Limbo Man by Blair Bancroft Read Free Book Online Page B

been so busy absorbing whore that she’d missed the nuances of bodyguard duty. The part where she might be called upon to take the bullet for a wiseguy who knew something vital to national security.
    So she couldn’t collapse just yet. She had to make a phone call.

 
    Chapter 5
     
    Vee came awake, knowing instantly she was in trouble. Nick, who was supposed to be locked in his room, was sitting on her bed, tucked into the curve of her waist—green eyes fixed on her face, one large hand wiggling her own damn gun in a ghastly parody of Naughty-naughty .
    “You need bodyguard,” he informed her kindly. “Not good sleep while strange man wanders your house.”
    “You may be strange, Sergei, but you’re not a stranger.”
    He cocked his head to one side, transferring his rapt attention from her face to the nine-mil. “I tell you keep it under your pillow, but not good idea with a Glock.”
    He was hatless, bandages on full display, his shaved head beginning to show a dusting of dark fuzz. Instead of looking invalid weak, he was a girl’s worst nightmare. He loomed over her, so close she could smell the soap from the shower he’d somehow fitted into his schedule before picking the lock on his room. Bastard!
    “I hate to tell you this,”Vee returned through narrowed lips, “but the experts say your problem is amnesia, not multiple personalities. So can the act, and bring back Nick.”
    “Experts, shmeckperts, what do they know?” He shrugged, seemingly unconcerned by the oddity of two personalities occupying his battered body. He leaned even closer, the hand with the gun pressing into the bed. “I must tell you, Valentina Frost, that you are not sufficiently paranoid to make a good bodyguard. You should have put me in a room with a deadbolt and hidden your gun.”
    “Maybe it’s all part of my plan to make you think I’m not dangerous,” Vee shot back, before she recalled exactly what her mission was with this man. Back-peddling fast, she added, “I mean, we’re supposed to be working together, right? I’m the girl who’s going to help you get your memory back.” It was a reach, but she managed a come-hither smile, a flash of fluttering eyelashes. “You know—you, me, mutual preservation. Trust.”
    The skinhead gargoyle face descended until his swollen lips were a scant two inches from her own. “Sergei will fuck you before he kills you,” he whispered. “Me, maybe I only fuck you. I’m not fool enough to bite the hand that feeds me, so I think I’ll keep you around as long as you’re useful.” Nick sat up. Using the Glock as a pry bar, he pulled the bedcovers down to her waist.
    Vee shivered as the cold black metal bit through the flimsy lavender nothing she’d bought to sleep in instead of a sensible cotton tee. At the time she’d told herself it was all part of her job. Now, she questioned her sanity. She couldn’t do this, she really could . . . not . . . do this.
    The man was not only a monster, he was an animal.
    “Ah,” he breathed, “maybe not so frosty after all. You give me hope, dushenka . Incentive to recover as fast as I possibly can.”
    Vee snatched the covers back up to her chin.
    Nick’s body language suddenly shifted from taunting but faintly amused to grim. Back to business mode. “So what did your people say? When do we get brought in?”
    Vee gazed pointedly at the Glock. Nick laid it on the bedside table where he’d found it.
    “We stay put. They’re bringing in watchers, but at the moment this seems as safe a place as any.”
    “When on the run, it’s best to keep moving.”
    “On the mainland, we’re targets. Here, no one can approach without being seen.”
    Nick nodded. “For the moment”—he heaved himself up off the bed—“I accept their judgment. When I change my mind, they get us out of here, or I go on my own. Konyeshno? ”
    “Understood.”
    Nick’s stance lost its belligerence, deflating into a bald, battered thirty-something with two white