Flashback (Five Years Ago):
Adam watched as the girl he had rescued last night came awake. Her black hair was fanned around her face on the pillow, giving a halo like look to her soft features, but he could tell it was not her original hair color. He could also see her disorientation, and knew the precise moment she saw him, because her body froze in terror. Her large soft brown eyes have her the look of a deer caught in headlights. She scrambled backwards, holding the comforter to her chest like a shield. Her shoulders hunched in defensively.
She was beautiful, even through the wounds, the bruises, and the starvation; she was beautiful. With a wide forehead, patrician nose and high cheekbones. Her chin was small and softened her features so that she could be called cute in the right circumstances. Yet, all of it paled behind the intensity of the personality that he could see blazing in her eyes, and her fierce will to live, to survive no matter what.
Adam held up both his hands in surrender as he watched her.
"Under your pillow is the gun I gave you yesterday." He told her in a gentle voice.
She moved one hand and finally grasped the gun. She pulled it up and her shoulders relaxed marginally.
"Do you know how to check if it's loaded or not?" he asked and she nodded.
"Good. Then check to see if it's loaded." He told her and after some hesitation when she eyed him suspiciously, she checked. It was obvious she had handled weapons before.
"Do you remember yesterday? You escaped, I found you, and brought you to my home." He murmured and she slowly nodded, lowering the gun she had trained on him.
"I give you my word that I will protect you, so try to relax at least a little. All right?" he said soothingly.
The girl nodded again, her pixie like hair bouncing around her face.
"I need to check your wounds." He told her and she flinched.
"I'm sorry but..." Adam stopped as she swayed and nearly collapsed.
He moved forward and caught her before she could topple off the bed. The gun had fallen from her hands, and both her fists gripped his shirt. Very carefully Adam laid her back down on the bed, but she still held his shirt as she stared at him. Her eyes were bright with fever now, and her body burned with it.
"You name?" she whispered.
"Adam." He answered her and she relaxed, her fists loosening as she fell unconscious.
...
Present:
Ellis was not sure what to do about Adam. His presence was bringing back all the memories she had stuffed away, but he was also the person giving her strength to face those memories.
She had agreed to have dinner with him just once, but it was as if that had opened the floodgates. She had never spent so much time with someone, ever, as much as she had spent with him this past week. Maybe that's what it feels like to have a boyfriend, she thought amused, except that he never touched her.
After that first night when he had kissed her chastely, he had not touched her at all. In any way. Ellis might have been hurt except she could see that he wanted to. He was giving her time, and she could admit to herself that if he had not been holding back, she would have freaked out. After what had happened five years ago, she hated to be touched, and had been unable to get close to any man, until now. Until Adam.
She was baking, again. It helped her think and he seemed to inhale the things she baked, and not an ounce of fat showed on his body. She would know, since he had a terrible habit of going shirtless. It was so unfair, Ellis thought grumpily.
Ellis chuckled as she remembered his expression last night when she had told him that if he wanted to have dinner with her again, he better cook. Of course, then he had asked her to join him for lunch as it was a Saturday. She shook her head. The man was completely crazy. He had even pretended to look hurt when she had told him it was dinner or nothing until he cooked.
Hence why she was finally having a Adam free day.
Ellis jumped at the knock on the front door. She eyed kitchen but nothing would go up in flames if she was gone for a few minutes. She strode to the door, already thinking what she was going to say to Adam who was most certainly at the door, but some sense of self preservation made her check the peephole and she as soon as she saw who it was, she started moving backwards as fast as she could.
It was the salesman who had been bothering her a week ago, but he had changed his appearance. It was a good disguise but she could always see through such things and she was very very grateful for it right now. She looked around for weapon but her eyes landed on her phone which was buzzing. She grabbed it and moving steadily towards the back door, answered it.
"Adam?" she whispered.
"What's wrong?" he was instantly all business.
"There is someone at my front door." She said softly, and before she could say anything more, she could hear him moving.
She heard him run and then she heard his voice clear over the phone and faintly through the front of the house.
"Can I help you?" Adam said icily.
"Uh... no its fine. I am a salesman and the lady here asked me to come over today. I don't think she's home." A male voice answered. Ellis flinched. It was definitely the same man as before.
"Why don't you show me what you're selling?" Adam asked watching the man through narrowed eyes.
"Of course." The man said breezily and then Ellis heard Adam shout. She ran to the door and at the same time she heard Adam curse and then the screech of tires.
Ellis stood next to the front door and cradled the phone in her palm, "Adam?" she whispered.
"Right here baby. Lemme in please." Adam answered and she quickly flipped the deadbolts and yanked open the door.
Adam was standing there, wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt. He was barefoot.
Ellis felt a small cry bubble up in her throat and before she could stop herself or think herself out of it, she threw herself into his arms.
Adam hugged her tightly, lifting her feet right off the ground. Ellis realized that he had moved them both inside the house when he kicked the front door closed behind them.
"Shh, I'm here, baby, I'm here." Adam murmured as he placed her back on her feet.
Ellis looked up at him and he gently kissed her forehead.
"He got away. Tell me all that happened, okay?" Adam asked and she nodded. She walked to the couch, but could not sit, so she started pacing the room. Adam sat in a chair, waiting patiently.
"He came here as a salesman a week ago. The day you first came over. It was late afternoon, and I was already feeling cranky. Usually I might've been polite but I was already on my last nerve, and he was very insistent that I let him into the house. I was starting to get creeped so I slammed the door in his face." Ellis took a deep breath and then resumed pacing.
"He knocked today and I thought it was you. I was about to open the door but something made me check. He'd changed his looks; skin color, eye color, hair color and even done something to his nose. There was a moustache last time which was gone this time. It was good, but I can always see through disguises. Always. I don't know how I manage to do it, and it used to drive my uncle crazy, but no one has ever managed to get one over me with a disguise." Ellis scowled. She was rambling. She took another deep breath.
"I knew who he was but before I could figure out what to do, you called and I told you... well... you heard it in my voice that something was wrong?" Ellis asked and Adam nodded.
"There. You have the whole thing now. What happened outside?" Ellis asked, finally sitting down across from him.
"He tried to bluff, and then ran. There was someone waiting for him in a car." Adam answered.
"You know more than you are telling." Ellis observed and Adam nodded.
"Will you tell me?" she asked and he sighed.
"Telling you currently solves no purpose. You'll have to trust me for a while." He told her, but his resigned expression also told her that he was expecting a fight; a fight that he thought he would lose.
"If you do not tell me I shall wonder and worry. If you tell me what is going on, I will know what I am worrying about." Ellis stated but she left it at that.
Adam rubbed his face and then pulled out his cell phone.
"Someone just tried to force entry into Ellis's house." He said in a flat voice, and then listened for a few seconds before hanging up. He stared at a painting hanging behind Ellis rather than at her, and then took a deep breath.
"You are the only person whom I would trust except my Uncle. You should know that before you decide." Ellis said before he could speak.
Adam closed his eyes and dropped his head on the back of the chair.
"You trust all the wrong people girl." He muttered.
"Uncle hired you. You are my bodyguard." Ellis said after a brief pause.
"Yes." Adam answered heavily.
"That is not why you are trying to date me." Ellis stated with complete certainty. Adam straightened so fast, she heard his neck crack.
She grinned at his surprised and hopeful expression.
"I have a lot of issues, but not that kind of insecurity, and I am not blind. You're into me, and it's veryobvious.." Ellis told him and he suddenly laughed. A relieved sound.
"Do you have any idea how worried I was that you would freak out when you found out that I took the contract from your Uncle?" Adam asked, his relief obvious.
"Good." Ellis retorted, her eyes dancing. "Now the full story, if you please."
"Right. I'm a mercenary. I don't really do bodyguard jobs, but someone called in a favour and I took a look at this one. Once I saw you were the charge, well, I had to take it." Adam said, trying to get his usual calm back.
"After you were kidnapped five years ago, your uncle has been keeping a bodyguard team on you 24/7 without your knowledge. They never had to do anything, until three days before I moved here. There was an attempt made at kidnapping you. They foiled it, but you almost found out what was going on."
"Petri, your uncle, had been receiving threats for a while, but he had not paid them any attention. He's a weapons manufacturer in the States with a Russian mob background. I don't think the man would raise an eyebrow if a tank attacked that thing he calls a house. But once you were involved, he took it seriously. So I came in as the best person possible to protect you. The plan was for you to not find out about any of this since your uncle is scared it will destroy all the progress you have made in the past five years."
Ellis raised an eyebrow. Adam raised his hands in a gesture of peace.
"I know you're made of sterner stuff, and you deserve to know what's going on. So I am your protection detail and my team is handling backup. We're hoping that they make their move soon so we can then capture them and find out who we're up against." he finished.
"All you know so far is that it's a terrorist group interested in the weapons Uncle Petri manufactures." Ellis said quietly and Adam nodded.
"There is something more though. Something they did that has you worried and furious." Ellis stated and Adam scowled.
Ellis just stared at him for a long while and then her eyes widened in horror. "It has something to do with when I was kidnapped five years ago... It's them, oh my god, it's them again. They found me." Ellis whispered even as she curled in on herself, her face losing all color.
In an instant, Adam was next to her.
"We don't know that. We don't. What happened then was random. There were no ransom demands, no nothing. They kidnapped you, tortured you, and then you escaped. There was nothing connecting that to you as a person or to your uncle. This time they want something from him. There is no reason for it to be the same people." He said earnestly, stroking her hair and back.
Ellis looked at him with haunted eyes.
"You think it's them. You do." She whispered, and her voice was choked with terror.
"I know it's not them because I killed them all Ell. Every single one of them." Adam told her seriously and hope glittered among the tears in her eyes.
"After you left me, I tried to find you but I couldn't. I didn't even know your name. But I could find them. I knew where I had found you, and I knew you could not have traveled far in that condition. I investigated, I questioned people, I bribed and I threatened. It took me a while but I found them, and I killed them. It cannot be the same people." Adam told her firmly.
"It cannot be the same people, but they know things about what those men did to you, that they should not know. That no one should know. That is what has me worried. When Petri hired me, I told him how I knew you, and I also told him what I did to those bastards. Someone is just playing on the past. That has me furious. That's it." he said seriously and Ellis slowly nodded.
"Dead. They're dead." she whispered and he nodded.
"Good." she said in a firmer voice and Adam nodded again. He removed his arm from where it had settled around her shoulders and took her hand in his.
"I should've told you everything earlier, but I had no idea how." he said sincerely.
"It's okay." she told him softly.
They both jumped when the timer on the oven chimed.
"Oh GOD! I had brownies in the oven!" Ellis cried as she ran to the kitchen. Adam followed her at a more leisurely pace and then stood at the side and watched her as she took out the slightly burnt brownies.
"Mind if I stay a while?" he asked sitting down in a chair.
"Be my guest." Ellis answered, sparing him a small smile.
Adam smiled back even as she returned to her baking.