Singe (Guardian Protection #1)

My throat closed and my lungs failed. “What the fuck?” I choked out as though the smoke were suffocating me all over again.



My breath hitched as I raked my eyes over his muscular frame. The outline of his chiseled chest showed through the straining fabric of his plain, black T-shirt, while a pair of dark washed denim hugged his tapered waist. His dark-blond hair had been shaved and large, rectangular bandages covered the back of his head and his neck, but he was still gorgeous.



I continued reading, bile clawing its way higher up my throat with every sentence. With a blast, oxygen filled my aching lungs just seconds before someone dropped a lit match and ignited my entire body into a wildfire, destroying me from the inside out.



“You’re real,” I whispered.

His eyes flashed wide, but a sexy grin pulled at the corners of his full lips. “So are you, my beautiful Butterfly.”



“Oh God,” I breathed, dropping the book to the ground.





Rolling over in bed, I stretched my arm out and found Jude’s side cool and empty. I pried my eyes open, and the room was still pitch-black. So I rolled back to check the clock on my nightstand, the stubby, red lines connecting to form 3:53.

Shit. It was early.

With sleepy eyes, I looked to the bathroom, but the light was off and the door was open. Jude’s bag was still in the corner across the room, so he hadn’t gone home. Not that I thought he would have without telling me, but it was one more place I could strike off my list of where he could be.

“Jude,” I called as I crawled out of bed and headed to my bedroom door.

Maybe he couldn’t sleep and went to watch TV?

When I got to the hall, the only light came from my tattoo room.

Smiling, I didn’t think much of it as I started toward the door, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and attempting to smooth my unruly morning hair down.

“Honey,” I whispered, pushing the door open wide.

My stomach dropped immediately.

Jude was sitting in the middle of the floor, my books strewn haphazardly around him, pure and utter torture contorting his gorgeous face until he was almost unrecognizable.

“What is this?” he whispered, motioning to the books.

All at once, it felt like my chest was caving in and my heart was exploding, breaking into a million shards, ravaging me without ever escaping.

I slapped both hands over my mouth and shook my head tightly, embarrassment flooding my system.

“Jesus, Rhion. What the fuck is this bullshit?” he asked roughly.

I recoiled but didn’t answer.

As he pushed to his feet, I fought the desire to forcefully drag him from the room, board the door up, and never look back. I didn’t care that it was only those books that had helped me survive the first year after the fire. Nor did I care that it had taken me nearly four years and countless hours of thankless work to write them. I would have happily abandoned every last page if it could have erased the look of disgust from his face.

“They’re…they’re nothing,” I stammered, backing away.

Rage flared in his eyes as he stalked toward me. Through clenched teeth, he seethed, “Don’t you fucking dare start that nothing shit again. You don’t get to play that card. Not now. Not fucking ever again.”

“You’re scaring me,” I admitted, throwing a hand up to stop him.

“Good!” he boomed. “After the shit I just read, it’s time you realize I’m a goddamn man, not some fictional character you created in that perfect little la-la land you so obviously inhabit.”

Okay. That hurt. A lot. Especially because it had come from him.

But, for those first few years after the fire, I couldn’t say he was wrong. I had been struggling, and yeah, losing myself in la-la land had been easier than facing the reality about my life.

“It’s not what you think.”

He threw his hands out to his sides and then let them slap his thighs as he dropped them. “Oh thank God, because for a minute there, I thought you had rewritten the night of the fire fifteen different ways. All starring me. All starring you. But not one thread of truth to be found. Yet, somehow, I end up fucking you in every goddamn one of them!”

I blinked and began worrying my necklace. “Okay, so maybe it is what you think. But it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“It is as bad as it looks! The night of the fire was a fucking nightmare! It changed my entire life. But, somehow, you’ve romanticized it into the night you met your soul mate, and here I am, standing in your fucking apartment, falling in love with you like it was a goddamn prophecy.”

I winced but kept my chin held high. “You don’t have to be a dick about this. You could allow me to talk.”

“Talk?” He scoffed. “Right. Since you’ve been so fucking good at that over the last six weeks. Maybe I should just ask Johnson and Leo about this since they seem to be the only ones who answer any of my fucking questions about you.”

“That’s not fair! I’ve told you everything recently.”

“Everything except the part about making up men who actually fucking saved you!”

I took a giant step forward, stabbing a finger into his chest. “You saved me!”

His gaze became pained, but his anger never subsided. “Stop fucking saying that! I’m not a goddamn hero. You fell, Rhion. Because of me. I was drinking and not thinking straight. It almost cost you your life.”

“Almost,” I countered. “I’m not dead.”

With a sweeping arm, he bent and scooped one of the books off the floor before sending it flying across the room. “I’m not like those men you wrote! Jesus Christ, Rhion. I didn’t jump on top of you when the house came down! I fell! Like a drunk fucking idiot. Three more steps and we would have been out of the way, and I fucking fell!” He picked another book up and sent it sailing. “Write that in your little fucking books!”

I might have carried the majority of the scars of that night, but it was clear he was hurting—worse than I ever had. While the flames had long since been extinguished for me, they still burned hotter than ever inside his conscience, and it shattered me.

I reached out for him only for him to deny the contact.

“I wasn’t injured though,” I told him. “Because of you. The how doesn’t matter. It just mattered what happened,” I said evenly, unwilling to match his intensity.

He laughed, but it held no humor. “Jesus Christ, Rhion. What actually happened was I gave you bad advice, I nearly got you killed, and…” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “And you write bullshit like smelling my cologne and having it soothe you? It was whiskey, sweetheart. Not fucking cologne. And we didn’t talk after the fire. There was no, ‘You’re real, Butterfly,’ because as I watched you screaming and writhing in pain, unable to form a coherent thought, I prayed to any and every fucking god in the universe that you weren’t!”

I shrank back, but he kept talking.

In paragraphs.