Page 26 of My Shifty Bodyguard

For a long moment afterward, we just stay like that. Her forehead against mine. Both of us breathing hard. My hands stroking slowly down her spine.

"Hi," she says eventually, and there's a smile in her voice.

I can't help it. I laugh. Actually laugh while we're still connected, while sweat is cooling on both our skin.

"Hi yourself," I say, and kiss her softly this time, because apparently I'm capable of that too.

Much later—when my heart has finally slowed and Violet is tucked against my side, warm and drowsy—my phone buzzes on the table. I ignore it once. Twice.

On the third time, duty rears its ugly head.

I glance at the text on the screen and sigh.

“It’s your father,” I say.

She opens one eye. “Is he mad?”

“He’s coming to take the hiker into custody.”

She considers that. “I hope he isn’t too mean to him.”

“What if the hiker was trying to kill you?”

“But…he’s a hiker. He loves nature. He loves trees and flowers. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s a killer, does it?”

I stifle a groan. Why does Violet not realize that the world is full of bad things and bad people?

Because she’s Violet. Because she sees beauty and sweetness where I see shadows and danger…and sometimes, when I’m with her, I see the world through her eyes and it’s full of wonders I never dreamed of.

Chapter Thirteen

Violet

We're waiting at pack headquarters, and I have made a list.

It's a short list. Things To Do When My Father Arrives. Item one: stay calm. Item two: do not cry. Item three: if items one and two fail, locate the nearest goat.

There is no goat in the meeting room. I checked.

Dax stands beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine every time I shift my weight, which is constantly, because my whole body is humming and my wolf is doing laps under my skin. Jesse and Lane are here. Cole and Alexis. Marion, who keeps looking at me with the sort of warmth that makes my throat go tight. The council. Half the Rowan clan, all of them built out of the same intimidating granite as Dax, all of them pretending very hard that they are here for official reasons and not to watch the show.

Then the door opens and my father stalks in, and the whole room straightens.

Emissary of the National Council of Shifters. The man who decides pack wars and territory lines and which Alphas live. The man who has never, in twenty-five years, let me cross a street without an escort.

He looks at Dax for a cold, hard second. "I will talk to you later about this nonsense," he says, and the temperature drops about forty degrees.

My stomach folds itself into an origami crane of dread.

And then my stepmother shoves past him.

"You can't arrest the hiker!" Drusilla announces, breathless, her braid coming loose, two spots of color high on her cheeks. "He didn’t do it. There were never any assassination attempts. It was me.”

I suck in a breath of shock. I don’t even understand what she’s saying.

"I faked the assassination attempts," she says. "All of them. I did it so you'd finally let Violet leave the pack lands."

You could hear a moth land.