allows a child to take trips from the space station in over a dozen directions, both factual and fictitious.”
Her voice had risen in excitement, but now fell as she added, “If Jillian can prevent him from being there with it, she can ruin him. It’s taken a great financial investment to get this far with it, and Amos has an electronics company waiting for the word to start production, depending on the reaction at the show.”
“Okay, you’re convinced the situation is desperate.” Meg leaned toward the woman. “Why is it so hard for Pike to see this? If there’s been a fire and a mugging and an attempt to copy his plans, and he still doesn’t want protection, I don’t see what we can do for him. When’s the toy show?”
“The weekend after the bachelor auction.”
Meg was confused. “What bachelor auction?”
“That’s part of the plan Ms. Boradino has come up with.” Paul raised his glass in a toast. “And it’s really rather a clever one. Shall we toast it?”
Boradino raised her glass to his.
Meg didn’t. “I think I’d like to hear the plan first.”
Paul lowered his glass with a shake of his head at their client. “Meg’s very methodical. Gets that from her mother. She’s never one to be surprised by the unknown, and exasperating as that can be for those of us in her personal life, it’s an invaluable quality in a bodyguard.”
Boradino, too, lowered her glass. “I understand completely.” She studied Meg a moment, as though measuring her ability to carry out whatever it was she had in mind. Then, apparently deciding Meg was capable, she went on to explain.
“I tried to hire bodyguards for Amos after the mugging, and he sent them away. His entire administrative staff has been worried about him. Without his knowledge, the men have taken turns following him home at night, watching his condo, watching the plant. Someone stays all night in the office.” She sighed, then smiled in self-deprecation. “We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we felt better knowing he had someone watching out for him. Then the Lost Springs Ranch for Boys called me about the bachelor auction they’re having this weekend. If they don’t get out of debt, they may have to sell out to a consortium. Amos spent eight years there as a child. They’ve invited back the former residents who are still single. I accepted for him without asking him first because a plan began to hatch in my head.”
Paul pointed a finger at his wineglass. “A plan worth toasting, Meg. If you bid on him and win, you can take him to the cabin on the lake until the toy show next weekend, and he won’t even know he’s being guarded.” To Boradino, he added in an aside, “My brother lived in Casper and he and I bought an old house together on Bluebell Lake in the Bighorns for fishing vacations.”
Meg considered her father’s plan and experienced very real trepidation. “Dad, what man would want to take off for a week to a cabin in the woods with a woman he’s never seen before? One who’s bought him at an auction!”
Paul laughed lightly. “Almost any man I can think of.”
“Dad...”
He put a hand over hers on the table. “Meggie, use your imagination. You can tell him you want fishing lessons, or a hiking companion, or you want to write a book about him. You can do this.”
That’s what he thought. She hadn’t shown him Daniel’s fax. What would a woman who was purported not to have a romantic bone in her body do with a successful young executive in a mountain cabin for a week?
Okay. There were a hundred creative answers to that question. But, those aside, what else could she do without making him suspicious?
“If you can’t help,” Boradino said, shamelessly placing the responsibility on Meg’s shoulders, “then I’m out of ideas. I don’t know where to turn. You’re the only chance we have of keeping him safe.”
Meg put a hand to her forehead, where a throbbing pain had beaten since she’d made the call from the courthouse to Daniel’s law office two days ago. Another drumming had begun in counterpoint. “What kind of scenario could I possibly make believable? I can’t pass myself off as an heiress. I just don’t have the...” She didn’t know what it was. She just knew she didn’t have it.
“He doesn’t like heiresses,” Boradino said, leaning toward her as though they were alone at a pajama party and indulging in a woman’s favorite topic. “He likes women who are real because he’s very real himself. Unfortunately, many of the women in his social circle are more interested in what he can do for them, rather than what they can do together.” She studied Meg closely, then added after a moment, “I think he’d find an honest, unpretentious woman refreshing. And once you’ve bought and paid for him—” she smiled wickedly “—he sets his own limits on what he’ll do for you. But I know him to be reckless and daring. He steps aside for no one. He’ll go with you to wherever this cabin is you were talking about.”
“And when he finds out it was all a setup?”
“The plan is mine. I’m the one who’ll have to answer for it.”
The whole idea was crazy. Meg had gained a reputation as the methodical one in her family because her life seemed to have been drafted on the principles of Murphy’s Law. Everything that could go wrong did—and frequently.
She could keep Amos Pike safe. She was sure of that. But she was worried about her ability to attract him in the first place, to convince him to take off with her for a week in the wilderness.
And even if he did go with her out of a sense of duty, she knew her own limitations. Her mother died when she was ten and she’d grown up in a family of men. While she wasn’t entirely unattractive, she didn’t know how to make the most of her attributes, partly because she never thought about them.
She worked for her father, and she spent her spare time teaching martial arts and other classes in the Women in Transition program at the community college. She lived her life in sweats, watching for trouble. Not the best way to meet men.
“Of course,” her father prodded as he swirled the contents of his glass, “if you think you’ll need backup, I could get Ben or Brian to...”
“No. Thanks.” That was dirty. He’d done it deliberately to force her hand. Meg’s brothers were the kindest, dearest men on the face of the earth, and the bane of her professional life. They were incapable of believing she could handle an assignment without one of them looking in on her. She hated that. And her father knew it.
“And I’m supposed to outbid wealthy women,” she asked him, “on what you pay me?”
Boradino straightened hopefully in her chair and Paul smiled. “Ms. Boradino’s taking care of that with the help of the rest of the administrative staff and other...undesignated company funds.”
Meg could imagine how much Pike must mean to this woman if she was willing to risk his wrath by tricking him with a bodyguard and using “undesignated” company funds with which to do it.
Somehow, Meg couldn’t find it in her to fail this woman. She picked up her wineglass. “To Ms. Boradino’s plan.”
“Bless you!” Boradino said, touching her glass to Meg’s, then to Paul’s.
Meg’s father
