Page 100 of Under Her Protection

"She will tire of her."

"She always does."

A laugh, low and not entirely kind.

Lipstick click. Clasp. A final small sound of a handbag shutting.

"Shall we."

"Let us go."

"Go."

The heels moved. The outer door opened and closed. The oxblood tile held the sound of them for three seconds and then did not.

Leo did not move.

She sat on the closed lid of the seat in the end cubicle.

Her chest did a thing.

It was, specifically, a thing that felt like her breastbone had been put in the vice a carpenter used to hold a piece of moulding. She could feel the grain of it. She could feel the two plates of it pressing against the soft tissue between them. Her breath, when she tried to pull it, came in short, and did not come all the way down, and stopped at about the place her chest-plate had been narrowed.

Her throat closed.

It closed and she did not let a sound out of it. Her jaw did the thing. Her hands went flat on her own knees and the knuckle bones pressed against the fabric of her black suit trousers and she did not move.

The hot bodyguard.

She had been, it turned out, the hot bodyguard.

She had come into her house with the assumption she was a professional on retainer, and she had in the last five weeks, become a member of Vivienne’s staff she was fucking.

She had been, by last night in bed, a woman who had begun to think, in a very quiet private way at the back of her own throat, the word love.

She loved Vivienne.

And a tiny part of her had hoped the feeling was mutual. But, maybe this was just a thing Vivienne did with her staff. Until she got bored of them.

On what planet did she think someone like her could be something more to a woman as powerful as Vivienne.

She had, for the purposes of the red lounge, no name.

She was a piece of furniture. She was a crisis accessory. She was an Armagnac story at Colette's table that had become a whisper amongst the rich and powerful. She was a funny story that Vivienne Strauss, fifty-two, was, at her age, to be allowed.

The hot bodyguard.

Leo put her head down on her knees.

She took a deep breath and stood up. She unlocked the cubicle door.

She washed her hands at the marble basin.

She looked at her own face in the mirror above it. Green eyes. Dark hair back in an elastic. The small pale scar at the collarbone. The line of the black suit. The shoulder rig under it. No name visible on her person anywhere.

The hot bodyguard.

She went back to the red lounge.