Page 2 of Indecent Proposal

This wasn’t a party or a club, though. This was the lobby of my office building, and she was talking like we had a standing appointment. Which we didn’t.

She held out her hand. I stared at her. I was pretty sure Lisa was staring at her, too. Was she really going to act like she hadn’t just rushed in here like a masked killer with a machete was on her tail?

Be professional you dickhead,a voice in the back of my head chided me. It sounded annoyingly like Bryce.

I slid my hand into hers. “I’m Vaughn Hughes, one of the three men who run this place. Nice to meet you, Miss Turner.”

As I shook her slender hand, I noticed the expensive clothes would normally suggest she could afford our services, but not in their current state.

Maybe you should get her out of those clothes…

I mentally swatted the dirty, inappropriate thought away. My brothers-in-arms would never let me hear the end of it if I fucked a client. We had a strict policy about not mixing business and pleasure. All three of us were men who heartily enjoyed women and all the things we could do with them, so when we’d formed EPC, we’d promised to keep it in our pants when it came to clients so that we wouldn’t cause any problems like conflicts of interest.

“Miss Turner, what exactly is your problem?” I asked.

Claire’s eyebrows rose, along with the tone of her voice, as if I’d just insulted her. “What exactly is myproblem?”

Yeah, this was why I let the other guys deal with people.

I tried to be a bit more diplomatic. “You’re in one of the best and most expensive security firms in the area. I assume there’s a problem you need us to handle?”

I realized I was still holding her hand and forced myself to let go. Claire’s cheeks flushed a little pink. Mmm. That knowledge brought a pleased little purr to my chest. Good to know she was equally attracted and that I could probably still make her my plaything if I wanted to, even though she was technically off-limits.

“Thereisa problem,” Claire acknowledged, shifting on her heels. “But the problem with the… problem… is that I don’t know what’s going on.”

I folded my arms across my broad chest and noted that she tracked the movement, her eyes going a little wide as the burgundy dress shirt I wore stretched tight across various muscles. I smirked. Yeah, I was built. You had to be strong in the military, and prepared to go hand-to-hand to protect your clients every day. Since leaving the service, I’d kept in shape, and it showed.

“That’s not really very helpful,” I pointed out.

Claire glared at me. “It’s not like I’m trying to beunhelpful.”

“Look, no offense, but…” I exhaled an irritable sigh and gestured toward her. “We get a fair number of people like you.”

“Peoplelike me?” she repeated incredulously.

“Let me guess,” I drawled, doing my best to summarize the situation. “You don’t know who’s after you, but you think someone has been following you. You’ve tried going to the police but they don’t believe you because you have no proof or evidence. And so now you’re here to hire us.”

Her lips pursued in annoyance. “…yes?”

“Here’s the thing, Miss Turner, we only deal with the most serious cases. We’re not a cheap company. We can’t help people who justthinkthey might be in trouble because they’re paranoid. Have you spoken to a doctor?” Okay, yeah, maybe I shouldn’t have said that last part out loud, judging by Claire’s reaction.

“Have I spoken to a—” Claire bristled even more, and she was pretty damn sexy when she was incensed, her eyes blazing with fury. “I’m not crazy or imagining this, you asshole. And I think you’ve got a hell of a nerve to tell me—”

Her words were cut off by the sound of shattering glass.

A fun fact about bullets: they moved so fast through the air, that they changed the air itself around them. Like ripples in water. Most people couldn’t sense it, but when you were around flying bullets long enough the way I was in the military, your body picked up the ability to sense that change in air pressure, to know instinctively when one was headed your way.

It was like many other areas of expertise: the more time you put into something, the more subtle cues your brain and body picked up on, until you could do things like tell the differences in medication just based on the slight difference in viscosity between them.

So, as soon as the bullet pierced the front window, I was already in action.

I didn’t know who was being aimed at, but Claire was in front of me. My battle instincts took over and I tackled Claire to the ground as a second later a bullet whizzed over our heads and hit the marble wall behind us, sending chunks of it flying. Lisa screamed and ducked down behind her desk. I was glad she wasn’t the target—she’d moved three seconds too late and would’ve been hit if the sniper had aimed for her.

And it was a sniper. I knew that, too, just from seeing where the glass had shattered and where the bullet had hit the wall. Nobody could have gotten that close to our building and not been spotted, anyway. We had security cameras and sensors. But a skilled sniper could make the shot through the large glass front entrance from a distance, if they wanted to.

Claire clutched at me, trembling alarmingly with fear. I hauled her to her feet and quickly booked it for the elevator with her in front of me so my back was a shield. Whoever this person was, I doubted they had the all-clear to kill anyone beside their target. Especially if whoever ordered the kill on Claire had any idea who me and my buddies were. Most people in the business of killing or protecting did.

“Lisa, stay down,” I yelled the order. “Security team’s already on their way.”

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