Page 30 of K-9 Guardians

“Figured you’d probably pass out at the dining table with your tablet stuck to your head.” While that may have been true, he also knew that keeping her from falling asleep in the communal dining room had little to do with it. “Wanted to save you the embarrassment.”

She laid her head back on the pillow. Silk. Another element of this personal space he hadn’t expected. Everything he’d known about Scarlett Beam up until this point had given him ideas of a dusty room with little to no personalization. A waystation between here and wherever she ended up next. But this...

This single room felt like a piece of home. Cared for. Lived in. Hell, he and Julien had been living together for nearly two months, and their place looked nothing like this. Didn’t feel like it, either. As much as he wanted to credit the decor, King understood that all this warmth came from Scarlett. She was the one who added life to every room she walked into. Including the one where he’d been bound, interrogated and stabbed.

Scarlett tucked her hands beneath her chin, studying him. “Is this what you really look like in the morning?”

“Disappointed?” he asked.

“Not at all. I can finally see your face without all those tight lines in it.” Her smile stretched from one side of her face to the other. The effect released her own set of tight lines from around her eyes and hitched his heart rate into overdrive. There was something about that smile. About that smile in this place, in this bed.

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to take that as a compliment or an insult.” He itched to close the small space between them, to feel her without a Kevlar vest getting in the way. To experience that heat she generated not just in his hand the few times they’d touched but over his entire body.

The truth was, he hadn’t felt anything for a long time. And painkillers had nothing to do with it.

King reached out, sweeping long red hair behind her shoulder. His finger brushed against the underside of her chin, and Scarlett closed her eyes as if she’d been waiting for that physical contact as long as he had. Hell, she was so damn beautiful like this. Raw. Without any threats driving her from minute to minute. Right here, right now, she looked...at peace.

And despite the danger and the violence and the worry outside of this room, King felt the echo of that peace for the first time in... Damn, he couldn’t remember how long. When his life hadn’t become his job. When he hadn’t been blindsided by a ten-year-old who’d been kept from him for the past ten years. When he hadn’t lost the closest thing to a best friend he’d had. How long ago was that?

Seconds blurred together as they lay there. King wasn’t sure how many. Didn’t matter. Because he finally had the chance to breathe. To slow down. To just...be. In this bed he wasn’t a DEA agent, the cartel didn’t exist, he wasn’t a father, and he wasn’t grieving the loss of the loss of his job or everyone he cared about. He was King. A guy who’d dreamed of being a hero all his life, who’d fallen in love for the first time as a junior in college and had his heart broken, whose bucket list included things like visiting the Grand Canyon and seeing a real-life volcano and running a marathon. Someone who didn’t feel the need to protect everyone and everything all the time, his own happiness be damned. Here, he was that man. Because of her.

King swiped his thumb beneath her chin, memorizing the feel of her skin, of a thin scar he hadn’t noticed until now. He ran the pad of his finger over it a second time. She’d told him not to ask about the scar across her stomach, and he’d do as she asked. “What about this one? Will you tell me about that?”

“You’re going to laugh at me.” Sliding her hand over his, Scarlett pressed her face into his palm. “My nana used to make my cousins and me take naps when we were growing up. My mom and my aunt were working single moms at the time, and the four of us cousins would get dropped off at my nana’s house. At the time I didn’t understand why we had to take naps, but looking back I can see she just wanted a break. She was the one who needed the nap, and she didn’t trust us to let her sleep without getting into trouble.”

“You were one of the kids that got into trouble, weren’t you?” He could see it now. Her curiosity, her determination to challenge and learn and figure the world out for herself. Nothing had changed in that sense.

“You’re not wrong.” Her laugh shook through his hand, real and bright. “We’d all pile in her king-size waterbed, but I never actually went to sleep. Instead, I would keep my brother and my cousins from going to sleep by poking them in their faces. Turned out, they didn’t like that so much. My brother scratched me, leaving this scar, and I never poked him in the face again.”

“Here I thought you were going to tell me you’d sneaked out of bed and gone to do something against the rules. Like climb the pantry for cookies. Seems more your style.” He’d meant it as a joke, but the smile disappeared from her face.

Scarlett drew his hand along her neck, down over her collarbone. His fingers trailed between her breasts and over her stomach, lifting the hem of her shirt to expose the angry jagged pink line underneath. “The last time I broke the rules, my unit turned on me.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, what to think. “Your unit?”

Her gaze dipped to the raised scar tissue. “We were stationed in the Middle East. Security. Our job was to keep everyone safe, escort any high-value property on and off the base, investigate criminal activity, the works, but it turns out, the best people to break the rules are the ones who are there to enforce them.”

Her skin warmed against his, her breathing coming faster, and King couldn’t keep his distance any longer. Shifting, he closed the space between them and speared his fingers into her hair. “Hey. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to trust me with this.”

“But I do.” She brought her gaze to his. Clear and soft and brilliant. The kind of eyes that could see right through him. And, damn it, King wanted her to see him. To be someone she could know and rely on in a world where she gave so much of herself to everyone else. “Which seems like a very dumb idea on my part, but here we are.”

“Here we are,” he said.

“I noticed things. Whispered conversations between a couple members of my team while we were on shift. I didn’t think anything of it at first. Our unit wasn’t exactly tight. More of a bunch of misfits thrown together, and I figured they had a closer relationship. They were friends, and I was the rookie. We got along. Drank together, told war stories and played Monopoly off duty, so I figured it was just a matter of time.” Her next laugh wasn’t as real as the last and died almost as quickly as it escaped. “But then I noticed a routine whenever the rangers brought in confiscated goods from their missions.”

“What kind of goods?” He hadn’t meant to ask, but it seemed important.

“Weapons, money.” Scarlett tightened her hold on his hand. “Drugs. It didn’t take me long to put it together. They had a protocol they followed whenever one of those shipments came in to be processed, and we were the ones in charge of processing.”

“They were helping themselves.” King pressed his thumb into end of her scar, where the tissue had built up more than the others. “What did you do?”

“Threatened to rat them out to our commanding officer and have them all court-martialed. Problem was, he was in on the operation, too.” Her voice softened as she studied the line across her stomach. “And then one night, he decided he couldn’t risk me telling anyone.”

Chapter Eleven

She hadn’t told a single soul.

Not outside of the court of JAG lawyers and the judge who’d been all too ready to throw her in the darkest hole after everything that went down.

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