Singe (Guardian Protection #1)

“Rhion,” he objected.

The two of us shared a multitude of regrets. But kissing him. Touching him. Being with him would never be one of those. At least not for me.

And, as I pushed to my feet, our hands and our mouths never losing contact, Jude gave his fight up too. Pinning me to the door with his hips, he used his mouth to explore my neck, and his hands roamed my body.

We stumbled from that pantry, both of us equally drunk, but now, it was on need and desire.

A fire blazed between us with only one way to extinguish it.





“Why the roof?”

I blinked.

That was the first question my captain asked me when he showed up in my hospital room at the burn center in Chicago. Not: “How’s your broken leg? Not: “You feeling okay after spending a full day in a medically induced coma while doctors monitored the swelling in your head?” Not: “How are those burns that cover the back of your skull and the back of your neck?”

No. None of those were what he asked me.

It was, however, why my answer was, “I’m sorry. What?”

“You told her to climb up to the roof? Why?”

I stared at him in confusion. My mind was still groggy from the medication, but I did the best I could to focus. “Because it was the only place that wasn’t on fire?”

“Is that a question or a statement?” he asked, raking a rough hand through his thinning, gray hair as he began pacing the room.

Movement at the door caught my attention. Careful not to move my aching head, I shifted my eyes to the side and saw two uniforms standing outside.

“What’s going on?” I asked suspiciously.

He stopped and gave me his full focus. “Why the roof, Levitt?”

“There was nowhere else. She was gonna die.”

And that’s when it hit me. My foggy mind finally caught up as, all at once, the pieces began to click into place. The last thing I remembered was the horrible creak of the house and the terrifying sound of her screams as it fell down on top of us.

My aching body protested as I sat upright, bile igniting a path up my throat. “Oh God, did she die?”

His head snapped back as he stopped pacing and fisted his hands on his hips. “What? No. She’s down the hall.”

“Thank God,” I exhaled, relief doing far more to soothe me than whatever cocktail of pain medication was pumping through my IV.

His expression turned hard. “Don’t be so quick to send up thanks. That woman you saved is Rhion Park. Sole heir to the Park Empire.”

He stared at me as though he’d laid out the secrets of the universe.

“Okay?” I drawled.

“Okay?” he repeated.

I winced as I attempted to shift in the bed. “I’m not following where you’re going with this.”

He stopped at the foot of my bed and crossed one arm over his chest, his other hand going up to scrub his jaw. “Where I’m going with this, Levitt, is I’ve got the entire Park family legal team and every fucking news station in the country crawling up my ass, wanting to know why in the hell a cop—my fucking cop—would send a woman up higher when a fucking fifth-grader knows to stay low.” He threw his hands out to his sides and took an angry step in my direction. “But, more than that, they want to know why a cop—my fucking cop—was making this astronomically stupid call with alcohol in his system. So yeah, Levitt. I’m gonna need some goddamn answers. First up: Why the roof?”

Suddenly, the air in the room became too thick to breathe. Reality crashed down on me harder than that three-story house ever could.

I’d wanted to be a cop since I was eight years old and my father had nearly cut his finger off while trying to trim the trunk of our Christmas tree. Blood was everywhere and my mother wouldn’t stop screaming regardless that my father was cussing at her for calling 911 for a simple cut. I paced the front porch, praying that he wouldn’t die, because, when you’re eight, that’s what happens when you bleed even the slightest bit. A cop arrived first. He rolled up onto the curb in front, lights flashing and sirens blaring, giving me, along with the rest of the neighborhood, the whole emergency experience. I’d never forget the wake of tranquilly that trailed behind him as he jogged up the front steps.

My mom stopped screaming. My father stopped cussing. I stopped worrying.

Looking back, I thought that cop had probably been relieved when he’d walked in and seen my too-proud-to-ask-for-help dad holding a washcloth around his finger. No guns drawn. No vile human beings destroying lives. No wounded butterflies.

But the little cut that ultimately earned my father eight stitches and an expensive ride in an ambulance changed my life. As I stood beside my mother, watching the cop drive away, I realized exactly who I wanted to be when I grew up. Donning on that uniform became my dream.

Yet, as I sat in that hospital bed, my chest physically aching, I began to wish that it had been a firefighter to respond to my house first that afternoon.

“Start talking, Levitt,” my captain ground out when I didn’t reply.

I cut my gaze to the door, an ocean of regret churning in my gut.

One night, one call, one decision—and I was going to lose it all.

“I think I need an attorney.”



When I awoke, blinding lights poured into the room, making it impossible to open my eyes. For the way my retinas ached, the sun might as well have been in the same room. A marching band was playing in my head. Okay, maybe not an entire marching band, but definitely the drum line.

I attempted to swallow, but my mouth was so dry that the action only made me cough. I threw my hand out to the side and blindly patted the nightstand down, praying that, in my drunken stupor, I’d had the foresight to grab a bottle of water.

In my search, my hand landed on a glass.

I lived in a hotel, and not a nice one, at that. I didn’t have cups at all. Much less a glass.

“Oh God,” I breathed as I pried one eye open.

Pale coral-and-white vertical-striped walls greeted me. My stomach rolled as I slowly sat up. Squinting, I attempted to take inventory of the spinning room. White, distressed dresser. Dark mahogany wood floors. A canvas painting of a starfish. And the salty smell of the ocean wafting in the air.

How the hell did I end up at the beach?

The last thing I remembered was staring down into an empty bottle of Jack at Park Hill.

I glanced down and saw that I was still in the same slacks I’d been wearing the day before, but my chest was bare. Where the hell is my shirt? My gaze dropped to the floor, where I spotted my white undershirt folded on top of my shoes, but my button-down was MIA.

I looked to the nightstand and saw my keys, my phone, and my wallet neatly stacked on top of each other. I was no detective, but it didn’t take any special skills to deduce that, if I couldn’t remember taking my damn shirt off, I probably hadn’t been the one to organize the contents of my pockets. Clearly, I hadn’t come to the beach alone. But who…

“Oh God,” I whispered to myself.