“Vance mentioned you were in the military,” I say, not looking at him. My eyes follow a woman pushing a supermarket trolley down the sidewalk. “Is that right?”
“Yes. Five years.” He opens his door and then mine.
“Where were you before this?”
He walks half a step ahead of me, scanning the street. “Albury Creek, mainly. I came here a few weeks ago for this job.”
He moved here for this assignment. That tells me he’s either ambitious or desperate. Or both. Something is pushing him, I can sense it, and I’d bet good money it isn’t the cost of rent in Albury Creek.
A row of metal mailboxes welcomes us, crammed with spam flyers, but half of them are on the floor where someone stepped on them and kept walking. He heads for the stairwell covered in wrinkly blue carpet and I follow.
Second floor. He stops at a door on the second floor and turns to me. “I’m sorry.”
For what? But I don’t say it with words. I say it with my eyes.
He holds the look a second longer, and the blue-gray of his eyes goes flatter. Then he unlocks the door, steps inside, and pulls it shut behind him, while I’m left standing in the hallway. Kai is apologizing for what I’m about to see.
I hear him moving around inside. Paper being folded or crumpled. A drawer opening and closing. Voices from the door next to his. Then the door opens.
“Come in,” he says, and I don’t waste time stepping in.
The apartment is a studio. A king single with one pillow is pushed to the wall. There’s a bedside table with a lamp. A kitchenette. The window faces the brick wall of the building next door, close enough to touch if you leaned out.
There is nothing personal anywhere. The room is a holding cell that an ex-soldier tidies out of habit. But it’s clean. I don’t see anything worth apologizing.
“You can sit on the bed,” he says, because there isn’t anywhere else to sit other than the floor. He pulls a black duffel bag from the closet. “I’ll be quick.”
I don’t sit. I lie down.
I stretch across the mattress and lace my fingers behind my head, behind the small pillow. The bed smells clean but lived-in. Detergent, mostly. But underneath that, him. His sweat. Not the gym kind, but the low, warm musk of a body that runs hot. It’s on the pillow, the sheets. The whole bed is full of him, and I turn my face into the pillow and breathe him in without pretending I’m not.
The zipper on his duffel bag stops, and I turn to look at him.
He’s crouched on the floor, a folded shirt in one hand, and he’s staring. Not in my face. At the full picture of me stretched across his bed, my arms open, the cap I’ve been wearing now tossed beside his pillow. The loose sweatpants riding low on my hips. His hand, with the shirt, has gone still in midair.
I smile, but only in my head. Maybe I can seduce my hot bodyguard after all. My little performance at the office rattled him. Kai’s disciplined; it’s obvious. But even the most rigid discipline has cracks, and I found one, and I’m going to keep finding more.
I roll onto my side when he turns back to his packing, reaching for the bedside table. There’s a wallet, and I pick it up.
“Kai Romero,” I read aloud, studying the ID. The photo is unsmiling. The blue-gray eyes flat and guarded. “Romero. That’s Spanish?”
“My mother.” He doesn’t look up.
“You look nothing like it.”
“Everyone says that.”
I study the birthdate. Do the math I’ve already done countless times before. “Twenty-five. So young.”
He doesn’t respond, so I set the wallet back on the table and roll onto my back again. The ceiling has a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the corner.
“Are you good at separating business and leisure, Kai?”
The packing stops again. “Yes.”
“Good. Good.” I keep my eyes on the ceiling. My voice is even, measured. “My job is intense. It doesn’t shut off when I leave the office. I go home with the stress, the adrenaline. I need an outlet. I imagine yours is the same. All the danger, the hypervigilance.”
I pause. Let him fill in the blanks.