Page 7 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

There’s no second voice. I checked the room myself; there’s no one in there. She’s on the phone, or?—

No. She’s talking to a pelican that isn’t present.

I stare at the ceiling. In eight years of details I’ve guarded a senator, two CEOs, a sheikh’s nephew, and a witness who tried to bribe me with a jet ski to let him go to a nightclub. Nobody briefed a pelican.

The monologue winds down around 2340, trails into a mumble, and goes quiet. The cottage ticks. The fridge hums. Outside, the dune grass moves in the wind, and I get up twice to confirm it’s the wind.

The second time, coming back through the dark kitchen, I stop outside her door. Habit. You verify the principal. Her breathing comes slow and even through the gap under the door, and there’s a sticky note stuck to the doorframe at eye level—her eye level—that saystide chart!!with two exclamation points, and I stand there a second longer than verification requires.

Bad orders. A loud, warm town. A client who bakes for the neighbors and files her death threats underpointless.

I lie back down on the too-short couch and run the threat assessment again, because the threat assessment makes sense. Network’s got resources, local knowledge, and an unknown level of nerve. Cottage is indefensible without changes I’ll start tomorrow. Principal is friendly, cooperative in tone, andcompletely ungovernable in practice. I already know this the way you know a storm from a wave line. She saidthis is going to be greatlike the situation was a puppy.

Six weeks, maybe eight. Keep her breathing. Go back to the boats.

Through the wall, asleep, Abby Marlowe laughs at something. Full laugh, from the middle of a dream, bright even filtered through drywall.

Eight weeks. Hell.

Chapter 3

Abby

Living with a bodyguard, day three. Observations so far: he’s quiet, he’s enormous, and he folds his blanket every morning with corners so sharp you could file paperwork with them.

I keep a running list on the second whiteboard, the little one by the fridge, under the heading NOAH FACTS. Currently it reads:

1. Coffee: black, no comment

2. Owns 6 identical black t-shirts (minimum)

3. Checks locks in a specific order??? (front, back, kitchen window, front again)

4. Made the couch look like a furniture ad by 6 AM

5. Said 11 words on Monday. ELEVEN. I counted.

He saw the list on day two. He read the whole thing, standing there with his coffee, and I braced for an objection, and what he said was, “Seven.”

“Seven what?”

“T-shirts.”

Then he walked away, and I updated the whiteboard, and something about the whole exchange made me suspect—for the first time since he’d walked into my cottage looking like athundercloud in tactical pants—that there might be an actual person in there.

Here’s the thing, though. The novelty wore off around the time I realized he meant it aboutwhere you go, I go. He came to the grocery store and cased the cereal aisle. He came to Kayla’s soccer game and stood at the fence line, scanning the parking lot with his arms crossed, and half the parents asked me if he was a scout for a youth academy. He walks me to Mrs. Pruitt’s fence like the eight feet of open lawn between our porches is a war zone.

And the turtles are suffering for it. Well. Not suffering. The turtles are fine; the turtles are unaware of literally everything, which is their superpower. But nest checks are supposed to happen on a schedule, and Noah treats every proposed departure from the cottage like I’ve asked him to escort me across enemy lines, with a planning cycle to match.

The loggerheads don’t have a planning cycle. They have biology.

Which is why it’s 4:50 in the morning, and I’m easing my bedroom door open in the dark with my field bag pre-packed and my sneakers in my hand, like a teenager sneaking out to a party, if the party were data collection.

“Okay, Abby,” I breathe, so quietly it’s basically a thought with air in it. “Stealth mode.”

The plan is simple. Out the back door, down the beach path, thirty minutes at nest 41 for the dawn temperature reading, back before he even wakes up. What he doesn’t know can’t turn into a security briefing. Besides, nobody’s dumping cargo on a beach at dawn, and if I take the path, I’m not even on a road, and I have thought about this from every angle for at least four minutes.

I make it two steps into the kitchen.