Tempting My Billionaire Bodyguard

Chapter 1 JACE

JACE

I set down the bourbon I haven’t touched and pick up.

“She’s not telling me everything.”

No greeting. No preamble. That’s Dawson. We’ve never needed the filler.

“Define everything.”

“Her ex. Tyler.” Static on the line.

Tyler . I remember enough. Possessive. One step from violent. Wren walked away on her own terms. Dawson thought that was the end of it.

“He’s back?”

“Seems like he never left. I called her to check in—you know he wasn’t taking the split well before I left.

She keeps running into him. She calls it bad luck, same neighborhood.

I call bullshit. Last weekend he was waiting outside her building when she got home.

Wanted to catch up. She told him no, he gave her a hard time, but he left. ”

I settle into my chair. Manhattan is laid out below me, all glass and moving headlights. The whole building is mine—forty-two floors of it. Office tenants, residents, the penthouse upstairs.

One lamp in the office tonight. The rest shadow. I can see out. No one can see in.

“So she’s playing it off again.”

“Yeah. Jace—her voice. She was scared. He’s not letting this go. Something’s coming, and I’m six thousand miles away.”

“How long since they split?”

“Four months. Maybe five. She ended it.”

“Has she changed anything? Locks. Route to work. Where she parks.”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t tell me that kind of thing. Not anymore.”

Because she’s not thinking about it like that. She’s thinking about it like something she can handle by not looking at it too closely. The bruise, the phone checks, the showing up uninvited—she explained all of that away too. She’s minimizing.

She doesn’t know what he’s capable of.

I do.

I know this math. The distance between what a person believes is happening and what’s actually building around them. It’s the gap people die in.

I don’t say any of that to Dawson.

“I’ll handle it.”

“I’d come back if I could,” he says. Quieter now. “You know I would.”

“I know.”

“She won’t listen to me. I’m her brother—she thinks I’m overreacting by default.”

I pull up a blank file on my screen. Force of habit. When a client calls with a problem, I take notes. Dawson isn’t a client, but the process is the same. Threat. Source. Proximity. Access points. Escalation indicators.

“I’m not asking you to do anything big,” he says. “Just—put eyes on it. Someone from your team. Low-key. She can’t know I called you.”

“She’ll know.”

“Then make something up. You’re good at that.”

I almost smile. Almost.

“I’ll put Garrett on it. He’s discreet.”

“Thank you.” He’s quiet long enough that I think the line dropped. “She’s not a kid anymore, Jace. She’s stubborn as hell and she’ll fight you on it if she finds out. Just—don’t underestimate her.”

“I won’t.”

We hang up without saying goodbye. We never do.

Persistence after a clean break isn’t devotion. It’s pattern. And patterns have trajectories.

I push back from the desk and cross the office. The security panel by the door glows a steady green—four cameras covering the building entrance, lobby, parking garage, elevator bank. I cycle through each feed out of habit. Nothing. There’s never anything. That’s the point.

I roll my sleeves and pull up Wild Tide Florals on the wall-mounted screen.

Brooklyn. Flower shop. Public-facing business—foot traffic, street access, glass frontage.

Same hours, same route, every day. A woman who opens the same door each morning and stands behind a counter with her back to the entrance, hands full of stems. A man who knows her schedule already has everything he needs.

Predictable is a problem.

I pull up a satellite map. Side entrances, alley access, where foot traffic thins after dark, where a car can idle without drawing attention. The picture builds the way it always does—clean lines, clear sight, everything accounted for.

Under four minutes. Not instinct. Practice.

Except the variable I can’t map from a screen. Him. Where he watches from. How long he stays. Whether he’s already inside the perimeter I’d set.

I close the map.

Dawson’s little sister. Wren. I haven’t seen her in years. She was young. Around at family dinners I showed up to now and then. Ponytail. Quiet. Looked at me a second too long, then pretended she hadn’t.

That was a decade ago. Irrelevant.

What’s relevant is a man with a history of control who’s reinserting himself into her routine. A woman who’s explaining it away the same way she explained away the bruise on her arm. A brother six thousand miles away who can hear the lie in her voice even through a satellite connection.

I open my phone and text Garrett.

Wren Ashford. Brooklyn. Wild Tide Florals. Low-profile. Daily check-ins. No engagement. Watch. Report.

I send it and set the phone down.

Dawson trusts me because of what I do. Because waiting for confirmation is how people die. You don’t wait for the proof. You read the pattern and you act.

I learned that the hard way. I flagged it. My CO said wait. I listened to him instead of myself.

I don’t listen to anyone else anymore.

The bourbon is still sitting where I left it. I pick it up, consider it, set it back down. Not tonight.

By morning, I’ll have everything I need on Tyler.

That’s the job. That’s the wound.