Free Bare Witness by Katherine Garbera Page A

of anyone who came to the door.
    He let her legs drop and put his arms on either side of her head as he leaned into her. Letting his body come to rest on hers. He reached for her breasts, but she exploded into action, her knee coming up between his legs and her hand hitting him in the throat.
    He doubled over in pain and stepped back. “What the hell?”
     
    Justine didn’t have time to explain. She was wrapped in a cloud of the past. As soon as Nigel had placed her body between his and the wall, the present had fallen away. She remembered…Franklin Baron, and the way he’d cornered her in that long hallway on the third floor.
    She had reacted with instinct and now…she backed away from Nigel and tried to get a grip on where she was. Dammit, she needed to get away. She moved farther from him, but he started toward her.
    “Justine?”
    She heard Anna calling as if from a distance. She couldn’t take her eyes off Nigel. She didn’t want to turn her back on him, but the reality of what she’d done filtered through her fear-and-panic-dazed mind. She stepped around Nigel and put the wall of the hut at her back.
    “Give us a minute,” Nigel said.
    “What’s up?”
    “Nothing. We need a minute.”
    Justine knew she should step in and speak up, do something to alleviate the worry she saw on Anna’s face, but all she could do was stare at both of them. Keep her back to the wall and let the flashback of her past play through her mind. She knew it wouldn’t last forever. That it would end and she’d be okay, but right now, keeping her screams deep inside was really all she could do.
    “Justine?” Anna asked.
    “Go.”
    Anna disappeared back inside and she was left alone with Nigel. “You, too.”
    “I’m not going anywhere until I’m sure you’re okay,” he said.
    He was still a bit pale, and she knew she owed him an explanation for kneeing him, but she had no idea where to start. This was precisely why she never got involved with men. She kept her sexual urges to herself because she really wasn’t comfortable with them.
    And now she knew that the legacy from Franklin Baron was pain. Not just for her, but for anyone who came in contact with her.
    She started shaking and realized she was on the edge of completely losing it.
    “What can I do, love?”
    She just shook her head, but he took a step toward her and she realized he wasn’t going to leave her alone. She moved around him and stepped to the left so that he was between the building and her. Maybe she could play off her reaction as some kind of claustrophobia.
    But lying went against her grain and Nigel deserved better from her.
    “Is it me?”
    She shook her head “I can’t talk about it. I need to put that,” she said, gesturing to the wall area, “behind me for right now.”
    He nodded. “I’ll keep my hands to myself.”
    She didn’t want him to, but she knew now that she wasn’t going to be able to experience the kind of relationship with Nigel that she’d been half-hoping to. She’d been hoping…Oh, my God. She really had been hoping she was normal. That with Nigel she could be a normal woman.
    “I think that would be best,” she said, even though inside she felt like crying. Which was silly and ridiculous because she was too tough for tears. She always had been.
    Why then would this man with the tough attitude make her feel like she was losing something? Losing a part of herself?
    “We better go see what Anna found,” she said. “I’ll follow you.”
    She finally realized that she’d essentially forgotten she was the bodyguard—Nigel’s bodyguard. She’d left him unprotected while she’d been kissing him, and then later as well.
    “Let’s get you back inside.”
    Nigel didn’t say anything else, just walked in front of her into the hut. When they got inside, the lights seemed bright and there was a strangeness to the normalcy of the room. She walked over to her partners and tried to slip back into work mode, but something