Guarded desires, p.5
Guarded Desires, page 5
Carmen hesitated, then stepped toward Amber’s desk.
Amber rose from her chair, rounding the desk to stand in front of it, bringing her face to face with the bodyguard.
She spoke softly, letting her voice fall an octave. “Are you always like this? So uptight? So on guard?”
A faint red flush grew on Carmen’s cheeks. “Like I said, it’s my job.”
“I know, but you’re only human. Surely there are times when you feel the need to loosen up a little?” She leaned in closer. “Everyone needs to let go now and then. Even you.”
There it was again, that shimmer, that spark of desire in Carmen’s eyes. Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. Only a trembling breath escaped her.
At that moment, one thing became clear.
Amber needed to make Carmen hers.
But before either of them could speak, there was a knock on her office door. Carmen tensed and spun around, staring down the brunette woman standing outside the glass door.
“That’s just Gabrielle,” Amber said. “She’s the CMO, and a friend. You can relax.”
But as Gabrielle entered, Carmen showed no sign of doing that. Instead, she returned to her post by the door.
“Can you give us the room, Carmen?”
Carmen opened her mouth to speak, but Amber cut her off.
“I assure you, I’ll be safe in my own office. You can wait outside the door. The walls are glass, you’ll still be able to see me.”
Apparently satisfied, Carmen gave her a brief nod and left the room, shutting the door behind her. She took a place beside it out in the hall, her back turned to them.
Gabrielle took a seat in front of Amber’s desk and crossed her legs. “Is it just me, or is it hot in here?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Amber said.
“What I mean is, I’m sensing some tension, and not the bad kind. Who is that woman?”
“She’s just my bodyguard.”
“Just your bodyguard?”
Amber leaned back against the front of her desk casually. “Of course. Why would you think otherwise?”
“The way you were looking at her when she left?
Normally you treat anyone who works for you like they’re beneath your notice, but you definitely noticed her.”
Amber crossed her arms. “I do not treat people like that.
And as for Carmen, I’m just trying to be personable with the woman who’s going to be protecting me 24/7.”
“Personable? More like you’re trying to get her into your bed.”
“I assure you, nothing is going on between us. She’s my bodyguard, and that’s all.”
“Sure. Those pictures from the night of the auction tell a different story.”
Amber pursed her lips. “Did you need something?”
While she and Gabrielle had been close friends since prep school, they got on each other’s nerves at times. Now was one of those times. The fact that Gabrielle could see right through her wasn’t helping.
“I just dropped by to say hello. I wanted to check up on you. We barely had a chance to talk at the charity auction, and you haven’t been to work much lately. And now you have a bodyguard sitting in your office, along with half a dozen others in the lobby? Is something going on?”
Amber waved a hand dismissively. “It’s just a minor issue. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Are you sure? That’s a lot of security for something minor.”
“I assure you, I’m fine. I’m just being cautious. I have a lot on my plate right now, with work, and my mother.”
Gabrielle gave her a sympathetic look. “How is she doing?”
“She’s doing well.” At least, that was what Amber was told. She still hadn’t called her. She was just too busy, or so she told herself. “But that’s enough about me. How have you been? I hear Chloe is moving in?”
As Gabrielle caught Amber up on her life, she found her attention wavering. She had too much on her mind. This stalker was just another thing she had to deal with.
But as always, she would handle it, because that was what she did.
Finally, Gabrielle looked at her watch. “I better get going. Will you be in on Friday? We’re going out for lunch.”
“I’ll let you know.” Amber was certain her bodyguard would consider lunch ‘unnecessary.’ Not that that would stop Amber.
Gabrielle headed to the door and opened it up, addressing Carmen outside. “She’s all yours.” She shot Amber a knowing smile before disappearing in the direction of her own office.
Amber gave Carmen a nod, silent permission for her to return to the room. Carmen resumed her watch just inside the door. Even from a distance, Amber could feel the heat radiating between them. Gabrielle was right about the tension between Amber and Carmen. It was impossible to ignore.
Would there be any harm in relieving it?
The thought was still coalescing in her mind when an intern came by pushing a mail cart. Under Carmen’s watchful eye, the intern dropped Amber’s mail off on her desk.
Amber set about opening it absently. None of it was important. But halfway through the pile, she reached a letter that didn’t have an address on it. It simply had her name scrawled on the front of the envelope by hand.
Dread washed over her. She recognized the handwriting.
It was the same handwriting that was on all the other letters the stalker had sent her. Until now, they’d all been
sent to her home, by mail. But this letter had to have been hand-delivered.
Her whole body tensed.
“Amber?”
She looked up to find Carmen before her desk, concern in her eyes.
“What’s going on?” Carmen said. “What’s the matter?”
“This letter,” Amber replied. “It’s from the stalker. They were here, in the office.”
C H A P T E R 7
Carmen looked down at Amber. The woman’s face was hard and blank, even more so than usual.
“Can I see it?” she asked. “The letter.”
Amber handed her the envelope. Carmen examined it carefully. No address, no stamp or postmark. Amber was right. This had to have been delivered to the office in person.
Carmen weighed the letter in her hand. It was heavy and uneven. Whatever was inside wasn’t just a letter. “I should open this for you, just to be safe. Do you mind?”
Amber shook her head. “Go ahead.”
Carmen took a letter opener from Amber’s desk and sliced through the side of the envelope. She peered into it.
There was no letter inside. Instead, the envelope was full of pictures.
“Well?” Amber said. “What is it?”
Carmen turned the envelope upside down, letting the contents spill onto the desk. They were photos, a mix of magazine cutouts and images that appeared to have been printed out from the internet. All were of Amber.
And the pictures had been drawn on, like some teenage girl’s poster collection, with jagged love hearts scrawled in the borders and around Amber’s face. But the other embellishments were far more disturbing. In some of the
pictures, Amber’s features were scratched out, her eyes and mouth replaced with deep, ink-filled gouges in the paper. In others, doodled ropes encircled Amber’s body, and scribbled handcuffs hung from her wrists. On one photo, a blindfold had been drawn, tied around her head.
Only in one picture had Amber been left untouched, unblemished. But underneath it, the sender had written the following words.
I will be yours.
You will be mine.
Carmen glanced at Amber. She was staring down at the photos strewn across her desk. Her face was still stone, but had grown pale as ice.
“This is… this is sick,” she said. “Who would do this?
What does it mean? What do they want?”
“I don’t know, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it,”
Carmen said. “And whoever it is that’s doing this, I won’t let them get to you.”
But the fury blazing behind Amber’s eyes made it clear that she didn’t need reassurance. “They came into this building, into this office. They’ve crossed a line.” Her fists curled on the table before her, her knuckles white. “We need to find out who delivered this. We need to track them down.”
“We will. I’ll make some inquiries, see if we can figure out where the letter came from.” She’d start with the intern who brought it to Amber’s office. The poor young woman was probably just the messenger, but Carmen could work backward from her to find the source. “If we can find out when it was delivered, we can check the security cameras to see if they caught anything.”
Amber nodded. “Get started right away.”
“I’ll get my team on it.”
“No. I want you to handle this personally, understand?”
“Understood.”
Carmen radioed Wheeler to send someone in to cover her post. She didn’t like leaving Amber alone, but given that Amber was back to bossing her around, she’d obviously recovered from her shock.
Once her replacement had arrived, Carmen headed off in search of the intern who had delivered the letter.
Unsurprisingly, the intern had no idea where the letter had come from, but a conversation with the mail-room assistant led Carmen to the receptionist in the Mistress Media lobby.
When Carmen asked the receptionist about the letter, she simply looked back at Carmen blankly. But after a few moments, her face lit up with recognition.
“Actually, I remember that,” the receptionist said.
“Someone dropped it off a few days ago. A woman.”
“What did she look like?” Carmen asked.
The receptionist shrugged. “Pretty average. I think she had dark hair? Sorry, lots of people come in here every day.
I can’t remember all their faces. But I remember she seemed a little… unusual.”
“Unusual, how?”
“She was kind of jumpy. And she looked out of place, the way she was dressed and all. But I’m not one to judge, so I just asked her if I could help her. She asked me if Ms. Pryce was here, but she wasn’t in the office that day, which is what I told her. She said she’d just go inside and leave something on her desk for Ms. Pryce. Obviously, I wasn’t going to let some strange woman waltz into Ms. Pryce’s office, so I told her whatever she wanted to give her, she could give it to me and I’d make sure Ms. Pryce got it. Then she gave me the envelope and left.”
Carmen crossed her arms. “And you didn’t think to tell anyone about something so suspicious?”
The woman gave her a sheepish look. “I did at the time, but I was really busy that day. I guess I just forgot about it.
The letter must have gotten mixed in with the rest of the mail.”
Carmen stifled a sigh. “Do you remember anything else about the woman? You said something about the way she was dressed.”
“She wasn’t exactly dressed for the office. She was wearing a sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, sneakers, jeans. And she had this weird necklace on. It’s hard to explain, but she just seemed strange.” The receptionist shook her head. “I wish I could be of more help. There’s a security camera up there behind you. Maybe it caught something.”
The cameras were Carmen’s next step. She gave the receptionist a nod. “Thank you for your time.”
Half an hour later, Carmen stood in the building’s security room with Hudson, scouring tapes of the Mistress Media lobby.
Hudson grunted impatiently. “This is taking forever. How are we supposed to see anything in these grainy videos?
This security system is ancient.”
“Stop complaining and pay attention,” Carmen said. “I know it’s a long shot, but we might find something.”
“Or maybe there’s nothing to find, and the client is just paranoid. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“She isn’t paranoid. There’s someone after her.” The rest of the team were only vaguely aware of what was going on. They hadn’t seen the letters themselves. “We don’t know how dangerous that someone is, but we need to take this threat seriously. Amber is depending on us.”
“Amber? Since when do you call clients by their first names?”
“She prefers that.”
Hudson smirked. “I’m sure she does.”
“What’s that look?”
“You have the hots for her.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t.”
“Pretty sure she has the hots for you, too. I caught her checking you out after your workout yesterday.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I’m serious. She’s into you.”
“Well, I’m not into her,” Carmen lied.
“I don’t blame you. That woman is ice cold. She chewed me out yesterday for tracking mud onto her fancy carpet. I felt like I was back in bootcamp.” Hudson propped his feet up on the desk in front of him. “I wouldn’t want to be with someone who could eat me alive. But I hear she isn’t into men, anyway.”
“Like you’d have a chance with her either way.”
Hudson chuckled. “Ouch. I liked it better when you didn’t have a sense of humor.”
But Carmen barely heard him. Her attention was fixed on one of the screens before her. It showed a video of the Mistress Media lobby, time-stamped at just after two p.m.
Someone had emerged from the elevator, dressed in a dark hooded sweatshirt. They paced in front of the elevator for several moments, escaping the notice of the distracted receptionist. The angle of the camera meant that the person’s face wasn’t visible, but their small frame suggested they were a woman. And she was holding something in her hand. An envelope.
It was her. It had to be.
After a minute or two, the woman made her move, setting off toward the Mistress Media offices. As she strode past the reception desk, the receptionist called out to her, finally noticing her. The woman backpedaled to the desk, then exchanged a few words with the receptionist. While the security cameras didn’t capture sound, everything was playing out just like the receptionist had said.
Finally, the woman handed the envelope to the receptionist and walked back to the elevators, but not before glancing back over her shoulder in the direction of the offices one last time.
“We’ve got her,” Carmen said. “Let’s see if we can get more footage of her.”
Hudson backtracked through the security footage, following the woman across multiple different camera feeds to the point where she’d entered the building. Infuriatingly, none of the videos caught the woman’s face.
But now they had a few vital pieces of information that they didn’t have before. Whoever was sending Amber the letters was female. And she wasn’t content with simply sending letters from afar. She’d tried to get close to Amber.
Was this the first time? Or had she been following Amber all along? It would explain why Amber felt like she was being watched.
“I want copies of this footage,” Carmen said. “Talk to the building’s security and get me everything that shows this woman. I’m going to go tell Amber what I found.”
Hudson nodded. “Yes, boss. And be careful.”
Carmen put her hands on her hips. “Be careful? Have you forgotten that I spent four years in the Marines?”
Hudson held up his hands defensively. “What I meant was be careful with Pryce. Don’t get too personally involved with a client’s drama. That’s never a good time.”
“I won’t,” Carmen said. She would do her job and keep her client out of danger. But she had no intention of getting involved with Amber in any other way, no matter how tempting it was.
Carmen finished brushing her teeth and headed back to her bedroom. As she passed through the anteroom, she glanced at Amber’s bedroom door. It was shut. Amber had turned in an hour ago, earlier than usual.
Was she unsettled by the events of the day? When Carmen had shown her the videos of the woman, Amber had barely reacted other than to confirm that she didn’t know her. She’d seemed completely unfazed. And she’d
seemed perfectly fine when she told Carmen she was going to bed.
But then again, Amber seemed like the kind of woman who never allowed any weakness to show.
Carmen shut her bedroom door and grabbed her phone from the nightstand, sending her sister a goodnight text.
Hopefully, it would remind Jo to go to sleep. She set her phone down and got into bed. But as she lay there for a minute, then five, then fifteen, sleep eluded her. While Amber seemed unaffected by the events of the day, Carmen couldn’t say the same for herself.
Up until now, this threat they were facing hadn’t seemed real. But those pictures, they were far more threatening than the letters, somehow. It was those doodles, those childlike scribbles of handcuffs and ropes, those gouges over Amber’s eyes, that disturbed her. This woman wanted to hurt Amber. Whether or not she would act on those desires was unclear, but Carmen wasn’t taking any more chances.
Sighing, she got out of bed. She would conduct a final check of Amber’s wing, just to make sure everything was secure. She left her bedroom and headed out into the hall, then moved from room to room systematically, keeping an eye out for any security vulnerabilities. Every room was clear, and every window and balcony door was locked.
Finally, she found Hudson was at his post, standing outside the doors that led to Amber’s wing, outside of her private sphere where no one else was allowed, but close enough that Carmen could call on him in an emergency.
She gave him a nod before returning down the hall.
Nothing was amiss. She’d checked every room.
Every room, except one.
She looked down the hall to the door at the end of it.
Beyond was Amber’s playroom. She hadn’t returned to that room since the day she started working for Amber, but she’d returned to it in her mind many times since then.
Before she knew what was happening, her feet carried her to the door. As she reached for the handle, she remembered what Amber had told her. The door was always kept locked. Only Amber had the key.
But Carmen turned the handle anyway.
And the door clicked open.
Slowly, she stepped into the pitch-black room, then felt around on the wall beside her until she found the light switch. She flicked it on. The room flooded with soft light, illuminating the deep purple walls and all they held. The ropes and handcuffs, whips and riding crops, tools and toys all tantalizingly erotic.
