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  Enough was enough, she thought. She was hungry and she wanted to eat. Before morning came. “Pizza,” Janelle declared.

  His shrug was vague and noncommittal. Sawyer didn’t care what she wound up ordering. It wouldn’t have been what he wanted anyway. Because tonight, in hopes of at least slightly appeasing his hunger, he found himself craving a whiskey, neat.

  Several shots, actually. Something to drown out, or at least tone down, the presence of this woman he was supposed to be guarding. But the very fact that he was guarding her dictated that he consume nothing stronger than a double shot of espresso.

  He needed a clear head.

  God knew that being around Janelle Cavanaugh and her smart mouth wasn’t conducive to having a clear head. Between her antagonistic nature, which both amused and galled him, and that perfume she was wearing that softly announced her presence moments before she was actually there, he felt as if his head were submerged in seawater.

  There was irony for you, he mused. Her perfume subtly announced what her tongue loudly proclaimed. In his book, she didn’t need the perfume—or the chip on her shoulder for that matter.

  Even if she just stood still, a person couldn’t help noticing her. There was just something about the woman that caught a man’s attention, that fired his imagination. He wished that weren’t the case. He wished that Janelle Cavanaugh was colorless enough and mousy enough to fade into any gathering of two or more. His job would be a hell of a lot easier. In a lot of ways.

  But then, he did like a challenge and she was that. Right from the word go. Just being around the woman without telling her exactly what he thought of her and her damn superior attitude came under the heading of one hell of a challenge.

  “Your apartment’s clear,” he told her, walking back into the kitchen.

  Janelle saw him holstering his weapon. All of her brothers wore holsters and guns beneath their jackets, as did her cousins. She was accustomed to this and hardly noticed.

  Except for now.

  There was something incredibly masculine about the way Sawyer moved, the way he took charge.

  Her sense of wonder warred with her sense of independence and her resistance to having him take over. This was not going to be an easy association, she thought as she hung up the receiver. Pizza was on its way. She’d selected the toppings of her choice since he hadn’t voiced a preference. If Sawyer didn’t like them, he was just going to have to deal with it.

  Janelle looked at him meaningfully. They had a difference of opinion there, she thought. He might regard the apartment as clear, but she certainly didn’t.

  “No, it’s not.”

  With that, she turned on her heel to go find Batman some bedding in case he was lying about his having no need to sleep.

  The pizza box, its bottom shiny with the oils that had leeched out of their dinner, was empty.

  Janelle reached for a napkin, wiping her lips and then her fingers before balling the paper up and tossing it into the box. She eyed Sawyer sitting across from her at the small, dinette-sized kitchen table. For once, his eyes weren’t on her.

  For a man who had expressed no desire to eat, he’d certainly done justice to the supersize pepperoni, sausage and cheese pizza she’d ordered. She’d hoped to have at least one slice leftover for breakfast, but that was no longer a possibility. He was consuming the last piece.

  She supposed she couldn’t really say anything about it, seeing as how he’d been the one to go to the door when the doorbell had rung—had insisted on it, actually and then had paid the delivery boy for the pizza.

  When she’d tried to reimburse him, he’d abruptly cut her dead with that cold, distant voice of his. She supposed he was good at that, cutting people dead. With or without a look.

  “Kill many people?” she heard herself asking out of the blue.

  She was more surprised by her question than he was. Actually, he looked rather unfazed by it. In the background, one of the many forensic shows that littered the airwaves played on her thirty-inch TV. She had a weakness for the shows, for problems that were neatly solved in an hour, counting commercials. She wished life could imitate art.

  Sawyer took his time answering. “Depends on what you mean by many.”

  Yup, the man was definitely dangerous. The minute she got into her bedroom for the night, she was going to pull out her laptop and see if she could access any information on her surly guardian angel. If that didn’t yield anything, she was going to start pulling in some minor favors. Or lean on Brenda. Her brother Dax’s wife was a wizard when it came to finding information.

  “More than one?” she guessed, watching his profile.

  The rigid contours gave nothing away. “Yes.”

  “Less than a hundred.”

  This time, he did raise his eyes. And just the slightest trace of a vein twitched for a second along his cheek. It almost succeeded in drawing her attention away from the hint of a smile on his lips. “Yes.”

  Well, that certainly left them a broad range. She’d only been kidding about the upper number. Now she wasn’t all that sure. She could feel a shiver shimmying up her spine.

  “Do you know how many?”

  His eyes were flat. “Yes.”

  Janelle blew out a breath slowly. The man really was Dirty Harry. At least as far as the communication part went, she amended. Dirty Harry with a slice of Batman thrown in. Both fictional characters were portrayed as intense and humorless. And damn near monosyllabic. She was accustomed to far more talkative people. Even strangers she’d encountered talked more to her than Sawyer did.

  “What does it take to get a conversation out of you?” she wanted to know. She half expected Sawyer not to answer.

  Taking the last napkin, he wiped his hands, then tossed it on top of hers. “Something worth talking about.”

  Point and counterpoint.

  Janelle stuffed both plates on top of the napkins, then closed the pizza-box lid. Getting up, she set the box aside on the kitchen counter. When she turned around, she saw that Sawyer had gotten up as well, an empty soda can in either hand. He put them on top of the pizza box.

  “Okay,” Janelle began gamely, picking up on his comment regarding worthwhile conversation, “tell me about yourself.”

  When he said nothing, she watched him expectantly. Had she not been staring, the movement of his head from side to side would have been imperceptible. “Not worth talking about.”

  “Modesty?” she asked.

  “Fact,” he stated flatly.

  He might have no say in the assignment he was given, but no way was he about to let this person elbow her way into his private life. His private life was going to remain just that, private. No one else’s business.

  She studied his face as she spoke. “Everyone’s life is worth talking about, Sawyer.”

  Just his luck to be told to guard a woman who could talk the ears off a stone statue. “It’s getting late,” he told her. “Maybe we should call it a day.”

  There were a few other things she wanted to call it—and him—but she kept that to herself.

  She glanced over toward the television set. The program had ended without her noticing or finding out who was behind the murders. The eleven o’clock news with its barrage of depressing sound bites was just announcing the main headlines. While programs that dealt with solving crimes captured her interest, the news did not. There was too much sadness in the world for her to actively seek out more. Fiction she enjoyed. Reality was another matter.

  Crossing over to the television set, she was about to shut it off only to have the picture suddenly fade into nothingness before her outstretched hand. She turned around behind her to see that Sawyer was holding the remote. He was aiming it at the set.

  Typical male.

  And yet, not so typical, really. At least, not when she compared him to the men in her family. Of course, her cousin Teri was married to Hawk, another detective on the Aurora police force. To say that the man had come across as less than a ray
of sunshine when he’d originally hooked up with her cousin was a vast understatement.

  Inside of every dark soul was a bit of sunshine, she thought. You just had to work the mine until you finally found it.

  Janelle shoved her hands into the back pockets of her jeans and took a defensive stance. Why did she even care if this man she was forced to put up with in her apartment even had a ray of sunshine inside of him? It made no different to her one way or another. He was just the thorn in her side right now, nothing more.

  A temporary thorn, she underscored silently. Once the case was wrapped up, the powers that be were going to pull this thorn out and she would be alone again. Away from electric-blue eyes that seemed to penetrate her very skin and look right into her. Away from a man who made her feel unsettled and nervous and who seemed to be going out of his way to irritate the hell out of her.

  She couldn’t wait.

  Chapter 7

  Janelle punched her pillow for the umpteenth time. Defeated, the pillow could no longer rise to the occasion but lay there, as flat as her attempts to find slumber, or even some semblance of rest.

  This wasn’t going to work. If she didn’t find a way around this situation, or how to at least tolerate it, she was going to wind up being a zombie by the time she had to show up in court.

  Glancing to the side, she looked at the clock on her nightstand. The electric red numbers told her it was three minutes past two.

  Janelle groaned.

  Normally able to instantly fall sleep, she’d been tossing and turning since she’d slipped in between the sheets at midnight. All because there was a man, an unwanted man, in her living room, supposedly sitting guard.

  A man about whom there was surprisingly little information available. She’d turned in at eleven and then had spent the next hour on her computer, hooking up into all the standard programs available to her and finding next to nothing. Name, rank and employee number, that was the extent of it. That and the fact that he’d been in the marines, then on the L.A. police force. She didn’t even know where he was born.

  Or if, she added sarcastically. For the most part, the man behaved like a robot.

  How could there be no history of him? she wondered, frustrated. It was the same question that pulsed through her brain now. With the same answer. She hadn’t a clue.

  After shutting down her computer, she’d put in a call to Brenda. She’d asked for help once she’d apologized for having woken her up. Brenda had promised her that if there was anything to find, she’d find it. Janelle had hung up the phone thinking how nice it was that all her brothers had found women to share their lives with who were utterly likeable. There were families that splintered after siblings got married. Hers just grew closer together.

  That thought and the fact that she might get information about her mysterious man-with-no-history bodyguard heartened her. For a few minutes.

  But hope was slowly eroded as the darkness of night stained its fabric.

  Not that she expected Brenda to call back within the hour. That was absurd. But her own inability to find anything had made her begin to think that maybe there was nothing to find. Which meant she was dealing with someone whose background had been covered up for some reason. Which led her to the question: Why?

  She was getting punchy. Punchy and edgy and just this side of slightly irrational. And lying here like this was only going to get her more so.

  Throwing back the covers, she sat up and swung her legs over the side. There were reference books in the bookcase in the other room that might be helpful with the Wayne case. No sense in just lying here, doing a bad imitation of a spinning top. She might as well do something useful with this downtime.

  She didn’t bother with the slippers at the foot of the bed. After grabbing her robe out of her closet, Janelle slipped it on and opened the door. From where she stood, she could see the back of Sawyer’s head. He was sitting, not lying, on the sofa.

  That didn’t mean he wasn’t asleep, Janelle thought. Plenty of people dozed off sitting up. She’d even fallen asleep once paging through a legal brief. But then, the kind of language that was found in a legal brief did not exactly make for scintillating reading.

  Very softly, still watching the back of Sawyer’s head, she made her way to the other room.

  She was only three steps closer when Sawyer turned his head in her direction. She felt her heart sink. The man was a robot. With super hearing. She’d even been holding her breath.

  “Going somewhere?”

  “Sleepwalking,” she countered.

  He nodded, as if that were a perfectly plausible explanation for her moving around in the middle of the night.

  “As long as I know,” he murmured, going back to reading his book.

  Curiosity got the better of her. She drew closer to try to see what was written on the cover. “What is it you’re reading?”

  His fingers were spaced so that they completely blotted out the title and author on the worn cover. “A book.”

  There wasn’t enough light to make anything out. He’d shut off all the lights except the one on the side table and he’d turned that down to the lowest wattage. The scene might have even been construed as romantic, if Sawyer hadn’t been the one on the sofa.

  “I can see that,” she retorted evenly. “What kind of book?”

  “A good one.”

  His picture had to be in the dictionary, under infuriating. “Are you doing this on purpose to annoy me,” she asked, “or does being a wiseass just come naturally to you?”

  When she took another step closer, Sawyer half rolled up his book like a fat magazine and stuffed it into his back pocket.

  “It’s still early,” he told her, changing the subject. “Why don’t you go back to bed?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Even as a kid, she hadn’t liked being told what to do. And that was by people who had a right to do it. He didn’t.

  “If I wanted a recommendation or your opinion on the matter, I would have asked for it.” Her statement would have sounded more forceful without the yawn that insisted on pushing its way in at the last moment. She blinked, focusing in on the kitchen. Her coffeemaker sat on the counter, dormant. If she was going to read—and make sense of what she was reading—she needed caffeine. “You want coffee?”

  He considered her question for a moment. “I could stand to drink a cup.”

  “Good, so could I. Go make it,” she instructed glibly. “The filters are in the cupboard just above the coffeemaker.” She pointed toward it for his benefit. “I keep the coffee inside the refrigerator door.”

  She’d tricked him. Sawyer was about to say as much, but then stopped before the words had a chance to form. She’d caught him fair and square, he thought grudgingly, turned his own words around and used them against him. What was she like when it really counted?

  The woman was probably hell on wheels in a courtroom, he judged. Maybe he’d watch her in action sometime. It’d be nice to see someone else on the receiving end of that smart mouth of hers.

  But that was for later. Right now, he thought as he got up from the sofa, he had a couple of cups of coffee to make.

  The scent of coffee, deep, rich, filled the predawn air and wafted into the room where Janelle was sitting, breaking up what could be best described as her extremely frail train of thought. There was just something almost sensual about sipping that first cup of coffee in the morning, having it seduce her senses.

  Rousing herself, Janelle cocked her head, listening. Straining to hear.

  But there was nothing to hear. No sound of someone approaching.

  The man probably moved like a stealth bomber and was proud of it. Nevertheless, Janelle decided to get up and investigate.

  Sawyer was back sitting on the sofa, a mug in one hand, his mysterious book in the other. He didn’t even glance in her direction when she planted herself right in front of him, the backs of her calves hitting the coffee table. “I thought I asked you to make coffee.”

 
“You did. I did,” he said, the simple sentences echoing rhythmically like the staccato beat of high heels resounding against tile. Sawyer briefly raised his eyes from the book. “You didn’t ask me to bring it to you,” he pointed out.

  “Next time I’ll try to be clearer,” she muttered under her breath as she moved toward the kitchen and the coffeepot.

  “You do that.” He hid a smile as he lowered his eyes back to the page he was reading.

  Janelle’s muttering continued. So did his smile.

  She went back to bed shortly after that, deciding to try to snatch at least a few hours of sleep before she had to go in. It didn’t matter that she’d had the coffee, or that it was the type that could have been used to resurface a driveway. Coffee had never acted as a deterrent for her when it came to sleeping. It had no effect on her.

  Just bodyguards camped out in her living room seemed to induce insomnia, she thought darkly before she fell into a fitful sleep.

  When she woke up again, streams of daylight were pushing their way into her room.

  She was late.

  Janelle hit the floor running. She lost no time in getting ready, showering and dressing in just under twenty minutes. Making her bed took another two.

  Fastening her second earring, Janelle opened the door leading out of her room. Sawyer wasn’t on the sofa. For a moment, she thought that maybe she was alone, but then she saw him in the kitchen, making a fresh pot of coffee.

  At least he’s good for something.

  He had on a different shirt, she suddenly realized. And, coming closer, she noticed that his hair was slightly damp. There was a bathroom in the spare bedroom. That would explain his damp hair, she thought, trying not to let her mind stray too far in that direction. But it didn’t explain the shirt.

  Taking the bread out of the refrigerator, she put two slices into the toaster and slid down the timer. “You go home during the night?”

  The first drops of brew made their appearance in the clear coffeepot, accompanied by the usual sound effects. “No. Why?”