if it was boredom pushing her now and afraid to wonder what else she didn’t know how to do, he stepped back to resume his stance at the end of the island. She was already down a personal assistant and a nanny. No way in Hades would he be her cook.
“You can probably find a recipe in a cookbook,” he informed her, thinking now as good a time as any to get on with what he’d been hired to do. “In the meantime, I’d like to do a security check of the outside of the house. Where’s the main security alarm located?”
Pure apology entered her tone. “I’m sorry. I was only thinking about feeding Mikey,” she replied, setting her ingredients by the pot. “I meant to tell you not to worry about us while we’re here. It’s only when we’re in public that you need to watch out for us.”
“So you have security on-site?”
“There’s the alarm,” she offered, thinking back to when she’d lived there. “It goes to a security service in Camelot. Or maybe,” she said, reconsidering, “it goes right to the police.”
As if calculating how long it would take for a patrol car to arrive from five miles away, Parker narrowed his eyes toward the window. “Any regular security patrols? Any dogs?”
“I don’t know about patrols.” She’d been aware of people in the background of her life as she’d grown up there, but she had no idea who her parents might have contracted with locally since she’d married and moved out. “Mom and Dad have an Irish setter, but Cooper is with them.” The dog she’d grown up with was gone now. But the thought of how much she still missed that old setter was pushed aside when she remembered another resident canine. “Eddy and Ina have a German shepherd.”
“If they do, it isn’t a guard dog. It was nowhere in sight when we drove in.”
“Maybe he was out by the lake.”
“This place is how many acres?”
“Twenty-five or so.”
“And how many rooms in the house?”
“Including bathrooms and the rooms back here?” She shrugged. “Maybe thirty-five.”
“That’s a lot of space to be alone in,” he informed her flatly. “I know you don’t want anyone to find out you’re here, but if someone does, it won’t be long before the press and the paparazzi show up. There could be breaches.”
As anxious as she had been to return, Tess had considered only how safe she’d always felt in and around Camelot. But with his cool, detached conclusion, Parker had just forced her to remember that there had been occasions when the estate’s privacy had indeed been breached. She discounted the time paparazzi had scaled the walls to take pictures of her wedding and the enterprising photographer who’d rented a hot-air balloon to fly over Ashley’s sweet-sixteen party simply because the events were the sort that attracted such intrusions.
There had been unexpected invasions, though, like the time her brother Gabe had been photographed by the lake inches from a kiss with the head housekeeper’s daughter. He and Addie were married now, but the press had had a field day with that one.
Like nearly every security person she’d ever encountered, Parker’s expression remained as matter-of-fact as his voice. “I just want to make sure you’re as secure as you think you are.”
He was doing what he was trained to do, what she’d paid him to do. Yet she didn’t care at all for the way he’d just robbed her of what little bit of security she’d finally felt.
Suddenly feeling vulnerable, she lifted her hand toward the hallway.
“The security system is behind one of the panels in the furnace room. The stairs to the basement are at the end of the hall.”
“And the monitor for the front gate and perimeter cameras?”
“By the computer. Over there,” she said, nodding toward the alcove by the utility room.
“Is that the only one?”
“The stable master has a monitor, too. There’s one there because someone always has to be here with the horses.”
He moved to the alcove where the head housekeeper apparently attended the duties of the household. Above the desk that held a state-of-the-art computer, a built-in television screen displayed rotating views from the various security cameras situated around the property. Integrated into the wall beside it was an intercom connected, presumably, to the front gate and possibly to the stables.
A shot of a lake came into view on the screen, followed by a view of tennis courts, expanses of lawns and gardens, horses grazing, a Roman pool. Then came a series of shots showing nothing but stone walls and foliage. Those were of the property’s perimeter, she told him.
“There’s no one on the property other than Ina, Eddy and…what’s the groundskeeper’s name?”
“Jackson. And no. There’s no one.”
“I need to know what they look like in case they show up on the monitors.”
“I’ll call down and ask Ina to introduce you.”
Parker watched her move past him to pick up the phone on the desk. As she did, the softness of her perfume, something subtle, warm and as elusive as the woman herself, drifted in her wake.
He had first become aware of that disturbing scent when they’d both reached to strap her son into his seat in the car. He’d thought then that the tightening low in his gut had been caused by the purely feminine softness of her skin brushing his. He knew now that he didn’t have to touch her for that unsettling sensation to take hold.
He needed to move.
“She’ll meet you by the hedge arch,” she said, giving him the excuse he needed to head for the door. “Just follow the stones across the lawn.”
“I’ll check out the interior when I get back.”
Tess started to tell him he didn’t need to worry about the inside of the house, only to remember that she’d never been alone in the big and rambling mansion before. When she’d lived there, even with both parents gone for a weekend and all her siblings having moved out, the cook, the head housekeeper, at least one maid and her dad’s butler had been in their respective quarters.
Tonight it would just be her and her son—and the no-nonsense bodyguard who walked out the door as if desperate for fresh air.
Tess leaned past the computer, watching his powerful strides carry him across the expansive deck and along the stone path by the flower beds.
It wasn’t air he was after, she thought. He’d just wanted to use his cell phone.
“I’m sort of in the middle of nowhere at the moment. But it won’t be a problem to keep up from here.”
Parker held the small cell phone to his ear as he angled for the gap in the hedges some twenty yards ahead. The logistics of juggling two jobs at once came easily to him. The admission that Tess Kendrick had a definite effect on him did not.
“The best thing to do is send them to the FedEx office in Camelot,
