Rhys somehow recognized that inherent truth about me before I did.
“Thoughtful and observant.” He was observant of his surroundings, but I hadn’t expected him to be so observant of me he saw parts of me I’d hid from myself. “You really are full of surprises.”
“Don’t tell anyone, or I’ll have to kill them.”
The tension cracked, and a small, genuine smile blossomed on my lips. “Humorous too. I’m convinced aliens have hijacked your body.”
Rhys snorted. “I’d like to see them try.”
I didn’t ask any more questions after that, and Rhys didn’t offer any more answers. We finished our dinner in companionable silence, and after he paid—he’d refused to entertain the idea of splitting the check—we walked off the food in a nearby park.
“You’re really letting me walk around here without my vest?” I teased. The bulletproof vest hung in the back of my closet, unused since our trip to the mall.
An image of Rhys’s hands on my skin in the dressing room flashed through my mind, and my face heated.
Thank God it’s dark out.
“Don’t make me regret it.” Rhys paused before adding, “You’ve proven you can handle yourself without me breathing down your neck.” He said it almost grudgingly.
I had been more careful with my actions in recent months, even without Rhys’s explicit instructions, but I hadn’t expected him to notice. He’d never said anything about it until now.
A pleasant warmth unfurled in my stomach. “Mr. Larsen, we might not kill each other after all.”
His mouth twitched.
We continued walking through the park, where we passed couples making out on the benches, teens huddled by the fountain, and a busker playing his heart out on the guitar.
I wanted to stay in that peaceful moment forever, but dinner, alcohol, and a long day conspired to drive exhaustion into my bones, and I couldn’t hold back a small yawn.
Rhys noticed instantly. “Time to go, princess. Let’s get you to bed.”
Maybe it was because I was delirious from fatigue and the high emotion of the day, or maybe it was because of my recent dry spell with the opposite sex, but a mental image of him “getting me to bed” flashed through my mind, and my entire body flushed.
Because in my imagination, we were doing anything but sleeping.
Images of Rhys naked, on top of me, under me, behind me…they all crowded my brain until my thighs clenched and my clothes rasped against my skin. My tongue suddenly felt too thick, the air too thin.
My first sexual fantasy about him, and he was standing less than five feet away, staring right at me.
I was a princess, he was my bodyguard.
I was twenty-two, he was thirty-two.
It was wrong, but I couldn’t stop.
Rhys’s eyes darkened. Mind reading didn’t exist, but I had the eerie sense he could somehow crawl inside my brain and pick out every dirty, forbidden thought I had about him.
I opened my mouth—to say what, I wasn’t sure, but I had to say something to break the dangerously charged silence.
Before I could utter a word, however, a gunshot ripped through the night, and chaos ensued.