Chapter 2
Lucy
Bronson Hale was the embodiment of every man I’d ever sung about.
He was tall, burly, and gruff. And breathtakingly handsome.
I’d been around a lot of security men in my life, but not one had ever set my pulse racing like he did.
Despite his military appearance, there were some rough edges to the man.
His hair was longer than regulation, and he had the beginning of a beard growing in.
Something about him set my pulse racing.
Valerie had even joked about him before she left, telling me to ride the beast while she was gone. She never missed a thing, and I knew she’d spotted me drinking him in when I first saw him.
Cal, the owner of Salt and Steel Security, had told me that Bronson had just left the Navy SEALs after twenty years of service. And that he was headed home to some small mountain town in the Ozarks.
He wasn’t a regular employee of Cal’s. In fact, he was just doing his old SEAL buddy a favor.
He fit in the mountains. I could see him there.
Dragging my eyes off him, I scanned the online menu before making my final choice.
He’d let me order dinner in, since Valerie wasn’t here to pick it up.
And when the delivery driver showed up at the gate, Bronson changed out of his military gear and put on a casual pair of jeans. Then he flipped a John Deere baseball cap backward on his head before going out to grab the food bags.
The change was immediate. He no longer looked like a bodyguard. He’d transformed into an everyday normal guy. An extremely buff, rugged version of an everyday normal guy. But still.
I ate fast because I always ate too quickly when I was nervous. And I’d been a bundle of nerves ever since this nightmare had begun.
Someone was hunting me, and I didn’t know who.
After dinner, Bronson rumbled, “I need to take a shower. Don’t move until I get back.”
As soon as he was out of sight, I snuck outside.
But not before hesitating.
He’d told me not to move, and here I was disregarding his order.
I knew he’d be pissed, but I needed to clear my head.
The sliding glass door barely made a sound when I slipped through it, and I relished my moment of freedom.
My nerves were shot, and I needed the fresh air to ground myself. Just five minutes to pretend life was normal.
The wind out here was stronger than I’d expected, and it caught my hair and threw it across my face.
The ocean waves crashed, and in the dark with just the stars shining down on the pitch-black water, I felt like I was alone on a small island. Just me and the sea.
I thought about the recording session tomorrow.
I’d been turning a new melody over in my head for weeks, about what my life might actually look like on the other side of all this mess with Jimmy.
The song was called Small Town Rambler, and I knew in my gut that it was going to be a hit.
I was humming the tune when a wind gust slapped into the deck.
I stumbled backward, and a hand closed around my waist, firm enough that I felt it everywhere.
My heart slammed hard into my throat as I turned and spotted my guard, still damp from his shower.
Bronson was sneaky.
“When did you come out here?” I asked, trying not to pay attention to how strong his hands felt on me. “I didn’t hear the sliding glass door open.”
The wind was blowing in a storm, and my hair whipped between us.
I was acutely aware of how close we were. The man was built like a tank.
His fingertips shifted slightly against my side, and heat moved through me so fast it almost made me dizzy. He felt dangerous in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
Then he pulled his hands free.
“You don’t go anywhere alone. Not even the back deck.” His voice was edged with steel.
This was everything I’d hated about Jimmy’s security detail.
But somehow, hearing it from Bronson didn’t make me feel controlled. It made me feel… protected.
He shifted closer, his eyes scanning my face.
Then he growled, “If you step out of my sight again, I’ll tie you to your bed myself. Don’t test me on that.”
I sucked in a tight breath. Bronson wasn’t like my previous security team.
He didn’t keep his distance, and the way he looked at me sometimes was positively scandalous.
There was something about his alpha-man vibe that made me feel weak in the knees.
The deck was darker now, the horizon line completely swallowed by night. And the ocean felt like something alive and restless.
He rumbled softly, “We should go back inside. You’re a target out here.”
“Can I just have ten minutes? I’ve been trapped inside this house for weeks now. Ever since…”
His eyes moved across me in the darkness. “Ten minutes, but it’s a mistake.”
“Thank you,” I told him, relief flooding through me.
“Walk me through it again,” he growled.
“What? The attempts? I already told Cal everything. You must have read the reports.”
“Now you’re telling me,” he rumbled. “Start from the beginning.”
Arguing with him would be pointless and exhausting. Bronson was the one in charge. And I imagined it was that way regardless of who he was with.
“Okay,” I said, feeling a wave of nervous energy as I thought about all the events that had led to this man being in my house. “The first incident happened as Valerie and I were walking into town on Seahorse Avenue. A car came around the bend going too fast. It seemed like…” my voice trailed off.
The memory was painful, and I found it hard to talk about.
“Tell me,” he rumbled, and all I wanted to do was put my faith in this man.
“The car seemed to veer toward the shoulder. I threw myself into the ditch to get out of the way, and it kept driving.” I paused. “That was it. It could have been someone texting and not looking at the road, maybe. It happens.”
I’d explained it away when it happened. But now I had my doubts.
“And Valerie was with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Did she jump in the ditch, too?”
“Uh, no. She… had stopped to pick some wildflowers. She was maybe five feet off the road when this happened.”
“Hm.” Bronson watched me intently. “And then she brought you a poison smoothie?”
I sighed. “It’s not Valerie.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“Valerie brought it home from the juice place I like on the waterfront. They were my breakfast spot.”
“Every day?”
“I like routine when it’s possible. Touring for a living, after a while you get tired of new places and new things.”
“But this time it had strawberries in it?”
“Yeah.” I kept my voice even because I didn’t like the way my chest tightened when I thought about it. “I’m deathly allergic to strawberries. Everyone who works for me knows that.” I looked down at my hands on the railing. “But Valerie didn’t try to kill me. She saved my life.”
“With your EpiPen?”
I nodded. Bronson didn’t need me to tell him anything. He’d already read the file.
“And the festival,” he growled, as another gust of wind splashed with light sea spray.
I sighed as I tried to explain it to him. “I don’t get the chance to be normal. And after leaving my husband, I just wanted a chance to hang out with regular people for once. So I went to the Shrimp and Grits Festival—”
“With Valerie.”
“Yeah. I thought it would be fine because it was so public. There were people everywhere. But then…”
It was after the festival that I knew these “accidents” weren’t an accident.
A man had appeared out of the crowd with a knife in his hand.
I shut my eyes, reliving the terror of the moment. I’d seen him coming, but froze on the spot. The knife had glinted in the crowd, catching my eye, and after that I couldn’t move.
My breath caught in my throat, tears threatening to spill again.
Bronson’s hand closed around my elbow, steady and warm. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me if it’s too hard.”
I leaned in toward him, wanting nothing more than to have this burly stranger pull me into his arms. I had to admit I felt safer with him around.
“The man had a knife. He came out of nowhere.” I started trembling, and Bronson rubbed his hand across my arm, soothing me. “Someone else saw the knife and tackled him to the ground. It was one of the s-security people who work for your boss. He saved my life.”
I could still feel the press of the crowd. It had been a hot day, the scent of cooked shrimp filling the air. And it had gone from a perfect morning on the waterfront to a nightmare in seconds.
“And where was Valerie?”
“Right by my side!”
But even as I said it, I remembered that she’d stopped and looked at a display of shells at one of the tourist shops that lined the edge of the pier right before I saw the man.
I pondered it for less than five seconds.
Valerie couldn’t be involved.
“She’s my best friend,” I whispered before breaking down into tears. “My only friend.”
Saying it out loud was doing something to me that thinking about it hadn’t.
Each incident on its own had felt like something I could explain away. But laid out in order like this, one after another, the shape of it became something I couldn’t ignore.
“She was there every time,” Bronson announced, his hand still on arm, soothing me.
“It’s not like she had the knife in her hand.”
He grunted.
“I know how it sounds,” I started.
“It sounds like escalation,” Bronson said calmly. “And we can’t rule Valerie out.”
“But she’s all I have.” I knew that made me sound weak and afraid.
But it was true. She was my only friend. And she’d been by my side before I ever knew Jimmy… before I got famous.
Tears spilled down my cheeks, and his hand slid from my arm to my waist, pulling me firmly against his chest. I locked up momentarily, then sank into his embrace.
He didn’t hesitate. He just held me. Like I already belonged in his arms.
“She’s not involved,” I said more firmly.
“Someone has been trying very hard to take you out. The top three suspects are Valerie, Jenna Love, and your ex.”
I breathed in the scent of him, letting myself go limp in his arms. This man was the oak who could keep me standing.
“It’s not Valerie. And it’s Jenna,” I told him with certainty.
Jenna was an up-and-coming singer who’d shared a few inflammatory thoughts about me on Tik-Tok. But the girl was just chasing fame. She wanted her name linked to mine to raise her popularity. I’d never responded to any of her jabs. Had never even met her.
“That leaves Jimmy.”
I sighed.
It still felt impossible that my soon-to-be-ex could be behind this.
But I couldn’t rule him out as easily as I did the other two suspects.
“What’s your plan to keep me safe?” I asked as I burrowed deeper into his arms.
I shouldn’t be holding my paid protection detail like this, but he started it. Was it my fault that I was having a hard time letting go?
“It means we don’t wait to find out. You stay where I can see you. And I’ll do everything I can to protect you, but you need to stop taking risks. At least until we catch who’s behind this.” His voice was sturdy, and it was impossible not to believe him.
I tipped my chin up to meet his eyes.
Why did it feel so natural to stand here with Bronson’s arms around me?
He stroked my cheek lightly and rumbled, “Your ten minutes are up. Let’s go back inside where it’s safe.”
But right as he finished saying that, a flash of light went off down on the beach, followed by a whole series of them.
Bronson’s grip tightened on me. He yanked me down and crouch-walked me to the sliding door, blocking my body with his.
“Inside. And don’t open the door for anyone.”
While I was still processing what he said, Bronson ran and jumped, clearing the deck railing effortlessly before disappearing from view.
I screamed and ran back to the edge of the deck, peering down into the dark. He’d just jumped off a two-story building.
He yelled back up, “Go inside, Lucy! Now!”
With nerves frayed, I did as he asked, locking the sliding door behind me.
I called 911 and waited for twenty breathless minutes to find out what was happening.
Then Bronson reappeared at my front door, unlocking it with a key I hadn’t given him.
“W-what happened?” I asked as I scanned him. “Are you okay? And how do you have that key?”
He was sandy, and his baseball cap was missing.
But other than that, he didn’t look hurt.
Bronson held up a camera and growled, “It was paparazzi. He won’t be coming back. And Cal’s team made this key when they first came to assess your house for security issues.”
My heart sank.
He was right.
This place wasn’t safe anymore.
That may be why I didn’t fight harder when he announced twenty minutes later that he wasn’t sleeping in the second bedroom.
He pulled out a cot the landlord had provided and set it up a foot away from my bed.
I was too scared to refuse. The closer Bronson got, the safer I felt.