Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CLOVER
Three days of living with Valen Stone, and I’ve learned several important things.
One, he’s a morning person. An aggressively cheerful morning person who wakes up at five a.m. and does push-ups in my living room like some kind of fitness magazine cover model while whistling an ear-piercing tune.
Whistling!
The grumpy, straight-faced bodyguard has turned into a whistle-while-you-work wake-up call.
Two, he cannot cook. At all. The man can apparently disarm a bomb but burns toast with alarming regularity.
Three, he sleeps in boxer briefs and nothing else, which is information I accidentally learned one night while trying to sneak into the kitchen for a drink and now cannot unknow. Ever.
And four, I’m entirely, utterly, hopelessly in danger of losing my heart completely and forever.
“Morning,” he says when I stumble into my kitchen with bedhead, morning breath, and pillow creases on my cheek that no amount of pinching would get rid of. “I made breakfast.”
I eye the smoking toaster with suspicion and tug on the tie of my weighted robe. “Did you though?”
“Ah…” He scratches the back of his neck. “I made an attempt at breakfast.”
Dang. He could disarm bank robbers with that grin alone.
“That seems…more accurate.” I rescue the charred bread before my smoke alarm goes off. Again. “How do you burn toast? I even lowered the setting after yesterday’s…episode.”
“In my defense, your toaster is temperamental.”
“My toaster is fine. You’re just—” I gesture in his general direction, but his sleep-rumpled hair, the bare chest, those ridiculous abs that have no business existing on a real human are messing with my morning brain fog. “You’re distracting.”
The words slip out before I can stop them.
His smile turns absolutely wicked. “Distracting? Distracting how?”
“I meant, distracted. You’re distracted. By—by security concerns.” I’m babbling now. “And Chief. And Wrecks.” Who chooses that moment to waltz into the kitchen. “Gah! He’s eating your shoe again.”
Valen spins to find Wrecks enthusiastically destroying what was once a very expensive running shoe.
“That’s the third one this week,” he mutters, rescuing what’s left of the sneaker. “I’m going to run out of shoes before we figure out what he has against my feet.”
“Maybe he’s jealous.” I pour coffee into two mugs, adding cream to mine and leaving his black because he enjoys it when his coffee strips away all his taste buds on the way down. “You do spend a lot of time walking.”
“I do perimeter checks.”
“You pace,” I say. “There’s a difference.”
He accepts the coffee, and even though I try to avoid contact, his fingers brush mine, and a thrill of longing races up my arm. We’ve been doing this dance for days—small touches that linger, eye contact that makes my skin heat, moments that feel almost…meaningful.
He fights it. I see how his jaw tightens when he catches himself standing too close. The way he takes a deliberate step back after every accidental touch. He’s great at masking his feelings, but some reactions you can’t hide.
Like the way his eyes darken the moment they land on me, or how his breath catches the instant our skin touches. He’s holding himself on a leash so tight it must be suffocating.
Part of me wants to tell him it’s okay. The other part of me is terrified of what happens when he lets go.
It’s messing with the little inner peace I possess. Every time he’s near, my body ramps up, anticipating his touch, his scent, his voice. He’s sensory overload in an aggressive sexually charged form.
“I don’t pace,” he says, his lips curling at the corners.
“You absolutely pace. Every night. Living room to kitchen to front door. Then you check the locks, the windows, and the back door before you head to the couch and repeat the process.”
“That’s not pacing, that’s—”
“Security theater?”
His lips twitch. “You’ve been talking to Roman.”
Over his shoulder, something in the window catches my attention.
Movement, maybe, at the tree line of my property.
My hand freezes with my coffee cup halfway to my lips, and I quickly steady my hold so I don’t burn myself.
When I look back at the window, there’s nothing. Just shadows and early morning mist.
Valen, noticing my hesitation, silently follows my gaze while I track his hand that drifts to his waistband.
Did he see something too?
When he doesn’t comment, I convince myself that I’m once again imagining things. Fear invading reality is not uncommon for me, especially when I’m stressed, and the last thing I need is for Valen to witness just how bad my paranoia can be, so I steer us toward safer topics.
“Roman has opinions about your habits,” I say.
He casts one more glance out the window before giving me his full attention. “Roman needs to mind his own busi—”
Someone pounds on the front door hard enough to rattle the frame, and Valen immediately positions himself between me and the door, his hand once again sliding down his back to the gun he has tucked into his waistband.
But this morning he’s only wearing jeans, no belt. How does the gun stay there? It looks heavy… Would he let me hold it? I lean back to really study his…form. Is he even wearing underwear? I think if his jeans dipped a quarter of an inch I’d see—
“Relax,” he says, having no idea I was so distracted I forgot to panic. “I recognize that annoying knocking pattern. That’s the Harrington Mayhem Brigade.”
“The what?”
I follow him as he stomps to the front door and unlocks all three of my deadbolts.
Grant, Chase, and Sterling spill into my house like a tornado of expensive cologne and confidence.
“Morning!” Chase is also a cheery golden retriever in the morning. He holds up grocery bags and turns up the wattage on his grin. “We brought reinforcements.” One of the bags spills open. “Well, mostly. Pothole took a bite out of this one.”
“It’s seven in the morning,” Valen says flatly.
“Is it?” Sterling checks his watch with exaggerated surprise. “Huh. So it is.”
“We’re going to teach you to make Mom’s biscuits,” Grant adds, heading straight for my kitchen. “Chief says you’ve been setting off fire alarms multiple times a day.”
“I can cook,” Valen protests. “I just…don’t always do it well.”
He looks at me for help, but I shrug. We’re not at the point in our relationship where I’ll lie for him. My cheeks heat because I know that’s the lie here.
“And you.” Chase points at me while unpacking the ingredients onto my counter. “You subsist on tea, coffee, chocolate, and whatever hasn’t expired in your fridge. Chief ratted you out.”
He winks, and I can’t help my smile even though I’m pretty sure he just insulted me.
“They do this,” Valen explains. “Show up. Take over. Reorganize your life whether you want them to or not.”
“It’s our love language,” Sterling says, pulling out measuring cups I didn’t know I owned. “Now, Clover. Have you ever made biscuits from scratch?”
“No?” I’m not sure where to even look.
“Perfect. Today, you’ll both learn.” Grant ties an apron around his waist—an actual apron he must’ve brought with him that says Kiss the Cook—and transforms himself into some kind of Southern grandma.
“Valen used to know, so this will hopefully just be a refresher for him. It’s our mom’s secret recipe. ”
“I don’t—”
“You burned toast, Valen,” Chase says. “Multiple times. Then you set Clover’s microwave on fire.”
“You did what?” I gasp, running to the microwave and opening it but not seeing any signs of damage.
“Chief has a big mouth,” Valen mutters. “I replaced it while you were writing. Walmart is a fucking nightmare at lunchtime, by the way.”
“Chief cares about proper nutrition,” Grant corrects. He’s so…stiff. It’s funny to see him this way. “Now, wash your hands. Both of you. We’re making memories.”
What follows is possibly the most chaotic hour of my adult life.
“You have to cut the butter into pea-sized pieces,” Sterling reads from an index card.
“Not like that.” Grant mutters under his breath as if he’s Gordon Ramsay.
Chase steals a medieval-looking tool that Grant was using to “cut butter” into his flour, which somehow results in Sterling chasing Chase around the island.
And Valen—
After my fourth failed attempt at cutting butter into proper flour nuggets, Valen cages me in with his strong arms. His chest presses into my back, his breath warm at my ear as he murmurs instructions.
I feel him hesitate—feel the moment he realizes how close we are, how easy it would be to turn this into something else if not for the Harrington Mayhem Brigade.
His hands flex on mine, and for one breathless second, I think he’s going to pull away. Instead, he leans closer.
“Like this, Honeybee.”
My mouth is so dry I can’t swallow.
Valen’s body flexes behind me—just for a second—before his breathing turns shallow.
“I…” His voice is distant, strange. “I’ve done this before. I was helping you with something. Dough? No…clay. We were making something out of clay, and you couldn’t quite…your arms wouldn’t reach high enough, and I…”
When I glance up at him, he’s blinking hard.
I want him to finish. To remember the rest of that moment, but his eyes glaze over, and I know the memory is lost.
I catch Sterling’s eye, and I can almost feel the disappointment in his expression too.
Valen presses his arms into my sides, and when he speaks again, his voice is rough. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
“It’s okay.” I want to bawl like a baby though—I’d forgotten that not all memories of my childhood were bad, but every single good one included Valen.
“Um, like this?” I squish the dough between my fingers, giving us both something else to focus on because my brain cells have evacuated in favor of screaming abort, abort, proximity alert.
I’ve spent too much time with bodyguards lately. Not even the characters in my novels are ever this cheesy.