But sitting there, breathing hotel air and trying to slow my heart, I realized something I hadn’t let myself admit:
Not needing protection and not wanting it were two different things.
“I can handle myself,” I murmured under my breath, testing the words.
I believed them. It wasn’t bravado. If Derek had pressed me harder, if Levi hadn’t appeared, I would’ve done what I had to do—heel of the hand, broken nose, scream loud enough to bring half the floor running. I’d done worse in worse places.
But the idea of not having to. Of knowing that, for once, someone else had seen a threat and stepped in before I had to bleed for it?—
That did something to me I wasn’t ready to name.
My mind drifted to all the other ways Levi’s capacity for violence lived under his skin. The precision of his movements. The way his hands could be gentle on my body one moment and devastating in a fight the next. The stored kinetic energy of him, like a coiled spring that only unwound for a purpose.
I imagined going back up there after all this. Finding him with bruised knuckles and a split lip. Climbing into his lap andjust … staying. Letting that dangerous energy curl around me like a shield while I kissed every place that hurt.
“Get a grip, Emerson,” I muttered.
The giddy, schoolgirl part of me—apparently back from the dead after a decade in the field—did not get a grip. It kicked its legs, metaphorically, in the back of my mind.
Did you see his face? it squealed.Did you see what he’d do for you?
My cheeks heated. If my younger self could see me now, I wasn’t sure if she’d be horrified or taking notes.
Slowly, the sharp edges of adrenaline began to dissolve, leaving something steadier in their place. The arousal didn’t vanish—if anything, it settled deeper, less like fireworks and more like embers—but my brain finally started doing what it did best.
Thinking.
What were they doing up there?
I glanced at the lobby clock. At least twenty minutes had passed. Maybe Thirty. Long enough for a confrontation, but not long enough for … whatever came after. Unless Levi had decided to call hotel security, or the cops, or?—
I winced. Levi was not a call-the-cops kind of man.
Images tried to crowd in—too vivid, too specific. My imagination had never had trouble filling in blanks, but now I had actual footage to overlay it with. Levi with his brothers, talking matter-of-factly about missions I’d only heard whispered about. Levi describing how he’d neutralized mercenaries to stop a massacre.
My fingers found the faint ache on my forearm where Derek’s grip had been. It would bruise. A petty part of me hoped Levi saw it before it faded.
The giddiness ebbed, replaced by a different weight.
Derek hadn’t just flown halfway down the coast to badger me about a memo. He’d been rattled—more rattled than I’d ever seen him. There’d been too much behind his eyes, too much unsaid in the spaces between “board” and “donors” and “pressure.”
Someone had gotten to him. The same someone, maybe, who’d fed me the original tip. The same someone Byron Dane claimed had his sons in their sights.
I’d held onto my sources like a security blanket, convinced that if I could just keep all the pieces close long enough, I’d see the shape of the puzzle before anyone else did. That I could control the narrative by controlling the information.
But Derek showing up at my hotel like that—flying across state lines under invisible duress, putting his hands on me because he was more afraid of whoever was pulling his strings than he was of losing my trust—that changed the equation.
This wasn’t just a story anymore.
It hadn’t been for a while, if I was honest.
The truth hadn’t stopped being the truth just because I’d fallen in love with one of the subjects. But the way to get at it might have changed.
A woman in a navy blazer and sensible shoes crossed the lobby, pulling a wheeled suitcase. The front-desk clerk welcomed a new guest. Somewhere, an ice machine hummed.
Life went on. Responsibility pressed down.
What are they doing up there?morphed into a better question:
