Read Online Her Bodyguard by Geralyn Dawson - Free Book Online

BLENDED sugar and cocoa and cream for a living. She’d developed her own personal recipes for her chocolates’ cream fillings, using her Aunt Claire’s special flavoring, Magic, in many of them. She considered candy-making part science, part art. Baking oatmeal cookies was pure comfort.
    After the scene with Kat, she’d fled the Texas Spring Palace for her shop. There she fired up her oven, pulled out the butter, sugar and flour, and went to work. Blending the thick, heavy cookie dough with her favorite wooden spoon was just the physical work she needed.
    “Frigid,” she grumbled. “The next time I see Alexander Simpson I’ll teach him a whole new definition of the Curse of Clan McBride. Spreading such nonsense to his friends. How dare he!”
    It hurt. It hurt to know that she was being talked about in such a personal manner. It hurt to know that the good reputation she’d worked so hard to establish was being tarnished by ugly accusations. It hurt that the man she’d loved and intended to spend her life with, raise a family with, would do such a thing. It hurt that her sister would believe him.
    “She’s supposed to be on my side. She’s supposed to stand up for me. That’s what family does. That’s what the McBrides do.”
    That’s what the McBrides used to do. Ever since Casey’s death, it seemed as if the family was falling apart. Emma was difficult to reach. Even tonight, dressed in yellow and out in public and obviously making an effort, grief wrapped Emma like a shroud and insulated her, isolated her, from her loved ones.
    Mari missed her.
    “Kat’s another story,” Mari muttered, giving her wooden spoon a whack against the side of the bowl. At the moment, she’d like to see her youngest sister take an extended trip somewhere far away. She could go visit their cousins, the Rosses, in Scotland. She could stay through the winter, a bitter cold Highland winter. “Maybe that would cool her lust-fevered blood.”
    Thinking along those lines, Kat would probably recommend Mari head for the Sahara Desert.
    “I don’t need a desert sun to warm me up.” Hadn’t her blood run plenty hot this very night while dancing with Luke Garrett?
    Luke Garrett. She wondered how he and Rory Kelly had crossed paths in the past. Something to do with money, she’d bet. A robbery? One of those legendary high-stakes poker games they have down in San Antonio? Maybe Rory once worked for Luke. She couldn’t imagine it being the other way around.
    If not money, then a woman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine a woman deserting Rory for the likes of Luke. Maybe she shouldn’t have left Kat alone with the two men. She’d jump from the frying pan into the fire.
    Mari wondered what it’d be like to play with that kind of fire. She wondered if Luke Garrett would tell all his outlaw friends that she was a cold fish. She wondered if he and all his outlaw friends had already heard that about her. Could she be as infamous in her own way as Luke Garrett was in his?
    “How humiliating.”
    Eyeing the cookie dough in her bowl, Mari imagined hearing the tinkle of her door chimes. She’d glance up to see Alexander Simpson walk into her shop, a penitent look on his face. She’d pick up the bowl—no, just scoop up a big wad of dough—and send it flying. It’d splat against his face in gooey, gummy wads. He’d drop to his knees and beg her forgiveness. He’d tell her—
    The fantasy dissolved when a thundering explosion rattled her shop windows. “What…?” she murmured, reaching for a damp towel to wipe her hands as she moved from behind her worktable, pausing just long enough to turn off her oven before hurrying to the front of her shop. Outside, alarm filled the faces of the people spilling into the street and the fading light of evening and rushing south.
    South? What could have exploded to the south? Her first thought had been the meatpacking plant, but that was on the north end of town.
    She smelled burning wood the moment