Declan sat forward to grasp hold of her wrist. “I already arranged for a team to be sent there once you’d told me the two of you lived together. The guys at Wynter Security have agreed to put a twenty-four-seven two-man rotation on River until Koslov has been apprehended.”
Her eyes widened. “You did that for River?”
He sighed. “Much as it pains me, yes.”
Fawn looked puzzled. “Why would it pain you to protect an innocent man?”
“Because it’s who and what River is to you that’s now preventing me from—” He broke off.
“From what?” She eyed him quizzically.
A nerve pulsed in his jaw. “Just from.”
Fawn studied him again before speaking. “You’re sure River is safe?”
“My men will ensure that he is and that he remains so until this situation has been contained.”
“What does ‘contained’ mean? Or do I not want to know?”
He shrugged. “That will depend on what Koslov’s future intentions are.”
“But River is safe?”
“Yes.”
“Then there are a couple of things you really do need to know about him and me,” she acknowledged. “If I’ve understood the situation correctly, the sooner the better,” she added with a blush.
Declan tensed. “Yes?”
“I’ll start with the fact that my parents met at university and stayed together afterward. They weren’t married, nor did they have any intention of ever being so. That was too much establishment oversight for them.” Fawn smiled. “They thought of themselves as free spirits, shying away from any responsibility or rules.”
“Isn’t having a child, by definition, a responsibility?”
“Not the way my parents brought me up.” Fawn chuckled affectionately. “We lived on a barge and traveled up and down the waterways of England, Wales, and Scotland from one year’s end to the next, never stopping in one place long enough to call home. The times we did stop were so that my parents could take up temporary work for a few weeks and earn enough money tokeep us for the next few months when we moved on to another location.”
“Unusual.”
She nodded. “To say the least. Our lifestyle, because we never really settled in one place long enough for me to attend formal education, meant I was homeschooled. Which really means I’m self-taught, because my parents were pretty haphazard when it came to providing that schooling. There was always something more fun to do than studying books.” The affection in her voice was obvious as she spoke of her irresponsible parents, despite their nomadic lifestyle. “I’m pretty sure having a second child wasn’t planned because the barge was already pretty crowded with the three of us on it, but lo and behold, a few years later, I was presented with a little brother. They named him River,” Fawn added pointedly.
Declan’s brows rose. “River is your younger brother, not your live-in boyfriend or husband?”
“Yes.”
Declan thought he was a bit old to stand up and do a little victory dance, and he probably wasn’t in any condition to do one either, but he damn well felt like doing it.
River was Fawn’sbrother,not her lover.
“Fawn and River?” he teased lightly to cover how pleased he was to learn of their familial connection.
She shrugged. “Chosen by our born-too-late-to-be-hippy-dippy parents,” she acknowledged, again with an open and affectionate smile. “I didn’t care what our names were or how crowded the barge now was, I was just thrilled to have a little brother.Someone nearer to my own age I could spend time with. The barge could get a little lonely at times without someone to play with. We both tried coming up with different names for ourselves, once we were old enough to realize that no one else was called River, except for the actor my mother swears she didn’t even know about, and I’ve never met anyone else called Fawn either.”
“Makes you both unique.”
She grimaced. “Children don’t really want to be unique; they just want to fit in. Which was something the two of us never did.”
“Where are your parents now?”
Fawn sobered. “They died from carbon monoxide poisoning a few years ago. My father had installed a small oil heater on the barge. Obviously not efficiently enough, because it leaked toxic fumes. It killed them both one night as they slept.”
