I lay back against him, sighing as his arms came around my waist. I ran my hands over his arms, the bottoms of my feet over the curves of his calves. His lips brushed the side of my neck, his teeth nipping my shoulder. I reached back to touch the side of his face, dragging my fingers through the five o’clock shadow that was beginning to reveal itself. His fingers were sliding over my belly, headed south, when I grabbed his hand.

“I don’t think I can handle any more right now.”

He chuckled softly against my shoulder. “What do you expect? You made me wait nearly seventeen years.”

“Me?” I twisted slightly so that I could see his face. “I think it’s been clearly established that you were the one making me wait.”

He held his hand up in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, Counselor. I’m guilty.”

I laughed, rolling into him, pressing my face against his chest. He held me there, his hands always moving over me, slipping up and down the length of my back, stealing little touches along my hips, my ass. When he grabbed my thigh and pulled my leg up over his, I had to push him away again.

“I wasn’t doing anything,” he protested. I slapped his hand.

Bo gave up and lay back against the pillows. I lay on his chest, my fingers dancing around the tattoo on his chest. It was the only one he had. He hadn’t even gotten a tattoo of the Air Force Insignia like Gentry—and I’m sure many others—had done right after boot camp graduation. That seemed to add weight to this choice.

“What did other women think it was?”

“Hmm?”

I sat up a little so that I could see his face. “The tattoo. What did you tell people it was?”

He shrugged even as he reached up to press his fingers through my hair, moving it away from my face. “I made up stories, depending on who asked.”

“What did you tell your lovers?”

He frowned, a cloud moving through his eyes. “Why do you want to know something like that?”

“I just do.”

He sighed, brushing his thumb over my lips. “I mostly told them it was for my mother. No one ever questions that.”

“Did you ever tell anyone the truth?”

“A few people.”

“Lovers?”

“Remy…” He turned my head slightly with a tug on my hair. “Why are you doing this?”

“I want to know.”

“Why? So you can torture yourself with something that doesn’t matter anymore?”

“Because my imagination is worse than the truth.”

He nodded, pushing me back down against the mattress and rolling after me, resting on his side as he studied my face. “I told three women what it really meant. Two were one-night stands. One was a woman we worked with in Germany. I told her because she was in the same boat. She had a guy back home she was in love with but he didn’t even know she existed. We got drunk together and told each other our stories.”

“And you showed it to her.”

“She saw it during PT on a regular basis.”

“How many women were there? Over in Germany?”

He closed his eyes, a tendon popping in his jaw. “I don’t know, Rem. A lot more than I’m proud of.”

“And how many since you’ve been back?”

He opened his eyes and studied my face again, the tendon still. “None.”

“Really?”

“I haven’t been with anyone since your father’s funeral until now.”

I touched the tattoo, my fingers again tracing the Gothic script. “Why not?”

“Because I saw you. Because I remembered why I got the damn thing in the first place. Because I knew I didn’t want to be that far from you again—physically or emotionally.”

“You slept with all those women because of me?”

“Because I wanted to forget you. It didn’t work.”

“Hard to forget me with this thing on your chest.”

He shook his head, but there was amusement in his eyes. “You make my life more difficult than it should be, you know? It’s hard for me to do much of anything when you’re always on my mind.”

“I don’t know about that. You became a proficient pilot and you’re a hell of an executive.”

He snickered. “I’m not an executive. I’m a glorified office assistant.”

“And investigator.”

“That’s true.”

I touched the tattoo again. “What did you tell Gentry about it?”

He shook his head. “We never talked about it.”

We were quiet for a moment, both lost in our thoughts. He ran his hand over my belly, his fingers moving as though it were a piano keyboard he was playing. I watched for a minute, waiting for him to make a dive for that lower region he was so enamored with tonight. Instead, he stopped.

“Tell me about Chris.”

I almost had to ask what he was talking about. Chris was so far in the past that he was no longer consequential in my mind. But the tension that had suddenly come into Bo’s shoulders told me he was. Chris was very consequential and what I said next had to be carefully thought out because it would follow us for the next fifty years.

“I told you, we had a couple of classes together, were in a few study groups together.”

“And you dated for three years. That’s more than just hooking up.”

It was. But what was I supposed to say? I thought he was never going to want me. I thought he’d gone off to the Air Force to escape me. I thought I needed a man in my life to make me normal, to make me happy. Chris was what I should have wanted. He was the son of a high-powered attorney in Los Angeles, a defense attorney who made headlines with almost every case she chose to take. He was royalty at Stanford Law School. He could have chosen medicine, too. His father was a cardiothoracic surgeon who’d saved the life of a sitting governor. He was royalty at the medical school, too.

And I was gold just because he chose me.

“Everyone was hooking up in college. Chris was just…he was a habit. He was someone I could count on, someone familiar and easy.”

“You didn’t love him?”

I thought I did. But that wasn’t something I was going to say, either.

“It was a long time ago, Bo.”

“But he’s the only real relationship you’ve had. I’m curious what it was about him that drew you to him.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.” I touched the side of his face. “We’ve both had lovers, both done things in the past that don’t have to define our future. Chris is the past. You’ve always been the future.”

“Even then?”

I made him look at me, my hand on his jaw. “If you’d walked into my dorm room and announced you were ready to be with me, I would have dropped Chris in an instant. You are all I’ve ever wanted.”

He kissed me, a rough kiss that quickly turned into something gentler, but more passionate. I rolled toward him, okay with his hand on my hip now. Okay with everything and anything he wanted to do to me. I just wanted him, wanted all this talk about the past to disappear. I was done with the past now, done worrying about who he might have lain with like this, done worrying that I might not be enough for him. I knew I was because I could feel it in his touch, in his kiss. In the persistence of his need.

We could let go of all that now. And I did. My mind was a blank the moment his weight pressed me down against the mattress again, the moment he entered me again, the moment we began to rock on that wave of ecstasy again.

*

“I’m starved,” Bo whispered against my ear a while later.

I laughed. “We could have eaten hours ago if you hadn’t been in such a hurry to come up here.”

“I was in a hurry? Who keeps reminding me she waited seventeen years for this?”

“Seventeen? I always counted it as fifteen.”

“Yeah, well, I’m five years older than you.”

I laughed as I climbed out of bed, searching around on the floor for our clothes. I glanced at him, found him watching with his hands behind his head.

“You could help.”

“Or you could just stay that way.”

I blushed despite everything we’d been doing these last few hours, belatedly moving my arm over my breasts. “Cooking in the nude probably isn’t the greatest idea in the world.”

He sighed before climbing off the bed. He snatched up his boxer briefs and pulled them on, tossing my panties at me as he snatched up his slacks. He slipped his wallet out of the back pocket then dropped them back down before heading down the hall.

We keep a variety of clothes in the bedroom closet of the master bedroom. It started out as a storage place for the unbelievably large amount of clothing we kids out grew each year, but then it became a place for Mom to keep donations for the clothes drive she ran through the church. Then when Jack proposed using the guest house as a safe place to house clients for Stone Security, we decided to not only keep the collection that we’d never dealt with after Mom’s death, but to add to it so that clients who had to abandon their homes in a rush, for whatever reason, would have something clean and warm to wear while they were there.

Bo dug through the closet and pulled out a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that once belonged to him, and handed me a pair of yoga pants and a skimpy, ripped tank top.

“Hell, no,” I said, tossing the shirt back into the closet and pulling out a concert tee Brent had donated.

Bo tilted his head slightly when I was dressed and smiled. “That’s not bad, either.”

I slapped his arm, his look making me aware that the t-shirt was tight enough to show off the fact that I hadn’t bothered to put my bra back on. I headed downstairs before he could say anything else, but the laughter that followed me made me smile.

We dug through the fridge together, pulling out the ingredients for the dinner I’d been in the middle of preparing when he arrived, turning back on the music that had finished playing while we were otherwise occupied. I was just about to pull the meat out of the marinade when I realized I’d missed getting the sour cream from Jack’s fridge that I needed for the sauce I was planning on serving with the finished steaks.

“What’s the matter?”

I glanced at Bo. “It won’t taste right without the sauce. The marinade is a little spicy and the sauce tempers it…but I don’t think Jack had sour cream in his fridge.”

“So we’ll go to the store.”

“The little place out here is closed.”

“There’s a store up the road, not five miles. We could be there and back in ten minutes.”

“Do you mind? It really will taste better with the sauce.”

He smiled, that familiar twinkle filling his eyes. “Why would I mind?”

We rode close to each other on the bench of his truck, my hand on his inner thigh as he drove. When we got to the store, he lifted me down like a delicate figure that might break on its own. I slipped my arm through his and walked close to him, loving the feel of his body against mine, the fact that he slowed his step so that I could stay beside him.

“We should get a cake or something, too,” he said as we stood at the refrigerator case, looking at the many different brands and sizes of sour cream. “Something sweet.”

“You have something sweet.”

“I guess I do.”

He kissed me, sighing against my mouth. I slid my hand over his chest, aware of the quick beat of his heart, loving that it was my touch that made it race that way.

“Get a room.”

A deep voice behind us poked a hole in our little bubble, causing Bo to break the kiss. He wrapped his arms around me and twisted a little, turning to see who was talking to us.

“If you’ll excuse us,” Bo said politely, “we’ll just get what we need and get out of your way.”

“What are you doing with him, pretty lady?” The guy sounded truly interested in my answer. “He doesn’t look like much. But you look like you could do with a real man in your bed.”

Bo pushed me away, forcing me to move behind him as he stepped toward the guy. “You should probably apologize to the lady for that.”

“Yeah? Why?”

“You’re being really rude, Mister. We weren’t bothering you. Why don’t you move on and leave us alone?”

“I wasn’t talking to you, if you want to get right down to it. I was more talking to the pretty lady.” He craned his neck a little, trying to see me where I was standing behind Bo. “You have a right to know what you’re missing out on, sweetheart.”

He was a couple inches taller than me, making him shorter than Bo. But he was as wide as he was tall, a big man who carried around as much muscle as fat. His face was red, his eyes dark and a little crazy, his thick lips pulled back in a sneer that added to the crazy.

“I’m good, thank you,” I said, hoping that my comment might and send him on his way. But I knew that was probably a little naive of me.

“This guy’s just a pretty boy,” the man continued, still craning his neck to see me. “Pretty boys can’t give a woman what she needs. Now me, on the other hand, I’m a real man. I can make you feel real good in the bedroom.”

“You need to shut the fuck up!” Bo was vibrating with tension now. I grabbed his arm, slipped my fingers into his.

“Let’s just go,” I said, shooting a glance at the crazy guy.

Bo shook his head. “We weren’t hurting anyone. This guy needs to go.”

Crazy laughed, then, just as suddenly as he arrived, the laughter was gone and he was lunging at Bo. He laughed when Bo stepped back, trying to avoid whatever was coming. And then he lunged again, this time with his fist raised. Again, Bo stepped back, his hands on my arms to keep me from falling over at the movement.

“You need to back up.”

Crazy looked up at Bo. “You must get your way most of the time. Is that why you’re such an arrogant ass?”

“We don’t want trouble,” I told him. “We just came for some sour cream.” I turned and grabbed a random container out of the refrigerator case. “See,” I said, holding it up. “We’re going now.”

But Crazy didn’t move. And he didn’t stop glaring at Bo.

Bo snagged my free hand and pulled me against his side. “We’re leaving.”

We started to walk toward the front of the store, but Crazy jumped in front of us, reaching for my hand. He got my wrist, yanking me to the side. When Bo moved to step between us, the guy spit in his face. Bo lost it then, swinging without pause, his fist landing in the soft, doughy flesh covering Crazy’s jaw. Crazy flew backward, slamming into one of the low freezer cases in the center of the aisle, knocking over a display of potato chips sitting against it. Bo followed him, punching him again and again in the face and the chest.

I just stood there. I didn’t know what to do, wasn’t even sure I would do anything if I did. The whole thing was so bizarre I didn’t know what to think. It seemed to last forever, the whole thing, but it was over in a matter of seconds.

Bo stepped back, holding his hands up in a motion of surrender, staring at the guy where he still lay sprawled over the edge of the freezer case. A couple of employees were charging down the far side of the aisle, just as confused as I was if the looks on their faces said anything.

“We’re leaving,” Bo said, grabbing my hand and tossing a couple of bills at one of the employees for the sour cream. We got into the truck and he put it into gear the second the ignition caught, pulling out of there much too fast, the back end of the truck skidding on the asphalt as we bounced over a curb on the way to the street.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Bo cried, slamming his hands on the steering wheel while we were still going seventy miles an hour down the country highway.

“Bo, please slow down.”

He glanced at me, then at the speedometer, finally lifting his foot from the accelerator. “I’m sorry.”

“He asked for it.”

“Yeah. He wanted a fight.” Bo shook his head. “I should have seen that. We should have just walked away.”

“We tried.”

“Not hard enough.” He shook his head again, cursing once more, this time under his breath. “I should know better.”

“You couldn’t have—”

“It was a setup, Remy. He set me up. He wanted me to hit him.”

That didn’t make sense to me. “Why?”

Bo glanced at me. “It’s West, Remy. Don’t you see that? They want to get to you, so they come after me.”

“But West doesn’t even know you and I are together. We weren’t together until three hours ago.”

“He must have someone watching you. It’s what I would do.”

That was food for thought. I couldn’t help but throw a glance at the road behind us. There was nothing there, no headlights, no cars parked on the side of the road. But that didn’t mean anything. And Jack’s place, our family’s estate, wasn’t exactly secluded. It wouldn’t be difficult to sit a car on the highway outside the property in a place where they could see all the comings and goings at the place.

We got back to the guesthouse and grilled the steaks, sitting down to eat them—sauce and all—in absolute silence. Bo was lost in thought and I couldn’t stop looking at the bruises forming on his knuckles, or seeing him beating that man senseless. I’d seen my brothers violent. I grew up watching them beat the crap out of each other, or anyone who said something against one of them. But Bo had always been the calm one, the one who tried to mediate everything. I’d never seen him quite like that.

I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not.

We went to bed in equal silence, holding onto each other in the darkness. I drifted off, but woke a short time later when Bo slipped out of bed, pulling on his jeans and leaving the room. I lay there in the dark, worried for him and wondering if I’d destroyed everything before it began by bringing Violet Mitchell into our lives.

Why did things always have to be so complicated for us? Why couldn’t just this one thing be easy?

I rolled over, closed my eyes and tried to shut off my head long enough to get a little sleep. One of us would have to be clearheaded tomorrow. But I was having no luck.

And then Bo’s phone began to ring.

I rolled over and searched the darkness for his discarded slacks, finding the phone just as it was about to stop ringing. It was Jack’s face that lit the screen, his number scrolling at the bottom.

“Hello?”

“Remy? Why are you answering Bo’s phone?” After a heartbeat, he groaned. “Don’t answer that.”

“Why are you calling him at two in the morning?”

“We’ve got a problem. There’s been a warrant issued for his arrest.”

My heart sank. “For what?” But I already knew.

“Aggravated assault. They’re saying he put some guy in the hospital last night.”

I closed my eyes, well aware how bad an aggravated assault conviction could be. “That’s fast.”

“You knew?”

“It’s complicated. But the guy was…it was a setup, Jack.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“It just happened! I didn’t think—”

“You didn’t think at all, Remy. This must be West coming after him because of you.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sending some guys to come get him. You’re still at the guest house?”

“We’re here.”

“I want you both in the safe room within the hour. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll figure this out once you’re both safe. Just…be careful, Rem.”

I found Bo sitting out on the front steps, sipping a beer that he didn’t seem to be enjoying. I sat down beside him, draping his t-shirt over his knee.

“You should probably get dressed.”

He glanced at me. “West?”

“They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest. Aggravated assault.”

He closed his eyes, biting back a groan. “That’s not good.”

“It’s not. It’s carries a fifteen-year prison sentence.” I lay my hand on his knee. “But we’re not going to let it get that far.”

“And how do you plan on stopping it?”

I shrugged. “You were provoked. Everyone in that store knows it. And there has to be security tape.” I took a deep breath. “No judge in his right mind would convict you.”

“He’ll turn the witnesses to his side and he’ll lose the security footage.”

“But we won’t let it get that far,” I repeated. “He’s doing this because of Violet. We’ll just have to find a way to end this. We’ll have to make him back off both of you.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But we’ll find a way.”

He took my hand between both of his and lifted it to his lips. “I love you for wanting to help, Remy. But this…I did this. I let him goad me. This isn’t something you need to get wrapped up in.”

“I’m already wrapped up in it. I brought this down on you.”

“You were trying to help a friend.”

“And you were trying to protect me.” I leaned close to him and kissed the side of his face. “Don’t push me away, Bo.”

His slid his arm around me, pulled me close to his side. But then he stiffened as a couple of SUVs made their way toward the guesthouse. It was a long second before we could see they were from Stone Security and not police vehicles.

We stepped inside to finish dressing, then allowed the guys Jack had sent to escort us to the front SUV. As we pulled onto the highway, the darkness was flooded with red and blue flashing lights. A police cruiser and an unmarked sedan were slowing to pull into the driveway. I twisted to watch them, recognizing West in the front passenger seat of the sedan.

“He’s determined to win this game,” Bo said.

“So am I,” I responded.