She glanced to the left.
A dark figure emerged from the crowd. He jumped over the barricades and ran directly toward her.
“No …” Gabrielle whispered, stumbling backward. “Don’t come any closer!”
Chapter6
Sebastian placed the sunglasses on his face.
Not because the sun was like a harsh laser beam scorching the air of the mid-morning, but because it gave him an excuse to gawk at Gabrielle without being noticed.
Ike’s incredibly sexy and devastatingly gorgeous younger sister.
This was definitely not the teenage girl he remembered.
She was all woman now and making it damn hard for him to remember she was at the bottom of his least favorite people list.
He lowered his sunglasses to get a clear view of her. Her heart-shaped face was framed by loose dark curls that brushed against her bare shoulders. Her deep brown skin shimmered under the rays of the island sun. Those dazzling dark brown eyes captivated and lured him, intense and defiant, yet barely concealing a hurt simmering beneath the surface.
He didn’t understand this swell within him to ease whatever pain she was dealing with, whether it was the bastard who’d stalked her a decade ago or someone else. When she’d been attacked and kidnapped as a senior in high school, he’d been in his final year at the Palmchat Islands Military University. The torment he’d endured at the hands of the punk college kids desperate to get her attention had faded as he focused on joining the Palmchat Islands Air and Land Force after graduation. He’d had sympathy for her and Ike, who was off the grid on his first official mission as a PISCO and unaware of what his sister was going through, but Sebastian was in no position to help with the search. He was barely an adult and focused on establishing his own life without leaning on the generosity of his host family or the King Family.
Now, as he stared at Gabrielle, he saw a woman too beautiful to have any kind of sadness reflected in her eyes.
Fuck, he needed to focus on the job of protecting her.
Not trying to dissect the psyche of a woman who’d made it clear she thought he was unworthy of her and her family. Sure, she’d tried to apologize for insulting him, but he knew she didn’t mean it. He didn’t need a fucking apology. All he needed was to protect Bernadette’s daughter. It was the least he could do for the woman who’d given him a new life and treated him like family, even if her daughter never would.
Sebastian leaned forward and placed his hand against the small of Gabrielle’s back as she exited the plane and walked down the steps. His fingers tingled as he let his hand linger longer than necessary.
“Sebastian … Sebastian …” Stacy’s shrill whisper interrupted his thoughts.
Pausing, he turned back toward the airplane door and glared at the woman through his shades.
“Gabrielle forgot her passport. It must’ve fallen out of her purse,” Stacy explained. “Should I have it sent with the rest of her things? Or do you think she might want it with her?”
“Give it to me.”
Stacy ducked back inside the plane, then re-emerged with the passport. He grabbed it and slipped it into his inner pocket, then turned toward the stairs.
The cheers from the crowd had turned into concerned howls.
A sudden movement caught his attention.
Adrenaline raced through his veins as his pulse jumped.
His eyes locked on the threat—male, over six feet tall, dressed in all black and racing toward … Gabrielle.
His heart threatened to beat right out of his ribcage.
The distance between the man and Gabrielle was shrinking by the second. Sebastian caught the glint of the sun off the dark gray of the weapon—a Sig P365 9mm pistol. The man’s hand was within inches of grabbing it. A few of the advocate groups supporting Damian Hester’s release were radical and on the fringes of vigilantes, but he didn’t think they’d be stupid enough to attack her the minute she stepped foot on island soil.
He was fucking wrong.
Sebastian leaped down the stairs three at a time, then hurled forward to intercept the attack. Pain jolted through his body as he crashed down on the man, trapping him against the ground.
Gabrielle shrieked as they crashed mere inches from where she stood. She stumbled backward, then fell on the concrete, rolling a safe distance away from them.
Sebastian tore his focus from Gabrielle and back to the bastard who had tried to attack her. The man’s eyes bulged as he thrashed and twisted underneath him. There was no way he’d be able to wrestle his way free. Pressing one forearm against the man’s neck, he used his opposite hand to wrestle the gun away and toss it out of reach.
