Good to have you back.
Looking forward to carving new memories with you.
—K
Luckily, Brat’s shopping interest seemed to vanish with her credit card. I doubted she’d even read the contract I’d given her. Maybe her interest had vanished with her purchasing power.
Now, if I were flying solo, I would take the news as a personal invitation to rip Kozlov a new one. The issue was—I was on a job. And right now, the only threat to Brat’s life was being associated with my ass.
Logic dictated I call Tom to let him know about this, then make the next call to Anthony Thorne, informing him of my immediate resignation, my reason for it, and referring him to another security company.
Logic, however, could suck it. Now that I’d started this assignment, I had my eye on the prize. I was getting that meeting with the former president and milking the connections I got out of it to the max.
By the time I was done with Brat, she was going to be enrolled in an Ivy League school, working full time, and volunteering at a shelter.
All I needed was to ensure that Brat was far away from her natural habitat.
Los Angeles.
The next few days passed in a daze.
Ransom did not leave my side. Barely even gave me privacy when I went to the bathroom. I counted down the days, the minutes, the hours until we flew to Dallas. He was obsessed with keeping me safe, and it obviously got to his psyche, because after four days, he called Max and asked him to bring a backup to my house.
“Make sure you patrol the place and don’t leave her alone for one minute,” Ransom ordered. “I have to get some fresh air.”
Oh, didhenow? Funny how it never occurred to him I might be needing a breather, too.
Max was too wrapped up in his job to be nice to me. He seemed relieved when, shortly after Ransom disappeared, I went upstairs and roamed the lonely rooms of my mansion, trying to find something to do.
I never quite understood how lonely I was until Ransom got here. His imposed lockdown made me realize that without my nighttime outings, I barely even left the house at all.
Like a ghost, I wandered the rooms on the second floor, until Ransom’s was the only one left.
Don’t go in there. Don’t ask for trouble.
But trouble was a great cure for boredom, as any ditzy heiress could tell you, and I wanted to stir the pot a little. Besides—what else did I have to do? Max was anxiously sitting downstairs, checking the windows and doors every half hour like war was upon us.
I sauntered inside Ransom’s room, closing my eyes and inhaling him.
I liked that I was attracted to him. It felt safe, because I knew he would never try anything with me.
A scribbled note on his desk drew my attention. Was that the same note he took from me? The leaflet that made him change his behavior and become so protective of me?
I made my way to the note and picked it up. It didn’t look like the paper I found in the doorway the other day. No. This looked unmistakably like Ransom’s bold, long-stroked handwriting. An address. In downtown Los Angeles.
Let’s look for trouble.
For a long time now, I wanted to find out something interesting and intimate about my bodyguard.
He knew so much about me. It was only fair I had some information on him, right?
Shoving the note into my pocket, I grabbed my bag and denim jacket. Max was downstairs, and I knew two more men were patrolling the neighborhood. The so-called backup.
The security app on Ransom and Max’s phone was on, so if a door opened in the house—even a window—they’d know about it.
But they wouldn’t know about my bedroom balcony.
My bedroom balcony did not have a camera installed, which made it a blind spot. It had one, when I first moved in three years ago, but it fell a couple years ago, and I never got around to fixing it.