The Alpha Bodyguards Books #4-6

Chapter Forty-Five

I felt it the second I walked through the door.

Something was different.

Like six and a half feet different.

My senses on high alert, I didn’t turn a light on. I laid Nash down and tucked him in and quickly backtracked, closing his door.

When I walked into the kitchen, the air conditioning kicked on and a scent drifted past me. Clean, fresh laundry, musk and spices I couldn’t identify. Only one person smelled like that. My heart tripped, and adrenaline spiked. I spun in a circle.

I couldn’t stop my sharp intake of breath.

Preston. In the dark. In the far corner of my living room.

“I know I didn’t leave the door unlocked this time.” My pulse racing, my nerves shot, my voice thankfully held steady. But my traitorous heart wept at the mere sight of him.

“You ran.” His voice quiet and even, it was still an accusation.

Flipping on the light in the kitchen, I glanced at the counters. “I didn’t run,” I lied. “I was giving you time to tend to your new blonde girlfriend.”

“You know as well as I do she’s not my girlfriend.”

“Then how did she get your number?”

“She lifted it off Thomas’s phone.”

Hating how reasonable that sounded when I’d been anything but, I didn’t answer. I glanced around my kitchen. Everything was cleaned up and put away. But it wasn’t just clean, it was organized. The flour, sugar and coffee tins were all perfectly aligned. The paper towel holder was lined up next to the hand soap and dish soap. The towel over the oven handle was neatly folded. All the chairs at the table were perfectly pushed in.

I hated my picked-up kitchen in that moment.

And I hated that I’d stormed out earlier without talking to him, but what was done was done.

Perfectly still, he continued to stand by the front window. “Where were you?”

“Out.” Being a shitty mother and keeping Nash up too late.

“Trust doesn’t exist in a vacuum.”

I opened the fridge. “Not sure what I did to make you not trust me.” Everything was neatly aligned, and labels were facing forward. “You’ve been busy.”

“I’ve been worried.”

Okay. That made me feel like an asshole. “Sorry,” I muttered, reaching for a beer. “Do you want something to drink?”

“I want to know why you ran. Specifically.”

Four hours of my own damn thoughts. Four hours to relive everything he’d promised. Four hours to stew on everything he wasn’t offering.

I lost it.

“ You want ,” I repeated, slamming my unopened beer down on the clean countertop. “That’s just it, Preston, isn’t it? It’s what you want. It’s always about what you want. The house you wanted, the life you wanted, the ready-made family you wanted. You carved out everything to your specifications, and now all you have to do is insert female and kid. What about what I want?”

He opened his glorious mouth to speak, but I cut him off.

“What about how I feel? Fuck, what about how you feel? I don’t even know what you’re thinking past the few cryptic lines you gave me today because I don’t know a damn thing about you. Not about your past or your family or your hobbies or your dreams or any of that shit.” I threw my hands up. “I don’t know you, Preston. And you want me to move in with you!”

His head dropped, his hands went to his hips and he stood there.

One heartbeat, two, three….

The silence was crushing.

But it was nothing compared to what came out of his mouth next.

Barely audible, the deepness of his voice took up every molecule of space in my living room. “I was six the first time it happened.”

Oh dear God, no.

Please. Please don’t be what I’m thinking .

I wanted his next words more than I wanted to hold my own son in that moment, but I feared them.

Not daring to speak, praying I could handle what came next, I waited.

He stared at my worn carpet. “Do you know how many minutes the human brain can take in panic before it shuts down?”

I let a single syllable slip past my suddenly dry lips. “No.”

“Seventeen.”

“Preston,” I whispered, my heart breaking for the memories that brought him to this moment.

“That’s not my given name.”

My heart, my mind, my body, they stilled. “It’s not?” A piece of the puzzle that was all him floated just out of reach.

“No.”

I waited.

“Six years old. Seventeen minutes. A lifetime of consequences.” Without looking at me, he glanced toward the hallway and Nash’s room. “You’re a good mother. Rollins would have been proud of you.” His voice lowered. “Proud of his son.”

Tears welled. For him. For Sam Rollins. For my son. I said the only thing I could think of. “Thank you.”

Lacing his hands in front of him, one of his thumbs brushed over the other. Intertwined, he moved his fingers as if aligning them just so. “Control is an addiction I will never recover from.”

More pieces. “Okay….”

He started to speak again.

I interrupted. “If you think I’m going to judge you for that, you’re wrong.” I would never hold his past against him.

“I can no more control your judgment than I can the weather.”

Studying his face for any sort of animosity toward me but finding none, I frowned. “I’m not judging you.”

“You were when you left the house.”

Fuck . “I’m sorry.”

No resentment in his tone, he switched subjects. “I was at the festival to do a job. I was also there to hone my skills.”

I was learning that Preston never spoke unnecessary words. No cuss words, no extra words, no insignificant words, but he didn’t always use enough words, and he didn’t always speak in order. I tried to read between the lines. “Which skill?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Observation.”

“That you are definitely good at.” More than good.

“A thousand details every square foot, all of it coming at you at once. The festival once a year is good practice. When Luna needed recon for another client, I volunteered. I did my job for him, but the blonde was unexpected. She was being pursued. I was in a position to intercede. The rest, you know. It doesn’t go beyond that.” Inhaling, he didn’t continue.

I wanted to go to him. I wanted to put my arms around him as freely as my son did, but I didn’t dare move. “You interceded to help her.”

His gaze, hard and impenetrable, bored into me, and his voice turned lethally unemotional. “I interceded to stop the gunmen.”

He was so broken. In so many ways. And in the next breath, so intimidating, he frightened me. “You saved her.”

“I came for your brother’s help to dispose of her body.”

I fought not to show alarm. “He doesn’t do that anymore.” I didn’t know what he did. I only vaguely knew who he used to work for, and the simple fact was that I could sleep better at night now knowing he wasn’t going to catch a bullet for the cartel.

Preston’s gaze, still on me, turned callous. “He has a skill set.”

“I know,” I admitted, giving voice to something I never wanted to think about. “But the question was why you needed to do that. If you were interceding, as you put it, you did nothing wrong. You could have taken her to a hospital.”

“She requested that I didn’t.”

Inhaling, I gave up navigating and went right for port. “You interceded, you saved her, you did a good thing. You like control. You like my son. And apparently you like breaking in to my house. All of this I could figure out. What I don’t know is how you feel about any of it.”

He looked away.

I tried another avenue. “Why do you live in a warehouse when you have a house on the intracoastal?”

He dodged. “I told you the property is a recent purchase.”

I tried again. “What name is on the deed?”

“Preston Vos.”

“So that is your real name.”

“Legal name,” he corrected.

“Okay.” Jesus. “So what’s your real name?”

“Does it matter?” His tone resonated to the very ends of my frayed nerves.

Preston Vos was a hit of every drug that promised addiction. I couldn’t breathe for want. Want for him. Want for his voice. Want for his words. But it was like I couldn’t get the needle in my arm. “You brought it up.”

“I thought I wanted to hear my birth name.” He glanced at my mouth, then dropped his gaze again. “From your lips.” One thumb brushed over the other. “Significance is greater unvoiced than in reality.”

I knew he was smarter than me, but sometimes he said things that made me feel like we weren’t even on the same playing field, and I wondered how I ended up here, in his line of sight. “And now?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’m not that child anymore.”

Jesus, he knew how to throw my heart into a tailspin. “What does matter?”

“Seventeen minutes.”

I bit the inside of my cheek so I didn’t fucking cry. If he was trying to break my heart, he was succeeding. Jesus, he was succeeding . “I’m a nurse,” I said as gently as possible. “I’ve seen how long a panic attack can last. It’s longer than seventeen minutes.” If whatever had happened to him to make him this way first happened when he was six, I was looking at a twenty-six-year-long panic attack.

With the grace of a man who fed every well-honed muscle with each inhale of breath, he stepped toward the window and parted the curtains barely an inch. “There was a clock over the bed. He told me not to cry. He told me if I made a sound, he would kill my mother.” Preston turned to face me. “He killed her anyway. Five years later. No foster parent wanted an eleven-year-old sexually abused violent child.”

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

I knew where this would lead. I’d seen it too many times in the ER. I’d cried too many times for too many helpless young victims. But this?

This took my fucking breath.

And replaced it with rage. Impotent rage and crushing grief so fucking heavy, I couldn’t crawl out of my own skin.

So I threw myself at him.

Arms, legs, heart.

I threw myself at his pain, at his mercy, at his past. I threw my body and my soul at the impossible mix of broken boy and stoic man standing sentry in my living room.