Page 8 of The Agent’s Curvy Seduction

“Get some sleep. Tomorrow we talk about the rest.”

I pick up my bag and head for the stairs before I can do something stupid like ask him to stay close. The master bedroom is at the end of the hall. Big bed. Soft lighting. Windows that look out over the dark trees. I set the bag down and sit on the edge of the mattress, staring at my hands.

My real name is still echoing in my ears, low and certain the way he said it.

Willow.

I press my palm against my thigh and breathe.

Seven months of running.

And somehow I just ran straight into the arms of a total stranger who should terrify me more than anything I’ve been running from.

I should be terrified.

Instead, for the first time in a long time, I don’t feel alone.

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. . .

Rhys

I listen to her footsteps fade up the stairs, and then I stand in the kitchen alone for a long minute, doing nothing but breathing.

Twenty-five years I've been hunting monsters. Twenty-five years of keeping my head clear, my hands steady, my heart entirely out of the equation. I know how to read a threat before it moves. I know how to compartmentalize a job so it doesn't touch anything real. None of that prepared me for what I saw in that bakery tonight.

I'd seen her before. Blood in her hair. Shock in her eyes. Twenty years old and holding the wreckage of her life against her chest as I carried her up an embankment seven months ago. That girl was a survivor I was sworn to protect.

But that wasn't the woman I saw behind the bakery counter tonight.

This version of her, defiant, sharp-eyed, ready to fight even terrified, that's the woman who stopped being a protection detail the second I laid eyes on her conscious and whole and furious. That's the woman I want with a clarity that has nothing to do with duty and everything to do with the fact that she's mine now, whether she knows it yet or not.

I do a final check of the cabin before I let myself sit still. Every window latched. Motion sensors live on the perimeter. Cameras feeding to my phone, all green. I pull up the threat file again anyway, scrolling through what little intel we have on the men who ran the Thompson family off the road seven months ago. Voss's name sits at the top of a very short list. Michaelson's empire is bigger and better protected than anything I've gone up against, and somewhere inside it is a girl who watched her family die and walked away with nothing but scars and a fake name.

She's stronger than she knows. I saw it in the bakery—the way she squared her shoulders before she ever said a word, the way she fought me even scared out of her mind. Most people freeze. She didn't.

I sit with that for a while, turning the file over, turning her over in my mind right alongside it, until the two things stop feeling separate.

I want her. That part isn't complicated, even if everything around it is. What's complicated is the line I have to hold—she needs space, needs time to breathe after tonight, needs to trust that I'm not another threat wearing a badge. So I stay downstairs. I keep my hands where they belong and my thoughts mostly where they should be, and I let her have the whole floor above me to herself.

Somewhere around one in the morning I catch myself standing at the bottom of the stairs, listening. No sound. No restless footsteps, no crying. Just quiet.

I think about the eight months I've spent building a case against Michaelson, piece by piece, invoice by invoice, and how none of it mattered until a dead man's daughter walked into a bakery and turned my whole life sideways. I think about Daniel Thompson's last message to me, the fear in his voice when he made me promise to keep her safe. I intend to keep that promise if it's the last thing I do.

She's not a witness to protect until the trial ends. She's not a job that wraps up neatly in a few weeks. Somewhere between the bakery and this cabin, she became something I'm not walking away from, no matter how this shakes out. Not temporary. Not replaceable. Mine to protect, mine to want, mine to wait for, for as long as it takes her to want the same thing back.

Near dawn I climb the stairs quietly and stop outside her door. No crying. No shifting sheets. Just the slow, even sound of someone finally, actually asleep.

The tension I’ve carried since the crash eases for the first time.

I stand there another minute longer than I should, hand flat against the wood like I could feel her through it, and then I go back downstairs to wait for morning.

The job changed the second I saw her in that bakery.

I'm done pretending otherwise.

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