Because a Husband Is Forever by Marie Ferrarella Page A

them.
    She gave up a half hour later. After getting out of bed, she got dressed before venturing from her bedroom. The rest of the apartment was very quiet. There was no sound, no evidence that there was someone else here.
    Maybe she’d somehow dreamed up the whole thing.
    On her way to the kitchen and some life-affirming coffee, she peeked into the room she’d converted into her office then stopped dead.
    Ian perused the bookcase in the room that his pseudo client obviously used as an office. A desk and two bookcases filled the sunny room. Photographs were hung on every available wall space. Photographs of Dakota with celebrities she’d had on the show.
    On her desk were more private photographs. One of a man he vaguely recognized and a smiling woman who looked like an older version of Dakota. Those had to be her parents. There was one of her and the man who’d secretly been his boyhood hero: Waylon Montgomery. Ian had been eleven when he’d arrived at the conclusion that no man was a hero. But until then, the man who played Savage Ben’s owner had been it for him. Another photograph was of her and a man he assumed was her brother.
    Two frames stood empty, and this aroused his curiosity. He was just about to examine them when he heard her voice and turned around.
    â€œYou weren’t a dream,” she said. He was there, his back to the door. For a man who stood approximately six feet tall, he still somehow managed to look larger than life.
    She looked a great deal more presentable. The football jersey had been replaced by a navy miniskirt with white accents and a navy sweater that showed off herassets. Still, the fact that she was no longer wearing a gauzelike jersey allowed him to look somewhere other than just her eyes.
    â€œNobody’s ever accused me of being that,” he commented, mildly amused. He nodded at the frame he was holding. “What’s with the empty frames?”
    There’d been two photographs, one of John alone and one taken of the two of them at the last fund-raiser they’d attended. Both photographs had met a quick demise when she’d discovered just how closely John liked working with his patients after they’d recovered. “I didn’t like the pictures that were there anymore.”
    Part of his job was to read people, and she was almost transparent. “Boyfriend?” he guessed.
    She shrugged a tad too carelessly in his estimation, confirming his suspicions as she walked into the room. “Something like that.”
    He set the frame back down in its space. “Oh.”
    On the defensive, Dakota raised her eyes to his. “What, ‘oh’?”
    Ian looked at her for a long moment. “You were serious about him.”
    Self-preservation had her wanting to deny it, but there was no point in lying. Ian’s X-ray vision would probably alert him to it anyway.
    â€œMore than he was about me, apparently.” She went on the offensive. “Is this what a bodyguard does, ask questions he shouldn’t? I thought you were the strong, silent type.”
    As far as he was concerned, he didn’t have a type. He just did his job to the best of his ability. “Just trying to get the lay of the land.”
    With effort, she forced herself to stop being defensive. John was history, and as part of hers, she was going to have to deal with it. For now she had something else to deal with, this man in her apartment. “You’re taking this whole thing seriously, aren’t you?”
    He took everything seriously, but saying so would probably start her off on some tangent, so he merely said, “The kind of money your studio is paying for this, there’s no other way to take it but seriously.”
    â€œYou could try having fun with this.”
    Spoken like someone who’d been pampered all her life, he thought. “I’m not being paid to have fun.” Ian looked at her intently. “Being a