Page 78 of The Bodyguard's Fall

In my room, while I was sleeping. While I was in the most vulnerable state a person could be in. He was in my room. And I had no idea.

Waves of nausea rolled in my stomach, but I fought to keep everything down. Tate led me to the bed to sit as he began explaining to his family what happened. My mind couldn’t process the absolute violation of privacy. It didn’t seem real. Not in this place. I expected it to happen in my apartment. It could have happened there so easily. But here? This little room had become a haven of sorts. Being in Autumn Ridge with the Walkers had been an oasis in my desert of hell. I wasn’t sure this was something I could come back from.

He was here.

Sympathetic and hardened Walker faces looked my way as they learned what had occurred, but when Luke started playing the tape and I visibly stiffened, Tate herded them all out of the room, barking orders to call the police and check the entire house.

“Check laundry baskets, the cold storage, under blankets, behind closet doors. Anywhere a grown man could hide, I want you to check it,” he barked.

He turned to me. “Grab whatever clothes you need. You’re moving in with me.”

When it must have looked like I needed more prodding to move, he added, “This room will be locked down as a crime scene in a few minutes,” he said. “Just grab a change of clothes.”

I did so, throwing in my makeup bag and hair stuff as well before Tate led me into his room.

His bed was rumpled and unmade, like he’d been woken by a crazy woman yelling for him next door. His clothes from the night before had been flung on the back of his desk chair. It smelled masculine and faintly of his cologne. He could have left me then. Ann offered to sit with me, but he stayed, becoming a caged animal instead, pacing the room and flinging back the curtains while talking to the police and then Will on the phone.

When he finally hung up with my brother, he threw the phone down on the bed. He stared at it, his hands on his hips, before he looked at me.

I couldn’t bring myself to sit, so I just stood by the doorway, holding my clothes.

As if needing to do something with his hands, Tate scrambled to throw his covers across his bed, a quick attempt to make it for me.

“Sit down,” he said, backing away and motioning me toward his bed.

“Are you alright?” he asked as I sat stiffly on the bed. The sympathy in his voice threatened to be my undoing. I didn’t look at his eyes.

“I’m fine.”

“How could you be fine?” His voice was gruff, and I much preferred that tone to the soft and sympathetic.

“My brain hasn’t caught up to what just happened. So right now, I’m fine. Just numb. Check back later.”

“You’re in shock,” he said. He motioned to the bed. “Come lie down.”

Since my brain was currently white noise, he could have told me to walk to New York City, and I would have left immediately. Though I wasn’t always prone to do anything he said in his bossy voice, lying down sounded like a good option, so I lay on Tate’s bed. When I did nothing else, he sighed, walked over to me, and draped a soft, cotton quilt over the top of me. He pulled the blanket up to my neck, his fingers grazing it ever so slightly.

“You can go,” I said, finding myself at a crossroads between wanting to be alone and wanting to drape myself all over this man and beg him never to leave. So it would probably be best if he left. He didn’t leave, though.

“Will’s on his way,” he told me softly.

My eyes flicked up to his in surprise.

And then I broke. The dam welling inside of me flooded at the knowledge that my brother was coming for me. My face crumpled, and my hands went immediately to cover my face.

Tate wouldn’t allow it. In one swift movement, he slid me across the bed, settled beside me, and slid an arm underneath my neck, pulling me into him and onto his chest, while I soaked his shirt with quiet tears that wracked my body.

When we heard the police arrive a few minutes later, most of my tears had dried up. It was just the occasional sniffle that escaped. I wasn’t sure if Tate even knew he was doing this, but his fingers brushed gently across my back, lulling me to a place of calm. We heard the Walker boys talking loudly and leading the police to my room next door.

Sometime later, a soft knock sounded on Tate’s door. Maybe I was dreaming—no doubt if it were true, Tate would deny it to his grave—but I could have sworn there was the softest of kisses brushed against my head before he slid out from underneath me and answered the door.

The next few hours were a blur of police questioning, dusting for prints, and the entire Walker family up in arms, trying to figure out how Leroy had gotten inside when all the windows had been locked and there was no forced entry. The Walker men performed room and window checks every night, last night included. It was finally determined that Leroy must have snuck into the home sometime the day before, while the entire family was at the barn raising.

“It would have been easy for him to sneak inside when you were all in and out of the house, and get somewhere downstairs to hide until the middle of the night,” one of the officers stated matter-of-factly, as if his statement didn’t absolutely obliterate all of us who lived here.

The police finished conducting their investigation later that afternoon with one policeman informing me that I could move back into my room. By that time, Will had arrived, and the Walkers already had plans in place to increase security around their house and put more cameras everywhere. I sat through it all, my brain a fuzzy mess.

Tate had such torment in his eyes I could hardly look at him.