What’s more, the stakes were higher than ever now. Not only did he need to figure out how to stuff away his attraction to Suzanne while they were alone together in this car for hours on end—but when they got to the wedding, he needed to make absolutely sure that he didn’t give away even one ounce of what he was feeling for her.
If Alec so much as caught a whiff of the thoughts Roman was having about Suzanne, he’d be a dead man. And rightly so. No bodyguard should ever step over the line he’d been on the verge of leaping over outright in her office the previous afternoon.
Being the best bodyguard in the world was what he needed to focus on. Not the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous, sitting beside him in her formfitting silk shirt and slim black pants, with her dark hair cascading down her back. Not all the places, all the ways, he wanted to kiss her. Not how much he wished he could see her smile again, hear her laugh, if only to know that the day was off to the right kind of start. The best start to any day he’d ever had.
Focus, Roman. Focus.
Roman had already let his investigators know that Craig was a dead end and to dig deeper, and faster, into who might be responsible for harassing Suzanne. Hopefully, he’d get more solid leads while they were in the remote Adirondack Mountains, a place that was as off the grid as you could get these days.
He was used to driving, but since Suzanne had immediately slid behind the wheel of her car and kicked off her heels, Roman did his best to relax and take in the scenery.
Growing up in the city, there hadn’t been much green space apart from the city parks. For his entire adult life, he’d worked and lived in cities—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami. The closer they got to Summer Lake, however, the greener it got. So green that soon only the blue sky and the ponds and lakes they passed provided contrast. When Suzanne rolled down her window, the air was the freshest Roman had ever smelled.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” For the first time since the day before, she smiled. “Summer Lake has always been one of my favorite places in the whole world.”
She was in her element in her office, and had been pure strength and energy as she ran through Central Park. But as she took a deep breath of the pine-scented air and looked up at the fluffy white clouds in the blue sky above the two-lane road, he watched her finally relax. Almost as though she’d just let the weighty responsibility of being the owner of a game-changing digital security company fall from her shoulders.
Though he knew she’d only be able to take a small break for this wedding, considering how hard she ran herself, every break she could get mattered, no matter how small.
“How long have you been coming here?” The more Roman knew about his clients, the better he could protect them. He swore to himself that he was asking because she was his job, rather than because everything about her intrigued him.
“As long as I can remember. After my mom died—” She paused for long enough that he knew she still grieved the loss. The same way he missed his mother every day, even when he tried to tell himself that he didn’t. “Once she was gone, Summer Lake was where my dad wanted to be, so this is where we spent most of our school vacations. When we were in school in the city, he’d come here whenever he could find someone to take us to our music lessons and after-school games, so that he could work on the house he was building. Pretty early on, he connected with a small home building company and began to help out with their projects. And as soon as Drake went to college, he moved full time to the lake. I think coming back to the city haunts him to this day, because all of his worst memories of losing my mother are there. Anyway,” she said as she obviously tried to pull herself out of the dark places her story had taken her, “we’ll be staying at the home he built. It’s really nice, all done in knotty pine with views out across the lake from every window.”
While doing his research into Suzanne and her past, Roman had been surprised to learn that when her father had stopped painting at the height of his international fame, he’d become a home builder instead. “It sounds like your father is as talented with a hammer as he was with a paintbrush.”
“He is, although most people think it’s really sad that he never painted again.”
“Do you?” This was exactly the kind of question that he didn’t need to know the answer to in order to do his job. But he had to ask it anyway, if only to get a deeper glimpse into what made Suzanne tick.
“I understand passion. I know how deep it can go. How it can drive you.”
“It’s how you feel about what you do.”