I watch the waiters and waitresses circulate the room with bottles of wine, filling everyone’s cups. A waiter arrives at my table, blocking my view of Makayla’s table as he mumbles something about the wine and takes our glasses. I notice the knuckles on his right hand are scabbed over and calloused. I look up at him with narrowed eyes. He’s a hell of a lot rougher around the edges than the average server, and he fills our glasses way too high, like he hardly knows what he’s doing--strange, considering the budget they likely had to put this dinner together for millionaire movie and TV stars.

My attention is quickly drawn away when he steps to the side and I see Makayla storming toward my table. Fuck, I can’t keep my eyes on her face because that dress is doing some wonderful things for her body. I’m practically mesmerized by the way her full tits are bouncing with every swaying step until she’s right in my face. Becca sits beside me, laughing and talking with the people at our table. She doesn’t seem to notice Makayla, which is probably for the best. She’s been trying to flirt with me since I took the job protecting her and I think she might bring her claws out if she senses my interest in Makayla.

“So this is why you quit?” Makayla asks.

I tear my gaze from her tits and look into her eyes. I see the hurt and pain there, hating myself for being the one who caused it. “This isn’t the place to talk,” I mutter.

“Oh yes it is,” she says dangerously.

I clear my throat, painfully aware that it’s only a matter of time until Becca notices her and makes this worse. “Why don’t we talk somewhere--”

“We’re talking here,” she says, folding her arms under her breasts.

God. The way her tits balloon upward gives me a sinfully good look at her perfect milky white skin and it’s all I can do not to reach out for a taste of her again, even if it’s just one last touch.

I know what she wants to talk about, and I realize I may have done more damage by keeping the truth from her. If she forgives me, I might not be able to stop myself from letting her get close again, and if she gets close, she’s in danger. At least until I can figure out how to get to Liam and stop his plans for revenge.

I hate myself for doing it, but I know I can’t stand her thinking I’ve betrayed her again. I thought I could do it, but every moment since I left her has been torture. I’ll just have to find a way to make sure Liam can’t get to her. I’m about to tell her the truth when I hear a soft hmmmm from behind me.

I don’t need to look back to know Becca just set her sights on Makayla.

“Is this an ex of yours, Jesse?” Becca purrs. She talks in slow, sultry tones, as if every word out of her mouth is murmured across the pillows of a luxurious bed.

I don’t quite know how to answer her, but Makayla saves me the trouble.

“I’m nobody to him,” she says sweetly, “But my name is Makayla. It’s nice to meet you.” She reaches to shake Becca’s hand.

Becca waits just a heartbeat too long to take Makayla’s hand, delicately shaking it. “Do I recognize you from somewhere, sweetie? Weren’t you in one of those made-for-television movies?”

Makayla smiles tightly. “I play the lead in Stalked. You know, the show this event is celebrating.”

Becca laughs unconvincingly. “Of course. It’s just so hard to keep track of all the shows lately. It seems like they are popping up everywhere. It’s good though. It gives people a chance to try their hand at acting even if they can’t make it to the big screen.”

I clear my throat. “Makayla’s not an ex, actually,” I say, standing and sliding my arm around her waist. I feel her shudder at my touch. “We’re currently dating,” I say, gently pulling her chin toward me with two fingers and kissing her softly on the lips. I can practically feel an electric jolt of energy pass between us, making my already hard cock throb painfully. Her lips are so soft and warm that it’s nearly impossible to pull away. She looks back at me, face momentarily frozen in shock. I see a flash of anger in her eyes and her hand comes toward me. I catch what she intends as a slap and slow her arm down, placing it on my cheek and winking at her as I force her to caress my face as a lover would.

She bites her lip.

Becca’s lip curls in distaste.”Well stop slobbering over her and get back to work. For how much I’m paying you--”

“I was just leaving,” Makayla says quickly, but that idiot she’s with shows up at her shoulder. He’s clearly pissed, in that way only privileged rich kids who are used to getting their way get pissed. I touched something that was his and he’s here to remind me that he doesn’t like to share.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he asks me.

“Who’s this?” Becca asks, the corner of her lip pulling up in a smirk as she starts to puzzle together the situation.

“Her fucking date,” Hunter snaps. “At least I was until she started kissing this asshole.”

“So you two are together, but she’s also dating this one?” asks Becca. She gives Makayla a predatory look. “Since you’re okay with being shared, you won’t mind if I take a little bite of this man of yours later tonight, will you? I just have to have him.”

I’m about to protest, but Makayla beats me to it.

“LIke hell you will,” she snaps. “If you so much as...” Her voice trails off and her cheeks blossom with red.

I grin, quirking an eyebrow at her. She gives me a confused look, clearly not expecting this exchange to play out this way.

Hunter is fuming, apparently not sure who he should be pissed at or what’s even happening.

Becca leans back in her chair, laughing through her nose without taking her eyes from Makayla. She opens her mouth to speak and I interrupt her, tired of this mess.

First I turn to Becca. “I’d rather cut my dick off than put it anywhere near your poisonous ass, so you can stuff it.” I look to Hunter next. “And if you put your fucking hand on Makayla one more time I swear to God I will snap it off.” Lastly, I look at Makayla. “You and I are going to talk privately. Now,” I add.

She flexes her jaw and her chest heaves, drawing my eyes to those perfect tits again. Instead of taking my offered hand though, she turns and walks back to the table where Kennedy sits.

Hunter walks after her, fists bunched at his sides, making him look exactly like the spoiled brat he is. I plop down and glance at Becca, who is openly fuming. I grab her wine and kick it back. “Get over it,” I mutter, turning to watch Makayla.

But something catches my eye. I notice another waiter who looks out of place. His movements are precise and his eyes are hard, harder than any waiter’s eyes I’ve ever seen. There’s something really fucking familiar about him. I watch him and realize he’s pulling a small container from his pocket and drizzling something into a man’s glass before handing the wine back to him.

Poison?

I’m brought back five years ago to a craggy, rock-strewn field in Afghanistan. We had ten days to take out the surveillance equipment in a terrorist camp near the border. Command wanted us to infiltrate the camp and sabotage the equipment quietly, but gave us carte blanche to get the job done however our team saw fit. I was going to go along with command and take the safe route, but one of my men took it upon himself to find a simpler, more brutal method. We were positioned upstream from the camp, and Liam dragged as much rotted meat as he could gather in a day from the surrounding plains and he piled it in the river. In a few days the terrorists were so sick that we just walked in and took the place from them. We were able to turn off the equipment without spending a single bullet.

It worked, but I always thought it was a dirty play. Poison is for pussies, as far as I’m concerned, and I only knew one man who resorted to it. I look at all the waiters and waitresses with renewed interest, realizing the majority of them have hard eyes and hard bodies. Professionals. All of them. This is a fucking trap and Makayla is right in the middle of it. Meanwhile fucking Edwards and Rosenthal are scanning the perimeter. Useless.

I stand, ignoring whatever Becca says as I rush toward Makayla’s table. A server reaches to refill her wine glass, which she just chugged, and he taps a drop of something in the glass just as I arrive.

“What do you have there?” I ask.

He looks at me, eyes betraying his desire to handle this with fists. “Pardon, sir?”

I take the wine glass from him and smash it on the floor. The room falls silent as heads turn to look at the scene that’s unfolding right in front of them.

“Don’t drink the fucking wine,” I say, projecting my voice so that everyone in the room can hear. Rather than try to explain to the entire room, I grip the waiter by the neck, squeezing him tight and frisking him with my free hand. There are a few gasps and murmurs as I search. I pull a gun free from his waistband and hold it by the barrel, showing the room. This time there are screams and the screech of hundreds of chairs being pushed back as people rush to leave the room. The men posing as waiters push their way through the panicked crowd, eyes intent on Makayla.

I shove the waiter to the ground and let him get trampled beneath the escaping crowd, using my size to bulldoze a path to the back exit I spotted when I came in to the large banquet hall. I have a firm grasp on Makayla’s arm, but she keeps tugging me in the wrong direction.

“Kennedy!” she yells over the noise. “I can’t leave Kennedy!”

“They want us,” I yell back to her. “The farther from us, the safer she is. Just stay with me.”

It seems to work, because she stops resisting my pull. A few seconds later, the room is considerably more empty, and I have no way around one of the waiters. When he spots me, he reaches behind his back for a weapon. I snag a plate from the nearest table and frisbee it at his face. He’s too slow to react and the plate shatters against his forehead. A second later, I’ve grabbed a steak knife and closed the distance to him, still gripping Makayla’s arm. I jam the knife in his chest and strip the gun from him. His eyes widen as he falls to his knees, clutching at the wound.

I push past him, not having time to finish him off because with the room mostly cleared out, the waiters will have a clear line of shot at us any second. I glance over my shoulder just in time to see a man aiming a pistol at us. I flick the safety off the stolen gun and sling Makayla behind me, shielding her with my body as I take aim. I squeeze off a round, favoring quickness over accuracy. The first bullet takes him in the shoulder, jarring his aim so when he fires a split second later, the bullet zips over my head. I fire two more times, dropping him. More gunshots follow, tearing into the plaster and showering Makayla and I in dust as we duck out the exit.

I’m running on pure instinct and training. I scan our surroundings, assessing our options. An alley to our left leads to the main street where I can see crowds of people from the party running past. Too obvious. They will have someone watching the main exit for us. To our right, the alley leads to a wider back alley behind the theater. I yank her to the right and just as we’re about to round the corner I plow into someone, knocking them to the ground.

I’m pointing my borrowed gun at the man’s face before I even register who he is.

“Edwards?” I ask.

He shakes his head a little. “Yeah, fuck. Remind me not to piss you off,” he says, reaching for the hand I offer to help him up.

“Where’s--”

“Here,” Rosenthal says, moving smoothly around the corner.

Just looking at the two incompetent assholes makes my blood boil. They didn’t know I would be inside to look after Makayla. Their “perimeter checks” left her completely vulnerable in there. If I hadn’t been here… Fuck. Just thinking about it turns my stomach. I want to lay into them, but now isn’t the time. Still, I don’t plan to let them out of my sight until I’ve had a chance to rip them to pieces.

“Come on,” I say quickly, “we’ll run a few blocks and then find a place to lay low till this blows over.

Rosenthal slides his hand from behind his back, pointing a gun at Makayla’s stomach. I raise my gun to his head in the same instant, finger tight on the trigger, heart pounding. Edwards shifted to move slightly behind my back and I didn’t even notice. I was so pissed off at the two of them that I let my fucking guard down. I run through all the possible outcomes and keep coming up short.

“Nothing personal,” Edwards says.

Double fucking crossed, and I paid these two slime bags more than triple the usual rate already. How much did someone have to offer them to get them to turn on me?

“You better fucking believe it’s personal,” I growl.

The exit door we came out of bangs open and a small group of waiters file out, guns in hand. They are followed by a man in black with a gold goat mask. I can already tell by the way he moves that it’s Liam.

I clench my jaw, holding Makayla tightly to me. I failed her. The thought burns like acid in my mind. I failed her, just like I failed all the men in my unit who trusted me to protect them. My finger twitches on the trigger and I feel it pull back slightly. Dangerous. It’s not my gun, and I don’t know how sensitive the trigger is. I could’ve just blown Rosenthal’s brains out and gotten both of us killed. It rips me up inside to do it, but I lower my gun, knowing this isn’t a situation I can fight my way out of. The only hope we have is to wait for a better opportunity, hope for some kind of fuck up on their part, as slim a hope as that might be.

If it was just me, I would happily kill Rosenthal and try to drop one or two more before they brought me down. But with Makayla beside me, it’s out of the question. As small as the chance may be, we have to take it.

“I expected better,” Liam mocks, lifting his mask to reveal his scarred face. “The great fucking Jesse Slade only killed one of my men and wounded another before being captured.” He clicks his tongue in disappointment. “And I tried telling these clowns he would never fall for their double cross, but you really have lost your touch, haven’t you?”

“You don’t care about Makayla,” I say. “Let her go and you can torture me as much as you fucking want. I won’t fight.”

He smirks at me. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You get to suffer through whatever I put you through knowing you did it for her.” He rolls his eyes, stepping forward and reaching out to touch Makayla’s face.

My hand flies out, gripping his wrist so tightly I can feel his bones straining not to snap. Half a dozen guns are pointed at my head, but all I see is red. If he so much as fucking touches her…

Liam’s face is strained, but he manages a twisted smile. “It’s okay, boys. He’s going to let me go, because he knows I could take his fucking bitch apart piece by piece right now if I want to. But if he behaves, who knows? Maybe he’ll find some way to stop me.”

I grudgingly let go of his wrist, glaring hard enough to burn holes in his skin. “What do you want?”

He looks down, smiling. “Since you’re mine now, I think I’ll let you in on a little secret. You too, honey,” he says, looking to Makayla. “Your stepfather has made arranging your death a can’t-miss opportunity. Imagine my delight when I realized I could get the revenge I want and cash in on your pretty little ass at the same time.”

“You’re lying,” Makayla breathes. Her voice sounds thick with emotion, and it tears at me to hear it.

The need to protect her throbs within me, nearly overwhelming me and driving me mad because we’re in an impossible situation. There’s no amount of strategy or cleverness that could do anything about the number of guns pointed at us. The only option right now is to wait.

“Not that I have anything against lying,” says Liam, “but no. Hubert’s up to his eyeballs in debt and the people he owes money to are just about ready to collect his balls as collateral. Do you recall agreeing to be covered for life insurance?”

Makayla doesn’t say anything, but the look on her face says she does.

“Well, I guess you didn’t bother to read the terms. He and his lawyer apparently managed to get you covered for a lot of money. And since Hubert is the primary benefactor in the event of your death, well, he’s ready to cash in and get his business back on the ground.

A tear streaks down Makayla’s cheek. “He wouldn’t. He loves me.”

Liam shrugs. “I’m sure some farmers become attached to their cattle, but when the family’s stomach starts to rumble, the cow gets slaughtered all the same.”

“You’re lying. They could have hurt me whenever they wanted,” she says, looking to Edwards and Rosenthal. “If he had paid them to betray me, they wouldn’t have waited so long.”

“I only just managed to find a price they both found agreeable. Besides, you’re worth about three times as much if the death looks like an accident. Putting a bullet in your head would lose us a lot of money. I’m thinking a car accident will do the trick, but I don’t plan to let this body of yours go to waste before at least giving it a taste,” Liam steps forward and reaches for Makayla.

I land two thundering cross hooks. The first connecting with his eye and the second with his nose. His head snaps back twice, eyes glazing. Something hard and metallic slams into the back of my head, followed by two more blows. I fall to my knees, vision going black. I have just long enough to hate myself for failing Makayla before I lose consciousness.