Breaking My Bodyguard novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: The Adjoining Door

My father didn't fire him.

I stood in the study doorway that evening and heard the verdict:

"Rafe stays. The door gets locked."

My father sat behind his desk with his cane across his knees.

Rafe stood in front of it with his hands behind his back.

"The connecting door between her room and yours stays locked from your side," my father said.

"You keep the key.

"She does not get through it and you do not open it."

"Yes, sir," Rafe said.

"Papa," I said.

"You are a Santoro, Livia. You will be a Brandolini wife in twenty-six days. Until then you are not a girl in a hallway."

"I'm a girl in a house with a man who's been shot for me."

"That is why I'm keeping him," my father said, and for a second his eyes went tired.

"Because I know he won't touch you."

Rafe didn't look at me.

He looked at the wall and said, "Yes, sir," again.

That night I lay in bed with the lights off and listened to him move around in the next room.

The floorboards creaked.

A drawer opened, then closed.

Water ran in the bathroom.

I pictured him standing under it with his stitches taped up and his head down.

I got up at midnight.

I wore a silk slip and nothing else under it, and I took two pins out of my hair.

The connecting door was oak, with an old brass lock that I'd stared at for three years.

The keyhole was on his side, but the lock was a cheap tumbler from the nineteen-twenties.

I had learned to pick it at sixteen, from a video, in case of a fire.

It took me under a minute.

The bolt slid back with a soft click.

I opened the door.

His room was dark except for the lamp by the bed.

Rafe stood by the window in black sweatpants and no shirt, with his arm in a clean bandage.

He didn't turn around.

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