Model Bodyguard (Haven Investigations Book 2) Page 3

“I don’t love him anymore,” he said softly, almost inaudibly.

  “I never said you did.” I understood what Ollie wasn’t saying. He didn’t love Jacob anymore, but there was still something. There were some relationships that just changed us forever. People who were just bad for us but we couldn’t help being attracted to them. “You want me to beat him up?”

  “He’s famous, you know.”

  “So? Famous people get beat up too.”

  He sighed. “You can’t beat him up.”

  “Nathan hit him,” I pointed out. He’d told me so in more than one letter.

  “And that was so bad. The press wouldn’t leave us alone for ages.” He looked away. “I didn’t want them to see me and I couldn’t get them to stop following me.”

  I reached out and gripped his hand. “Okay. No beating him up unless he throws the first punch.”

  Ollie squinted like he didn’t believe me.

  The buzzing of the machine stopped, and Sean wiped my arm down, studying his work. I wasn’t going to look until he was completely finished. Ollie had purposely avoided that side. He hadn’t even asked about it as the picture began to change and come to life with each session. I think he was afraid it would bring up bad memories for me. Of the war maybe, Nathan’s death, the guys, who knew? Certain things just made him turn from the naturally inquisitive Ollie into a quiet, reserved Oliver. I could walk on eggshells if I needed to, or poke until he gave in and fessed up. The balance was knowing which he needed.

  Sean twisted my arm a bit to look at it. Probably studying for lapses in color. I glanced his way. “I think we’re good until you heal up. Might need to touch up again. Depends on how your scar tissue heals the ink,” he said, got up, and adjusted the full-length mirror near his station. “Sometimes it peels over scars. Other times the ink is darker.”

  I stood and made my way across to the mirror, Ollie’s hand still gripped in mine. Would the ink scare him? There was nothing Disney about the image. It was vibrant sky blue, deep purple, and black with white highlights. Something from a dream bordering on the edge of a nightmare. It was the darkest of the images I’d be adding, but necessary for the tribute.

  A wide, somewhat menacing grin in a cat face with large eyes stared back near my wrist. The body curled around the front lower side of my arm, tail a rope of stripes, each with a name in it, wrapped around the rest of my arm all the way up to my shoulder. Nathan’s name was in the tip of the tail, larger than the rest, outlined in white. It was actually a copy of his signature taken from so many of his letters. He’d always had a very clear and precise way to sign his name. Nothing like the illegible scrawl I’d mastered.

  Inked into the smile of the cat, so well that the letters looked like teeth, were the words: We’re all mad here. The cat’s paws seemed to rest on my wrist as though he were hunched and waiting to pounce. The entire tat was more arty—watercolor styled—rather than detailed to look real. It looked like my arm had been dipped in paint, pools of color brushed across my skin allowed to drip, run, and bleed. Hand in my pocket and in a sleeveless shirt, the whole thing would be visible: beautiful, menacing, and a little crazy. The story of my life.

  “The Cheshire Cat?” Ollie asked. He put his arms around my waist and stared down at the arm.

  I smiled at him. “Creepy?”

  “I like the colors.” His fingers hovered above Nathan’s name, but he didn’t dare touch. “I loved that book so much when I was a kid.”

  “I know,” I told him and wrapped my other arm around him to pull him close. I’d read him to sleep with it a few times. He probably only vaguely remembered those nights.

  Sean took some pictures, and I let him wrap me up like a piece of meat. “You okay with this?” I asked.

  Ollie swallowed hard but nodded. “Your body.”

  “I mean Nathan’s name.”

  He nodded. “I get it. It’s like he’ll always be with you. I wish I could do something like that.”

  “He’s always with you. Name on your flesh or not,” I told him.

  He blinked back tears and looked away. I let him. He was doing okay. I kissed his cheek.

  “You know the drill,” Sean told me. He began to clean up his station.

  My phone rang. I debated answering for a minute. It would mean letting go of Ollie to dig in my pocket, and he felt so good tucked against me. But he dug into my pocket and pulled it out, then looked at the screen.

  “It’s Tomas,” he said and answered it by putting it to speaker. Tomas was our receptionist at Haven Investigations, though he did more than scheduling and answering the phones now since Ollie was back to designing and some modeling.

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “There’s a rock star in the office,” Tomas sounded shocked, his voice a little higher pitched than normal. “Jacob Elias is pacing the lobby. There are men in black waiting outside and he’s insisting on seeing both of you. Oh my God, what do I do?” The last bit came out in a panicked little squeak.

  Sean finished up with my arm. He was shaking his head. I followed him to the main computer to schedule any touch-ups in another month. “Tell him to sit down and relax. I’ll be there in twenty minutes or so.”

  “We’ll be there,” Ollie said though his expression was guarded. Tomas hung up with an exasperated sigh.

  I kissed him on the forehead. “You don’t have to see him. You were going to meet B for lunch, right? Have her try on some designs you were working on?”

  “That’s hours away. I don’t want you to see him.” But he looked away, and that self-destructive silence of his fell over both of us.

  I made my appointment, paid up, and thanked Sean before dragging Ollie out of the shop. “Talk to me, Ollie. I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling if you don’t tell me.” I hated when he shut down like this. A quiet, nonexpressive Ollie was an unhappy one.

  Finally he said, “Jacob is beautiful.”

  I laughed as we got in my SUV. I drove, mostly because Ollie’s driving could give the Dalai Lama a heart attack. “Baby, you are beautiful. Jacob is….” I shrugged since he wasn’t really my type. The growly feral musician in leather with perfect rock star hair did nothing for me. I understood the bad boy appeal, but my taste ran to prettier men. “Jacob,” I finished, not able to find a flattering word for him. My opinion was biased, and I knew that, but he’d hurt Ollie. Badly.

  “Everyone wants to sleep with him. Whenever I went with him to a show, he’d have hundreds of people waiting backstage to try to get into his bed.” He shook his head. “I can’t even count the number of times he tried to get me in bed with him and some random stranger. We couldn’t even go out to eat without some waiter or waitress sitting in his lap.”

  I reached out, grabbed his hand, and squeezed as we made our way to the office. “I have no interest in Jacob Elias. We can send him on his way. I doubt he has any interest in me.” And far too much interest in Ollie.

  “You’re beautiful too,” Ollie said after a few minutes of quietly staring out the window.

  I laughed. “Okay.”

  “Really. Not like Jacob. Different.” He shrugged.

  “Thank you. But I don’t need the ego stroke, baby. You with me is enough of that for me.”

  Ollie went quiet again. I navigated traffic wondering what he was thinking. We’d been together almost half a year. My longest romantic relationship. So far I hadn’t fucked it up, and I wanted to keep it that way. “Talk to me, Ollie.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to think. My chest hurts.” He pressed a fist to his chest just left of the breastbone, and his breathing grew shallow. The beginnings of a panic attack. Fuck. I squeezed his hand tighter and rubbed his wrist with my thumb.

  “Breathe, baby. It’ll be okay.” Right after I punched Jacob in the face for giving Ollie one second of pain. “Let me drop you off at Britney’s.”

  “No.” Ollie pulled his hand out of mine, curling up near the window. The SUV was t
oo large to reach across and pull him back.

  I sighed. “I just don’t want him to have a chance to hurt you again.”

  “I fought all the time with Nathan when I was dating Jacob. Jacob thought I let Nathan control too much in my life and I listened. Pulled away. Maybe if I hadn’t—”

  Ah, so the hurt was more than just their past relationship. It was guilt. Nathan wouldn’t have blamed Ollie for things he did while with Jacob. Nathan had disliked the man and ranted many a time in letters to me how Ollie was too good for the likes of Jacob Elias. But he’d always tread carefully. Nathan wanted his little brother to find love, even if sometimes it hurt to get there.

  “We talked about this self-blaming thing in therapy,” I reminded him. Three months in therapy. I almost always went with him. Most of the time I just sat nearby and listened. He liked having me close even if all he did sometimes was cry. “What did Jolanda tell you?”

  “No one can change the past or predict the future. Even with a thousand changes, the outcome could be the same,” he said it like he was reciting a Bible quote, matter-of-fact and somewhat emotionless.

  “And we played the if/then game. What changed?”

  “Nothing,” he whispered. “Nathan’s still dead. And I’m alone.”

  “Not alone,” I reminded him. “I’m right here.”

  He sucked in a deep breath but wouldn’t look at me. I knew it was because he was holding back tears. And that was okay. He knew I wouldn’t judge him either way.

  I pulled into the lot, surprised it was filled with cars. There was one black car and a handful of regular-looking sedans, SUVs, and trucks. The lot was never this full. There was no mistaking the people near the door as anything but muscle. Most of them were twice my size and packing. Well-tailored jackets only hid so much. If I didn’t know a rock star was inside the building, I’d think we were about to be hit by the mob. I parked in my usual spot, reached over Ollie, pulled my Sig out of the glove compartment, and slipped it into my shoulder holster. His eyes widened.

  “I’m not gonna shoot him,” I promised. No matter how much I might want to. “He’s just got a lot of scary-looking guys. Better safe than sorry.”

  Ollie glanced around at the cars, which were filled with more bodyguards from the looks of them. “This is a lot of security. Usually he only has the two guys by the door. Or at least he used to.”

  Which meant whatever Jacob had gotten himself into was serious trouble. It was like he was the president or something, a whole fucking entourage of muscle. I got out of the SUV. “Stay by me, please,” I told Ollie as I opened his door. He slid out and stepped close enough to me that our hips bumped. His breathing still wasn’t steady, but I could see the concentration on his face and knew he was counting, working through the anxiety.

  We approached the office together, Ollie on my left, tucked in close, but leaving me enough distance to draw my gun if needed. His Taser was in the computer bag at his hip. Ollie didn’t carry a firearm. He could shoot. Hell, he could probably shoot the wings off a fly if all our time practicing at the gun range was any indication, but it wasn’t his first choice for defense. I was okay with that since he really did react well to violence when necessary. Self-preservation was more important anyway.

  The men at the door barely glanced at me. It was Ollie they looked over like he was a piece of prized meat at auction. I gave them both angry eyes and pulled Ollie through the doorway and into the office.

  Tomas jumped up the second he saw us. His hair was a mess of wild curls that meant he’d been tugging on it instead of sitting behind the desk and answering phone calls. Ollie would insist on fixing his hair before he left. He always did.

  Jacob paced the room, stalking across it like a large cat in a zoo. His dark-wash, skintight jeans and nearly translucent T-shirt under a leather jacket made him look like the guy I’d seen in the media. Jacob’s brown eyes took him in, rolling his gaze over Ollie from feet on up and lingering too long on Ollie’s legs before finally meeting eye to eye. Jacob took a step forward, but I put myself in between them. Since he hadn’t bothered to acknowledge me, I couldn’t help being a little bit surly when I said, “What do you want, Jacob?”

  He glanced at me, irritation clear on his face. “Can you and I talk?” Jacob asked Ollie directly, ignoring me.

  Ollie’s grip on my hand tightened. He shook his head and buried his face in my neck. His breath was hot against my skin, and he was trembling. “I thought you had a case for us?” I told Jacob, tugging Ollie with me into the small office we shared. A long desk took up one side of the room with several plush chairs for clients to sit in. The walls were a soft ocean blue, floors a plush sand-colored carpet. The window behind the desk let sunlight in despite the bars on the outside. They were barely noticeable on a day like today. There were even prints on the wall—acrylics of ocean waves sweeping in white foam rushes over a beach somewhere. My certification hung beside them, but those documents weren’t nearly as stunning or peaceful as the paintings. Britney had outdone herself with the office design. The room displayed calm professionalism without the cold, sterile feeling that came with most office spaces.

  Ollie went to his section of the desk and pulled out his laptop before sitting down, and I took my end, then pointed Jacob to a chair. I tugged off my coat, leaving my shoulder holster and Sig visible just in case Jacob got any ideas.

  Tomas stood at the door, eyes still wide, swaying from side to side as he shifted his weight. “When my eleven o’clock shows up, put her in the conference room and let her know I’ll be right with her,” I told him.

  He nodded and tugged the door shut as he left.

  Jacob stared hard at Ollie. Ollie stared at his computer.

  “So Jacob, perhaps you could tell us why you’re here?” I prompted the singer.

  He scowled at me, but grabbed up a bag he’d brought in with him and dug out a tablet from the padded front pocket. A few taps later, he was handing it across the desk to me. I took it, finding a folder of saved articles all about Jacob. What the hell was this?

  “Someone is slandering me.”

  I tapped on an article and found it was an accusation of statutory rape. He was actually accused of having an orgy with a half-dozen minors. It sounded believable to me. The next was how he’d encouraged a former lover to take out student loans and give the money to him. That seemed a little odd as Jacob probably had a ridiculous amount of money. Still another had him swiping an ex-lover’s car or stalking them. Most of them were related to former lovers.

  Karma. I wanted to smile, but held back. I handed the tablet to him. “Maybe you should stop dating so much.”

  “I didn’t do any of these things. They are all lies,” Jacob hissed at me.

  I shrugged. “Not sure what it has to do with us. Ollie’s not publishing articles about how you cheated on him. So why are you here?”

  “You’re not a very patient man, are you, Mr. Alme?”

  I actually was. The military had taught me that. Ollie had reaffirmed my need to keep that skill up. It was only Jacob who made me want to throw something just to get him out of my office. Mostly I was pretty sure it had to do with the tense silence from Ollie sitting beside me. He was still, something he almost never was, and quiet.

  “I have a client coming in less than ten minutes. You’re here unscheduled. If you’d called and made an appointment as I told you to this morning, we’d have more time.”

  Jacob’s eyes narrowed, but he put the tablet down. “I want to hire you to find out who’s behind all the slander. To stop it.”

  “There are hundreds of articles. They can’t all be made up,” I insisted.

  Ollie took the tablet and began browsing through the articles. He was better with the tech stuff anyway. “They’re all written by the same three people.” He scrolled through them with ease. “Four people. Published all over.” He typed something into his computer and a moment later frowned at it. “These four only ever write articles on Jacob, and it�
��s never good.” He still hadn’t looked directly at Jacob.

  Jacob put his hand over Ollie’s. “Baby, I’m sorry. You have to know I’m sorry.”

  Ollie pulled his hand away as if he’d been burned. He folded both hands into his lap and stared down at them instead of at Jacob or his computer. I patted his knee before looking back up at Jacob. “You’re probably better off hiring someone else,” I told him.

  “I fucked up so you won’t help me? I have people trying to fuck up my career. End my career and you won’t help?” He glanced between the two of us, looking more like a petulant child than the millionaire rock legend he was supposed to be. “If I go down, it’s more than just me, you know. I’ve got dozens of employees. Hundreds if you take into account all the road crew, marketing, and online help.”

  “Truth, Jacob,” I said after a moment of silence. “Why are you really here?”

  “I need help. I need someone to look into this.”

  “You could hire a million people to do this,” I pointed out.

  “Whoever it is has to be really close to me. They know stuff.” He glanced at Ollie. “Stuff they shouldn’t know. If I bring in just anyone, they’ll know. I’ve tried. Had three other investigators in and everything dies down for a while.”

  I didn’t miss the flush that stained Ollie’s cheeks pink. Just what stuff was he talking about? The many orgies Jacob was known for? Or was there something else Ollie wasn’t telling me? “And none of the investigators figured out who it was?”

  “Accusations. I fired a handful of people each time. Things stopped for a while, but it always starts back up. I’ve even offered to pay off the bastards who are writing this stuff if they tell me their source, but they refuse. I’ve had people follow them for weeks. Hack into their stuff.” He shook his head. “I really don’t know what else to do.”

  “And if I come in and start looking around, they aren’t going to think the same thing? That they should back off awhile?”

  “I thought maybe Ollie could investigate….” He glanced at Ollie, his eyes all over him, longing. I so wanted to smash his face in. “He could pretend we’re dating again.”