Donna Young – The Bodyguard: Protecting Plain Jane (страница 2)

“Come on, girlfriend.” The one with the big fists from the parking lot threw aside his pan and held up the scissors he’d been banging it with.

“No,” she begged when the other two held her down on the bed. “Please, no.”

He splayed his hand over her bruised face and turned it into the stale bedding. “I’m tired of waiting for my millions. It’s time to show Daddy just how serious we are about the money.”

He brushed aside her hair with his long fingers. When she felt the cold metal against her neck, Charlotte screamed.

Charlotte screamed herself awake. She sat up in bed, a cold sweat trickling down the small of her back as she kicked away the covers that had twisted around her legs. She tapped the lamp beside her bed three times, flooding her room with the brightest light possible.

“Max? Stay in the moment,” she chanted aloud, repeating one of the mantras her therapist had taught her over the years. Her heart was racing, she couldn’t catch her breath. She needed to think. “Max!”

A black-and-tan terrier mix that looked like a miniature German shepherd hopped onto the bed and into her lap. He licked the tears from Charlotte’s face as she ran her hands over his short, soft fur, seeking out the grounding realism of the dog’s body heat and thumping heart.

Once she was certain she was awake, once her panicked brain truly understood that this was now, not ten years ago—that she was home, not in that smelly beige room—that she was safe—she hugged the dog until he squeaked.

“Sorry, boy.” She scratched at his scarred-up ears, kissed the top of his head and pushed him off her lap so she could climb out of bed. “Sorry.”

Moving with practiced efficiency, Charlotte picked up the pillow trimmed with Battenburg lace off the floor and tossed it onto her rumpled bed. She pulled her red, narrow-framed glasses from the bedside table and put them on, already heading into the connecting sitting room. She waved her hand in front of the switch there and lit up the crowded oak tables and desk stacked with papers, the bookshelves and antique Americana rugs, the overstuffed sofa and chairs, and went straight to the locks on the door.

While she could visually verify they were all secure, she needed to touch each one—the dead bolt, the doorknob, the chain and the computerized keypad that glowed green to show the high-tech Gallagher Security Company lock was engaged. Once she was certain she was safely locked inside her private rooms at her father’s mansion, she spared a rueful thought for her father, stepmother and stepsiblings. Had she wakened anyone on the estate? But just as quickly, she breathed out a sigh of relief. One advantage of living behind soundproof walls was that the same loud noises she wanted to keep out also prevented the rest of the household from hearing her on nights like this one.

After stopping in the bathroom to check the barred window and splash some cool water on her face, Charlotte padded back into her bedroom, pulling aside the thick drapes to check that the locks and laser alarms were still all engaged. Only then did she really stop to breathe. And think.

She hadn’t completely wigged out the way she once might have, but she hadn’t been able to stop the nightmare, either—a sure sign she was overly fatigued, or more worried than usual about something. Maybe she’d been keeping too many late hours, working at the museum long after closing. Maybe she was feeling like a twenty-seven-year-old imposition to her father and his new wife. Maybe it was agreeing to install the telephone in her quarters after all those years of even refusing to answer one.

The press and police and friends had called around-the-clock. Landon had called her so many times after her release. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Forgive me,” he’d begged. Sometimes, he’d be drunk and would simply say her name, over and over again. The restraining order had finally stopped him.

Maybe it was all those things that had triggered the nightmare again.

Maybe it was nothing.

Max lay over her bare feet as Charlotte looked through the glass and bars up into the night sky. Frothy, fingerling clouds sailed past the full moon and disappeared into a bank of darker clouds, sure signs that a storm was gathering.

She had a sense that something else was coming, too. Something very, very bad.

But in the ten years since she’d been kidnapped and ransomed for five million dollars, she almost always felt that way.

Resigning herself to that reality, Charlotte wiggled her toes to stir Max to his feet and closed the drapes. But the memory of the nightmare—of the real events she’d survived—still sparked through her blood. The notion of sleep, of facing the uncertainty of even the next few hours, took her past her bed and back into the sitting room where she pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves and curled up on the sofa with a box of pottery shards she’d brought home from the museum. She picked up the first piece and a magnifying glass, resuming the painstaking process of identifying and dating the fragments from a dig near Hadrian’s Wall in England.

When she got up to retrieve a reference book, she saw the dusty high-school yearbooks on the shelf and briefly wondered why she thought she needed to keep any remembrance from that time in her life. She nodded and headed back to the sofa.

It was because she treasured the past. The now was a frightening thing, the future uncertain. But the past was complete. Done. Finished. Nothing could be changed. There were no more surprises.

She was safe with the past.

It was the present and future she couldn’t handle.

Chapter One

Three days later

Charlotte Mayweather eyed the canopy of gray clouds that darkened the Kansas City sky beyond her front door and shivered. She pretended the goose bumps skittering across her skin were in answer to the electricity of the storm simmering in the morning air rather than any trepidation about stepping across that threshold into the world outside.

But with a resolve that was as certain as the promise of the thunder rumbling overhead, she adjusted her glasses at her temples and stretched up on tiptoe to kiss her father. “Bye, Dad. Love you.”

Jackson Mayweather’s gaze darted to the flashes of lightning that flickered through the thick glass framing each side of the mansion’s double front doors. “Are you sure you want to go out in this? Looks like it’s going to be another gullywasher.”

“You know storms don’t bother me.” Charlotte cinched her tan raincoat a little more snugly around her waist, leaving the list of things that did bother her unspoken. “You can’t talk me out of going to the museum. I want to get my hands on those new artifacts from the Cotswolds dirt fort before anyone else does. I have to determine if they’re of Roman origin or if they date back to the Celts.”

Her trips to the Mayweather Museum’s back rooms and storage vaults—where the walls were thick, the entrances limited and locked up tight, and she knew every inch of the layout—were the closest she’d ever come to experiencing an actual archaeological dig. Unpacking crates wasn’t as intriguing as sifting real dirt through her fingers and discovering some ancient carved totem or hand-forged metalwork for herself. But it brought more life to her studies in art history and archaeology than the textbooks and computer simulations by which she’d earned her PhD ever could.

It was normal for an archaeologist to be excited by the opportunity to sort and catalogue the twelfth-century artifacts. And it had been ten long years since she’d felt normal about anything.

Her father scrunched his craggy features into an indulgent smile. “Those treasures will still be there tomorrow if you want to wait for the storm to pass. Better yet, I can arrange to have them brought here. I do own the museum, remember?”

Thunder smacked the air in answer to the lightning and rattled the glass. Charlotte flinched and her father tightened his grip, no doubt ready to lock her in her rooms if she showed even one glimmer of hesitation about venturing out into a world they both knew held far greater terrors than a simple spring thunderstorm.

Wrapping her arms around his neck, she stole a quick hug before pushing herself away and picking up her leather backpack. Go, Charlotte. Walk out that door. Do it now. Or she never would.

She plucked a handful of short curls from beneath the collar of her coat and let them spring back to tickle her mother’s daisy clip-on earrings. “I’ll be okay.” She pulled the check she’d written from her trust fund out of her pocket and waved it in the air. “I’m paying to have those artifacts shipped from England, so I intend to spend as much time as I want studying them.”

“I don’t like the idea of you being alone.”

She zipped the check into the pocket of her backpack. Alone was when she felt the safest. There was no one around to surprise her or betray her or torment her. There was no second-guessing about what to say or how she looked. There were no questions to answer, no way to get hurt. Alone was her sanctuary.