Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110360 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 552(@200wpm)___ 441(@250wpm)___ 368(@300wpm)
A sad laugh escaped my throat. “Thanks for the heads up.” That I really could have used two fucking months ago.
I gave him one last squeeze and then stepped away.
He held my gaze for a moment, that easy grin gone, something careful in its place. He tipped his head to the man at his side. “Carter, make sure she gets to her car safe.”
“I got her,” Devon rumbled behind me, his hand finding the small of my back.
And for the very first time, my body had absolutely no reaction.
Well, that’s not totally true.
The already cracked and broken pieces of my heart fractured beyond repair.
Henry tilted his head, the challenge unmistakable. “Like I said, Carter, make sure she gets to the car safe.”
Devon’s fingers flexed at my back. “And I said, I got her.”
“Don’t argue,” I hissed. “I don’t need this to get worse.”
He went solid beside me.
I hadn’t meant it as a weapon, but with betrayal raging inside me, I sure as hell hoped it landed like one.
26
DEVON
The drive back to the beach house was the longest thirty-two minutes of my life.
Lofton sat in the back seat with her arms folded and her eyes fixed on the window, never so much as glancing forward.
I sat in the front with my hands on the wheel and the rotting silence of a man on death row.
Fucking Henry Alexander.
Of all the people on the planet we could have run into, he was the absolute worst. Even Levee would have been better, because she at least had tact. Henry had acted like ruining my life was his opus. Years in the making. All culminating in that one perfect moment where he got to conduct the whole damn symphony of disaster himself.
And kudos to him, because that little prick had produced a masterpiece.
Lofton hadn’t spoken since Carter had escorted me, escorting her, to the car.
Yeah. Fucking Carter. As if suddenly, I needed the help keeping her safe.
The truth about my past had been bound to come out. LA was a small city dressed up as a big world. Levee and Henry ran in circles that overlapped with Lofton’s at parties, award shows, and as my supremely shitty luck would have it, a practically empty soundstage.
I’d just been operating on the tragically stupid assumption that I’d be the one who got to decide when and how she found out.
Now that I could add that to my ever-growing list of failures, my brain was ricocheting with all the possibilities of what was going through her head. She’d shut down every conversation I’d tried to start with either a one-word answer or no response at all. It was absolutely killing me, but I couldn’t get a read on her from stolen glances in the rearview mirror alone.
I hoped she’d let me explain. But even then, I wasn’t sure what to say. Or what it would mean for us when I figured it out.
I’d fought to avoid that job. But deep down, it wasn’t LA I’d been afraid of. It wasn’t celebrity clients or close quarters or the intimacy that came from being someone’s shadow.I’d had a lot of clients in the time between Levee and Lofton. I’d spent a year guarding a federal judge who received death threats every morning with his coffee. I’d spent eighteen months with a tech billionaire who hadn’t left his compound long enough to remember what rain felt like. I’d protected senators and executives and a foreign diplomat who required round the clock coverage.
Working with all of them, I’d been nothing short of the perfect model of professionalism.
Because the problem was never the job.
The problem was me.
Specifically, the part of me I’d been pretending didn’t exist.
The part that had been engrained in me since childhood and intensified as I’d gotten older.
I’d grown up the rock in my family. The man of the house before I was old enough to shave. My mom worked doubles, my sisters needed more than we had, and I made damn sure they never felt it. That’s just how I was built. I paid attention. I stepped in. I handled things before they became problems. Because if I did it right, the people I loved never had to worry at all.
That wasn’t a trained skill set.
That was just who I was.
I was built to care about people in a way that didn’t stop at the edge of the job description. I’d known Lofton was going to be trouble from the start. Not because I thought I’d fall in love with her—even though I had. Fast and hard in a way that didn’t ask permission or offer an escape route.
I’d told myself that the physical was the extent of it. That wanting her was just biology and proximity and nothing I couldn’t manage. But truthfully, I’d been in way over my head long before she ever knocked on my door in a stolen shirt and a pair of heels. Which, don’t get me wrong, had been fucking incredible. But that had just been the culmination of her seduction rather than a grand strategy. I’d fallen in love with Lofton morning after morning, when she’d consistently and relentlessly shown up as herself in front of a man who was wired to notice.