The Socialite and the Bodyguard by Dana Marton Read Free Book Online

Tsini,” Mike’s eyes flashed as he issued his warning at last, the true reason for their coming over.
    The two had been eyeing him since he’d shown up at the apartment last night. They obviously didn’t like the idea of anyone sticking his nose in their business.
    Nash ground his teeth, but somehow managed a nod, silently cursing his latest assignment all the way to Hades. Ivan prevented further friction by calling the two bodyguards to the front to settle some dispute between him and Fisk. Then Nash was finally able to turn his attention to the e-mail.
    He’d seen her type in her password earlier and had no trouble getting in now. She had only one unread message.
    The sender field was blank. The subject field said: Did you like my gift?
    He could have waited until she woke and asked her to open the message and let him look at it. Instead, he reached over and clicked. No text, only an attachment. He had to wait until the program ran a virus scan before he could open the picture file.
    The image was grainy, but good enough to make out what was important. The picture showed Kayla’s living room with her sitting in her pod chair and Nash on the couch, holding up the blue fur coat.
    Could have been taken with a cell phone. By someone who’d been in Kayla’s apartment yesterday when he’d arrived. Which meant all the people who traveled with them in first class right this minute. The cooking-show crew had stayed in the kitchen the whole time. Her staff had been coming and going from the den. And this picture had been taken from there.
    By one of her people. One of her friends.
    Oh, hell. She was really going to hate him for telling her that, he thought as his blood heated. If there was one thing he couldn’t forgive, it was betrayal. In his eyes, maybe because at the core he would always remain a marine, betrayal of a teammate was the ultimate sin. He couldn’t stand the thought that a member of her own staff would betray her.
    And he couldn’t even talk to her about this right away. He needed a chance to observe her interacting with the staff first. Once she realized that whoever was harassing her was one of them, she would relate to them differently. He wanted to get a fair assessment of her relationship with each and every person before suspicion hit her and she pulled back.
    He looked at the people in first class. Nobody was watching him. The message had been sent in the last couple of minutes. But anyone could have sent a saved message with a surreptitious click on their cell phone, just reaching for a second into their pockets. Or they could have timed delivery set up from a remote computer.
That was a trail Dave and Mike might not have been able to trace back, but Nash had his sources. He forwarded the note to his own e-mail account, then deleted the original.
    He didn’t have the previous threatening notes with him. They were already at a lab, along with the fur coat, to be dusted for fingerprints. They weren’t much to start with—pictures of poodles printed off the Internet, DIE in big block letters printed underneath. But now he had one more clue.
    It should have made him happy. Except that one thing about this whole setup bugged him. Why would the bastard send a picture like that? Sure, the photo would make Kayla nervous, would make her feel she wasn’t safe even in her own home. But it also narrowed the field of suspects considerably. And that was decidedly not to the sender’s advantage.
     
    H E DIDN’T WANT to kill her. He looked out the plane’s window and saw her face even in the clouds. He loved her. He’d hoped that harassing that dumb dog of hers would distract her from the “accidents.”
    But she wasn’t distracted, she was thinking, thinking, thinking. He could see it in her eyes every time he looked at her. And she was smart. He couldn’t let her figure it all out. She would never forgive him.
    He’d set up a last warning for her this morning, but as she was talking with the new