stop in New York City and seeing to details for the next two days, Jase had read everything he could get his hands on about Edwin Grimm. And yeah, it looked like the creep had left his standard calling card.
A heart-shaped crystal bowl sat on the carpet just inside the door. Inside the bowl was a red velvet cloth. On the cloth were two bloody hearts, each no larger than a robin's egg.
Chapter 7
Between the Atlantic City cops, the hotel security, the backup singers and band members who all showed up, the next hour turned into a world-class cluster fuck. And it royally torqued Jase off.
"Okay, that's it, people." With a hard look he took the arm of Lakesha Jones and herded the backup singer toward the door. "Let's everyone just hustle on back to whatever it was you were doing, all right? Party's over."
Lakesha had heard via Christine Ramsey—a videographer or some such thing who was taping this leg of Janey's tour—that the police had been called to Janey's suite. Ramsey had just happened to stop by—a coincidence that had all of Jase's "got a bad feeling" vibes revved—to see if she could film a little downtime, star style, when hotel security had arrived followed by Atlantic City police. Not only was Jase having a hard time buying that the videographer had just happened by, but he hadn't been able to catch Ramsey, a sharp-featured, thin redhead, before she'd whipped out her cell phone and given Lakesha a call.
Of course, Lakesha had called the other backup singer, Tess Brewer, who'd called someone else, and the next thing Jase knew, the whole damn entourage had made an appearance, from the band members, to the rest of the singers, to Neal Sanders, whom Jase had met at a post-concert party and disliked on the spot. And who smelled like he'd drunk his breakfast
and
lunch.
Max was notably absent.
Janey was still notably shaken, although she was doing her damnedest to show a brave face. Just like the day the police had told her about her mother's death.
Jase was out of his comfort zone on this one. He was here to provide security, not a shoulder to lean on. Yet every time he caught sight of her wide, haunted eyes, he fought an unprecedented urge to pull her into his arms and promise her that everything was going to be all right.