THE MASTER'S GAME PLAN

CHAPTER 4 - THE CONDITION

The Condition

LOPEZ MANSION...

"If I'd found a husband at that damn audition, those animals wouldn't dare look down on me." Ellah murmured the next thing in the morning in her room.

She recalled what her grandfather had said the previous night.

"If you keep holding onto this stubbornness of yours, it's going to be what brings this family down."

This time she let the silence stretch, perched at the edge of her seat. She couldn't let the company slip out of their hands. Not now, not before she'd earned the right to take his place.

"I'm sorry, Grandpa. I'll do whatever it takes to be worthy of this. I won't let this company slip away from us."

Then she remembered the CEO.

He was always the one standing at her grandfather's side, and quietly, without ever saying so out loud, the one standing at hers too.

Then, during that audition, it kept replaying in her head, and every time it did, Ellah wanted to throw something.

"Next!" she snapped.

"Never mind, Miss Lopez!"

Her chin came up. The man was already backing toward the door, grinning like he'd won something.

"No wonder you're rich, probably drug lords. Look at those goons of yours! Straight out of a syndicate!"

The door clicked shut. Ellah stood there a second, then let out a breath through her nose that was half laugh, half groan. Four bodyguards.

That was the whole problem, really. Four walking reasons her dating life had turned into a punchline.

She could practically hear the pattern by now. The handshake. The eyes flicking up to the men behind her chair. The smile that arrived a half second too late, like the client was doing math on whether to run.

"Your guards, ma'am. God, they're terrifying. Look like villains from the movies."

She dropped into the chair beside her grandfather and started fussing with her coat collar, mostly to have something to do with her hands.

Her grandfather's eyes drifted back to the screen of the television.

"Still watching TV, Grandpa? What is it this time?"

"The news. They arrested a drug cartel."

"Hmm. Okay," she said, barely glancing at the screen.

She let her own eyes settle on him instead, on the old man folded into that wheelchair since the accident took his car off the road last year.

"Grandpa, how's the treatment on your leg?"

He didn't answer.

She studied her grandfather, watching the news like it owed him something. Even sick, even bound to that chair, there was still something upright in the way he carried himself, an authority that hadn't bent with his body.

That, she thought, was probably where she got it from. Whatever steel was in her had come from him.

At twenty-eight, she'd already made General Manager. She had the mind for it, the money, the looks. Everything except the one thing they kept telling her she needed.

And she needed it. Not for herself. To keep the one thing that mattered from slipping through her fingers.

"I don't want to say this, Grandpa. But we have a problem."

"What is it?"

"My guards."

Don Jaime's brows lifted, eyes still on the television. "What do you mean?"

"I want to replace them."

"What!" This time, the old man looked at her intently.

"Yesterday. At the audition. Someone accused us of running a syndicate, because of how the guards look."

"They're good at their jobs. That's what matters."

"It's costing the company, Grandpa." She held up a hand and started counting on her fingers. "Every client, every meeting, every single time."

He didn't answer right away, so she pressed her case, leaning in like she was closing a deal.

"Even just one man. But he has to be worth all four."

"Never," Don Jaime said, not even glancing her way.

She followed his gaze to the screen instead. An old man in a black tuxedo came down a set of steps in handcuffs, a graying police officer at his elbow, cameras strobing white.

Her eyes snagged on the man beside them, the one facing the reporter like it was the most boring thing he'd done all week. He turned a pair of shades over in one hand, unhurried, and somehow made a beat up leather jacket and worn jeans look like the only respectable thing in the frame.

'I know my beloved grandfather couldn't make it. Even with his power, he couldn't find a guard to replace all four bodyguards in just one day, right? If he fails, he must stop introducing me to worthless suitors!'

She smiled unintentionally at her idea.

"Grandpa?"

"What?" Don Jaime asked sounding annoyed.

"I'll consider dating one of the men you keep throwing at me." She stood, already enjoying herself. "On one condition."

"What?"

"If you find me a replacement. By tomorrow."

Don Jaime's eyes finally left the screen, and there was a glint in them she didn't like. "If I find one by tomorrow, you're getting married. That's my condition."

She opened her mouth, closed it, then shrugged like she hadn't just been outmaneuvered by a seventy year old man in his own living room.

"Fine. If that's what you want."

She turned and took the stairs two at a time, muttering something under her breath. 'You can't grandpa.'

"Alex, come here!"

Alex ambled over, grin already halfway to trouble.

"Yes, Don Jaime?"

"You see that man?" Don Jaime jabbed a finger at the screen.

"Yes, Don Jaime."

At the top of the stairs, Ellah paused, one hand on the banister, and shook her head slowly. Whatever her grandfather was cooking up, she already knew she wasn't going to like it.

The reporter's voice rose over the noise. "Sir, what can you tell us about the capture of one of the region's largest syndicates?"

Don Jaime didn't blink, didn't look away from the screen.

"That man..."

"Yes, Don Jaime?" Alex responded.

"...will be my granddaughter's bodyguard."

Upstairs, Ellah's grip on the banister went white knuckled, and her groan echoed all the way down the staircase.

"Unbelievable!"