Could she risk it? She knew he had feelings for her. He just couldn’t admit them or articulate them. Could she accept a cool, practical “partnership”? With protection and money and lots of hot, excellent sex? Just hoping that someday he’d finally recognize his feelings for her as love?

No. She wasn’t made that way. Maybe she would always be alone. Maybe she was unrealistic. Or just plain dumb. Letting her one chance at true love and passion go by. For the sake of stupid semantics.

But she wanted her man to love her. With an open heart. That was not too goddamn much to ask.

She opened the door, and stepped out onto the terrace. A gust of wind blew the terry cloth bathrobe open over her legs. She yanked it closed. She was nude underneath. Nudity that had abruptly become inappropriate. In fact, it had become an agony of embarrassment.

“I, um, have to go,” she quavered to his rigid, muscular back.

“Why am I not surprised,” he said, without turning.

She told him the story of Elsie and the letter. Duncan stared out at the city. “I’ll take you up there,” he said, his voice stony.

“No,” she whispered.

“No?” He turned, and the fury in his eyes knocked her backward, like a punch. “What the fuck am I supposed to do? Nothing has changed. You’ve still got criminals prowling the city waiting for your guard to go down. Am I supposed to cut you loose? Let you get wasted?”

She shook her head, helplessly. “It’s not your responsibility anymore, Duncan,” she said. “It never really was.”

“What a crock of high-minded horseshit,” he snarled. “I get the message, Nell. You can’t stand to be with me—”

“That’s not it!”

“—so fine, I’ll arrange for a car service and a professional armed escort to accompany you. When you get back with your letter, you’ll check into a suite at the Hilton. Twenty-four-hour bodyguard coverage. No more Sunset Grill shifts. Just your university work.”

Her mouth dangled, and her head shook helplessly back and forth. “Duncan. But…but that’s insane.”

“I’ll finance it until you’ve written your fucking thesis and gotten your precious Ph.D. At which point, we’ll reassess the situation.”

“But I—”

“Consider my position, Nell. Cold and detached as you think I am, I don’t want you to die. Even if you’re blowing me off, even if I’m not fucking you, I don’t want you to get hurt. If you got hurt, or dead, that would suck. Is that clear? Are we on the same page here?”

She scrubbed her eyes with the back of her hands, and nodded.

“Good. Then stop arguing. I am sick of it. And I no longer need to bother trying not to piss you off. What a fucking load off my mind.”

Cold. Hah. He was anything but cold, standing there like some sort of raging, thunderous pagan god in the chill morning air, the towering cityscape as his backdrop. His face was rigid with fury.

He made a sharp gesture for her to precede him inside. “I’ll make the calls. Come on, let’s get this thing moving,” he said. “This shit is killing me. Go get dressed and packed. Fast.”

She scrambled to do so and dragged her suitcase out of his room into the living room. She overheard snippets of Duncan’s conversation with someone named Braxton as he arranged for the bodyguard. He turned, frowning. “What’s the address of this neighbor?”

“Twenty-one thirty-one Fairham Lane, in Hempton,” she said.

He repeated the address to Braxton. “Put this one on my personal account, not the corporate account,” he said into the phone.

His personal account? She’d be in debt to this guy for the rest of time. Well, hell. In essence, she already was. For her life.

Duncan escorted Nell down to the parking garage, where the car service was waiting, and bundled her into the vehicle. He lectured the bodyguard, a burly guy with long arms and a low, bulging forehead, about the mortal danger Nell was in for about fifteen minutes before he let the guy get into the car, still rolling his eyes. Fucking jerk-off.

He watched the car pull out of the garage, turn, and disappear.

It felt wrong. He wanted to run after the car, screaming and waving his arms. Something had been wrenched out of him. It left a bleeding hole.

He stumbled upstairs like a zombie, dropped onto the couch.

The sun got higher. His landline phone rang. His mother, for sure. Calling to give him hell about Ellie. The machine got it. His mother talked for five minutes onto the machine, her voice shrill. Not a word of it sank in. The square of sun on the floorboards inched along.

His cell rang. He checked the display. Bruce, wondering what the hell was going on. Nell had stood him up. He tossed the thing back down onto the couch, still ringing. Later for Bruce.

The only reason he didn’t turn it off altogether was because Nell was out there in the world without him. With just some jerk-off clown bodyguard to protect her. That phone was his last and only link.

Some time later, the phone rang again. This time it was Braxton. He pushed “talk.” “What happened?” he barked. “Is she okay?”

Braxton was taken aback. “Ah, yes. As far as I know,” he said carefully. “I haven’t heard from Wesley, so I assume things are fine.”

Duncan’s lungs released, allowing him to inhale. He felt stupid and hysterical. “Oh. Good. So, uh, what’s up?”

“Just letting you know that Teiko and Sam just presented their report about the apartment they bug-swept yesterday.”

“Yeah? What about it?”

“It was riddled,” Braxton said. “High quality, foreign made. Amazing stuff. There were cameras behind both air vents, and bugs and traces everywhere. Teiko’s convinced that they didn’t find everything.”

“Did you have them deliver the material to Gant for the evidence techs to look over?”

“As promised. One question. Did she bring any stuff with her when she came to your place? Suitcases, electronics?”

“Who told you she was at my place?” he snapped.

“Word gets around,” Braxton said patiently. “So? Did she?”

“She brought a suitcase,” he said. “But she took it away with her again. It’s in the car, with her and Wesley.” A cold chill began to prickle up his back. “Oh, my God. Oh, shit.”

“Probably tagged,” Braxton said. “So they know where she is.”

His eyes fell on her laptop, which lay where she’d forgotten it on the couch. The chill transformed into an icy cramp, squeezing his guts. “Fuck me,” he whispered, his voice a thread. “Her laptop. It’s still here.”

“Check it,” Braxton said.

He grabbed it. It was a big, clunky dinosaur of a thing, at least eight years old. He found a screwdriver and pried the case open.

There it was. A listening device. It had its own battery and a powerful microphone. It was transmitting in real time, as he watched. Everything they had said had been heard, clear as a bell. Including the address where Nell was headed right now.

Where she might have already arrived. It had been over an hour.

He yanked the thing out, detached its power source with a brutal yank. “Bugged,” he said. “They know where she went.”

“I just tried Wesley.” Braxton’s voice was grim. “He didn’t answer.”

“Fuck,” he hissed. “Call the cops for me, right now. The local ones. Have them check the place out. I’m on my way.”

“Wait! Dunc, don’t go alone. I’ll organize a—”

He clicked “stop.” No time. He shoved the phone into his pocket, sprinted for the bedroom. Tossed on a T-shirt, a pair of army-issue pants, shoes. Shoved his gun into the back of his pants, buckled on his ankle sheath and knife. Dug out the drug-treated throwing stars from his weapons stash, filled his side pants pockets with them.

Grabbed the laptop with the software to triangulate the GPS signal implanted in the cell phone he’d given her.

And ran like holy hell on wheels.

Nell kept her face averted in the car, so she didn’t have to see the bodyguard Wesley’s sympathetic glances. Her stores of dignity and restraint had been exhausted by the last scene in Duncan’s apartment. Now all she wanted was to crawl into a hole and stay there.