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Barrick had proposed to me on Christmas Eve three years before, and between school, work, and life in general, it had taken us forever to decide on a wedding date. Then I’d gotten pregnant out of the blue, and we’d decided that a quick, intimate wedding was a better option than the huge, gala-style wedding we’d originally planned for the next summer. Most of the plans had already been made, so all Momma needed to do was trim the guest list, move up the date, and dial back the event a bit.
My future husband was adamant I have his last name before the world found out we were going to be parents. To me, that wasn’t an issue. My own parents hadn’t gotten married until I was nearly two years old. I’d been their flower girl in the wedding that had taken place in a huge tent on the beach outside their house in Malibu. Barrick’s Neanderthal personality, however, refused to let his child be born without us sharing the same last name. The caveman I was about to marry needed a wedding band on my hand to go with the engagement ring.
Once my pregnancy truly began to show, I figured he’d pound on his hard chest and roar to the world, “I put that baby in my wife’s belly!”
It was enough to make me roll my eyes at his antics, but damn did it cause my panties to become uncomfortably damp just thinking about how much he loved and wanted me.
Chapter 2
Barrick
Agitatedly, I flicked my pen between my thumb and index fingers as I sat at the conference table. Seller was droning on and on about all the private clients the company currently had on its roster, filling everyone in on all the boring details of the latest antics of entitled, spoiled billionaires who needed a little extra personal security. I’d already read all the reports, so nothing he said was news to me.
The fucker knew I didn’t want to be there, and he was dragging out the meeting longer than it needed to be. I could barely stand to be in the same room with him on a good day.
It wasn’t a good day.
He had been my godfather before my biological dad passed away. It wasn’t long afterward that the man I’d once called uncle, the man my father had thought of as his brother, was shacked up and then married to my mom. I lost respect for him then. For both him and my mom.
All I’d been able to wonder was if they’d been sneaking around behind my dad’s back while he was still alive. Had they even cared when he’d died? Did they have something to do with his death?
Growing up, I was taught to question anything that didn’t feel right. It was what gave me better instincts when I was in the Marines. Then when I went into the family business, that background made me suspicious of everything that went on around me. Maybe that was why I was so paranoid about my stepfather and my mom. But I’d never been able to shake the notion that Seller hated my guts. He was obsessed with my mom—something I understood once I met Mia—but even after falling in love, I couldn’t help wondering…
Did Charles Seller kill my dad so he could be with my mom?
Before Charles Barrick Sr.’s passing, Seller and I were close. But as soon as we put my dad in the ground, things changed. I could see the wildness in his eyes when he was around my mom. His need to always have her close.
Part of me understood that to a certain degree now that I had Mia, but what he felt for my mom was…off.
My gaze stayed on my phone, waiting for Mia or her mom or one of the bodyguards to check in.
Someone.
Anyone.
Fuck.
They were dress shopping, which shouldn’t have been a cause to worry; nevertheless, I did. Whenever my little firecracker was out of my sight, all I could do was worry. Her father’s concern for her safety hadn’t been unfounded. She drew attention anywhere she went, and the majority of it was unwanted.
The woman was too beautiful for her own good. Too sassy. Too fucking sexy.
I doubted any of those were the reasons Nik Armstrong worried whenever his daughter left the house. His anxiety was related to Mia having been kidnapped not once, but twice by the same psychotic bitch when she was a child. The first time, a family friend had nearly lost her life. The second, Mia, along with the family friend and one of her honorary aunts, had been taken. Mia had nearly overdosed on whatever drug she’d been shot up with to knock her out for the drive to the farmhouse where she and the others were kept locked in barn stalls—a barn that had then been set on fire.
Both incidents had been traumatic for her parents, which had led to Nik having an almost PTSD kind of reaction whenever Mia wasn’t with him or under the watchful eye of a security detail. At first, when the job was forced on me by my stepfather, I hadn’t understood her father’s reasons for putting a secret detail on Mia.
And then I met Mia, and it hit me like an anvil.
Too many men looked at her, greedy intent in their eyes whenever they let their gazes travel over her.
Over what was mine.
That was just my immediate gut reaction.
Once she personally told me more of her backstory, giving me the details that weren’t in the dossier I’d been handed along with what I’d considered another babysitting assignment, her dad’s borderline obsession over her safety made sense on an entirely new level.
His need to protect his baby girl became my own. The itch just beneath my skin that I couldn’t satisfyingly scratch whenever she wasn’t within reach had only gotten stronger, more agonizing, as time passed.
Now there wasn’t just her security to consider.
