Hunting Season: Werewolf Bodyguard Romance (Guarded by the Shifter Book 1), Kate Rudolph [ebook reader with android os TXT] 📗

But she couldn't. "So what's your story? You don't seem like a bodyguard." Every bodyguard she'd ever employed was all business, all the time. A good trait in someone trying to keep her safe, but not exactly memorable. There was something about Owen, though, something that made her want him physically and sit down beside him to watch TV.

He blew out a breath and grimaced. "That was not the plan."

Wasn't that how life went? But now that she had a taste, she wanted to know more. "I know a thing or two about plans changing. What was yours? Originally?"

He laid his arm on the back of the sofa and ran his fingers over the red leather. Some part of him always seemed to be in motion. "Army for a while. I didn't really think much past that."

She looked at him, really looked at him, and tried to imagine him in fatigues on a battlefield somewhere. It didn't fit. "Full career?" Then again, she didn't always seem to fit in the places she wanted to be.

But he shook his head. "I wasn't going to go that far."

Stasia turned more fully to him and placed the remote on the side table. "How long have you been out?"

A dark look passed over his face so quickly that she wasn't sure she really saw it. "Two years."

"Doesn't sound like you planned it." But maybe Owen wasn't a planner, maybe he just let things happen.

"I didn't."

"Want to tell me what happened?" Now that she was asking, she was desperate to know. She could feel a secret hiding beneath the surface and she wanted to cut it away, layer by layer, until she knew it all.

He waggled his eyebrows and grinned. "I'd tell you but then I would have to kill you."

"I thought you were supposed to protect me."

He made a rumbly sound in the back of his throat that did things to Stasia, things she wasn't allowed to think about. Danger! Danger! She threw another question out there, desperate for a lifeline out of flirty territory. "Do you like New York? Do you even live in New York regularly?"

His finger dipped into one of the divots on the couch and circled around one of the decorative buttons. Stasia tried not to imagine what his fingers would feel like against her skin. "The company is based out of New York. I live in Queens. Raised in Jersey. It's alright."

Alright. Some people said New York was the greatest city in the world. Stasia agreed with Owen's assessment. It was fine. It was where she lived. But just like with the future of her career, she wasn't sure it was where she wanted to stay.

"What made you want to go to Bermeja?" Owen asked.

The question caught her off guard. Her father and AR had railed at her, demanding she not go. Em had insisted that she needed to go, just to stick it to them. But no one had wanted to know why. "I saw the devastation of Hurricane Charles and I knew I had to help. I always wanted to go into emergency medicine and I wanted to go someplace that really needed help. The dirty secret of a lot of humanitarian missions is that they need people with money to make things work. I had all the qualifications and I have the bank account where I could afford to do it. So I went. And as crazy, as hard, as terrible as the conditions were, I loved doing it. Helping people like that. I felt almost like I was made to do it."

"What do you mean by that?" He was leaning closer, as if her story had pulled him in.

Stasia could practically feel the grit in the air from the makeshift hospital she'd been working in. Reconstruction never seemed to end and a fine sheen of dust had covered every surface. "Thinking on my feet. Improvising. Just making it work. It really made me test my abilities to the furthest limits of what I learned and to listen to people who didn't go to a super fancy med school that had every single piece of technology that a person could ever hope for."

The scent memory of the place was obliterated by the smell of Owen's soap. When had he gotten so close? Had she moved closer? She must have; they were both leaning towards the middle of the couch, pulled together as if they were stuck in each other's gravitational orbits.

"What about the other doctors?" he asked, his fingers close enough to touch her if he stretched a little. "You meet a cute humanitarian who wanted to save the world with you?"

Stasia could barely imagine that. "We were way too busy for that. And, well. I'm me." She'd managed to make exactly one friend in her entire medical career, and that friend was about to abandon her to another job.

Owen's face scrunched in confusion and the tips of his fingers teased her shoulder. "What's that supposed to mean?"

It was her turn for confusion. What was there to explain? He'd only been around her for a day, but he had to know, right? People didn't get close to her, and those who tried quickly retreated when they realized there wasn't some secret soft core under her prickly skin. "I'm a bit abrasive."

He stared at her in a way that felt like a caress, and then his hand moved, almost like he planned to touch her face. She wanted him to. She wanted him to reach out and close the distance between them, to put an end to this dance and quench the thirst she'd had for him since the moment she laid eyes on him. But he stopped his hand before he reached her.

Stasia was done fighting. She was done worrying about whether it was appropriate or not. She laid her head in his hand and let his fingers stroke her cheek, her eyes falling closed at the sensation.

"I don't think you're abrasive. I think you're kind