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The woman struggled to stand. “Idiot,” she practically snarled as she slipped in the puddle of frozen coffee and landed on her ass again.
Alyssa smothered a giggle. Dressed in much more suitable jewel-studded flip-flops, she easily stood and swiped at the damp spots on her denim capris, without bothering to tell the gangly woman in black to try taking off those skyscraper heels first. Let her figure it out for herself, especially after she flung another murmured f-bomb at Alyssa.
The woman finally managed to get to her feet on her own. “Watch where you’re going next time,” she snapped, grabbing the handle of her carry-on, then stalking away unsteadily, an angry frown on her pinched face.
Alyssa let out a sigh as she stooped to pick up the placard scrawled with Rolston’s name. She shrugged off the woman’s bad manners. She’d been called everything from a dingbat to a screwup, and names far worse than what that scrawny witch had called her.
As much as it pained her to admit it, there was some truth to the name-calling. Ever since kindergarten, she’d been trying to find herself, and not doing a very good job of it. All through school, there hadn’t been a student activity she hadn’t tried. Some she’d done well. Some had bored her to tears. Others were nothing short of a bona fide disaster. If she were a betting woman, she’d lay odds that Melinda Wilcox would still refuse to speak to her. Forget that it’d been ten years since the toppled cheerleader pyramid incident. Was it really her fault Sean Bakker had waved to her and she’d waved back?
She let out another long-suffering sigh. From the minute she’d walked into the office this morning, she’d had a bad feeling today was going to be another one of those days. The sun in Venice Beach had been playing peek-a-boo behind a heavy marine layer, making for a hazy day. She hated hazy days. They just never felt quite right to her, and something invariably went wrong. Like Mercury was in retrograde and on steroids.
Today, apparently, was no exception.
She was supposed to be in the office preparing a bid proposal for security services at an on-location shoot for one of the big movie studios, not standing around LAX with a hand-scrawled placard in her hands. Surrounded by a bevy of professional chauffeurs and other drivers passing time until the passengers of Flight 546 from Charlotte, North Carolina, deplaned hadn’t been on today’s To Do List. But since she’d been the one to screw up the date, she had to make it right, even if waiting for some geeky pharmaceutical company whistleblower to arrive was so not in her job description.
A Jillian of all trades, but master of few—that was her. She was the go-to girl, the copy girl, the fix-the-website-again girl, the type-up-this-letter girl. She fetched coffee, sorted the mail, fixed the fax machine and ran to the deli for the guys. She was the office staff. And, because she’d obtained her commercial driver’s license when she was in college so she could make rent by working part-time as a school bus driver, she was also the occasional take-the-limo-for-detailing girl. But her primary nine-to-five responsibility was answering the phones and keeping the schedule for Primo Security Services, a private security firm started by a pair of California surfers looking for a way to make a living and support their passion for hanging ten. In the twenty years Perry Zellner and Craig Newberry had been in business, Primo had been providing security for everyone from Hollywood’s A-list to high-powered executives, with a few big-name politicians thrown in for good measure. Whether playing bodyguard for an out-of-towner at a star-spangled media event, or carting some coked-up starlet off in style to the county jail to serve a week out of a ninety-day jail sentence, no job was too big or small for Primo Security Services.
The first wave of passengers arrived, and Alyssa jockeyed for position with the other drivers. Problem was, she had no clue what Charles Rolston, the former accountant for Bastian Pharm
aceuticals and the federal prosecutor’s star witness, looked like. Once she’d realized her mistake this morning, she’d been in such a rush to get to the airport on time, she hadn’t thought to Google the guy to at least see what he looked like. A quick search using her iPhone, while standing in line at Starbucks, hadn’t helped because neither Rolston’s name or photo had been released to the press. Odd, considering the of instant information. All she had was a stupid placard with the guy’s name scrawled on it in her doctor-worthy penmanship.
And now she was a mess, thanks to the anorexic skyscraper who’d mowed her over. She looked down at her damp and stained top and capris. Rolston would probably take one look at her and hightail it back to the Carolinas, wondering about the federal prosecutor’s seriousness in keeping him safe until it was time for him to testify.
The People of the United States vs. Bastian Pharmaceuticals had been making daily headlines ever since the federal grand jury had returned an indictment. The Justice Department had then filed criminal charges against the top executives of the company. Bastian Pharmaceuticals had developed Tocalis, the first drug appropriate for both sexes for that “total sexual experience,” as the television ads had proclaimed. While half of the Tocalis users were busy getting it on, the rest had suffered serious side effects. For those with uncontrolled cholesterol, Tocalis had led to off-the-charts triglycerides, which had resulted in deadly cases of pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer and in some cases, heart failure. And the bitch of it was, the execs had known about the negative side effects for five years and had done nothing to warn the public, earning the company the nickname “Bastard Pharm.”
Each night on the nightly news shows, People v. Bastian Pharmaceuticals was rarely less than the number three story, commonly with a report of yet another fatality. Despite dire warnings from the Justice Department not to air the special, and threats from both parties of being buried in enough legal paper to kill off an entire forest, NBC’s Dateline had gone forward with a two-hour investigative report on the case. They had, however, taken Justice’s threats into consideration and had kept the identity of the prosecution’s star witness a secret.
Still, it wasn’t every day the federal government filed criminal charges against one of the country’s largest and most prolific pharmaceutical companies. While the plant facilities were located in North Carolina, the company’s corporate headquarters was housed on the thirty-fifth floor of the ARCO Towers, thereby allowing the trial to be set in Los Angeles.
Alyssa stood on her toes to peer over the shoulder of an uniformed chauffeur, to no avail. She stepped to the side in time to see the crowd coming toward the drivers, but couldn’t find a single guy who resembled what she thought an accountant should look like. It didn’t matter. At this rate, buried behind a sea of uniformed drivers, he’d never find her.
With a bit of force and apologies raining from her lips, she pushed her way to the front of the crowd, careful to keep the hurried CHARLES ROLSTON placard she’d made in view. As she elbowed her way around a three-hundred-plus-pound bodyguard, she stumbled. A pair of warm, strong hands reached for her and kept her from falling flat on her face. She murmured a quick “thank you,” then looked up and locked gazes with the most gorgeous specimen of male flesh she’d ever seen.
Oh. My. God. He had the greenest eyes on the planet. And a near-perfect face. His thick, sable hair was cropped short in an executive style, just long enough for her to run her fingers through. She would’ve drooled, but thankfully her mouth went as dry as the sand in Desert Hot Springs. Gracious. She hadn’t even dipped her gaze to take in all of him.
Yet.
“I’m sorry,” she managed to croak. She regained her balance and straightened. A quick sweep down his body and back up again nearly gave her heart failure. He was tall, easily over six foot, with wide shoulders, like one of her treasured 49er linebackers. And solid muscle. Like a man should be. “Thank you.”
Whether she was thanking him again for keeping her on her feet, or for being so freaking drop-dead stunning, she didn’t much care. She just wanted another look. And another.
“You looking for Charles Rolston?” he asked.
Her eyes widened. He was the nerd-ball accountant from Bastard Pharm? Not possible. Geeks didn’t have voices like melted chocolate poured over silk sheets. They sounded . . . geeky. Nerdy. And certainly not the stuff fantasies were made of—at least her fantasies. Besides, she just didn’t have that kind of luck.
Ever.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she told him.
. . . my entire life, she finished silently.
She tossed the placard at a nearby trash can and didn’t look to see if it made it in, then slipped her hand around his arm. Struggling not to hyperventilate, she marveled at the feel of his muscles bunching and jumping beneath her fingertips.
She way too easily imagined the rest of him.
Naked.
She cleared her throat, but that did squat to dispel the delicious image of a very naked, well-muscled witness for the prosecution from her dirty mind. “I was worried I might have missed you.”
