Page 19 of A Guardian for Christmas

“What did you do?”

He shrugs. “Muted it.”

“Huh,” I say, biting my lip. “I never knew I could do that.”

A few seconds later, my phone rings on my bedside table. The screen lights up, telling me Mr. Frye is calling me.

I reach for it, but Sagan beats me to it and silences it, too.

“He’s worried about me,” I say.

Sagan pushes aside the half-open curtain, letting the midday sun flood the room.

“If he was worried, he would never have let you rot away in that bed.”

The way the light hits his ticking jaw as he stares outside could make me wish I kept up my acrylic painting lessons. This man is a work of art.

A perfect, dangerous, sweet work of art who just accused me of letting myself waste my life in bed.

Of course he’s not attracted to me. I’ve read him all wrong. How dare I even assume there’s some potential between someone like him, a man of action and determination, and me, who’s so damn lazy she has to mentally run a marathon just to get up and put on socks?

Chapter Ten

Sagan

The snowy landscape on the other side of this window shows the path I took to get here after I jumped down from the magnolia tree.

I curse myself for not beating a path to Esme sooner.

How could I let her get like this? I’m just as guilty as the rest of them.

“Shit.” I’m angry at how badly I want her.

I’m in so deep I can’t turn back. I have to tell her the truth.

“I know I’m a handful. If you need to go…”

“I lied, Esme.”

She pauses and then asks, “To get Frye to let you in? I figured out that much.” She has a smile in her voice. How I would love to turn around and bask in that smile, but I’m undeserving of it.

“That, and I lied to my parole officer. He thinks I’ve been at work, but I’ve been in that tree,” I say, pointing across the expansive lawn toward the stone fence. “In that magnolia tree, about a hundred feet up, watching this window for signs of life.”

Another pause follows, and then she says, “Why?”

“You’re not going to like it.”

“Let me decide if I like it or not.”

Here we go. If I go down in flames, I might as well be a forest fire. “I paid someone on the dark web to track your flight to Switzerland and all your receipts. I saw when your plane landed. I knew when you checked into the spa and went out for coffee. Every time you paid for a driver, I got a notification. But then, you disappeared about two weeks ago. You weren’t on any airline manifest between there and here. Nothing at all. You vanished, and I lost my goddamn mind.”

“I came home early,” she says softly. She senses my confusion and supplies, “Private jet. Friend of the family. It was a snap decision. Can we go back to the part where you mentioned a parole officer?”

Fuck me, I can’t look her in the eye. But I’ve done enough work on myself after all this time that I don’t sugarcoat it. I wouldn’t want to. Some prisoners fool their parole boards with proclamations about having found god. Me, I found Thich Nhat Hanh, meditation, and Zen Buddhism. I found myself, and then I let myself go. Denial of the ego. Negare Ego was the first thing I had tattooed on my chest when I got out of prison.

No sense in having any pride anyway. Esme will be googling this case as soon as I leave. Guess I’ll never leave, then.

“I was out with my drinking buddies one night on leave. I knew I should never drink at a seedy civilian bar. I always went looking for someone to get cocky with me. I was bored and mean and drunk. Eventually, I spotted my mark. This guy was hitting on a young woman who was denying him at every turn. She got up and went to the bathroom, and this guy had the gall to follow her. He waited outside the women’s room door. I got distracted for a minute, and when I looked again, he was gone. I marched over to where he was, and I found the door to the women’s restroom blocked from the inside.

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