Page 6 of Billionaire Bodyguard Summer

I’m drawn to him too, I don’t want to admit. I find myself sidling up to him, unbuttoning the buttons on his fancy shirt, revealing the ripple of muscle underneath. He’s gotten thicker, more built since we first met. I let the shirt slide off him and run my hands over his chest. He sighs and pulls me to him, his handsclasping behind the small of my back, only for a moment, before he remembers how it scares me, any small pretense of capture, the slightest feeling of being boxed in. So he lets go. He knows me really well, for a man who doesn’t know me at all.

He takes one of my hands in his and raises it to his lips, kissing my fingers. His eyes go glossy. “I missed you, Mia. I did.”

It breaks the spell on me when he calls me by the fake name I gave up at the club in East Greenwich, the name that’s followed me across three states, three arms of this investigation, three locations where Armin loved me as best he could, and then I ran.

I’m here for Harvey. That’s all. My love life doesn’t exist. It can’t.

“Let’s get some rest,” I say. I set my purse down on the little counter by the bedside, lift up the covers, and slide myself in. Armin lays down next to me, bare-chested but still wearing those damn business pants. Everything in me wants to unbutton them. I dig deep, fighting my urges, fighting to ignore him. I promise myself I’ll push him away. But when he gathers me into his arms and begins stroking my hair in that familiar way of his, I feel safe again for the first time in weeks.

I wake up, I bolt upright with a start, breathing heavy.

“It’s okay,” a deep voice says. “You’re safe.”

Armin.

He’s wrong of course. I’m not safe, and he’s not. What the hell was he thinking renting a boat at the same marina as Harvey, two rows down?

Always some measure of audacity, that’s him. Cowboy boots at the beach.

He doesn’t reach for me, this time, but he leaves himself open, chest still bare, dress pants rumpled.

I don’t go to him. My eyes water with the effort, but I pull away. I untangle myself from the sheets and take in the boat’s master cabin instead. It’s tidy, modestly luxurious. Nice attention to detail, nothing ostentatious like Harvey’s yacht. “You just get here?”

“A few days ago.”

“How’d you know where to find me?”

He pulls a small leather wallet off the end table and flips it open.

“Sunbreak Security?”

“The best of the best at the beach,” he says.

The corners of my lips twitch, but I won’t give him a smile. “Is that their motto?”

“Nah,” he scratches his stubble, and I remember in a flash how that feels between my thighs. That’s one way to forget this case completely. “I made that up for you.” He smiles, and winks.

He’s no crime boss, and he isn’t my FBI coworkers, either, and I’m already breathing easier. Most of the tension’s gone out of my shoulders.

And that’s what makes him the problem.

“I gotta go,” I say, running my fingers through my disheveled hair. I’d rather be running them through his, and then smoothing them down his chest. The outline of his cock is thick through the fabric of his pants, and my desire to fuck over this case, to fuck him is growing, while he is, too, and it’s all I can do to keep from straddling his muscular thighs.

He sees my train of thought, where I couldn’t keep my eyes from straying. “Harvey’s yacht set sail about an hour ago,” he says.

I get up so I don’t get on him. “He’ll be back.”

“Late night cruise?”

“Body disposal. He does it every Tuesday.”

I’ve been telling Harvey my so-called testimony is nothing more than a double-cross, a way to stall the feds, keep them off his back. I have no idea if he buys it or not.

Maybe by now he knows I’mthe feds, too.

If Armin hadn’t come along, tonight’s body could have been me.

five