The Assassin’s Billionaire Bodyguard
Chapter 6

Isabella stared at her computer screen and grimaced with frustration. She was unfocused and she had made three errors so far. If she kept this up, Calvin would have her head on a platter. He demanded perfection mostly because his boss demanded it of him. She took a breath, stood up and did some stretches. Her cell phone ringing made her cringe. She had been dodging Evgeni's calls since he'd shown up at the offices on Tuesday. He'd even had his security guard and his driver call her.

Portia had been sending her text messages and she was now seriously considering telling the girl how much her father didn't want her dating Evgeni.

An unknown number made her eyebrows raise and she hit decline. With Evgeni having his friends and employees calling her she didn't trust any number she didn't know. Immediately the phone rang again, and she answered it furiously and spitefully, "what the hell is your problem?"

"I'm starting to think there should be a class in college on telephone etiquette," the voice on the other end mocked her.

"Who is this?" she demanded angrily.

"You don't know?"

"I don't have time for this," she grumbled and was ready to hit the end call icon when she heard him identify himself. "Great," she mumbled, "what do you want Torres?"

"You know, I have a first name," Camden Torres mocked her. "My friends call me Cam."

"We're not friends. In fact, you're the father of the enemy. You need to get your brat under control."

"Have dinner with me and we can discuss it."

"No," she refused him. "I'm considering asking my sister-in-law to engage in something illegal to make all of Portia's social media presence disappear. Make it flicker with my face every time she tries to upload a photo." "Can she do that?" he asked laughingly.

"With her eyes closed, in a dark room with an old IBM." Isabella grinned as his deep laugh echoed in her ear and she shivered with the warm sensation of it. This man was trouble with a capital T. She stuck to the matter at hand. "She's full of tricks." "What kind of tricks can you do?"

"I put people to sleep telling them about my day," she found herself engaging with him against her better judgement, "I spend my time compiling statistical evidence and providing an analysis of the replaceings. The detailing can dull the most exciting of situations. Puts people to sleep in minutes."

"You want to tell me a bedtime story? I'll listen," he whispered provocatively in her ear.

"Jeez Torres," she yelped at the seductive tone to his voice, "what happened to you want me to date your daughter's boyfriend?"

"I changed my mind. I have a new game plan. Have dinner with me and I'll tell you all about it."

"I'm not keen on the idea. It could be a set up. Maybe you're on team Portia now and you want me out of the picture."

"I'm always team Portia but not for murdering you. Do the calculation. What are the chances I'm lying?"

"Fifty-fifty," she said quickly not bothering to even try, "but if you give a full minute, I can give you the actual statistical probability of exactly this situation occurring."

"Can you give me the probability of you having dinner with me?"

Just then another call beeped on her phone, and she groaned as she looked at her display. Evgeni again, immediately followed by a text from Portia. "Depends on the information you give me in the next ten seconds."

"What information do you need?"

She could almost hear him sitting straighter in his chair and she grinned at the realization she had his attention. "Will having dinner with you get back to your daughter and absolutely piss her off?" At his silence she continued, "I only ask because I'm not sure how much more of her vitriol I can take. She just sent me a text message which reads "you stupid fat b***h, you'll never take him from me, I hate you. I hope you die.""

"Isabella, I am so sorry," he spoke quietly.

"This is one of the tamer ones from this week. I'm not usually one to tattle on a chick to her daddy. In school I just pulled them into the schoolyard and kicked the s**t out of them until a teacher pulled me off but knowing how often your daughter has her camera on," she chuckled lowly, "pretty sure Clara would not like the publicity of me beating up your daughter."

"Yes, I'll ask you not beat her up. I tried to teach her self-defence once and she actually punched herself in the face and bloodied her own nose," he was quiet.

"So, are we done then?" she asked seriously as she saw Calvin poke his head into her office.

"No, I'd still like to have dinner. We can be discrete if you wish. I have a proposal and I'm still very much interested in discussing it with you."

"When?" She realized she had capitulated as soon as the word came out of her mouth, and she blamed Calvin for distracting her as he leaned in her office.

"Are you free this evening?"

"Yes, sure. What time?" She glared at her boss who was grinning widely at her discomfort.

"I'll pick you up at eight."

"No, I'll meet you. Where?" When he started to protest, she cut him off, "Torres, I'm busy and my boss is standing at my desk. Give me a time and location and I'll meet you at eight."

"I'll text you," he said suddenly as if understanding she felt compromised. "I will make a reservation and we can meet there."

"Thank you," she hung up before he could say anything else. "Calvin, you're being rude listening to my conversations."

"Well, I came in to ask if you saw my email from earlier but then noticed how pink your cheeks are and the wide smile and knew it had to be a man you were chatting with. It's not often, I replace you behaving like a human."

She glowered at him. "I'm not a human?"

"Sometimes you make me wonder if Clara didn't create you in the lab," he teased her with a wide grin.

"Oh you," she folded her hands under her armpits trying not to smile at his teasing. Since she'd started at Draxton while interning for college, he had been a grandfatherly figure to her, and she knew he teased her out of a place of kindness and not malevolence. "I did see your email and I was working on it when I was interrupted by my phone ringing."

"Date?"

"Yes, no," she moaned, "more of a meeting to try to solve a mutual problem." She dropped her face in her hands. "I blame you. I had said no until you distracted me and now, I'm meeting him at eight." She looked at her phone as the text message popped up with the name of a fancy restaurant she'd never been to. Elian would probably know the owner, the chef, the head server and the names of their parents and families. She wasn't telling him.

She waved Calvin away. "Get out so I can get this fixed and send it back to you. I'll have it done before I go for the day."

"Will it take you so long?" he seemed surprised.

"No, it will take me thirty seconds but seeing as it's the third mistake, I'm going to review the entire thing over again and make certain you don't have to send it back a fourth time." "Sounds good."

An hour later she had completed turned her phone off, tired of the barrage of calls and texts from Evgeni and his girlfriend. She printed a copy of the report off and set it in front of her. Using a pencil, she went through the entire document line by line and ensured there wasn't another error she had missed. When she was satisfied her data and replaceings were conclusive with no further errors, she did a final version and emailed it to her boss.

She rose from her desk and stretched again, glad she'd finally gotten it right and had pushed her distractions out of her head. A sense of accomplishment filled her. As thrilling as it was to work for Bellona, the steady consistency of her work at Draxton and satisfaction of seeing numbers balance was equally important to her.

Her desk phone rang, and she answered it on the first tone recognizing the extension, "Isabella Ruiz."

"Hey, can you come up to my office for a minute?"

"Yup, be there in two," she hung up and immediately went to make her way to Clara's office. She didn't often get called up to Clara's office so when she did, she moved.

She knocked once on the door and entered at her sister-in-law's call to do so. "Hi. Everything okay?"

"I need your help," Clara motioned for her to approach her desk.

"Of course, what can I do?" she moved to stand behind her and looked at the computer screen. "What am I looking at?"

"I feel like I'm missing something. You have an ability to pick out a detail or a flaw in pattern."

"I'm killer at Where's Waldo," she grinned widely at Clara's chuckle.

"I've been looking at this damn thing for four hours, but it doesn't feel right," she brought up the schematics for a project. "This is the end goal. To get to this end goal, I need this," she pointed to her second monitor, "to make sense and right now, something is missing." "I'm not a computer programmer Clara," she wasn't sure what she was looking at.

"I know but you replace things out of place. My program is a series of zeroes and ones in a specific pattern. Follow the pattern and see what I've missed. I need to get this done today because I promised the kids, we would do the zoo tomorrow thus I can't work on it at home. I'm frazzled and pissed off,"

Isabella squeezed her shoulder, "hey, let me sit here and look. It's all patterns?"

Clara stood up. "Yes, sort of," she stood behind Isabella.

Isabella let her eyes scan the lines of the programming. She went through it twice and then near the end of the program, she pointed to a line. "Is it this?"

Clara almost hauled her out of the chair and leaned into it the screen. "Yes, oh my god Isabella, I could kiss you." She threw her hands up in excitement before she started typing frantically. "I would have sat here all night and Elian would have been annoyed, not as if he'd ever say he was annoyed."

"He knows the pressure you're under Clara." Isabella reassured her.

"I know, he's a good man. I just often feel like he got the short end of the stick," she rubbed her temples.

"I don't know," Isabella teased, "I mean he gets a workaholic warrior princess for a wife, but you have to eat all his crazy concoctions. Raoul told me they were working on a new menu, and he mentioned something about avocado foam in a taco. Sacrilege." Clara shuddered, "they put artichokes on a pizza Isabella."

"Amelia and I were talking about it Monday night. We ordered pizzas from Julio's instead. I'm not eating artichoke pizza."

"Oh Julio's" Clara looked up at her dreamily. "I'd kill for a slice of their thin crust pepperoni."

"It's what we ordered to watch the game. I ate the rest for breakfast next morning. It was perfection."

Isabella stood over Clara's shoulder and watched as her fingers flew over the keyboard. "Have you ever eaten at Domingo's?"

"The Italian place? I went there once with my grandfather for dinner a few months back. It was good. Why?"

At Isabella's silence her fingers stilled on the keyboard, and she slowly spun her chair around. "Tell me you're not letting the Russian turdball who left a woman to be raped and murdered in an alley out to dinner."

"No," she pursed her lips at Clara's description. "He's been harassing me all week. I'm this close," she held her fingers a hair apart, "to sending his mother the d**k pick and the text messages and telling her to get her son under control."

"I'll do worse, just say the word," Clara promised with a gleam in her eye. "What is his problem? You broke up years ago."

"I know. I can't figure it out. He's acting like a child, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact he's dating one."

"Who then?" Clara grilled her, "you may as well tell me. I can simply replace out other ways."

"Camden Torres," she walked around the desk and flopped into a chair and spun around in it wistfully. "He caught me in a weak moment between Portia, Evgeni and Calvin."

"What does Calvin have to do with your love triangle?" Clara sniffed curiously, barely looking up from her computer screen.

"Nothing other than he was openly eavesdropping on my call and it made me self-conscious. I wanted to get off the phone and I ended up agreeing to go to dinner."

"He's a good-looking man and I know Mikhail has a lot of respect for him."

"He is the parent of a psychopath. He can't be all so incredible if his daughter is such a nut."

Clara shrugged, "she spent the first fourteen years of her life with her mother. Cam had no idea he even had a kid. Five years ago, he ran into his ex in London. She was shopping with Portia, and he immediately noted how much she looked like his younger sister. He was pissed, took her to court and everything. Most people don't even know he has a kid."

"Well then he's not entirely to blame."

"His ex is an heiress to some Greek shipping tycoon's fortune. Not a brain in her head and filled Portia's head with ideas of how wealthy people should behave and none of it good."

"Well, hopefully, he comes up with a good solution to get these two idiots off my radar. I'm really losing my patience and about ready to explode all over them both."

Clara chuckled at her, "can I give you a tip?"

"Yes, please."

"Listen to what he has to say, make up your own mind even if he tries to pressure you and," she grinned widely, "the steak tartare was to die for. Order it."