The Bodyguard (16)

“You’re early,” he said then, interrupting my ogle. “I was just getting dressed.”

I was still mute. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I could hear myself wanting to say, “I am exactly on time,” in a professional, even imperceptibly irritated voice—but I couldn’t actually orchestrate the required squeezing of the diaphragm to make it happen.

Using every ounce of willpower I had, I ratcheted my open mouth closed.

That was something, at least.

He frowned at this for a second, and then he said, “Wait. Are you early? Or am I late?” He checked his watch. “You know what? I’m still on mountain time.”

All I could do was not gape.

“Are you thinking that North Dakota is central time?”

No response, but I did maintain eye contact.

He went on. “Because I get that a lot. North Dakota is central time, mostly. Except for the southwest corner. Where I happen to live.”

He was unfazed by one-sided conversations.

This must happen to him a lot.

But now he turned and waved for me to follow. “Come on in,” he said, heading farther back into the house.

I closed the door behind me and trailed him to the kitchen. Get a grip, I scolded myself. He’s just a person! He cut himself shaving! He’s not even all that tan anymore!

“Cool pin necklace, by the way,” he called back as he walked.

Like a reflex, I touched my beaded safety pin. Huh. Observant.

And the pin must have been even more of a talisman than I’d realized, because only then did I magically remember how to talk. “Thank you,” I said—though it came out more like a question than a reply.

In the kitchen, Jack Stapleton bent down and started rummaging through the cabinet under the sink, like regular people sometimes do.

Imagine that. They’re just like us.

“I’m new here,” he was saying, as I watched, “so I don’t really know what we have, but just let me know anything you need, and I’ll get it for you.”

He turned and stood up then with a caddy full of cleaning bottles, scrub brushes, sponges, and trash bags, which he set decisively on the counter in front of me.

I frowned at him.

“For cleaning,” he said.

I shook my head.

He frowned again. “Aren’t you the…”

And then—so newly grateful for the power of speech—I answered with, “Executive Protection Agent.”

Just as he said, “Cleaning lady?”

Really? Here I am in my best pantsuit, and he’s thinking “cleaning lady”?

Maybe Robby was right. Maybe I couldn’t pass.

“I am not the cleaning lady,” I said.

He frowned. “Oh.” And then he waited, like Who are you, then?

“I’m the primary Executive Protection Agent on your personal security team.”

He really looked baffled. “You’re the what on my what?”

I sighed. “I’m in charge of your security detail.”

“I don’t have a security detail.”

Well, this was new. “Pretty sure you do.”

At that, he clamped his hand around my arm just above the elbow—not so hard that it hurt, but hard enough that I couldn’t mistake the strength of the grip—and he led me back out the front door. In truth, it’s a grip I knew how to get out of, but I was so befuddled by what was happening, I just followed like a lamb.

Outside, he closed the door behind us and locked it.

Then, he got back to business. “You’re telling me you’re not the housekeeper?”

“Do I look like the housekeeper?”

Jack Stapleton shrugged, like Why not?

I should’ve let it go. “How many housekeepers show up for work in a silk blouse?”

“Maybe you were planning to change?”

Okay. Done with that. I gave a sharp sigh. “I am not the housekeeper.”

That’s when he held up his finger, like Just a sec, turned, and walked down the driveway digging his cell phone out of his pocket.

After a few steps, I heard him say, “Hey. A person just showed up here claiming to be personal security.”

Wait. Was he suspicious of me?

I couldn’t hear the response.

But I could hear Jack Stapleton loud and clear. “We decided against that already. Twice.”

He was kicking the crushed gravel on the driveway.

“But that was years ago.”

A pause.

“It won’t work. It’ll be a disaster. There has to be another way.”

Another pause.

Jack Stapleton and whoever he was talking to—His manager? His agent? His guru?—went round and round. I don’t know if he didn’t realize that I could hear him, or if he didn’t care … but he vociferously protested my presence in his life, right within earshot.

It stung a little. To be honest.

He argued for so long that I finally sat down on the little bench near the potted fiddle-leaf fig, noting that it could be used to smash the window behind it and should be moved, or sold, or thrown away. With nothing else to do, I half-heartedly assessed the property—distance from the street: adequate; lack of driveway gate: suboptimal; potential skull damage from one of those landscaping rocks: lethal—more out of habit than anything else.