Chapter Twenty-Five
D amian smiled, but he didn’t say anything as he helped me into the Escalade. Walking in front of the vehicle, I watched him do what he did almost constantly. He scanned his surroundings. He did it whenever we went outside. He did it whenever we went anywhere. He did it every time he walked into a room. He even did it while he drove. His unrelenting vigilance and awareness of his surroundings was so constant, I was sure he did it even when he was not with a client.
He got behind the wheel and started the SUV, then he scanned the rearview mirrors. Throwing the vehicle in drive, he looked over his shoulder then pulled away from the curb. “You’re staring.”
I instantly averted my gaze. “My apologies.”
He gave me half a laugh. “I don’t mind you looking, sweetheart, but this wasn’t that. What’s on your mind?”
I didn’t tell him I was wondering about his time in the military, or about the sacrifices he’d made protecting his country before he’d entered the personal protection business. I didn’t ask if it was his experiences in the Middle East that’d made him hyperaware.
I said the first non-prying thing that came to mind. “You and your brothers all look alike.” They were all tall, muscular, and dark haired. There features varied slightly, and their eye colors were not all the same, but you knew immediately they were brothers. They all resembled his mother, but clearly they’d gotten their height from their father. Damian was the most handsome, but his brothers held their own.
He glanced at me sideways, and his eyes narrowed. “You checking out my brothers? ”
“What? No.” Embarrassment heated my face. “Of course not.”
He took my hand and put it on his thigh. “Just checking.” He winked.
Feeling his hard muscles under my fingers, having his masculine scent surround me in the confines of the car, it made awareness zing through my body and center in my core. The pull of this man was undoing me at the seams. My self-imposed exile into singlehood, an exile I’d made into a religion, was being singularly destroyed by a warrior turned protector with a heart-stopping smile.
Except I no longer knew how to act around him, or what to say, and a part of me was shell-shocked. I had never truly understood the term until this man entered my presence. It was as if he’d woken me up and shown me everything I was missing, but then left out the directions on how to embrace it. It was simultaneously terrifying and intoxicating.
I loved how his voice spoke to me more than his words. How his touch caressed more than my skin, and how his gaze traveled farther in to my heart than distant memories of what my mother smelled like. Everything about him made me feel… more.
“I feel more than the muscles of your thigh under my hand while I am touching you.” I no longer cared what was appropriate to say in front of him, or what wasn’t. I felt connected to him.
His hand closed back over mine. “Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
He nodded as if he understood. “Risk assessment.”
I didn’t pretend to not understand his cryptic response. “You’re a great risk.” Maybe the greatest I would ever take.
He squeezed my hand. “Seems to me you already took that risk. Why not let it play out?”
“And then what?” What happened when he tired of the idea of bedding a princess? The thought had been plaguing me since he’d taken me on my desk, and I kept pushing it down, but I could no longer ignore it.
He glanced at me, his blue eyes dark in passing street lights. “Then we have babies and live happily ever after.” His smile was disarming .
“Are you teasing me?”
He sobered. “No, not at all.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I didn’t say anything.
We drove in silence a few minutes as he scanned the streets and rearview mirrors.
“The truth?” he asked, not casually.
“Always.” Maybe.
“I never cared about a woman before. I always went in knowing I wasn’t gonna stick around. I never made promises. I never wanted to. I also never cared whether a woman was going to be there when the sun came up. I never even considered it.” He glanced at me, his eyebrows drawn together as if assessing me for a reaction.
When I gave none, he went on.
“I started thinking about that sun coming up the second I laid eyes on you. Then when I got inside you? It wasn’t about the sunrise anymore.”
“What was it about?” I dared to ask, dared to hope, as I sat still, staring straight ahead.
“Making you mine.”
Three words. Innocuous on their own, but strung together, they were more powerful than the bomb that exploded my car. My heart leapt, my stomach fluttered, and a certainty that I could not walk away from him coursed through my veins.
“It hurt when my mother passed,” I admitted, returning the brutal honesty he’d just given to me. “I was too young to understand what I was promising myself in that devastating first night without her, but I made the promise all the same.” I glanced at his handsome profile, and my body remembered every second of him inside me. “I swore to myself that I wasn’t ever going to love like that again.” I didn’t want to. It hurt too much.
Bringing my hand to his chest, placing it on his heart and holding it there, he gave me something no one ever had. “I promise I won’t ever let you hurt like that again. Not at my hands.”
“Damian— ”
“This is real, Calandra. As real as it gets.” He turned onto my street.
“This is crazy.” As crazy as it gets.
“Marriages, lifetimes of happiness, they’ve been based on less.”
Marriages. Not relationships, not sex, not casual— marriages .
He pulled up to my gate, and two men in the Luna and Associates uniforms of black polo shirts and black cargo pants were working on the security pad. Damian tipped his chin at one and he nodded back a second before the gate swung open.
Marriages .
Damian pulled up my driveway.
I wasn’t thinking stalkers and letters and car bombs and art. I was thinking lifetime. Permanence. Security. Love. Stability. Damian .
Sawyer was at the car before Damian had it in park. My door was opened, his hand was on his weapon, his eyes were everywhere and he barked a single word. “ Protocol .”
I was whisked from my seat as Damian ran around the vehicle, his eyes suddenly everywhere. His weapon drawn, he flanked me the second my feet hit the ground and two men each took my arm.
“Collins, patrol,” Damian clipped.
I was inside my house faster than I could blink.
The heavy wooden front door thunked shut behind us, and Sawyer held out an envelope.
An envelope I knew well.
Oh God .
Sawyer’s intent gaze met Damian’s. “Just showed up outside her office door at the back of the house. I was doing a patrol of the front of the property.”
Damian started toward the back of the house, but stopped when Sawyer spoke again.
“Already checked,” Sawyer clipped. “He’s gone.”
My breath hitched.
My heart shifted .
Everything I wasn’t thinking flooded back in. Hope fled, and I was drowning.
“ Fuck ,” Damian growled, his voice sounding like it was coming though a distant speaker. “The salt smell. He’s coming by water. Did you fucking check?”
“Twice. Whoever it was is gone.”
“How long before we have the cameras up and running out back?”
“Two days.”
“Tell them to get it done tonight.”
They kept talking. Approach and boundaries and security and slipping through and none of it registered. I stared at the letter in my hands.
I was opening it before either of them noticed.
I was unfolding the paper when my name was barked in warning.
“ Calandra .”
I didn’t have to read the note.
It was only two words.
And they stood out like the brightest of sunrises a warrior-turned-bodyguard had just told me about.
Two words.
One threat.
Be ready.
Fear took my balance.
The letter was stripped from my hands and a strong arm was around me, pulling me into a solid chest as a deep voice rumbled against my cheek. “You’re okay, sweetheart. You’re okay. Nothing’s gonna happen to you. Not on our watch.” His hand stroked my back, his voice was meant to soothe, but his muscles were stiff.
I said nothing.
Pulling his phone out, still holding me, he dialed. “I need those backgrounds now. Filter the list of potentials to anyone with a boat, or connections to the docks, water, ocean, marina, anything like that. Fuck, add a naval background. Get back to me ASAP.” He hung up.
Collins came down the hallway from the back of the house. “Clear. ”
I could feel the heat of anger rise in Damian, and it only fueled my fear.
Sawyer’s eyes cut to mine, then he looked at Damian. “Take care of her. We’ll cover patrols.” He walked off, and Collins followed.
I didn’t notice there was no staff in my house.
I didn’t remember being walked upstairs and to my bedroom.
I didn’t appreciate the soft carpet or familiar scent of fresh roses in the vase by my bed.
But I noticed the strongly muscled man who was over six feet tall case every window and check all four doors to the balcony. I noticed how he stalked like a lion and radiated raw power like a warrior. I watched as he closed curtains I never used to close and secured windows I never used to check.
I saw the gun at his waist as he squatted in front of me.
“Would you?” I asked.
“Would I what?” He slipped off one of my shoes, then the other.
“Shoot him.”
Blue eyes the color of a stormy sea looked up at me. “Without hesitation.”
Fragments of the conversation we’d left unfinished filtered in, muddying the hope I’d let myself feel earlier. “Do you want children?”
“Yes.” He didn’t smile. He didn’t hesitate. His stare didn’t waver. “Do you?”
“Children are a gift.” That much I knew.
He stood, taking me with him. “Not much of a direct answer.” He took the hem of my soft dress in his rough hands. “Arms up.”
I lifted my arms. “I am out of answers.” Nothing made sense, none of it. Not this stalker, not why he’d picked me, not why this man undressing me wanted me.
He smiled. “I forgive you.” He lifted my dress over my head.
Cold, air-conditioned air hit my skin. “I am not asking forgiveness.”
His smile dropped, and he took my face in his hands. “You’re going to be okay. ”
“This whole house could blow up,” I whispered, letting the fear of the car bomb bleed out like an open wound. “We could be dead in an instant.”
For three whole heartbeats he said nothing.
Then he gave me his brand of honesty.
“If that happened, there’s no one I’d rather die with, Princess.”
I sucked in a breath.
His thumb stroked my cheek. “Would it comfort you to know we wouldn’t feel it?”
“Is that what you told yourself when you were in the military?”
Honest blue eyes stared at me. “Yes.”
“Did it work?”
“Fear is a useful tool, but yes, an instant death void of pain would be a preferable way to go.”
“Preferable would be falling asleep in old age next to the one you love after a life well lived.” We had very different definitions of preferable.
He smiled, but not like any time he’d smiled at me before. This smile, it was different. The corners of his mouth tipping up softened his expression, and his eyes filled with an emotion I couldn’t understand. Uncomfortable with the intensity of his expression, with this conversation, with the turn my life had taken, with his sheer magnetism, I shifted.
“Don’t.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t pull back from me now. This is real. This is us. We get to talk about anything. You get to ask about anything. We get to be ourselves.”
“I’m too nervous to be myself around you.”
He smiled wide. “No, you’re not. That’s why I smiled. You didn’t hold back just now. You didn’t break under the weight of stress. You bent.”
“I swayed, drastically,” I corrected. In the foyer, I’d almost lost my balance.
“Sweetheart, if that’s a drastic sway for you, I’m even more in awe of you. ”
Familiar heat rushed to my cheeks, a heat I’d not known I’d had until I met him. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“You’re not going to die,” he whispered back. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
I opened my mouth to protest, and his finger touched my lips.
“I already know that look in your eyes. Take my promise, and let it be. I mean it, and you need to sleep now.” He reached behind my back and undid my bra.
For a split second, I forgot about the newest letter and the security men outside my house and Nikolas’s lack of presence. For a split second, all I was thinking about was this man’s hands on my skin. The way he’d touched me earlier like he couldn’t get enough. The way he was touching me now, gently sliding my bra down my arms, running his hands over my shoulders, my back, like I was precious to him. But I wanted more. I needed more right now.
“I want to feel you again,” I breathed, pleading for anything and everything he could give me.
“I’m gonna hold you all night, sweetheart.” He put his gun on the nightstand and pulled his shirt over his head.
Frustration licked at my nerves. “That’s not what I meant.”
He chuckled quietly. “I know, baby, but that’s what you’re getting. As much as I’m dying to get back inside that sweet body of yours, I’m not gonna do that tonight.”
Forgetting I was naked, I pouted like a child. “Why not?”
He unbuckled his belt as he stepped out of his boots. Dropping his pants and stepping out of them so that he was left only in fitted boxers that made my mouth water, he took my face again. “You need time to heal.”
I knew I’d bled a little. But it was only a little, and the pain of my core pulsing around emptiness right now was a hundred times worse than when he’d entered me. “I’m fine.”
The different smile came back. “I know you are, but do me a favor? ”
I didn’t hold back the sigh I would’ve never let escape under any circumstance before I’d met him. “What?”
“Let me hold you.”
I couldn’t argue with that. And I didn’t want to simply because I’d gone from thinking I would live my life alone, to overnight not wanting to disappoint the man who made me feel more secure and more hopeful than I’d ever felt.
Misinterpreting my silence, he smiled again. “I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
Hiding the heat that touched my cheeks, I crawled into bed.
Without a word, as if it were as natural as breathing, he turned out the lights then got in behind me and pulled my back to his chest.
Wrapping his huge arms around me, taking my hand in his, his lips found the spot between my neck and my shoulder. “You feel so fucking perfect in my arms, beautiful.” His exhale was half growl, half contentment. “And you smell like heaven. There’s nothing about this moment I don’t want to get used to.”
“Me either,” I whispered, stifling a yawn as my heavy-lidded eyes fluttered shut.
“That’s it, my tired girl.” He kissed me once more then settled into me. “Relax and sleep, baby. I got you.”
The day caught up to me, and my body melted into his.
Shockingly, I fell fast asleep.