The Baron and The Bodyguard. Valerie Parv

ache as though from overuse. He heard a distant groan that he barely recognized as coming from himself.

      He wanted to retreat into the mist, but the woman’s voice came again, refusing to let him go. “That’s it, come back to me. You can do it.”

      Come back where? To whom? He couldn’t force the questions out, but she anticipated them. “It’s me, Jac. You’re in the hospital. You have to wake up for my sake, Mathiaz.”

      Jac? Instinctively he rejected the name. Jacinta, that felt better. He remembered that her name was Jacinta Newnham, although she liked to be called Jac. He must have murmured her name, because her sigh whispered over him.

      He felt her bend closer, and her lips brushed his mouth. A faint scent of frangipani teased his nostrils, the perfume as familiar as her touch and every bit as arousing. The sensation was so pleasant that he took it with him back into the mist.

      Jacinta felt his grip slacken and fought back tears as she looked at Mathiaz in the bed. The nightmare was happening all over again. A man she cared about was hovering on the brink, and there was nothing she could do. For a moment, she’d thought she’d managed to reach him, only to watch him sink back into coma.

      A white-coated man came to stand beside Mathiaz’s bed. “Isn’t it time you got some rest?”

      She gave the doctor a savage look. “I’m not going anywhere until he comes out of this, Dr. Pascale.”

      “I know I asked you to come in and talk to him, but running yourself into the ground isn’t going to help anyone.”

      “Then tell me what will?”

      The doctor’s craggy face softened. “With all the medical marvels at our disposal, sometimes there’s nothing you can do but wait.”

      Nothing you can do. The words she hated most in the whole world. “There must be something.”

      “You’re doing it. Keep talking to him, let him know you’re here and that there’s a world he should be rejoining by now.”

      “Talk to him about what?”

      The doctor thought for a moment. “You worked with him for four months. Talk about the time you spent together.”

      “That ended ten months ago. We didn’t part on very good terms.”

      “He fired you?”

      She shook her head. “He wanted me to stay. I was the one who quit.”

      “Didn’t take to royal life, huh?”

      “The baron hired me for a specific assignment. When the danger to him was past, I had no reason to stay.” She didn’t tell the doctor that Mathiaz had given her the one reason guaranteed to make her run like a rabbit. He had begun to care about her.

      The doctor’s expression showed he had his own suspicions. “I got the impression that the two of you…”

      She didn’t let him finish. “We set out to create that impression as a cover. Mathiaz thought that being seen with increased security would alarm the public. Running my own defense academy, I have the skills but I’m not actually a bodyguard, so he suggested I pose as his girlfriend while keeping him from harm.”

      The doctor looked at her as if he didn’t quite believe her, but decided to let it go. “Then talk to him about yourself.”

      “He already knows my background. He had palace security check me out before I came aboard.”

      “I don’t mean the facts, I mean you, your interests, your passions. You do have passions, don’t you?”

      She kept her face averted. What would the doctor say if she admitted that one of her passions had been Mathiaz himself? “Climbing and adventure training,” she said instead.

      The doctor made a skeptical noise. “I’ve heard you took two American teenagers to ride the Nuee Trail, but I’ve never heard having a death wish described as a passion before.”

      “Depends how much you care about what you’re doing. Those boys were tough street kids. A judge gave them the choice of undertaking one of my adventure training courses to straighten themselves out, or going to jail.”

      “I’d take jail.”

      She knew the doctor didn’t mean it. As court physician, Alain Pascale was known for his gruff manner, but also for his willingness to do anything he could to help his patients. “Anyway, I didn’t take them out solo. The court supplied a supervisor who complained all the way up and down the mountain. The boys acted tough but they were only sixteen and seventeen,” she told him.

      “The age when Carramer males traditionally ride the Nuee Trail,” the doctor mused. “They considered it a rite of passage for hundreds of years.”

      “As well as being one of the toughest endurance rides in the world,” she pointed out. “When those boys finished the course, they were different people.” She had also been different, too, in love with an island kingdom called Carramer. She had returned to America long enough to resign from her job as a personal trainer, said a tearful goodbye to her parents and older sister and moved to Carramer. When suitable premises in Valmont came up for rent, she had leased it and spent the next three years establishing her own fitness business. Guarding Mathiaz had seemed like an interesting change of pace at the time.

      The doctor patted her shoulder. “Now you know what to talk to the baron about.”

      “This feels weird,” she said to the still form in the bed after the doctor had gone. “While I worked for you, we talked so much, but I managed to tell you very little about myself.”

      He had asked, she remembered, but she hadn’t wanted to let him get too close. She still wasn’t prepared to tell him the most significant details of her life. He might be unconscious but she preferred to keep some secrets.

      “There isn’t much to tell,” she began awkwardly. “Compared to your royal family, mine isn’t the least bit glamorous. Mom and Dad have a berry farm in Orange County, California, and my sister, Debbie, runs a store selling their produce and local handicrafts when she isn’t taking care of her husband and their three children. She’s much better suited to that life than me, although I never thought I’d end up on an island in the middle of the South Pacific.”

      She lapsed into silence. Once she had thought of training as a kindergarten teacher. She enjoyed working with children, the reason she’d volunteered to help the street kids in her spare time. Switching her degree from education to science, with a major in sport and exercise had been an impulsive choice. The right one, as things turned out. At twenty-seven, she was still a teacher of sorts, and exercise was a universal skill, as useful in Carramer as in Orange County.

      “I’m supposed to talk to you about passion. How’s that for irony?” she asked Mathiaz’s unmoving form. She felt a pang as she said the word. Mathiaz had been a passionate man—was a passionate man, she amended the thought firmly. They had agreed to act in public as if there was a romance between them. Holding hands, exchanging looks, all in the name of keeping him safe.

      When had they stopped acting?

      The first time he kissed her, she remembered. Two months after she started working for him, she had accompanied him to a trade dinner. Hardly a forum for passion. In the back of the limousine, returning to Château Valmont, they had laughed about how boring the chief delegate’s speech had been. Letting Mathiaz kiss her had seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

      He’d kissed her again as they shared a nightcap at his villa in the royal compound. Talked long into the night. Talked some more the next day. Kissed again. She had told herself she was acting a part, while recognizing the lie for what it was.

      She should have left after the man threatening Mathiaz was caught, but she’d agreed to stay for another month, telling herself she needed the pay check. The truth was, she needed Mathiaz. And she didn’t want to need any man.

      Unconscious,