Page 12 of Broken Bodyguard

“Maddie.” He sent me a stern look, but the corners of his lips curled. “You gotta know by now that while you’re with me, you’re not lifting a finger.”

I fished my keys out of my purse and clicked the car to unlock, biting back a little smile as he headed for the backseat and tugged the booster out. Something in his gait looked off; I studied him as closely as I could but he was back to the Jeep before I could make a determination.

“You ready for this jelly?”

“If the jelly is runaway-flavored, I guess so.”

He cracked a heartbreaker grin as he rolled into motion. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting you to make a jelly flavor joke like that, and I’m not prepared with a good comeback. But just know, I’m much wittier in usual circumstances.”

And just like that, even more of the tension of the night snapped. I grinned over at him, remembering how easily that night at Seven and Jordan’s had disappeared for us.Like this.

“If you can’t be level ten witty in the wake of being attacked by a guy with a baseball bat, then…” I drifted off, shaking my head. He looked like he was holding in laughter. “Then I think I’m going to have to runaway to someone else’s cabin.”

His shoulders shook with laughter. “Okay. I’ll drop you off at another bodyguard’s house.”

Poking fun at the situation really helped to lessen some of the anxiety. The car ride progressed like that—banter tempered with questions from Grace and the occasional moments of easygoing silence.

“How does your leg feel?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “Fine. Why do you ask?”

“You took a baseball bat to the knee.”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“I don’t believe you.” That would explain the hint of a limp I’d seen. Or maybe I’d onlythoughtI’d seen it. “That had to have hurt.”

“I’ve experienced worse, I promise.” He flashed me a smile that told me to drop it, because I wouldn’t get the answer I wanted out of him. “You don’t have to worry about me, Maddie.”

“But maybe I want to?”

He looked over at me, and even in the darkness I could see the question marks in his gaze. There was something heavy behind my words that even I wasn’t sure I’d intended. But there it was.

The truth of the matter.

If he’d chosen me to protect…then I could choose him to worry about.

Even though I wanted to do a lot more with him than just worry.

CHAPTER FIVE

TROY

"WhereareweMommy?”

Grace’s little voice in the backseat of my Jeep felt like a spear to my heart. Nothing about this situation was right. The fact that they had to leave Louisville to feel safe; the fact that they even needed me to begin with. In a perfect world, Maddie would have married a guy who wasn’t a level ten douchebag. But we didn’t live in a perfect world…and maybe part of me was secretly glad that I was the one who was able to catch her when she needed the support.

“We’re at the cabin I told you about when we left the party.” Maddie’s voice was a calming hush as she stroked her daughters’ silk blonde hair. We were roughly forty five minutes outside of Louisville in a cabin owned by Len, one of my good friends, as a “safe house”. Really he used it as an outpost on his cross-country security gigs—I had a lot of traveling bodyguards as friends—but it was also stocked as an emergency spot in case things went south politically or economically. He wasn’t an apocalyptic nut, but he did have three years’ worth of rations in the basement.

“Let’s get you two inside.” I headed for the back of the Jeep, ignoring the screaming pain in my knee. I needed to rest and I’d wake up fine—that was a demand more than a hope. I plucked Maddie’s bag out of the back along with my own, the automatic lights of the sprawling wooden porch clicking on as I got closer to the front door.

“This place is pretty nice,” Maddie murmured once she had Grace in her arms. The scraggly branches of the bare trees framed the edges of the cabin, which was nestled at the end of a long driveway in the forest. I set our bags at the front door as I wrestled with the lockbox to get it open. After inputting the wrong code about six times, I finally got the key out with a satisfied grunt. When I caught Maddie’s eye, she was biting back a smile.

“What’s so funny?”

“I love how you can defend me against four men but a little lockbox will take you out.”

I snorted with amusement as I unlocked the door and pushed it open. Then I turned my gaze to her, lifting a brow.

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