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It was rare for me to find myself in a situation where I felt fearful.
I’d felt tense or anxious, and I’d certainly felt anger or rage. And that wasn’t to say that I didn’t currently feel those emotions now.
I did.
I absolutely did.
But there was something else beyond that. Something I hadn’t been very familiar with in my line of work.
Fear.
More often than not, my job as a bodyguard put me in situations where we knew what the threat was and where we would find it. Having spent a good chunk of time over the last few years working as part of the private security team for a world-renowned industrial rock band, I’d managed to do my job with a certain level of confidence.
The band had been on tour, and we knew what had to be done to get them to where they were going at each venue, hotel, or stop they made along the way. It was a unique situation with celebrities, and not once had I ever felt the way I felt now while needing to do that job.
It was because this was her.
It was Sawyer.
The life of the woman I was in love with had been threatened and was at risk, and I was just now realizing the severity of the situation was worse than I had originally thought. It was no wonder I couldn’t contain the dread.
There were about a hundred other things I would have rather been doing with Sawyer, but what I wanted right now didn’t matter. I needed to focus on the facts and the very real threat against my girl’s life.
I’d been under the impression that I knew everything about this situation, but that call she’d just received had clearly indicated that there was more going on here than Sawyer had shared.
Now that I’d led us both into the living room—I couldn’t bear to stand at the kitchen counter knowing everything I’d just been envisioning doing to her on it—it was time to get everything out in the open.
“I thought you told me everything I needed to know about this predicament you’re in,” I said.
“I forgot about Eric,” she murmured.
“You forget about mentioning the guy responsible for putting you in this situation?” I countered.
She lifted her shoulders to her ears. “When I was on the phone with him, he said he didn’t intend for that to happen.”
“Are you seriously defending this guy right now?”
Sawyer shook her head as a look of disgust washed over her. “No. I hate that he made me think he was interested in me all so he could take down some criminals. I just think that now that we’re discussing it, maybe I should tell you everything that has been said to me.”
Based on the very brief conversation I’d had with the guy and the part of the conversation I’d heard when Sawyer had been talking to him, I couldn’t exactly say that I believed he was using her.
I think he had likely intended to find out some intel, stumbled upon her, and Sawyer, being all that she was, ended up on his radar in a different way. I wasn’t a fool. I knew how beautiful Sawyer was. It wasn’t unbelievable or out of the realm of possibility that someone could be in his position as a detective and find it difficult to separate what he needed to do for his job and what he wanted to do in his personal life. Fortunately for me, he didn’t get the chance, and she got out of there before it seemed he could act on whatever attraction he might have had to her.
I nodded and urged, “Yeah, let’s do that. Why don’t you tell me what it is that I need to know about this guy? And I’ll preface this by saying that I even need to know the things that you might think I don’t. In other words… everything.”
God, I hated this.
On the one hand, I felt nothing but murderous rage that Sawyer was in such a terrible position because some asshole couldn’t do his job without putting her in the line of fire. It was that part of me that was struggling to keep things on an even keel.
But on the flip side, there was that part of me that realized what was happening, how it was affecting Sawyer, and wanted to protect her from it.
“I thought he was a regular guy, just like all the other ones who came into the club,” she started. “The only difference between him and the others was that he spent more time chatting with me instead of watching the girls who were up on stage.”
“You didn’t find that to be odd?” I questioned her.
A look of disappointment washed over her. “Well, thanks for pointing out that I’d be far less interesting than naked women.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, not a trace of humor in my tone. “But a guy showing up at a strip club and never paying attention to the strippers should make you at least a little skeptical.”
