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She heard Brand fumbling with his own clothes, heard the elasticized snap as he pulled the condom off, and she wondered what he would do with it. He couldn’t leave it in here for some poor unsuspecting farmworker to find. But where would he put it in the meantime?
All the possibilities grossed her out a bit, and she shoved it to the back of her mind. That was his concern—she had other stuff to worry about right now. She sniffed and winced at the wet sound. She would kill for a tissue.
“You okay, princess?” he asked, his dark voice sounding almost genuinely concerned.
“F-fine.” Well, she would be if she could stop shaking. She distractedly wondered if she were in shock, because she was trembling so badly despite the pleasantly balmy spring evening. He pressed something into her hand and, for a split second, she irrationally thought it was the condom and her reflex was to drop it. Luckily she didn’t, because she soon recognized the soft, folded linen square in her hand as a handkerchief, and she gratefully lifted it to her face to pat at her wet cheeks and then blow her nose noisily into it.
“I don’t want to do this again,” she said in a high, shaken, and almost hysterical voice. She sounded terrified and shocked, even to her own ears.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted,” he quipped, but his own voice had a tremor to it and she wished she could see his face.
“I don’t usually . . .”
“No need to explain yourself to me, princess. I’m all for meaningless hookups. It doesn’t make me respect you less. Besides, it would be hypocritical for me to judge you based on something that I enjoy doing so much myself.”
His words made her feel a little sick and made the entire encounter seem even more sordid.
“Have a nice life, Sam Brand. I look forward to never seeing you again.”
Her eyes had adjusted to the gloomy interior of the barn, and she knew from his dark silhouette on a slightly less dark background that he was standing directly in front of her. But even so, it surprised her when he cupped her face and graced her with the sweetest of kisses.
“You take care of yourself, princess,” he said after lifting his lips from hers.
Lia didn’t respond and turned to gingerly make her way, in the dark, back to the barn door. He didn’t follow her.
CHAPTER ONE
Four months later
God, this hurt! Sam pushed the button on the morphine dispenser and lay back with a groan. He wasn’t going to be macho about this shit. First time he’d ever been stabbed, and it sucked balls. How humiliating to have some scrawny fucker use him as a pincushion. While Sam had taken him down and beaten the guy to a pulp, he was still pissed off as hell that the asshole had managed to inflict five stab wounds in the process.
Five stab wounds! What the fuck? Three tours to Afghanistan plus numerous special ops missions without a scratch and Sam got himself wounded by some psycho stalker with a knife. Worse, the guy looked like a stiff breeze could knock him on his ass.
One of the penetrating wounds had missed his femoral artery by a quarter of an inch; another—the most severe—had punctured a lung. But the worst injuries—in Sam’s opinion—were the double fractures of his ulna and radius thanks to his takedown of the attacker. He had miscalculated the landing and had wound up with the perpetrator landing on top of him. Sam’s arm had broken the fall. That injury had required surgery as well, and Sam was now the reluctant owner of a couple of metal plates and screws in his arm. He would be setting off metal detectors in airports for the rest of his life. Wonderful. And of course, it hurt like a son of a bitch and would require lengthy rehabilitation.
He sighed when the morphine started to kick in and allowed himself to relax. He contemplated the plethora of flowers and cards scattered throughout his expensive, private hospital room. There were more than he’d anticipated. Turned out that saving everybody’s favorite pop princess from certain death earned you more than a few fans. Five days since the dramatic attack had taken place at a celebrity/paparazzi–heavy charity gala and he already had three huge bags of fan mail cluttering up a corner of the hospital room. His employees thought it was fucking hilarious to leave them here, and none of his grousing had scared them into removing the bags yet.
He rarely did fieldwork anymore, usually operating behind the scenes, running the business. But Laura Prentiss—the aforementioned pop princess—while a pain in the arse, was a top-tier client, and what she asked for she usually got. After receiving a series of threatening letters that had escalated into full-on stalking, Laura had demanded Sam as her close protection officer, or CPO. The paparazzi had had a field day with that—thus, many “confirmed” accounts from “reliable sources” about Sam being her lover had surfaced. They had both shrugged the stories off, hazards of the job, so to speak, but every picture of them together had apparently enraged psycho stalker boy even more. The guy had somehow managed to finagle a job on the event caterers’ waitstaff and had intercepted their path almost immediately after they’d stepped off the red carpet and into the actual building.
