Bodyguard Daddy by LISA CHILDS Read Free Book Online Page B

agreed.
    Now, as she walked with him across the hotel parking lot, she wasn’t certain she’d made the right decision. Milek had proved over five years ago she couldn’t trust him with her heart.
    But could she trust him with her life and Michael’s?
    He had changed. He was no longer the sensitive artist he’d once been. He was a bodyguard, all steely-eyed and focused.
    Even now, as he walked her and Michael from the hotel with an arm around each of them, he wasn’t focused on them. He was focused on everything around them. The parking lot was dark, the light from the hotel faint. She could see nothing.
    But she felt the moment he did. His body tensed, and his grip on the gun he held against her side tightened.
    “We’re going to play a game,” he whispered to their son. “We’re going to play hide-and-seek. You and your mother are going to hide. You’re going to hear bangs again but you’re not going to come out until I tell you to.”
    There was that sensitivity—just a glimmer of it—when he tried to convince their son that the danger they were in was just a game.
    After that brief explanation, he acted fast, though. He passed their son to her and stepped in front of them. “Run back into the hotel,” he told her.
    Before she could say anything, shots rang out. She didn’t know who was shooting—Milek or whoever he had seen in the darkness. She couldn’t ask. She couldn’t move. Fear paralyzed her.
    “Run!” he yelled.
    And finally her legs moved. Michael clasped closely to her chest, she ran straight for the hotel lobby. But the glass doors stopped her, drawing her up short. Was she locked out?
    Slowly they began to part. So the automatic opener was just slow. Too slow. She ducked as more shots rang out. Something whizzed past her head. She hoped she imagined it, but then the glass of those slowly parting doors shattered.
    She shrieked.
    And Michael echoed her scream, his body trembling against hers. She swung him out of her arms and through the narrow opening. As Milek had told her, she told their son, “Run!”
    He was smaller—a smaller target. The shooter was after her. Not Milek. Not Michael. But he was putting those she loved in danger. Anger coursed through her—along with the fear. And she thought fleetingly of running back—of trying to negotiate with a killer. Her life for the lives of her son and Milek. But her little boy paused in the middle of the lobby, staring back at her, his eyes wide with fear. He needed her; he needed his mommy.
    She squeezed through the metal frames of those shattered doors and caught up with him, swinging him back up into her arms. But she didn’t know where to go. Outside the gunfire continued. And inside all she could hear was screaming. And crying.
    But she and Michael had gone silent—probably with shock. The screaming and crying emanated from behind the check-in and concierge desks. She could have carried Michael back there. But the night clerk’s fear would terrify Michael even more.
    She needed to take him somewhere safer. She had the key to the room Special Agent Rus had booked for them. But how had the shooter found them? Had Rus told him where they were? Or was it Rus out in the parking lot—shooting at Milek?
    She shouldn’t have trusted the FBI agent. She hadn’t been certain she could trust Milek when he’d told her that they needed to leave right away, that he would take them home with him where he would be able to protect her and Michael.
    He was protecting her now, putting his own life in danger to save her and their son. Maybe he was the one man she could trust. And she might be losing him...
    Panic pressed on her heart, painfully squeezing it. The gunfire grew louder—the shots even closer now. Windows splintered next to the already shattered doors. And vases and pictures broke, exploding into sharp fragments.
    Clasping Michael more tightly in her arms, she ran again—through the lobby to the bank of elevators and the stairwell. She