Singe (Guardian Protection #1)

For the first week, Johnson had gone with us any time we’d left her apartment. It’d bothered me that she didn’t completely trust me to take care of her. Though, if I really thought about it, the other time I’d attempted to save her, she’d only narrowly made it out alive. When I’d brought this theory up to her, she’d dismissed it immediately, stating that I was becoming the crazy one. However, from the way my chest ached each time she attempted to touch the back of my head, I knew I was right.

When she finally took the plunge and went out with me alone, Apollo made an appearance. We were at dinner when I tagged him sitting at the bar. He didn’t approach, and we didn’t hang around long enough to see if he was going to. Thankfully, I was able to distract Rhion so she didn’t notice him.

The following week, he brazenly walked right past us as I guided Rhion into her new favorite place: the Neiman Marcus shoe department. He made sure she couldn’t miss him that time. We walked in one door and he walked out the other, a smug grin decorating his face. Rhion reacted so viscerally that it was only the need to take care of her that kept me from hunting him down. I didn’t care that he wasn’t making contact; he was torturing her all the same.

She didn’t leave her apartment for a week after that, and it damn near broke me when her clothes started being delivered again. While I hated shopping something fierce, I loved watching Rhion come out of her cocoon and spread her wings. In those moments, I felt like I’d had a hand in bringing her back to life. And that feeling did some amazing things in my chest, because that was exactly what she had done for me.

Rhion Park had ignited my life in unimaginable ways.

The nightmares were gone, and each passing day, I felt lighter than I had in years. She’d done that. And there was nothing I wouldn’t do to return the favor.

Rhion was beautiful inside and out. She could be quirky and funny, but she was also complex and ridiculously intelligent. She could debate the meaning of life just as easily as she could wax poetic about the relationship between Marshall and Lily from her favorite sitcom. Romantic by nature, she tried to claim she’d calloused through the years and now considered herself to be more of a realist. However, the way her face had lit the night I’d brought her flowers, told me romance still ran thick in her veins. While she was kind and gentle, melting into me the moment the clock struck five every afternoon, she had no qualms about putting me in my place over the practicality of coasters.

There were many brilliant colors to Rhion’s personality, and each one I’d discovered was more vibrant and awe-inspiring than the last. It wasn’t until Rhion that I’d truly realized how bland the first twenty-nine years of my life had been. I’d never experienced the color blue like I did when she stared up at me post-orgasm, her eyes shining and soft with trust. And white. White was one of those colors that used to just blend into the background, that I never really noticed. But white was also the color of the stars she’d hand-painted on the navy-blue ceiling in her ocean room. Because, to quote that crazy woman, “One couldn’t fully appreciate the sun at the beach without the contrast of the night’s sky.”

I never could have anticipated just how deeply Rhion Park would ingrain herself in my life.

But she had. Wholly. Completely. And, as the days passed, I’d begun to hope that maybe it would be permanently.

Rhion curled into my side, snapping me out of my thoughts.

“Don’t get me started on Jude drinking a bottle. They must have been out of cans,” she smarted.

I chuckled and then tipped up the same beer I’d been nursing all night to polish it off.

“You ready to go?” Rhion asked, peering up at me through her lashes.

“Whenever you are.”

“I’m tired. I might not even make you put out tonight.”

Rhion had spent the day furiously decorating for Halloween. Leo had given her approximately five hours’ notice that he’d arranged for all the guys to bring their kids over to do a little early trick-or-treating at her place.

She’d promptly written a mile-long list of candy for me to get and then lost herself in a sea of black and orange.

I respected the fuck out of Leo James for being a strong leader and a savvy business owner, but it was moments like that, when he’d go out of his way to do something for Rhion, that made me respect him as a man. He’d been full of shit the day he’d told me that she was his number-one client. Leo had accounts much bigger than hers. However, he’d hit the nail on the head when he’d called her family. That was exactly how all of the men at Guardian took care of her. Not a single guy had bitched when Leo’d made the announcement about trick-or-treating at Rhion’s. Hell, a few of them went so far as to jump on the phone to borrow nieces and nephews to make sure her candy didn’t go to waste.

I still stood my ground that Guardian was filled with some of the craziest people I’d ever met, but I’d never been prouder to be part of such an incredible group of men.

My lips twitched as I arched an eyebrow at her. “Trick-or-treating take it out of you?”

“No. Accosting you in the ocean room when the kids left took it out of me,” she replied, nudging me on the shoulder before yawning.

I laughed and dug my wallet out to throw some cash on the table. “Say your goodbyes. Let’s get you home.”

“Quitters!” Devon exclaimed, lifting his beer in the air as I slid out of the booth, pulling Rhion up with me.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” she mocked, giving him a hug.

I extended a hand Johnson’s way for a shake. We’d come leaps and bounds in the nearly two months I’d been working at Guardian. I wasn’t sure the two of us would ever be best friends, but with Rhion, we’d come together to accomplish a common goal—her safety.

He tolerated me. I tolerated him. She adored us both.

“You gonna stay for a while?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” he replied, getting to his feet, but his gaze never left Rhion. “She doing okay?” he asked under his breath so only I could hear.

We both watched as she laughed wildly, swatting at Devon as he tried to force her to taste his beer.

“She is,” I confirmed.

“And what about you?” he asked.

I visually swept through the room one more time before I cut my gaze his way. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, she wasn’t the only one who walked away with scars from that fire.”

I widened my stance and crossed my arms over my chest, not liking where it sounded like he was going with this. “You want to elaborate on that?”

He finally turned, his hollow eyes staring through me. “Doesn’t take much for one brutally broken soul to recognize another. Your head is fucked, Levitt, but it’s the same reason I know you’ll take care of her.”

A sense of uneasiness took up root in my stomach. “And what about you?” I asked. “You okay?”

His face broke into an uncomfortable grin. “Nope. Don’t forget my head is fucked, too.”

I followed his gaze as it drifted back across the table. Though, this time, it wasn’t Rhion who captivated his attention as she wrapped her arms around Alex’s thick neck.

Alex looked anywhere but at Johnson as he awkwardly patted Rhion on the back with one hand before setting her away.

Puzzled, I flicked my gaze back and forth between the two men until Rhion appeared at my side and looped her arm around my hips.

“You ready?”