5. Connor
CONNOR
Morning comes with Emi asleep against my chest. I don’t move.
I barely breathe. Her body is tucked against mine, curvy and warm and perfect, one gorgeously thick thigh draped over me and her hair spilling across my arm.
I can still feel her everywhere. Her mouth.
Her hands. The way she gave herself to me with so much trust that it took apart whatever control I thought I had left.
I’ve spent my adult life moving carefully. Identify the exits. Know the threat. Keep the client safe. Don’t want anything badly enough that it can be used against you.
Emi destroys all of that by sleeping in my arms.
I press my mouth to her hair and let myself go where I’ve been stopping my thoughts from going since the first morning I saw her outside the bookstore.
I picture a ring on her finger. I picture her walking toward me in a curve-hugging white dress with that smart mouth and those warm brown eyes, letting me make promises I already feel carved into my bones.
I picture carrying her over the threshold of a house that’s ours. I picture coffee in the morning, books stacked on every surface. I picture her belly round with my child, my hands on her body, my mouth against her skin as I tell her she’s beautiful over and over again.
Emi stirs, making a little sound against my chest, and my arms tighten around her.
For the first time in years, the future doesn’t feel empty or far away. It feels close enough to touch, and it’s shaped exactly like the woman sleeping beside me.
My phone rings on the floor beside the bed.
Emi shifts, but she doesn’t wake. I reach down carefully, check the screen, and see Jenner’s name. He handles contract placements for several private security firms, including mine.
I ease out from under Emi with more regret than I’ve ever felt leaving a bed. She frowns in her sleep and reaches for the warmth I’ve taken with me, and that’s almost enough to make me ignore the call. But I pull on my jeans, step into the hall, and answer quietly.
“Rhodes.”
“Got a serious offer for you,” Jenner says without greeting. “High-profile family, private security detail overseas. Three months minimum, possibly four. Pay is excellent, travel covered, hazard bonus built in.”
I look back toward Emi’s bedroom. The door is half-open, and I can see the pale tangle of sheets around her body. “Where overseas?”
He gives me the location, then runs through the basic outline. Private compound. Politically connected client. Rotating team. Clean contract, good money, the kind of assignment I would have taken without hesitation a week ago. The kind of job that makes sense for a man with no one waiting at home.
“What’s the timeline?” I ask.
“Fast. They want wheels up in forty-eight hours.”
My grip tightens around the phone. Forty-eight hours.
Three months away from Emi when I’ve barely had her.
Three months with someone else’s safety as my entire world, while the woman I already know is mine opens her store every morning, walks to her car at night, and pretends she doesn’t need anyone watching the door.
“I need to think about it.”
Silence stretches on the other end. “You need to think about it?”
“You heard me.”
Jenner gives a short laugh, more confused than amused. “Since when?”
“Since now.”
“All right, but they’re not going to wait long. I’ll need an answer today.”
“You’ll get one.”
I end the call and turn around to find Emi standing in the bedroom doorway wearing nothing but my T-shirt. Her hair is messy, her eyes sleepy. She looks soft and rumpled and mine in a way that makes every part of my body go still.
“Everything okay?” she asks, her voice rough from sleep.
I go to her. When I bend to kiss her, I mean for it to be sweet. It is, at first. Then her lips part under mine, and the memory of last night hits so hard it makes me groan against her mouth.
When I pull back, her eyes are wider. “That was a convincing good morning.”
“Good morning,” I say, kissing her again. “Everything’s fine. It was a call about a potential job.”
She searches my face. “A big one?”
I nod. “Can we make coffee while we talk?”
She smiles. “I’ll make the coffee. You talk.”
We move into the kitchen, where she starts the coffee while I lean against the counter and watch her.
“It’s an overseas assignment,” I say. “Three months minimum. They want an answer today.”
Her hands pause on the coffee scoop. “That’s soon.”
“It is.”
“And you’d leave right away?”
“In a couple days.”
She nods, looking down at the coffee maker. “Is it the kind of job you usually take?”
“Yes.”
Emi turns to face me. My shirt falls low on her thighs, and she folds her arms across her middle as if she’s trying to keep herself steady. “Then you should take it.”
“I need to think about it.”
“Connor.”
“I don’t want to go.”
She swallows. “I don’t want you to go either.”
“Then that’s the answer.”
“No,” she says, stepping closer. “It’s only part of the answer. You had a life before you walked into my bookstore, and I don’t want you turning down something important because we got swept up in all this.”
“We didn’t get swept up.”
She gives me a look. “We absolutely got swept up.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Maybe. But I also know you’ve spent three days deciding you need to protect me from everything, including my own doorknobs.
” Her smile is faint, but her eyes are serious.
“Give it real thought. I’ll miss you if you go.
A lot. But I’m not going anywhere, Connor. I’ll still be yours when you get back.”
Mine.
I pull her into me and hold her tight, pressing my face against her hair while the coffee drips behind her. She thinks she’s giving me room. She doesn’t understand that every bit of room between us feels wrong now.
A couple of hours later, I’m back in my corner of the bookstore.
Emi moves through the morning with her usual rhythm, greeting customers, checking orders, straightening displays. I watch her, but my head keeps turning over the job. The money is good. The work is clean. Turning it down means changing the shape of my career, and maybe that should feel reckless.
It doesn’t.
The only real argument for taking it is the man I was last week. That man made decisions around work, risk, discipline, and profit. That man slept alone and didn’t care. That man could cross an ocean with one bag and a passport because there was nothing behind him worth aching over.
That man is gone.
A flash of red catches my eye through the front window.
The sedan is parked down the block. It’s not moving this time. Someone sits behind the wheel, angled toward the store. I can’t see much through the windshield, but I don’t need to. My body already knows.
I move for the door.
Emi looks up from the counter. “Connor?”
“Stay inside.”
Her eyes sharpen. “What is it?”
“I’ll handle it.”
I step onto the sidewalk and head straight for the car. The driver sees me coming. He freezes. Then the engine starts, but I’m already at the driver’s window, one hand planted on the roof, my body close enough to make backing out impossible without hitting me.
The window lowers a few inches.
The man inside is pale, narrow-faced, and sweating through an attempt at anger. David. I know it without asking.
“You need to move,” he says.
“No.”
His throat works. “I have a right to be here.”
“You have a right to leave.”
“I’m not doing anything. I’m just parked.”
“You’re watching Emi.”
His eyes flick past me toward the bookstore, and rage moves through me so fast that my voice drops to something flat. “Look at me.”
He does. Barely.
“She doesn’t want you,” I say. “She told you that. You decided not to listen.”
His mouth twists. “You don’t know anything. Women say no all the time when they mean maybe. She led me on.”
My hand curls around the top of the door. “Say that again.”
He shuts his mouth.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to stay away from Emi.
You’re going to stay away from her store, her home, her car, her family, and every street she walks down.
If I see you near her again, I’ll make you real fucking sorry you ever laid eyes on her in the first place. You don’t want to test me, son.”
He swallows, and whatever courage brought him here shrivels in front of me. “Fine. I’ll go.”
“Far.”
“Fine.”
I step back, and he pulls away fast, tires bumping over the curb before he corrects. I watch until the sedan turns the corner and disappears.
Then I call Jenner.
He answers on the second ring. “That was fast.”
“Sorry, but I’m out.”
Another pause. “You’re turning it down?”
“Yes.”
“Rhodes, this is a lot of money.”
“I know.”
“You sure?”
I look over at the bookstore. Through the window, Emi is helping an older man at the counter, her face calm, her smile gentle, completely unaware that my life just narrowed and widened at the same time.
“I can’t be away that long,” I say. “Moving forward, I’m only interested in short assignments.”
Jenner exhales. “That’s a big change.”
“Yes.”
“All right. I’ll tell them.”
I hang up and start walking back toward Emi, but then I change my mind and make a detour at the florist two doors past the bakery. Five minutes later, I step into the bookstore with a bouquet in my hand.
Every person in the shop notices. Conversation dips, then rises in a ripple of poorly concealed interest. Emi is ringing up a customer when I come toward the counter, and her eyes land on the flowers and she goes completely still.
The customer grins as she takes her receipt. “Well, that’s my cue to get out of the way.”
Emi’s cheeks go pink. “Thank you for coming in.”
“You too, dear,” the woman says, then leaves with zero urgency.
I set the bouquet on the counter between us. “For you.”
Emi touches one of the blooms. “They’re beautiful.”
“You deserve beautiful things.”
Her gaze lifts, playful but tender. “Are these because of last night?”
“They’re because you deserve a life full of good things. And I’m going to give you the sweetest life I possibly can.”
Her lips part. For a second, all the teasing leaves her face, and I see what’s beneath it. Hope. Want. Belief.
“Connor,” she whispers.
I wait.
Then she smiles. “Kiss me.”
I go around the counter.
The first cheer comes from somewhere near the romance display. Emi laughs against my mouth, but she doesn’t pull away. I cup her face in my hands and kiss her properly, right there in the middle of her bookstore, with flowers on the counter and her customers making noise around us.