My Brooding Boss (Eidolon Nights #4)

Chapter 1 Runaway Under

Fireworks

Delilah

The shuttle door opens and I run.

No shoes. No plan. Just the dress bunched in my fists and the veil ripping free behind me as my feet hit the pavement.

The crowd swallows me instantly tourists, families, kids with sparklers and I let it. I push through elbows and lawn chairs and the thick, sweet smoke of someone's grill, and I don't look back.

I can't look back.

The lakefront is chaos. 4th of July chaos, the best kind, the kind where one more frantic woman in a wedding dress might just look like a very committed bit.

No one stops me.

I don't know what I'm doing. I knew that the moment I stood at the back of that chapel and felt the walls close in like something living. Graham was already at the altar. Everyone was smiling that tight, expectant smile the one that means don't you dare disappoint us.

And I couldn't breathe. I just couldn't.

So, I grabbed my veil off the pew and I walked out the side door and I got on the first shuttle headed toward the lake because it was there and I needed to be somewhere that wasn't there.

My feet are already screaming. The asphalt is hot and gritty and I step on something sharp near the marina entrance I hiss through my teeth, stumble, catch myself on a wooden post.

The marina.

I know this place. Not well, but enough. Cole dragged me out here twice last summer his brother manages it, he'd said. His brother who doesn't come to family things anymore. The brother who I've only ever seen twice, who looked at me both times like I was a problem he hadn't figured out how to solve yet.

Bishop.

Bishop Morgan.

I don't know why that's the name my brain lands on. I don't know him. Not really. But Cole trusts him or used to and right now trusted-adjacent is the best I've got.

The marina lot is packed. Trucks and boat trailers and a pop-up selling overpriced lemonade. I'm scanning for the office, or a dock, or anything that looks like it belongs to someone who works here, when a hand closes around my arm.

Hard. Fast.

I yank back, ready to scream, "Stop."

One word. Low, like gravel.

I stop.

He's taller than I remember. Broader. The tattoos on his forearms are dark against his skin and his jaw is set like he's already decided something. He's not looking at me.

He's looking past me.

"Don't turn around," he says. "Walk."

"I"

"Walk, Delilah."

He knows my name. Of course, he knows my name. Cole talks about me. I know that, even if Bishop and Cole barely speak anymore.

He steers me sideways, one hand at my elbow, and I go because my feet hurt and my chest hurts and I have exactly zero better options. We move between two parked trucks, then along a chain-link fence toward a low building with QUINN'S MARINA, STAFF ONLY stenciled on the door.

"Bishop." My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I need you to not call anyone."

He doesn't answer. He's still scanning the lot over my head.

"Bishop. Please. Don't call Graham, don't call my parents, don't."

"I'm not calling anyone." He shoulders the door open and pulls me through it. "Get inside."

The office is dim. A metal desk, a radio crackling weather, a corkboard drowning in boat slips and maintenance requests. It smells like lake water and machine oil.

He locks the door behind us.

I watch him move to the window just the blinds, two fingers, a sliver of light and I think: this is not how a man checks a parking lot. This is how a man checks for threats. This is muscle memory. Something old and deliberate living inside him.

"You're bleeding." He says it without looking at me.

I look down. My left foot. Something got me on the pavement. "It's fine."

"Sit."

"I'm not a dog."

He looks at me then. Really looks. And whatever he sees makes something shift in his expression not softness exactly. More like recognition.

"Please," he says. Quieter. "Sit down."

I sit on the edge of the desk.

He crouches, and before I can process what's happening, he's got my foot in his hand. He's inspecting the cut like it's a problem he can fix, which is apparently the only kind of problem Bishop Morgan is interested in.

"There's glass in it."

"Of course there is."

His thumb presses carefully around the edges and I grip the desk and stare at the water stains on the ceiling and try not to think about the chapel. Graham's face. My mother's hand squeezing mine.

You're doing the right thing, she'd said.

She meant marrying him.

I was about to disappear inside that life and call it a good decision.

"Why here?" Bishop asks.

"What?"

"You could've gone anywhere. Why'd you come to the marina?"

I look down at him. The dark hair, the set of his shoulders, the tattoo that curls up his neck just behind his ear. He still isn't looking at me.

"Because you're the only person I could think of," I say, "who wouldn't hand me back."

He goes still.

Doesn't answer.

He stands, drops my foot carefully, and moves back to the window. His hand finds the blinds again. His whole-body shifts something tightening, sharpening.

"Bishop."

"There's a black SUV," he says. "Slow. Coming up the access road."

He's not talking about Graham's people.

I can tell by the way he says it. Flat. Like a door closing.

"Who is that?" I ask.

He lets the blind fall.

Doesn't answer that either.

But his hand moves to the back of his waistband, and I realize with the particular clarity of a very bad day that whatever just pulled into this parking lot has nothing to do with me.

And everything to do with him.