on the public side, privacy fences all around but open to desert everywhere else. Rule of thumb here was that you kept your desert walks away from your neighbouring accommodations; a privacy thing. So staff wouldn’t visit while Sera was in the suite and no one should be hauling themselves up the dune face and stumbling into her private pool area any time soon.
Though shouldn’t and wouldn’t weren’t necessarily the same thing. His formal orders were to make sure Sera stayed out of trouble while the media attention from her recent legal troubles died down, but when your father was as rich and famous as hers, anything was possible. And he wasn’t about to get caught out by letting his guard down.
Once burned, ten times shy.
Brad locked suite eleven’s door behind him and jogged past Sera’s to the neighbours on the other side to confirm nine was definitely empty. Then he checked his watch to ensure a full hour had passed and he presented himself back at her door, knocking firmly.
He counted to ten before trying again.
Still nothing.
‘Sera?’
His chest filled with lead. Please don’t let her have gone exploring alone...
Just because she’d agreed to ground rule number two in the SUV didn’t mean she’d stick to it when faced with the seductions of this unique place. He stepped down off the decking leading to the front door and walked around the side of the suite where his own had a side opening for maintenance staff to use. He could hear a bunch of animal noises he didn’t recognise—one of them a kind of gaspy hitch—so the wildlife around them could be just about anything.
‘Sera?’ Something about the desert silence made him not want to shout. ‘I’m coming around.’
But as he stepped back up on to the decking within her back yard, his quick eyes saw exactly why Sera hadn’t heard him. She floated at the deep end of her little pool, the water cascading over her arms that lay folded on its tiled infinity edge, chin resting there, staring out at the desert beyond. Her long hair looked even darker wet and it hung flat down her back between pale shoulders and blue swimsuit straps, which made it easy to see the headphones she had wedged into her ears. He followed the white wires over to where her phone rested on the flat, dry tiles of the pool edge.
Something about her posture stilled his feet before he reached the steps, though.
And then he heard it... The choked hitch he’d attributed in amongst the other desert wildlife sounds. It wasn’t an exotic bird calling at all; it was Sera, crying—sobbing, actually, if only she weren’t doing such a good job of muffling it in her folded arms. He stood, frozen, and stared at her heaving shoulders and back. Everything in him burned to go and check on her. The urge bubbled up and made his feet twitch.
But a single image fought its way through all the instinct and kept him utterly immobile—a young, glittery-eyed face, splotched red with distress, pressed up against the rear window of a hastily departing transporter, his little mouth open in a cry that Brad couldn’t hear.
But he’d felt it down to his very soul.
He still did.
Sera’s tears could be about just about anything. The ex-boyfriend her file said she’d parted ways with. Bad news from home. Work hassles, if not for the fact that she didn’t have a job, at least, not a proper one. Her father’s money had brought her freedom from the worries of ordinary people.
He stared at the soft lurches of her pale shoulders.
Clearly, money hadn’t exactly bought her happiness.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t any of his business until it put her at physical risk. His job was to keep Sera out of trouble for four weeks. Muddling around in her emotional well-being was completely outside his remit. He wasn’t paid for it.
And he wasn’t remotely skilled at it.
He took a backwards step, and then another, and vanished the way he’d come, leaving Sera to her privacy.
And her pain.
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