“I made them leave,” she said about her so-called friends.“They’d already been key witnesses to a fatal shooting at the Dying Lion monument.”Her voice lowered along with her gaze.“Our informant was murdered.”She toyed with the corner of the tape holding down her IV tube.“If they were found at another crime scene, the police would’ve been suspicious, and we have no idea of the enemy’s reach.What if he has local cops in his pocket?”
What the hell had she gotten into?Ford’s head whirled, and it wasn’t because of the obscenely late hour, or the fact that he’d spent most of the evening playing a distraught fiancé.
Before she’d been declared dead, her father had been more than willing to tell the hospital staff that Ford was now her betrothed.That relationship gave him access to watch over her, but he knew nothing of why she’d been targeted.Mr.Nygaard-Brown could only tell Ford that Natalie worked as an investigative journalist and had gone to Europe for a story.
Her question about Gretchen, though, had him wondering if there was more to it.
Five years ago, Gretchen and her wife Laura had led the charge to take down Remy Blaze and his revenge porn site after a fan had become obsessed with, and eventually killed, their oldest daughter, Parker.Natalie was part of a group of victims Gretchen had gathered to support each other, and to help build a case against Blaze.
Along the way, Natalie had caught the interest of a stalker from the pictures her ex had posted on Blaze’s site.That’s when Ford’s team had been hired to protect her.
Blaze had eventually gone to jail after paying hefty reparations to many of the victims, and Ford had mostly stopped working in the field after recovering from his injuries, eventually moving to Geneva to run the European arm of his family’s security business.He hadn’t heard from Gretchen or Natalie again until the phone call six hours earlier.
“Who exactly is the enemy?”he asked.“And why are they after you?”
Natalie stared at a slightly fuzzy Ford, her eyelids growing heavier by the minute.Because of him, everyone she loved and cared about thought she was dead right now, and she knew she was mad about it, but her body had started floating and she couldn’t seem to hold a thought.
Had she told him too much?
“What have you gotten into, Natalie?”he prompted, those pale blue eyes scanning her face with concern.He’d shown more emotion tonight than in the entire three months he’d been her bodyguard.
And Lord knew she’d tried to crack that stoic facade a hundred times.Anything to escape the reality of having a stalker and the limits to her freedom that her dad had pushed on her, even if out of love.
Stewing in negative emotions was wholeheartedly not her thing.So she’d focused her attention on Ford, studying every nuance of expression and twitch of his lips until she’d become addicted to the idea of finally scaling his mile-high walls, doing everything she could to get a reaction out of him.Anger, laughter, even a simple shake of his head would suffice.And then, one day it had worked.She’d been fucking jubilant until her stalker Tim Marinelli took advantage of the distraction.
If Ford hadn’t shielded her, she’d probably have died.Instead,he’dtaken a knife to the back.
Her stomach clenched.For a moment, she’d been able to forget that she almost got him killed.“You must hate me,” she said, hardly able to open her mouth enough to get the words out.
He stilled and frowned at her.“Why would I hate you?”
It was her turn to frown.Why wouldn’t he?“My fault you…got hurt.”Her tongue felt heavy.
A little line formed next to his brow and he shook his head.“Nothing about that situation was your fault.I’m the one who let down my guard.That asshole is the one who attacked.”He ran a hand along the dark stubble on his jaw.“If I hate anyone, it’s myself.Your safety was my one job, and I almost failed.”
Her jaw slackened.Twenty-six-year-old Ford would have never talked to her like this.He’d barely paid attention to her at all except as it pertained to keeping her safe from the predator who’d seen her half-naked photos on a revenge porn site and developed an unhealthy obsession.
Tim had started with social media DMs and text messages that she blocked, and escalated to showing up at her work with flowers and a stack of photos he’d taken without her knowledge.After she got a restraining order, she could never prove it, but he broke into her apartment and rearranged her things, reset her thermostat, turned off her fridge.And then the threats had started.
Back then, Gretchen Hawthorne and her wife Laura hadn’t yet formed the Night Herons or The Parker Foundation.Theirs was simply a group of LA-based victims of Remy Blaze’s awful website, who came together to support each other through the feelings of violation and grief that no one else could fully understand.Led by Gretchen, they had eventually helped the FBI take down Blaze, and they’d pooled some of the money they’d received in damages to create both a foundation—named after Gretchen and Laura’s late daughter—to help women in need, and a secret team to take down men who abused their power.
But she couldn’t explain all of that to Ford even if she had the capacity right now.He knew about Blaze’s website and Nat’s stalker, but not the Night Herons.All of that was “need to know” only.And even now, he didn’t need to know.Her situation was the same, either way.If Gretchen had wanted to share the truth with him, she would have.
Natalie intended to feed him her cover story and tell him what she knew about who’d tried to kill her—very little—but the next time she opened her eyes, bright sunlight streamed through the window and Ford was gone again.God, she had to pee.She pressed her call button, eliciting a visit from a nurse within minutes.He helped her walk to the bathroom, opened the food containers on the breakfast tray next to her bed, and changed her dressing.
Tired, but no longer sleepy, Natalie adjusted her bed to sit higher and looked around.Where the hell was her cell phone?Then again, who could she call?Everyone believed she’d died last night.
Her throat closed up.For all intents and purposes, she was dead.Gone.No longer in her friends’ and family’s lives.Presumably, they were mourning her right now, rearranging their lives to deal with the heartache and the paperwork.For no good reason.She was perfectly fine.
Okay, not fine exactly, but alive.
They were going to hate her when she just popped up one day like, “Psych!Sorry to put you through that but my safety mattered more than your feelings.”Goddamn Ford for putting her in this situation.Could he really not have thought of a single other alternative to killing her off?
The negativity burrowed into her chest like a termite chewing through pine, and—hell no.She recoiled from the dark spiral of emotion.Glancing around she snatched up the TV remote and started flipping channels until she landed on reruns ofBig Bang Theorydubbed in German, and watched Sheldon and Leonard bicker while she mowed through the bland hospital food.Anything to get her mind off the clusterfuck that was her life—her death?Ugh, whatever—right now.
By midday, she’d binged too much television, learned the names of all the nurses, used the bathroom twice, doodled on a small notepad someone gave her, given her body a cursory wipedown at the sink, and gotten help putting her tangle of curls into a low ponytail—something she couldn’t do one-handed, which was going to be fucking annoying for the next month or two.
Finally, around one, Ford strode in wearing a baseball cap and square-framed glasses.It was a light disguise that would work from a distance but not register as too odd up close.He set a cloth tote bag on the chair and hooked the glasses on the placket of his polo.“How are you feeling?”
