I wanted to slap myself. Of course I hadn’t been there. A few hours ago, I’d been more than a little intent on making sure I never saw this woman again.
And now, fuck, I was sweating. What had happened?
That little pinkie touch? The way that she’d sagged in my hold, her blue eyes so completely trusting.
Fuck. My cock was perking up at the thought of her coming back, and somehow, I might get a chance to defend this woman from something that scared her.
I knew there was no way that my people would let anyone nefarious follow her back here, but still, I knew I would be sleeping with a gun under my pillow for the foreseeable future.
Maybe Gia needed to sleep with me too. That way I could keep her close.
I groaned, shoving a hand down over the cock that continued to thicken as I considered the idea that I was going to be able to swoop this woman up in my arms when she got here. I was not taking any other response as a possible answer.
The minute she was here would be the first moment she was mine.
I moaned.
“Colton? Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I rasped at her, forcing my thoughts from the gutter and back to the woman on the line with me. “You’re going to be fine.”
“There’s someone behind me. Is that—are they your friends?”
I nodded and then realized she couldn’t see that. “They are. Just make sure that you get back to the cabin safely.”
“Okay.” Gia sniffled. “Colton, what the heck am I going to do?”
I leaned against the wall. “You’re going to come back here to me, and I’m going to make sure you stay safe while some of my crew sweeps your house and local cameras.”
She sniffed again.
Something in my chest tugged. “Baby, listen to me. No one is going to hurt you on my watch. Now, why don’t you tell me who you think did this? Because I can hear it in your words that you know. Or at least you think you know.”
“You can’t know that.”
I smiled. “I can. I’ve been doing this a long time. If it had been a stranger or completely unexpected, most people would’ve been angry or even frustrated at their home being hit. But you, you were scared of someone. And you called me right off the bat.”
“I did.”
“Good girl. Now tell me about them.”
Her rattling sigh filled the phone line. “My event planning business failed last year. Or at least that version of it did. I’d been focused in on the wedding niche and while it was always a beautiful final product, it was hard to do solo. Then my business partner and I hit it off during the pandemic, and our portfolio was so similar that it made sense to work together, you know?”
I made a soft, agreeable noise in my throat, loud enough that she could hear. I could already sense where this was going, but at the same time, I was starving for more information about this woman.
“We had already rebranded our partnership and signed several amazing vendors around town. I was hard at work. My background is in graphic design, so that worked right in. But she was supposed to be managing the business itself. We were booked for months in advance, and I could actually afford to breathe for the first time in years. It wasn’t until months later that I realized that she had no idea how to do any of it, or maybe that she never intended on trying. And worse than that, she refused to talk about it. She shut down completely. Suddenly, I had no business, no money, no future, no nothing.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I started taking on clients as a nanny. It was easy when I’d already been so involved with the local event scene. But when she disappeared along with all of their deposits and trust…there was nothing I could do but apologize a hundred times over.”
I heard a blinker over the phone. She was getting closer.
“One of my client families, they were really good and managed to pull a ton of detail together. She said it shouldn’t just be me paying all these people back for the clothing they ordered. That my partner needed to do her part. After a few weeks, we had enough that I could sue her for rights to our products, my banking information, even the small office space that we’d been working out of. She had closed all of that without my permission.”
“When did that happen?”
Gia sighed. “Last week.”
