Page 30 of Escorting the Bodyguard
“You don’t know how to run a businessyet,” Rae corrects. “But you know how to create things that make women feel beautiful. And that’s the hard part.”
After Rae leaves—with measurements for three custom pieces and a deposit that makes my head spin—I sit alone in my apartment again. But this time, the silence doesn’t feel heavy. It feels... expectant.
I make myself a real dinner for the first time in a week. Pasta with chicken and actual vegetables, a glass of milk because apparently calcium’s important now. While I eat, I make a list on the back of an envelope:
Doctor’s appointment
Prenatal vitamins
Turn spare room into studio
Business plan
New life
The practical stuff. The things I can control.
But as I sit there in the quiet, my mind inevitably drifts to the things I can’t.
I think about Ford, wonder where he is, whether he’s sleeping. Whether he thinks about me. Whether he regrets walking away.
The ache in my chest hasn’t disappeared, but somehow there’s room for something else now too.
Grief and hope, I’m learning, don’t require me to choose between them.
I place both hands against my stomach, trying to imagine the life growing there. It’s too early to feel anything, but somehow, I swear I can sense it. This tiny spark of possibility that lives inside me, mine to protect.
Ford made his choice. Now I’m making mine.
10
Ford
The Azerbaijan contractstares back at me from my desk. Six months protecting an oil executive’s family in Baku. Six months of running from what I left behind on a busy street corner three weeks ago.
I pick up the pen. All I have to do is sign.
The office clock reads 2:17 a.m., but I stopped caring about time somewhere around the third whiskey. Or maybe the fourth. The empty bottle sits beside the contract, both mocking me in their own way. One promises escape, the other promised to dull the pain but left me feeling worse than before.
I’ve slept six hours in the last three days. There’s a tremor in my hands I keep trying to ignore. Every time I blink, I see her face. The way she looked when I walked away from her.
I tell myself it was for her own good. I tell myself it was the right call. But it doesn’t feel like relief.
It feels like bleeding out slowly.
I focus on the contract details. Remote. Isolated. Far enough from New York that I won’t catch copper hair in my peripheral vision or see a pregnant woman on the subway and think aboutwhat I left behind. It’s perfect. It’s exactly what I need to stop hearing Gemma’s voice echoing in my head:Don’t disappear.
Too late for that.
I roll up my sleeves and lean back in my chair, staring at the city lights beyond the windows. Somewhere out there, she’s probably asleep. Maybe lying on her side now, protecting the life growing inside her. The life I helped create and then abandoned on a street corner in Brooklyn.
The image of her alone, one hand protective over her belly, makes my chest seize up. Like someone’s clamped a vice around my ribs. I can’t breathe around it.
I drain the last dregs from my glass, welcoming the burn.
The pen sits heavy in my hand. Six months of escape, waiting for my name. Maybe by the time I come back, I’ll have figured out how to live with myself. Or maybe I’ll just take another contract. And another. Until the guilt stops following me around like a shadow.
The sound of keys jingling in the outer office makes me freeze. JJ’s voice carries through the door before he even reaches my office.
