His Bodyguard. Muriel Jensen
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She handed Meg a pair of large chaste silver buttons with a beadlike turquoise inset. “There you go. Now you look like a page out of an Eddie Bauer catalog. What do you think?”
Becky was right. She looked like a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company Monday through Friday and on weekends frolicked on a ranch with a handsome man in plaid flannel.
But it was a lie. And she remembered what Boradino had said about Pike appreciating honesty in a woman.
“Do not look like that,” Becky ordered, pulling several shirts out of her closet and tossing them onto the bed. She put an arm around Meg’s shoulders and pointed to the mirror. “This is the real you, Meg. Not the woman who fell for Daniel because he was the first man to notice you. He wanted the vulnerable part of you, not the strong part. You want a man who’ll appreciate all of you.”
Meg spread her arms and blew out her breath in exasperation. “The problem is I don’t know who I am. I like men, generally, but in our work with Women in Transition we hear so much about the bad ones. And when my other job is to protect people from those out to harm them, you start to see everyone as a threat. So I tried to loosen up about that, fell in love with Daniel, and look where that got me.”
“Free in the nick of time, if you ask me,” Becky said without apology. “Where’s your backbone? You weren’t the problem, he was.”
“Becky.” Meg put her hands on her friend’s shoulders and squeezed gently, apologetically. “You realize what Daniel changing his mind might do to Grandma Rooney’s endowment to your program?”
Becky nodded philosophically. “I like to think she’ll listen to reason when you explain that Daniel left you.”
Meg gave her a little shake. “Reason? Becky, we’re talking about the woman who offered blue-chip stock to Kenny Kaiser in high school so he’d take me to the prom.”
Becky smiled. “So, she’s a little...wacky. When’s she due back?”
“Next week sometime.”
Guinevere Rooney Ross, Meg’s maternal grandmother, was currently in Africa buying art for a small museum in northern California. She was in her early eighties and in good physical health. But she suffered from a form of age-related dementia that caused her to confuse and sometimes connect unrelated facts until her reality existed on a separate plane from everyone else’s.
For the past two years she’d pleaded with Meg to spend less effort on Becky’s program and more time trying to find the right man. In her mind, a woman’s happiness depended upon husband and family.
When Meg introduced her to Daniel and told her they were engaged, her grandmother had said that since Meg had done what she’d asked, she would do something for Meg. At Meg’s request, she had promised a substantial donation to the Women in Transition Center Becky had been dreaming of building for years, a place where young women without guidance or those starting over for any reason could stay until they found employment and felt secure enough to be on their own again.
“I don’t know, Becky.” Meg checked her reflection in the mirror and smoothed the jumper’s short skirt. “Grandma told me she wouldn’t do it if I chickened out.”
“But he chickened out.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it’ll be to make her understand the difference? Especially since he left with a woman fifteen years older than I am? She’ll blame me. I know she will.”
Becky put the shirts inside a black plastic suit bag. “He found her money more appealing.” Then she giggled. “And he never could get over the plate-glass window episode.”
Meg rolled her eyes. “I’m an Amazon with an inferiority complex.”
“You’re beautiful, Meg,” Becky corrected her, handing her the bag. “Remember what we’re always telling the women in the program. The past doesn’t matter. It makes no difference who tells you you’re stupid or you can’t do it, or you’re never going to make it, or it’s more than you should try for. Everything you need to succeed is inside you. You have to believe in you.”
Meg nodded. “I know that, Becky. I have faith in my ability to support myself, to make friends, to live a good life. I’m just not sure I’m destined for love and marriage.”
“That’s ridiculous. Of course you are.”
Meg decided there was little point in arguing. Becky would believe what she wanted to believe, and Meg knew what she knew. After so many years of frightening men away with her physical strength and dexterity, she’d attracted a man who’d walked away less than two weeks before the wedding.
“Well,” she said, taking a last look at herself in the mirror. She did look far more confident than she felt. “This week isn’t about love and marriage, anyway. It’s about making myself appealing enough to Amos Pike that he’ll come away with me. Then, I suppose if I have to keep him locked in a room until the toy show, I can do that.”
“You won’t have to,” Becky said, walking her to the door. “Trust me. And don’t worry about the center. I’ll just keep dreaming about it awhile longer.”
* * *
AMOS FOLLOWED the brightly lit streetlights down Main Street in Lightning Creek, Wyoming, population fifteen hundred and something, and looked around him in disbelief. Time had stopped. That was the only possible explanation. Everything he remembered was still here—the general store on the east side of the street, Ellie’s Dress Shop, Western Savings and Loan, the post office.
Across the street was Reilly’s Feed Store, Twyla’s Tease ‘n’ Tweeze—wait. The beauty shop might have been called something else back then, but it had been there. The Main Street Grill. The aroma of barbecue drifted out to him and he had to stop and breathe in a deep gulp of it.
It was twenty-five years ago. He was nine years old.
He felt a little shudder deep inside him that recalled that time even more sharply than the old familiar storefronts. It had been dark then, too, and he’d been driven into Lightning Creek by Barbara, his caseworker.
Barbara had already been working with him a year when she’d brought him to Lost Springs Ranch for Boys, a few miles out of town. She’d been kind and done her best to be supportive, but she hadn’t known what to do with him after a year of moving him from one grandmother to another, from aunt to aunt.
She’d pulled the car over right about where he stood now. He could remember staring at the floodlit statue of Wyoming’s famous cowboy on a bucking bronco that dominated the town’s center.
“Amos, please try to hear me this time,” she’d said. “You have to start helping yourself now. I know what happened to your mom and dad was a terrible tragedy, and it’s not something you can get over quickly—even a smart, strong boy like you. But you have to make a start. You have to decide you want to go on. You can’t keep running away and doing things that you know will get you hurt. That radio tower thing, Amos, was crazy! If you had fallen, they wouldn’t have found enough of you to bury. Now, I know that sounds harsh, but it’s time you...”
He could probably remember the rest of it if he put his mind to it, but he had finally found his footing here after a few rough months, and what had gone before was put away somewhere inside him with the memories of the parents he’d loved so much and had wanted so desperately to join.
It was surprising—and also humbling—to discover that despite all his hard work and success, he could still feel the loneliness that had swamped the little boy he’d been.
He pushed his way into the café, needing coffee. The square room was quietly lit to take advantage of the stone fireplace on one side. Booths lined the walls and tables and chairs were grouped in the center.
A score of tempting aromas mingled with that of barbecue, filling the air with a welcoming familiarity. Red meat had been considered a man-builder when Amos had been a boy, and the Lost