Chapter 12
I wake with the sun streaming through my bedroom windows and a headache that feels like someone is tap-dancing across my skull. The sleep I managed to steal last night was fractured and unsatisfying, my dreams riddled with storm-cloud eyes and rough hands.
Okay… maybe it wasn’t entirely unsatisfying.
Half awake, I grab my phone from the nightstand. It’s barely seven in the morning and I have no less than twenty missed calls and texts.
JAKE
What kind of PR stunt is this?
Call me, Devyn.
LESLIE
Who’s the silver fox?
I click the link in her next text and immediately regret it.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I snarl, tossing the phone and hastily sliding out of bed.
After throwing on a silk robe over my sleep shorts and tank top, I grab my iPad from my nightstand and shove my phone into my pocket.
My body moves on autopilot, toward the scent of coffee and the sound of chatter in the kitchen. Toward the source of my anger.
All four of the men I was convinced to hire are scattered around the marble island.
Hawk is nursing a mug of coffee and reading on his tablet.
Damon sits beside him, his expression unreadable as his thumbs tap the screen of his phone.
Jagger is leaning against the island, shoveling cereal into his mouth with the enthusiasm of a teenager, milk dripping from his spoon.
Their eyes lift to me when I storm into the room.
All of them except for Gunnar. He is standing with his back to me, pouring coffee into a mug that looks comically small in his massive hands.
He’s wearing gray sweatpants, slung low on his hips, and a white T-shirt that is straining across his shoulders.
His hair is still damp from the shower, but the silver at his temples catches the morning light filtering through the window.
With an iPad clutched firmly in my hand, I cross the room silently. Almost reaching him, I toss the tablet onto the countertop beside the coffee pot. It slides across the polished stone, spinning slightly before coming to rest in front of Gunnar.
“Are you fucking happy?” My voice cracks as it echoes through the room.
Gunnar doesn’t even flinch at my outburst. With an infuriating amount of calmness, he finishes pouring his coffee before setting the carafe back in its place and pivoting to face me.
“Good morning to you, too.” He takes a leisurely sip of his black coffee, and when he pulls the mug back from his lips, I catch the faintest tinge of a smile.
It disappears as he sets his cup on the counter.
He lifts the tablet and swipes it open with a controlled patience that makes me want to scream.
The screen is a mosaic of chaos. Twenty open tabs—maybe more—each one a different shade of disaster. TMZ. People. E! Online, and every gossip columnist in LA is running variations of the same story.
Devyn Martin: From Colton Cross to Caveman
Who is the mystery man carrying Devyn Martin?
Forget Colton Cross! Who’s The Silver Fox?
Devyn Martin Swept Off Her Feet, Literally
The photos of us are everywhere. Me, upside down and slung over his shoulder. My dress riding up. His hand on my ass. My hair almost covering my flushed, furious face.
“I’m the fucking laughingstock of Hollywood.” The words tear out of me, raw and ragged. I can feel the tears of frustration building behind my eyes, drops I refuse to shed.
Gunnar’s expression is unreadable as he scrolls through the tabs. His thumb moves with mechanical precision, flicking from one disaster to the next. When he looks up at me, his gray eyes are flat and cold.
“Do you have any idea what this is going to do to my image? My brand? I’ve spent years cultivating a certain aesthetic, a certain persona, and now I’m—”
“Had you not been a little brat and actually listened,” he states matter-of-factly, enunciating each word with surgical precision, “none of that would have happened.”
I stare at him, my mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping for water. “You’re saying this is my fault?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” He sets the iPad down with a sharp clack. “You made a choice. You chose to violate protocol, take a restricted vehicle, and go to a public location without security. You chose to put yourself in that position. I simply chose to extract you from it.”
“Extract me?” My voice has climbed an octave, becoming shrill and unrecognizable. “You carried me out of a restaurant! You—”
“Protected you?” he interrupts, stepping closer until he’s crowding my space and flooding my nostrils with his strong, woodsy cologne.
“That’s what you hired us to do. And if that means carrying you out of a dangerous situation like a child throwing a tantrum, then that’s what I’ll do. Every. Single. Time.”
My heart hammers against my ribcage, and I struggle to breathe as I stare up at him, the air suddenly so thick it could be cut with a knife.
“Actually,” Jagger’s amused voice cuts through the tension of the room as he peruses the tablet, “the article isn’t even really about you.
According to People, the public is way more interested in finding out who the hot silver fox is.
” Scrolling with one finger, he reads out loud.
“Apparently, the ladies are really turned on by his ‘Woman, mine,’ caveman behavior.”
He drops his voice into a deep register, doing a passable imitation of Gunnar’s gravelly tone, and pounds his chest with one fist. “Me Gunnar. You Devyn. Me carry. You like.”
“Fuck off, Jagger.” Gunnar hisses, not bothering to look at him.
I glance from Jagger to Gunnar and find his gaze still fixed on me.
His stormy eyes bore through me, and I see what the articles are talking about.
The lines around his eyes that speak of experience and sleepless nights.
The morning light makes the silver threading through his dark hair more prominent.
Yet, even at his age, it is clear that, beneath the shirt stretched across his chest, is a wall of muscle.
He is a silver fox.
Gunnar is undeniably attractive. He’s one of the hottest older men I’ve ever met. And that’s saying a lot, since I live in fucking Hollywood. I roll my eyes, forcing a dismissive expression. “He’s not even that good-looking.”
“Liar,” Jagger singsongs, giving me a wink before nudging Gunnar with his elbow, both with a reckless abandon that makes me wonder how he’s made it this far in life. “Way to go, Dad. You are trending on social media. You are officially a DILF.”
“Jagger,” Gunnar admonishes, his voice low and dangerous as he gives him a warning.
“What? I’m just saying what the internet is saying.
As weird and gross as it is, the ladies love you.
They’re all over the comments section, talking about how they’d love to be manhandled by you.
And…” He trails off, cocking an amused brow before his eyes flit from the screen to me as he clears his throat.
“And other things I probably shouldn’t say in mixed company. ”
My phone rings. The sound is jarring, cutting through Jagger’s commentary and Gunnar’s simmering rage. I scramble uncomfortably to yank it from the pocket of my robe. Leslie’s name flashes across the screen when I pull it free.
“Great,” I grumble, swiping to answer. “Now I have to deal with this.”
I huff out of the kitchen, desperate to put air and distance between us. I need to be far away from Gunnar’s stormy eyes so I can ignore the way my entire body seems to hum with awareness whenever they’re focused on me.
“Dev?” Leslie’s voice bursts through the speaker before I make it to the living room. “You’re awake. Did you get my texts? Have you seen the tabloids?”
I collapse onto the couch, staring at the ceiling and the prisms of light dancing across it from the crystal chandelier. “Yes,” I exhale on a heavy sigh, closing my eyes. “I’ve seen them.”
The silence on the other end is ominous, and I know she’s upset.
She’s been with me through bad breakups and worse movies.
She held my hand through a scandal in my early twenties, thanks to a very out-of-context photograph of me leaving a married co-star’s hotel room.
Leslie carefully constructed my reinvention, creating Devyn Martin, the movie star.
She doesn’t do silence. She does strategy.
“Leslie?” I prompt, my stomach tying into knots. “It’s bad, isn’t it? Just… Just tell me how bad.”
“I’ve been fielding phone calls all morning,” she shares.
Her tone is strange. Instead of sounding annoyed or upset, she’s excited.
Almost breathless. “Talk shows. Magazines. Everyone is calling with requests for interviews. And they all want to know one thing, Dev. They want to know who the mystery man is.”
I jolt upright, my eyes springing open. “What?”
“Who is he?” Leslie’s voice rises, taking on a manic energy she gets when she smells an opportunity.
“The public is absolutely obsessed. The photos are everywhere. You’re trending on Twitter, and everyone wants to know about him.
Who is this guy who carried you out of the restaurant?
The hot guy with the arms, the jaw, and the—”
“He’s one of the new bodyguards,” I interrupt, not wanting to hear where this is going.
“Well,” Leslie purrs, “he could guard my body.”
“Leslie!”
She laughs, a rich, full-bellied, delighted sound. “Oh, come on. Tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
I open my mouth to deny it, insist that I hate him, and that the only thing I feel when I look at Gunnar is annoyance and disdain. But I can’t, because I have thought about it—briefly when he first arrived and constantly since last night.
How could you not think about a guy who looks at you like he wants to devour you whole?
My thoughts are consumed with his hands, that deep, gravelly voice, and the way he makes me feel both small and safe when he towers over me.
“He’s insufferable,” I exhale. It’s true… even if it’s not the whole truth.
“Yeah,” Leslie drawls, clearly not believing me for a second. “Based on the photo TMZ posted, the smile on your face is screaming how much you hate him.”
“What photo?” I ask, already scrambling to open the TMZ app. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t smiling. I was furious. I was—”
The photo loads, stealing my entire train of thought.
It’s not one of the ones where I’m upside down with my hair swinging and my dress riding up to a dangerously risqué territory.
Nor is it one of the images with me pounding my fists against his back.
It’s the moment after, when he dropped me into the passenger seat of my Aston Martin.
I’m looking up at him, my face tilted toward his, and my expression is undeniably a smile.
It’s not a big toothy grin, but I am clearly pleased.
My eyes are bright, and my lips are curved.
I look like a woman who is exactly where she wants to be, getting manhandled by a towering brute.
“Dev?” Leslie’s voice is distant and tinny. “You still there?”
“Yeah,” I breathe, scrolling to the next photo before making my way through the entire gallery.
There are tons of them. The paparazzi were more than thorough, capturing every moment of exit from every imaginable angle.
As I scroll, I see things I missed before.
Details I was too angry—and humiliated—to notice before.
I had thought that his hand on my ass was a grope. That he was taking liberties and using the situation to touch me inappropriately. But looking at the photos of me slung over his shoulder, the placement of his fingers and tension in his forearm weren’t to cop a feel.
The silk dress barely covered me when I was standing upright.
Upside down, it would have pooled around my hips, exposing my underwear—or worse—to the cameras, but Gunnar held my dress down.
His large hand spans the curve of my ass, pinning the fabric in place, while his muscular forearm shields me from the kind of photos that would have ended up on porn sites before midnight.
He might have been a caveman, but he was also a gentleman.
“Dev?” Leslie sounds more concerned. “You okay?”
“Yeah… uh… I have to go,” I whisper, my throat tight.
“Wait! We need to talk strategy. The public is eating this up. We could leverage this, make it work for us. A little mystery, a little romance: the brooding bodyguard and the movie star—”
“I’ll call you back.”
Hanging up before she can protest, my thumb hovers over the screen, my gaze fixed on the photo where his palm cradles me with such careful possession.
He protected my modesty. While I was screaming at him, hitting him, and calling him names, he was making sure the world didn’t see more than I wanted to show.
I keep scrolling, my heart racing a little faster with each swipe, and I find a video from someone who captured the whole thing on their phone.
I watch myself disappear over his shoulder.
When he adjusts his grip, his free hand comes up to steady my legs, to keep me from slipping and make sure I’m safe even while I’m fighting him.
The video continues as he deposits me into the car.
When he reaches across me for the seatbelt, his face inches from mine, I watch myself smile.
And for the first time, I see his reaction to it.
His face shifts, the corner of his mouth twitching, like he’s fighting the urge to smile back at me.
His eyes drop to my lips, and I can feel the electricity between us for a brief moment before he pulls away.
My pulse racing, I set my phone down on the couch beside me, the video paused at the second the seatbelt clicks, staring up at me.
With his hands on me and the expressions on our faces, we look like something out of a movie.
The realization of what I’m looking at hits me like a physical blow, stealing my breath.
I like the controlling, overbearing neanderthal…
And judging by the way he’s looking back at me, the feeling is mutual.