The Accidental Bodyguard Page 14
Lucas.
The lanky messenger was Montague.
“No!”
Rafe had tricked her. She lunged at the door to escape.
But it wouldn’t budge.
She was trapped.
Until somebody released her.
“Somebody—let me out!” she screamed frantically, searching for her site foreman, who had mysteriously disappeared. As had most of the other workers.
Lucas opened the truck door, and she practically fell into his arms.
Her hands grabbed at him for support, one hand closing around his denim-clad thigh, the other his waist. Clumsily she levered herself up his body.
“Hey, that was kind of fun,” he whispered, so jauntily she longed to slap him. Of course she couldn’t do that. Not in front of the big-eyed church women.
“Well, what are you looking at?” she yelled at the women.
“Hey, don’t get so riled,” Lucas whispered. “It’s not their fault.”
“No! It’s yours! I hate you!”
“Are you sure about that?” He clasped her tighter.
He was hot, and so was she. But he felt good, so incredibly good, so good she felt another touch of vertigo. Suddenly she was breathless.
For four long, agonizing weeks she had slept alone and tried to forget him.
She was still sure she could, in time, so she pushed frantically at his chest. But it was like trying to budge a steel wall with her puny strength.
“I love you,” he whispered, pressing her closer. “I love you.”
“No.”
“Forgive me,” he begged hoarsely, his low voice so strangely choked she thought he might be about to cry.
The broken sound caught at her heart, and she couldn’t resist glancing at him.
Their eyes locked. His rugged face was fierce. He wasn’t weeping, but the all-powerful emotion she read in his eyes was more profound than tears.
I love you. Believe me. Because I’ll die if you don’t.
I forgive you.
It took them a moment to realize that neither of them had spoken. At least not with words.
And yet they had.
In their own special way.
Then his face softened, and he enfolded her in a crushing embrace.
She couldn’t fight him any more than she could fight herself. All her life she had been looking for him. At last she had found him. And she knew that no matter what he had done, no matter who he was, she wanted to be with him always.
Quiet tears of joy slid down her cheeks. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. “I was such a fool. Of course, I forgive you. For that is the nature and power of true love.”
“I tried to come before. I spent a night cooling my heels in one sorry Mexican jail cell with some pretty disgusting individuals.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
Chandra clung to him, aware of a thrilling happiness as she surrendered her lips to his hard mouth in giddy delirium.
As he kissed her, only vaguely was she aware of two hands slapping each other triumphantly in the background, of two excited adolescent voices that were belovedly familiar.
“So, is she or isn’t she going to have a baby sister?”
“Or a baby brother.”
“When’s he gonna ask her and give her the ring?”
“Shh! Let ’im kiss her first, stupid.”
“Not stupid.”
“At times you are. Girls like kisses.”
“Boys, too.”
“Just sissies.”
Slowly the quick, pulsating phrases and words became recognizable as the voices of her darling boys. Her angels.
Her sons.
They wanted to know if she was going to have a baby sister.
A baby?
The thought electrified her.
Never once had she considered that wonderful possibility. She had just thought her stomach was upset from nerves or from something in the border food. She remembered how oddly Rafe had looked at her every time she had insisted that was all it was, how solicitous he’d been, how determined he’d been in his search for a new driver.
Rafe was a father himself. He must know the signs.
Her mind raced backward. She always felt sickest in the morning. Suddenly she was nearly positive that she was, indeed, going to have Lucas’s baby. How could she have been so blind?
“Marry me,” Lucas said when at last he withdrew his lips.
“Yes. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes,” she whispered, right before she reached up and kissed him again.
A long time later she thought she heard two hands come together in another loud slap.
“See, I told you, stupid.”
“Not stupid!”
It was she who had been stupid. She who had carelessly thrown away the three people in the whole world she cared most about.
She would have to spend the rest of her life making it up to them.
The breathless kiss she gave Lucas was only the beginning.
Epilogue
Below their charming hotel, Posada la Ermita, which was perched loftily on a hill, the colonial Mexican town with its cobblestone streets, jacaranda trees and many churches dozed quietly in the hazy, pink and lavender light.
“I told you San Miguel de Allende was the perfect place for our honeymoon,” Chandra said to Lucas as she came out onto the tiled balcony of their suite just as a white-coated waiter arrived to set the table so they could enjoy a private dinner with the boys after they finished swimming.
The air was refreshingly crisp and cool after the summer heat of Texas. The sound of water splashing in the nearby fountain and the plaintive notes of a Spanish guitar in a cantina could be heard.
Lucas set his beer down and got up to help her to a chair.
Her face was glowing in the rosy sunlight. The last rays burnished her golden hair, making it look like flame. Her blue eyes were radiant. He had paid the boys a fortune to stay away all day and had spent the afternoon making love to her while the boys had explored the village and cavorted down at the pool.
“Aren’t the views and the sunlight wonderful?” she asked, staring at the lime green jacaranda trees and a trellis brimming with purple bougainvillea.
“Wonderful,” he agreed, squeezing her hand, but he was looking at her.
“That’s why it’s been an artist colony for years,” she continued. “Except for the church bells, it’s very quiet.”
There were dozens of bell towers, and the bells started ringing before dawn and didn’t stop until well after midnight.
“It’s damned hard for the ordinary tourist to get to.”
They had come in a friend’s private plane.
“You’re spoiled, my love,” she said.
Furious shouts drifted up from the pool. The boys, who had been told to watch for the waiter and their dinner and to come up as soon as they saw him, had forgotten that parental order and were fighting over a pair of flippers and a float.
Lucas smiled at her. “The boys are as noisy as the church bells.”
“I don’t mind their noise,” she whispered.
“I guess you’d better get used to it, since we’re well on our way to a house full of kids.”
The waiter left them.
“Oh, Chandra,” Lucas said, pulling her close and burying his face in her golden hair. “All this happiness is going to take some getting used to.”
She clung to him just as tightly. “I feel the same way. I still can’t believe—”
“What?”
“That I finally found you.”
“That again?”
“I know you don’t believe in reincarnation—”
“That’s right. One lifetime of happiness is definitely all I would ever ask for,” he stared, kissing her so she couldn’t reply.
Dinner was over.
“So, Dad, if those birthmarks on your chest were really scars and you two knew each other in another life, were we there, too?” Peppin asked his father.
> “Look, one lifetime is enough of a challenge for me,” Lucas said. “Like I keep saying, I’m not at all sure I can buy into this reincarnation theory. I don’t remember anything about any other life in India.”
“That’s ’cause you weren’t murdered, Dad!” Montague inserted in a sage tone.
“What does being murdered have to do with anything?”
“Just everything! I’ll loan you my favorite book, Psychic Vampires, and then you’ll understand. Murdered people are more likely to remember their past lives.”
“Thanks. But I’ll pass.” Lucas chuckled. “Loving Chandra now, in this lifetime, on this side of the world, is miracle enough for me.”
* * *
Chandra was standing naked in the mists of their hotel bedroom’s shower when Lucas stepped in and joined her.
Their eyes met.
As they had before.
Without speaking, she picked up the bar of soap and began running it over his thighs and abdomen in electrifying circles that made his brown skin heat.
He grabbed her wrist and shoved her gently against the wall. The bar of soap fell and slid to the drain. Lucas stepped over it.
In a wild outpouring of sexual exultation, he picked up his wife and fitted her snugly against his hips, driving inside her.
Their sexes joined, their souls, as well. She wrapped her legs around him and let her swanlike neck fall back as gracefully as a ballerina so that warm water streamed over her face and hair and swirled around their naked forms.
She had never felt so hot or so good. As if he and she were made of some molten liquid that flowed together and became one.
Without realizing it, he began to move.
She said his name, over and over, and her low, soft, staccato voice made it so incredibly erotic he came.
She exploded, too.
For a long time he clasped her hips to his, wanting to stay inside her forever.
It had never been this sublime with anyone. It never would.
What he felt for her was beyond love. Beyond time.
Beyond this world and all eternity.
He picked her up and carried her to the bed, where he patted her naked body dry with a towel.
She crawled on top of him, and kissed the new bullet wound. With her tongue she traced the long white birthmarks that crisscrossed his torso.
She looked into his eyes and smiled that dazzling smile that he felt he had always known.
And he wondered. In spite of himself, he wondered.
And he knew he always would.
* * * * *
eISBN 978-14592-7879-0
THE ACCIDENTAL BODYGUARD
Copyright © 1996 by Ann Major
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office. Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.
Printed in U.S.A
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Dear Reader
Books by Ann Major
Ann Major
Dear Reader
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Epilogue
Copyright