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“What’s going on? Are you okay?” he asked, sounding concerned bordering on agitated.

Shit, shit, shit. He was going to hate me even more for this, I just knew it.

What had I been thinking?

If I’d just texted Clayton, we could have laughed about this.

And to top it all off, I wasn’t wearing much myself, just a thin white muscle shirt that barely covered my ass, and underneath it nothing but black panties.

“I’m so sorry,” I began, figuring that the best way to handle this was to just get it all out there. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I woke up in a panic, and I don’t know why, but you were the first person I thought to reach out to. You can go back to bed. I was being silly. Again, I’m so sorry.”

He ignored that, stepping inside and shutting the door behind him.

I took a few quick steps back to avoid contact with him, trying to not so much as even look at his naked, hard-muscled torso. God, he’d bulked up even more than I’d realized, and it was solid muscle. Tanned, rippling muscle.

What was wrong with me?

“Come on, babygirl,” he said in his slow, smooth drawl of an accent. “Let’s take a look around.”

I could barely make my legs work after hearing him call me that. It was like I’d flipped a switch, and the last two years had disappeared. The old Declan had reappeared.

The one I’d fallen for.

The one I couldn’t forget, no matter how hard I tried, or how much time passed.

“Come on,” he repeated, voice soft to the point of tender. “Stay close. You wouldn’t have sent me that text if everything was okay over here. We both know it.”

He began to move, and I fell in close behind him. He went slowly through the living room and into the kitchen, going around corners like a cop’s kid: cautious, gun held at the ready, finger indexed safely along the frame.

He moved unhurriedly, turning on every light we passed, until he came to the back door.

“It’s locked,” he observed. “We’ll come back and check it out after we secure the house.”

“Where’s Max?” he asked, a few rooms later.

I gulped. “I don’t know. I think that’s what woke me.” The sound came back to me then. “He yelped.”

Declan looked at me.

“Once. Really loud. It wasn’t a noise I’d heard from him before.” My mouth went dry. “And then it just—stopped.”

“Well, hell. I’ll look around out back for him after we finish with the house.”

I really didn’t want him to do that.

There were woods out back, about fifty yards from the house. The thought of him going into them in the dark made my skin crawl.

He pushed my bedroom door flat against the wall while he checked the room, covering the full-length mirror behind it.

I went in when he’d cleared it, sat down on the bed, letting out a dejected sigh. “This was idiotic. I’m sorry. It was obviously nothing. You can go back home now.”

He shushed me and kept going. I followed and tried to look at him as little as possible.

It was a small, single-story house. Three bedrooms, a study, kitchen, living room, dining room. My parents had one child, so we didn’t need a big house, and all of their extravagances had centered on turning the backyard pool into the neighborhood hangout.

“That was everything,” I told him, as he finished searching my parents’ room. He’d been very thorough.

“Not quite. You have an attic, don’t you?”