Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

I pressed my hands against the wall and took a beat to compose myself. Normally nothing fazed me, but seeing her again rocked my world.

How in the hell had I missed who she really was? How had we not found her before, given how famous Rae Griffin actually was? After all, it wasn’t like I hadn’t tried, hadn’t pulled Gage in to help with the search. And yet, nothing had come up no matter how many different avenues we’d looked into. It’d been as if she’d just vanished into thin air. Eventually, I’d had to admit that was probably by design.

I’d given up my search, but I hadn’t forgotten.

I’d regretted leaving her room that morning. I’d been hungover and in no mood to argue, but later I hadn’t been able to forget the fear I’d sensed radiating off her while she’d told me to fuck right off. She’d squared her shoulders and tried to pretend she hadn’t felt our connection, but afterward—once I’d showered, eaten a healthy breakfast, and had time to think about what had gone down—I’d recognized her behavior for what it truly was: bravado.

I knew because I’d been in plenty of situations where I’d had to bluff my way through a scenario just to make it out alive. And because I’d been there myself more times than I cared to recount, I recognized belatedly my sad, brown-eyed beauty was fighting a wealth of unknowable demons. She was fighting for her very life.

In the present, I shook my head to clear these dark thoughts. I didn’t need to go there. I had business to attend to, and I needed to find Gage.

Searching the hallways for my cousin and best friend, I went over the meeting again. I’d behaved like an asshole, and Rae probably thought I was pissed at her for not telling me who she was that night, but I understood why she hadn’t. I knew better than most why people clung to their anonymity. She hadn’t known the type of man I was or how I’d treat her once the alcohol had left our systems.

The idea of Rae not being safe—of her fucking some other man and him not taking so kindly to being dismissed as easily as I had—clawed at my gut. For some inexplicable reason, I couldn’t get the picture out of my head of some asshole pushing her up against the wall and taking what he wanted from her body before moving on.

Fuck.

I thought I’d gotten her out of my system, but from the way I’d responded to her—the way I was responding right now thinking about her being in danger—I knew I’d been fooling myself. This woman was in my blood, and I didn’t know how to exorcise her. A lesser man might think he could fuck her out of his system, but that was a crock of shit, and anyone who said otherwise was a delusional asshole. You didn’t fuck a woman you wanted and forget about her. It only made the craving worse.

And yeah, I was suffering.

The second I’d seen her eyes go wide and her lips part on a gasp, I’d warred with my desire to throw her over my shoulder and march right out of the building. I wasn’t a caveman or anything, but in that moment, there’d been some strong fucking evolutionary imperatives at work.

This wouldn’t be the first time I’d guarded a celebrity, but it was the only time I’d had a connection to the person beforehand. And our connection? Fuck me, but it was still there. Hell, it might even be worse than it’d been back then. The idea of dragging her up to my place in Oregon and having her all to myself, away from the rest of the world, where I could fuck her every which way I’d ever imagined?

It had me rock-fucking-hard.

Which was a problem because this wasn’t just some random woman I’d picked up for a quick fuck and could move on from. I was being paid to protect her, and I didn’t take that responsibility lightly. There were unwritten rules about this sort of thing: you did not touch the person you were guarding—no matter how bad you might want to. And I wanted to touch every perfect inch of her. Again and again and again … until she couldn’t remember her name. Until she forgot who she was and the dangers she faced.

Until all that existed between us was explicit carnal pleasure.

And then I wanted to do it all over again.