7. Chapter 7
Cole
By the time Sloane and Eli leave, the cottage is quiet in that uneasy way houses get after too many serious people have stood in one room talking about danger. Kara locks the door behind them before I can do it.
She checks the deadbolt once, then looks over her shoulder at me as if expecting me to correct her form or tell her she missed something.
I don’t. The house has already been swept, the locks checked, the exterior walked, the sight lines noted.
She doesn’t need another man turning her temporary safe place into a tactical diagram. Tonight, she needs to breathe.
I set my duffel in the guest room, leaving the door open. It’s just another base, not bedroom. I’ve slept in vehicles, on floors, on rooftops, and once inside a storage closet behind a hotel kitchen because it had the best line of sight to a service entrance.
The room is clean and coastal, too many soft blues and white linens for a man like me, but it will do. Kara stands in the hallway with her phone clutched in one hand.
“I have three missed calls. Five texts. All from Vanessa,” she says softly.
I saw the name earlier. Heard the way Kara said it. Best friend. Safe person. The one she wants to call when the world tilts.
“You can call her,” I say.
Her eyes lift to mine. “Sloane said not to give details.”
“Then don’t give details.”
“That sounds easy when you say it.”
“Most things do.”
Her mouth moves like she almost smiles, but doesn’t quite make it. “I’m going to take it in the bedroom.”
I nod. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
“Not listening?”
“Not unless you scream.”
She lets out a small huff of laughter before she turns away.
I wait until her bedroom door closes before moving back through the main room.
The cottage smells like salt air with something warmer beneath it.
Her, maybe. The place should feel like any other short-term rental I’ve worked out of, but it doesn’t.
The analytical side of me wants to know why.
I’ve had clients in beach houses before.
Wealthy men who thought money was armor.
Actresses hiding from ex-husbands. Executives who wanted discreet protection but still posted enough clues online for any half-trained idiot to find them.
I know how to stand close without getting personal.
How to watch without staring. How to become part of the furniture until trouble walks in and learns it picked the wrong room.
Kara is different. I don’t like different. Different can male men sloppy.
From the bedroom, her voice carries faintly. Not words at first, just tone. She does sound tired, apologetic, but careful. Then clearer.
“I’m okay. I promise.”
A pause.
“No, I can’t really talk about it yet. Local security is handling it.”
Another pause, longer this time.
“I know. I love you too.”
Something in her voice softens on the last sentence, then tightens again immediately after, like love and guilt are braided together.
I turn away from the hall and open one of the kitchen drawers because pretending not to hear is sometimes easier with motion. Utensils. Clean towels. A corkscrew. Rental-house basics arranged too neatly by someone who doesn’t cook much.
The knife block on the counter catches my attention. Cheap rental knives. Lightweight handles. Dull edges. Nothing like the blade in that photo.
Miss You.
The words bother me more than a direct threat would. A threat is honest. Ugly, but straightforward. Miss You is intimate. Possessive. Designed to reach under Kara’s skin and live there. Whoever sent that picture understands her. That’s the part I don’t like.
Kara comes out a few minutes later looking paler than when she went in, but more composed too. Some people fall apart after contact with their safe person. Some patch themselves up because they’re afraid of worrying them more. She looks like the second kind.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “But apparently I can say the words ‘local security’ three times and make Vanessa breathe into a paper bag from two hundred miles away.”
“Did she ask where I was?”
Her eyes fall on me quickly.
“Yes.”
“What did you tell her?”
“That Sloane had someone nearby tonight.”
“Good.”
“She wanted a name.”
“And?”
“I said I was tired and didn’t want to get into details.”
Kara walks into the kitchen, then stops beside the island as if she doesn’t know what to do with her hands.
Her hair is still down from the beach, a little wild around her shoulders, red catching in the warm overhead light.
She has changed into loose linen shorts and a thin sweater that slips off one shoulder whenever she moves.
Bare feet. No makeup I can see. None needed.
My body notices all of it and I immediately blame the long stretch between women.
It has been months. More than months, if I’m honest. Work has a way of eating time clean through without leaving much behind.
A contract overseas. A maritime job off the Keys.
A week helping Sloane with a private event that turned into three weeks because rich people attract problems the way open sugar attracts ants.
Women have existed in theory. Not in my bed or looking at me with tired green eyes and a mouth that says sharp things when she’s afraid.
That’s all this is. Biology combined with proximity and timing.
A beautiful woman in distress and a man who hasn’t touched anyone in longer than he wants to calculate. It’s really simple when I analyze it. Except nothing about Kara feels simple.
She inhales suddenly and looks around the kitchen. “I need to make something.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
I wait and watch as she presses both hands flat on the island. “If I don’t do something with my hands, I’m going to crawl out of my skin.”
That I understand.
“Cook,” I say.
Her gaze moves to the knife block, then away. I cross to my duffel without making a thing of it and pull out the folding knife I keep for utility work. Then I stop, because handing a woman a tactical blade after she got a photo of her stolen chef’s knife is not my finest idea.
“I can chop,” I say instead.
She stares at me for half a second, then laughs. I can already feel the mood changing in the cottage.
“You can chop?”
“I can follow directions.”
“That sounds dangerously close to confidence.”
“It’s not. It’s discipline.”
“Even worse.”
She opens the refrigerator and starts pulling out groceries. Shrimp. Greens. Lemons. A small bundle of herbs. Good bread from a market bag. The items land on the counter one by one, and with each movement, Kara becomes less client and more woman.
Then, I see the chef appear. Her shoulders settle. Her breathing evens. She washes her hands, rolls up her sleeves, and starts issuing instructions like she has every right to command the world.
“Rinse those greens. Dry them well. If you bruise them, I’ll know.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “Don’t ma’am me unless you want me to make you peel garlic with a butter knife.”
I take the greens to the sink. “Understood.”
I wash greens and try not to watch her too much. I fail. Kara moves through the kitchen differently than she moves through fear. Earlier, she was careful with every step, every glance.
Here, she is fluid and precise. Heat in a pan, oil shimmering, garlic crushed beneath the flat side of a cheap knife she handles with the resignation of a surgeon forced to use plastic scissors.
She tastes with instinct, adjusts without measuring, turns basic groceries into something that makes the entire cottage smell like citrus, butter, salt, and comfort.
I’ve been hungry before. This is different.
“You’re staring,” she says without looking up.
“Observing.”
“Bodyguard word for staring?”
“Sometimes.”
She glances at me then, and the look should be illegal. Tired, amused, still frightened around the edges, but alive. Very much alive.
“You really don’t cook?” she asks.
“I grill.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is my answer.”
“Cole.”
“I can cook enough not to die.”
“Survival isn’t the same as flavor.”
I remember her saying it on the beach, toes in wet sand.
“I’m starting to understand that,” I say.
Something shifts in her facial expression. Am I mistaking it for attraction. Whatever that look was, it’s small and fast, gone almost immediately. But I see it.
My job is to keep her safe, not flirt over shrimp and greens in a beach cottage while someone out there has her knife and her phone number.
I step back from the counter. Distance is useful.
Kara plates the food, two servings without asking if I want one. She sets mine in front of me with toasted bread angled against the shrimp like she can’t help making things beautiful.
“Eat,” she says.
I do. The first bite shuts me up.
Lemon, garlic, herbs, heat, sweetness from the shrimp, bite from the greens, bread crisp enough to catch the sauce. I’ve eaten in embassies, on yachts, in private clubs with menus designed by men who used tweezers like weapons. This is better.
Kara watches my face with more vulnerability than she probably knows.
“Well?”
I swallow. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I understand the difference now.”
Her expression softens so suddenly I want to take the words back, not because they’re false, but because I don’t know what to do with that softness when it’s aimed at me.
“Good,” she says softly.
We eat standing at the island because neither of us suggests sitting. Outside, night presses against the covered windows. The ocean keeps moving beyond the glass, steady and indifferent. Inside, the cottage holds the smell of food and something new I don’t trust yet.
When she reaches for my empty plate, I catch myself wanting to stop her. Not because of the plate. Because I want her hand near mine. That is a problem. I let her take the plate.
After we clean up, she looks smaller somehow, energy spent, adrenaline gone. “I think I can sleep now.”
“I’ll be awake for a while.”
“You don’t have to …”
“I do.”
Her protest dies before it forms.
She nods and starts toward the bedroom, then pauses near the hall. “Cole?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for not treating me like I’m fragile.”
I think of the way she steadied herself with a pan in her hand, the way fear trembled through her and still didn’t stop her from feeding both of us.
“You’re not fragile,” I say.
Her throat moves.
“No,” she whispers. “I don’t think I am.”
She disappears into the bedroom and closes the door softly. I stand in the kitchen for a long moment after she’s gone, staring at nothing. Then I check my phone. One message from Sloane.
Number’s a burner. Rafi’s digging. Don’t get stupid.
I almost smile. That order may have come too late. Somewhere between the beach, the knife photo, and lemon-garlic shrimp, this woman has stopped feeling like an assignment. That’s the kind of gap a man like me cannot afford. Not with her.
I turn off the kitchen light and take up position where I can see the hall, the front door, and the shadowed edge of the porch. Peace can wait. Sleep can too.