One Night with Her Brooding Bodyguard

by Cara Colter

  He had carried her across that creek, she reminded herself.

  But, just in case it caused weakness, she also told herself it only meant she was at least as valuable to him as his stupid fishing rod. As she watched him wrestle his wet socks back onto his feet, she realized her own feet were so wet and cold they were losing feeling.

  For the first time since she had known him, Sophie could not wait to get away from him. Maybe she would leave Havenhurst altogether. She loved Maddie. And Ryan. And Edward. But she wasn’t really needed here. And staying was just proving too hard. A roller-coaster ride of emotion. It had been so much fun spending time with him this afternoon. Hopes up. He had not listened to her when she most needed him to listen. Hopes dashed.

  Hopes up. Hopes dashed. The pattern of her entire history with this aggravating man.

  She needed to be getting her life back on track. She needed to be applying for a new job, not hiding from her failures here with a fake job. She needed to be thinking of how she went for the protector type, over and over again, and then was disappointed by them. She could learn to protect herself! She could take self-defense!

  She needed to get away from Connal Lancaster. He didn’t help her think straight. The opposite. How could any woman ever make a rational decision within a hundred-mile radius of the man?

  A woman who had just experienced the disappointment of a fishing rod chosen over her sense of well-being could make a rational decision.

  When they got back to the palace, she was leaving. As soon as it was humanly possible, she was leaving Havenhurst.

  Except by now if there was one thing Sophie should have known it was this: every time she made a plan, whether it was to get married, or get her life back on track, the universe was determined to have the last laugh.

  The weather outside was so bad that Lancaster was leaning forward, a grim look on his face as he tried to see beyond the swirling sleet. It kept jamming up the windshield wipers and icing the windshield. He had to stop and get out of the vehicle several times to clear the ice. She was not sure how he found it in himself to reenter the storm.

  Now that she had made her decision, and now that the car was pumping out warmth, Sophie felt suddenly exhausted. Beyond exhausted.

  She closed her eyes.

  And was nearly thrown into the windshield when Lancaster slammed on the brakes.

  “Sorry,” he said, and then got out of the car.

  Now he said sorry! She watched him fight his way through the wind and sleet. In the faint illumination of the headlights, she saw him staring at something.

  Good grief, had he hit something? Someone?

  Despite how she wanted to stay in its warmth, Sophie scrambled out of the car, too. She went and stood beside him. Her mouth fell open.

  Where there had been a quaint little bridge over a sweet little brook this morning, now there was a pile of debris shoved up on the bank like so many toothpicks, the raging water sweeping by them.

  She didn’t know how he had seen it in time to stop. They could have been killed. Again. His saving her life, for at least the second time today, made her attitude toward him soften slightly.

  Slightly.

  “Now what?” she asked him. “Do you have a phone?”

  He nodded.

  She waited for him to pull it out and use it. When he didn’t, she wondered if it was because he knew the service would be spotty in such a remote part of Havenhurst.

  But, of course, that wasn’t the reason, at all.

  “I don’t want to make our rescue a priority,” he said. “There will be people in far more need than us after a storm like this.”

  I need to get away from you would not count as a priority in his book Sophie knew, as he had shown her feelings barely rated on his radar.

  He took his phone out and looked at it, before shoving it back in his pocket, away from the weather.

  “No signal, here, anyway. I’ll check in later. I’ll have to watch the battery life.”

  “You can charge it in the car,” she suggested, quite pleased with her contribution to their survival strategy.

  “Normally, I’d say we should stay with the car, but all of Havenhurst will be digging out from under this storm. It could be days before they get to us.” He looked at a sky darkening as night approached and made a decision. “Luckily, there’s a little cabin not far from here.”

  Sophie felt something in herself go very still.

  Just when she had decided there was absolutely no hope for her and Lancaster—not ever—she was going to have to spend days in a cabin with him?

  It really was a cruel, cruel world.

  He gathered anything he thought would be useful from the trunk, including the basket of freshly caught fish, and gave her that look when she offered to carry some of it.

  Later, she realized how wise that look had been. Because the cabin was farther away than he had let on. She was starving, exhausted, soaked and thoroughly frozen. She could not have managed to carry gear as well as her weary self.

  And then, just when she wanted to sit down beside it and weep—never mind impressing Lancaster with her newfound determination to look after herself—the path opened into a clearing. Even in the state she was in, and even in the horrible, dismal weather, she could see the cabin was an enchantment: whitewashed, roughhewn logs, turquoise shutters, a thatched roof.

  “How long did it take us to get here?” she asked. “It felt like an hour.”

  “About eighteen minutes.” He didn’t check his phone for accuracy. If she wasn’t so completely done, she might argue the point with him.

  He opened the door, stood back and let her pass him. Sophie stumbled through it, and stood there, exhausted and shivering and wanting to weep. The cabin was uninhabited. And primitive. It was obvious there was no power. Why had she hoped for warmth?

  He moved by her, fell on his knees before a stone hearth and shoveled kindling in. She saw the loveliest stack of dry logs beside it and went to stand in the meager warmth.

  “You need to get out of those clothes,” he said to her, without looking up when her shadow fell over him. It definitely was not a request. It was an order.

  She stood there, dripping on the floor, her mind moving ever so slowly. Get out of those clothes and into what?

  He got the fire going, moved through the cabin, familiar with its layout. He came and stood before her, a rough blanket in his hands.

  “Get out of those clothes,” he said again.

  Despite how utterly done she felt, she mustered a bit of pride. She folded her arms over herself and glared at him mutinously.

  “Don’t make me ask you again, Sophie.” His voice was dark with warning that made her shiver more than her soaked clothes.

  She grabbed the blanket out of his hand, planning on just pulling it around her soaking-wet clothes. He read her intent instantly, and stopped her with a look.

  “I could only find one blanket, so don’t even think of getting it wet,” he warned her. “Naked. Now.”

  The words made her shiver harder. It wasn’t as if he had designs, other than keeping her alive. She was going to have to concede. It was no different from being caught in her wet underwear at the hot springs. Only it felt so different. She had felt some semblance of control there.

  “Somehow,” she said, with a toss of her wet hair, “I never pictured this particular moment going quite like this.”

  “Neither did I,” he said, so softly she was not sure she had heard him correctly.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  WHY HAD HE said that? Lancaster asked himself. The last thing Sophie ever needed to know was that he might have indulged the terrible weakness of imagining them together in any way, never mind that way.

  Now she knew. They had both pictured this moment.

  Of taking their clothes off.

&nb
sp; And not at a hot springs, either.

  For each other.

  Thankfully, he had no time to indulge in weaknesses. He wasn’t romancing her. He was taking charge in a situation that was probably far more dangerous than she realized. He estimated they were both on the verge of textbook cases of hypothermia.

  There was no use second-guessing his choice to leave the vehicle. He had underestimated the time it would take to get here, because by himself he could have gone faster, eating up the ground with his long stride.

  Sophie had already used up most of her resources getting out of the canyon, and her terror at his crossing back over the creek against her instructions had sucked up way too much of her energy.

  Which made it even more imperative that she see there was room for only one leader in a situation like the one they were in, and it wasn’t going to be her.

  Mentally he ticked off his priorities, none having anything to do with her sudden modesty, modesty that had been nowhere in sight the other night at the hot spring.

  Because, he told himself sternly, both of them had known there was an escape hatch that night, room to walk away. That was a luxury they did not have this time around.

  He needed to get that fire going, get them both warm and dry and get something hot into them.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Sophie as she dropped the blanket at her feet. She managed to undo the laces on her boots and kick them off, but she was fumbling terribly. Her hands were so cold and shaky she couldn’t get the buttons of the shirt undone. She was going to go into full-blown hypothermia before she managed to get her clothes off.

  He took a deep breath, strode over to her, grabbed both sides of the front of her blouse in his hands and tore it open, buttons flying.

  “I love it when you’re masterful,” she said through chattering teeth.

  At least she hadn’t said that this wasn’t quite as she’d pictured it. He couldn’t help but smile—inwardly, not outwardly—at her brave attempt to inject a bit of humor into her situation.

  He quickly crouched in front of her, dispensed with the button on the front of her slacks the same way, and yanked the pants down. His hands brushed the flesh of her thigh and it was like a block of frozen ice.

  Moving quickly, he rose again, reached behind her and dispensed with the soaked bra with one flick of his index finger. She glared at him and scrambled to cross her arms over herself.

  “It seems as if you might have done that once or twice before,” she said.

  “Well, watch this, then, lass.” He hooked his thumbs on either side of her soaked panties and yanked them down.

  “Yes, you definitely have experience at separating a woman from her underthings. You might need a bit of work in the finesse department. On the panty part, anyway.”

  “Hard to get it right with my eyes closed.”

  “Your eyes were closed?” she asked.

  Mostly.

  “Thank you for saving my dignity.” While she stepped clumsily out of them, he scooped the blanket that was at her feet and wrapped it around her tight, as if she was a sausage.

  “See how painless that was?” he told her. “Hardly time to sneak a peek.”

  He wasn’t sure if she looked relieved, or offended!

  It was one of those rough wool blankets, the weave coarse, and he was sure it would feel scratchy and unpleasant against her skin, the delicacy of which he was newly aware of.

  “You aren’t going to like this,” he warned her. Starting at her legs, he worked his way up, rubbing the blanket, hard, against her. She whimpered. “That hurts. It’s not like when you did my feet.”

  “No,” he agreed, “it’s not like that at all. I’m sorry, lass. It can’t be helped.”

  “What a letdown,” she said. “Despite your efficiency at getting clothes off, you suck at foreplay.”

  It was something a man less disciplined than himself might take as a challenge. Ignoring her whimpering and his own wayward thoughts, he methodically rubbed the circulation back into her.

  Satisfied that her shaking was subsiding, he pulled an old overstuffed sofa as close to the fire as he dared and set her down on it. Then he went and searched the cupboards, coming up with an ancient bottle of brandy. Her arms were pinned inside the blanket.

  “Open your mouth.”

  “After the horrible attempt at foreplay, you’re going to get me drunk?” she asked, but she opened her mouth.

  He poured a shot of brandy down her throat and then took one himself.

  “I am starting to believe I might live,” she decided.

  “No one dies on my watch.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, he realized the enormity of that lie. He quickly gathered her clothes and began to pin them on a line that ran beside the chimney.

  Sophie was watching him closely.

  “I think it’s your turn to dispense with your clothes, Connal Lancaster.”

  He turned and looked at her. She was right. He was cold to the core, and he could not be of any assistance to her if he got sick. He knew a man’s strength was a puny thing against the ravages of being cold and wet. As a soldier, he had been taught there was hardly a worse enemy than that.

  Still, he felt the surrender of it, as he reached for his buttons. He did not turn away from her.

  “Somehow,” he said, trying to tease her, and not quite pulling it off, “I never pictured this particular moment going quite like this.”

  He shucked off his clothes, felt instantly warmer without their wetness clinging to him. She averted her eyes when he freed himself of the wet boxers. He left the clothes in a pile as she managed to squirm free from a corner of the blanket, and she held it open to him. He hesitated for only a moment before climbing under there with her, pulling the coarse blanket tight around them again.

  “Are you completely unclothed?” she asked him, her voice a squeak.

  “As the day I was born.”

  She contemplated that.

  “Hmm,” she finally said, “this isn’t quite as I imagined, either. It’s about as romantic as cuddling up with a frozen ham.”

  “I’m no romantic, Sophie. I’ve disappointed others.”

  “Your wife and your baby didn’t die on your watch,” she told him softly, some intuition leading her directly to the heart of his every disappointment in himself. “It was a fire. You had no more control over that than over this storm. You told me you weren’t even on the island when it happened.”

  He suddenly felt utterly exhausted. He could feel faint warmth creeping, with excruciating slowness, back into both their bodies. He could not fight, anymore, the need to tell her exactly how it had been, the need to dispel her illusions.

  Maybe it was crucial in these circumstances. They were bound to bond to one another in this kind of survival mode, in this kind of forced proximity. He assumed they would be here days, not hours.

  So, it suddenly felt imperative that Sophie know exactly who he was and how greatly he had failed the only time it had ever mattered.

  “The regret,” he said slowly, going somewhere he had gone only—but endlessly—in his own mind, “wasn’t just that I failed to be there when I was most needed, it was that I was a failure as a husband. And a father.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she said stubbornly.

  Her faith in him was troubling and undeserved.

  “I didn’t come from one of those big, happy families,” he said. “My father was a career soldier, as I am. The Havenhurst forces are allied with other armies, and we share personnel, missions and assignments.

  “My father was seconded for a mission to a place nothing in Havenhurst had prepared him for. He came back from his deployment minus an arm and a changed man. He refused to accept a disability pension, calling it charity.

  “He was harsh, given to drink and episodes of violenc
e. It was worse after my mother died. I was twelve. The only respite I had was my grandfather, who would take me fishing.” He cast her a look. “I guess that’s why his rod means so much to me. The only good legacy from my childhood. Anyway, I followed the lead of my three older brothers and left home as soon as the army would take me.”

  “I didn’t know you had brothers.”

  So much she didn’t know. So much he had succeeded at keeping from her. “They all serve overseas. We’re not close. Survivors who bailed off that sinking ship as soon as we were able.

  “My family became my brothers in arms in the guard. I loved my new life like a puppy who’d been kicked too often finally finding a good place to be. It wasn’t just that I was fed and a life that had been utter chaos took on a soothing routine, it was that I started to hear words I’d never heard. Well done. Brilliant. Good job.”

  He realized her hand was resting on the top of his wrist. When had she put it there? Why did he feel as if he was drawing strength from her, when in fact, the whole point of this story was to set up a barrier between them?

  He wished he could shake off her touch, the comfort of her hand resting lightly atop his wrist, but his strength seemed to be waning.

  “I don’t tell you this out of disloyalty to my father,” he said, “but to let you know there is nothing in my background that prepared me to be a family man.

  “Not that that kept me from longing for what I had never had. When Ceyrah came along, she just seemed to love me so completely. I’d never had that before. But what started off as a blessing soon felt like a curse. She didn’t like me out of her sight. She was bitter about my work obligations. She chaffed at every assignment I was sent on. She wanted me to love being with her, and love doing things with her, but I’m ashamed to say I was bored by every single thing she found interesting.

  “I was a selfish bastard. I didn’t know what to do with all that need. I was rising in the corps, and had been offered an opportunity to go to a military college off island. I wanted to focus on my career. She was opposed to me leaving, and there were no married quarters at the college. At twenty-one, I wanted a divorce, something that is almost unheard of on these islands. Her answer to that was to get pregnant. And I went off island anyway, leaving her to cope with the baby mostly on her own.