I’d been right. You couldn’t fuck a woman like Rae Griffin out of your system. One taste of her had me craving more. More of her lips, more of her sighs, more of her sweet little cunt coming all over my tongue.

More of everything.

And that was dangerous because I didn’t know if we could sustain anything beyond this mad, all-consuming passion we seemed to have for one another. I admired her, and was proud of everything she’d accomplished, but the truth was, we didn’t know each other well. And what I did know about her proved we were as different as two people could be. Aside from music, we basically had nothing in common.

Not that I was looking for forever—not with her, and not with anybody—but the night before had me thinking about more than just the here and now, something I’d ever only done once before. And that had been a lesson I wouldn’t soon forget. Not that Gage would ever let me. Which was why I was hesitant to confide in him now. But if anyone could set me to rights, it’d be my cousin.

“Dude, you’re playing with fire,” Gage said on the other end of the line. I heard passing cars in the background. “You know the rules.”

From the incessant honking and other ambient noise, I figured he was in the middle of a big city. Personally, not where I would have taken Charlotte to keep her out of danger, but Gage and I had operated on opposite spectrums. It was one of the reasons McClintock liked having both of us on his team. No matter the situation, chances were one of us would be able to handle it. It was only when we worked on the same detail that things got dicey. You could only have two alphas vying for control before all hell broke loose. Thankfully it had been awhile since Dermott had needed both of us in the same place at the same time.

“What’s with you and the rules all of a sudden?” I asked. Gage had never met a rule he didn’t immediately try to break.

“I’m just saying, you shouldn’t get involved with her.”

I could sense there was something he wasn’t telling me, and that pissed me off. First, him keeping something important from me was pure bullshit. And second, the fact that he even knew something important to keep to himself meant he and Charlotte were getting close.

“Hypocrite much?”

“For fuck’s sake, man. She’s got serious problems. I’m just looking out for you. Isn’t that what we do?”

“What do you know about her problems?” I asked, suddenly desperate to hear any extra nugget Charlotte may have shared with him despite my misgivings about how he may have gotten it.

It was ridiculous, but like I said, Rae and I hadn’t exactly gotten to know each other. I could tell you everything about her body, every little sound she made, but her mind? Well, that was something I hadn’t tried to breach. We’d talked a bit here and there, but mostly I gave her space to work on her album while I went about my business.

Unfortunately, that business had me bored as fuck. I’d already made sure my studio was set up for whenever she wanted to start recording, and I performed my regular, three-times-daily perimeter walks with Blanche and Dorothy, but that was more about wanting something to do and needing to give the dogs their daily exercise than necessity.

Rae didn’t know it, but we weren’t the only ones out here. I had a whole team that reported to me—not Dermott—patrolling the property and monitoring all the roads in and out of this section of the forest. Dermott hated not being in charge of my men, but that was the price he paid for working with me. He could have me on retainer, but my guys were mine. Loyalty was something I didn’t take lightly.

“I know you think it’s cool to go through life living like a hermit, but that girl has a seriously fucked up past. If you ever picked up a magazine, you’d know it.”

I had to bite my tongue around the urge to holler “Fake news!” Arguing with Gage was mostly a losing proposition, especially over something he’d read in the aisle of a grocery store or on some online forum. For some strange, inexplicable reason, the man lived for celebrity gossip. The fucker had a subscription to Celeb Weekly and everything, for fuck’s sake. If I hadn’t known better, I’d swear Gage was obsessed with that dude from The Ties That Bind.

Briefly, I wondered if Gage had shared his celebrity fixation with Charlotte while she was dishing out gossip about her employer. And that was the third thing that didn’t sit well with me. If Charlotte was truly Rae’s best friend, why was she airing the woman’s dirty laundry?

Gage often used his dick in the line of duty, but Rae wasn’t part of a problem we were trying to solve. She was the person who needed our protection, which didn’t include using sex to get access to her secrets.

“I know all I need to know about Rae, so don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.”

“So you know she fucks around? Like, a lot?”

I scoffed. “Says the man who slept with half of DC on his last detail.”

Gage laughed into the receiver. “Not half, just a quarter or so.” He paused as if reconsidering that number. “Okay, maybe a third.”

“Right,” I challenged. “It’s okay for you to fuck your way through the nation’s capital, but it’s not okay for her to enjoy sex?”

“It’s different and you know it,” he argued.

“Watch out Gage, your misogyny is showing.”

“Fuck you!” he barked. “I love women.”

“No, you love fucking them Gage. There’s a huge difference between using them to get off and respecting their choices.”

“Look at you, Mr. Feminist,” he ridiculed. “How precious. But can you honestly sit there and tell me you’re okay knowing that Rae tried to kill herself after a night spent snorting coke and fucking two guys at the same time?”

My stomach clenched with barely suppressed violence. The honest-to-god truth, much as it pained me to admit, was that I wouldn’t have been okay with it—if that’s what had really happened. But I knew differently; Rae had told me so herself. Still, during the course of that conversation, I’d been more focused on absorbing details that pertained to her supposed suicide attempt than the fact that they’d found her in a room with a pair of male escorts. I’d pretty much glossed over that whole part of the story, and hadn’t really thought about it since.

But Gage’s taunt had me doing so now.

When I let myself examine how I really felt about Rae’s history, I couldn’t ignore the part of me that hated that she’d slept around. Hell, she hadn’t just slept around—she’d fucked her way across America. Literally. Then again, hadn’t I done the same thing? Twice, in fact, if we were keeping count.

But like Gage said, that was different. Wasn’t it?

I hated that the idea of Rae being with any man she wanted made me furious because I didn’t think women had the same right to fuck whoever and whenever, but if the pulsing vein in my neck and my clenched fists were any indication, I had a huge problem with it.

And yet I couldn’t imagine not being with her either. I wasn’t as comfortable with her past as I’d tried to convince myself, but I also wasn’t so uncomfortable as to put a stop to what was happening between us.

I didn’t want to examine too closely what that said about me.

“I’ll take your silence as a no,” Gage answered. “Look, keep fucking her if you want. I’m not going to tell you not to. Just make sure you wrap your dick up and don’t get too close.”

“I don’t get close to anyone,” came my clipped response. “You know that.”

“Yeah, I do,” my cousin replied. “But you’re acting different with this one. You’ve been off since you walked out of that conference room and into my office. You’re not yourself, Ash. Just …” he paused, and I could practically see him running his hand over his closely shorn scalp. “Just don’t get invested.”

I laughed cynically. “When have you ever known me to become invested?” Before he could answer, I rushed to put a stop to what I knew would be the next words out of his mouth. “And don’t you dare fucking say Sonia. I was twenty-one. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”

“Okay, fine. I won’t bring her up,” Gage conceded. “But I’ve told you this before, so don’t expect me to pull my punches now. You’ve got a soft spot, Ash. I know you like to think you don’t—that you want everyone else to think you’re cold as ice—but the reality is, you love the broken ones. You’ve always wanted to fix them.”

“Fuck you!”

Blanche’s head popped up at my outburst, the perfect example of exactly how often I tried to fix the broken ones. Blanche and Dorothy had been the runts of a litter of pups that were supposed to become police dogs but they’d been small and sickly and their mother had abandoned them. When my buddy Roz told me about them, I’d taken them off her hands, spending more time and money than I’d thought possible on nursing them back to health. Today you couldn’t tell they’d ever been close to death.

“I guess it’s good though, that you’re not as broken as you think you are,” my cousin continued. “It means there’s still hope for you. Me? I’m a lost cause, but you still have some softness left inside. At least one of us should make it through life without turning into a misanthrope.”

“You’re not a misanthrope,” I argued jokingly. “You’re just a self-centered asshole.”

He laughed. “Yeah, that’s probably true. Not that it’s hurt my game; you know the ladies love that shit. They all think they can fix me. Which brings me back around to my earlier point. You can’t fix her, Ash. She might be sober now, but that’s more baggage than you want to carry around for her.”

“Dude,” I cautioned. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. You act like I’ve declared my undying love for her. That’s not what this is.”

“What is it then?”

That was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it?

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, scratching at my beard. It was getting longer than I liked and in desperate need of a trim. “Right now, it’s just fucking with maybe a side of friendship. I like how I feel when I’m with her.”

“Like I said,” Gage interjected, “you like fixing people. She’s like catnip for you. Hot as fuck and you get to be the big bad alpha wolf protecting his pack. You can deny it all you want, but I know you Ash.”

“And like I said, that’s not what this is.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

Our conversation halted when Gage covered the mic and took time to deal with something. “Sorry about that,” he apologized when he came back. “This place has the best barbecue in the city, but the old lady running the cash register is close to a hundred years old it’s always like a game of charades when I want to place an order.”

“No worries,” I answered, looking at the clock. I didn’t have anywhere important to be, but I didn’t know how much longer I could stand Gage’s commentary either. Mostly because I didn’t want to think he might be right. “I should probably get going though. I can’t sit around talking to your sorry ass all day.”

“Ha! It’s the best part of your day and you know it.”

“Fuck off,” I answered, this time with far less rancor.

“Sure, I’ll do that. But answer one thing before you hang up. Have you told her yet?”

My blood ran cold. “Have I told her what?” I asked, careful to keep my voice modulated.

“Don’t be coy,” he answered jovially and I relaxed. If he could be flippant, he certainly wasn’t referencing that. Then again, we’d only ever talked about it once, and neither of us had ever mentioned it again. As far as I was concerned, I could go the rest of my life without ever discussing that day. Shit, if only I could forget it too.

“I’ve never been coy a day in my life,” I answered, pushing those dark memories away.

“You’re going to make me spell it out, aren’t you? I shouldn’t be surprised though. You’ve never given a straight answer to anything your whole damn life,” he said around a mouthful of food. “Have you told her about, you know, the sex thing?”

I groaned. In a list of my Top Ten Biggest Regrets in Life, taking Gage to an exclusive sex club in DC a former client had turned me on to ranked pretty high up there. Gage didn’t just love sex, he loved talking about sex. And against my better judgement, I’d gotten drunk afterward and told him how they knew my name at the door.

“It’s not a sex thing,” I explained for probably the millionth time. Why he persisted in calling it that was a mystery.

“Dude, you like tying women up. And I’m pretty sure the Army fucked you up good because that whole ‘sir’ thing is just weird.”

No matter how many times I tried to tell him that’s not how it worked for me, he refused to listen. I think he’d probably watched that sex movie all the women loved a few too many times.

“I don’t know why I bother talking to you anymore,” I said with a sigh. I loved my cousin—as much as I loved anyone, really—but he was hard to take in large doses. Everything was a joke to him and that’s just not the way I was wired.

“You have to,” he replied. “If you don’t, I’ll tell my mom, who’ll tell your mom … and we both know that’s not a phone call you want to get. You’re supposed to be looking after me, remember?”

“Right,” I laughed, “because you’re perfectly harmless and couldn’t get by in the world without my supervision.”

As a government-trained assassin, Gage hardly needed looking after. But our family had no idea what he really did for a living. His cover as a bodyguard with McClintock Security was solid, especially since all of Dermott’s employees had similar backgrounds. As far as I knew, though, Gage was the only one of us who’d ever been sent to put a bullet between the eyes of a dictator during a black-tie dinner. Back when I was still active duty, I’d been more of an “under the cover of darkness” type of operative.

“Yup, perfectly harmless,” he replied with a hint of mocking blitheness.

“I’m hanging up now,” I told him.

“Fine, run and hide from your little cousin on that big compound of yours. But remember what I said. Don’t get attached.”

“I won’t get attached,” I promised and clicked the red button to end the call.

The only problem was I thought I might already be.