Free Protector by Catherine Mann Page B

harem. She started to throw another stone at the legendary beauty when—
    A noise startled her. She dropped the stone beside her, and looked again. Anticipation eased the ache in her chest… But it was just Uncle Simon. Rats.
    Uncle Simon was with two men in dark suits, and boy, were they all mad at each other. They were pushing and shoving each other past a circle of iron benches and chairs until they stopped beside the fountain. She pressed her back to the leafy horse’s leg and searched for a way to sneak away without them noticing.
    A shot popped through the air.
    She jerked, her eyes snapping back to the sound. Back to the three men. Back to her uncle. She bit her hand to hold back a scream. Horror, however, bubbled inside her until she could swear it was in her sweat.
    Blood oozed from a single bullet wound behind his ear. One man caught him on the way down, staggering against the fountain. The other man, the one with the gun, tucked it under his jacket as he turned. Toward her.
    Panic bit harder than the prickly branch slicing into her hand as she scrambled backward. The gun guy in a black suit stared. Straight. At. Her. And she knew him.
    She knew Charles Tomas…
    Jolting awake, Jolynn rolled off the edge of her bed and hit the floor. Hard.
    “Damn it!” She grabbed her elbow, the charley horse stabbing pain through her.
    Charley horse? Even her aches linked up to Charles after only a couple of days on the ship together. She blinked to adjust her eyes to the shadowy suite, the first rays of morning sun casting a minute orange glow through her balcony window.
    She’d spent the past two days on the cruise ship visiting with her father and ignoring Charles. And it hadn’t done her one damn bit of good. The man invaded even her dreams. Intellectually, she knew he wasn’t there the afternoon Uncle Simon had been shot behind the ear, execution style, but the eerie horror of her dream wasn’t so easy to shake.
    Swinging her legs to the floor, she padded barefoot past her circular bed perched into her sitting area. A deep rose, red, and bronze color scheme bathed the stateroom with a fire-and-brimstone decadence.
    God, her dream was making her melodramatic. Used to working sixty-hour weeks, she really had too much time on her hands. Marseilles had come and gone, and they were set to drop anchor in Sardinia today, but she’d visited the ports countless times in the past on one of her father’s earlier ships, and sightseeing alone held little allure.
    She needed something to fill her mind with anything other than worries for her dad. And thoughts of Charles. She needed to be more insistent with Lucy about helping out with office affairs while her dad was under the weather. She had an accounting degree after all. Surely it wouldn’t sound out of the realm of possibility that she would offer— and it would give her a great chance to snoop.
    And digging around in her father’s files would provemuch more productive than just standing around on a balcony, the water below reminding her of her midnight walk with Charles.
    Jolynn pulled a bottled fruit juice from the small refrigerator tucked under the counter next to the minibar and twisted the top off. Her great plan for peace wasn’t working out. Staring out the balcony window at the endless ocean, she rolled the cool bottle between her hands. There wasn’t much she could do about her relationship with her father during this cruise other than hang out for a bedside vigil and fluff his pillow.
    But when it came to Charles Tomas, ignoring wasn’t working out for her. Her hands slowed… She frowned, looking harder at the balcony.
    And the masked man staring back through the window at her.

S IX

     
    Jolynn screamed.
    She wasn’t hiding in topiaries these days. She shouted at the top of her lungs while running for a phone. A knife from the kitchenette would be a welcome bonus. And never once did she take her eyes off the black-clad figure on her balcony. A man. At