And also how much I needed to sort out. I needed to talk to Xander first and foremost. He’d called me again twenty minutes ago, but I hadn’t wanted to answer when I was visiting my dad.
“My men aren’t leaving. They’ll be here in shifts, always two of them. Your dad won’t be alone,” Declan said.
I leaned my forehead against his chest. The light feeling I had earlier was threatening to vanish completely. His arms came around me, heating the chill that had swept over me.
“Come home with me,” Declan murmured, smoothing his hand down my hair. “You need some rest. And I want you safe.”
I looked up and searched his gaze, surprised at the vulnerability I saw there. “I need to talk to Xander and… I don’t know. Maybe just sort through everything that’s happened.”
“Don’t pull away from me, Royal,” he said.
“No, it’s not—I’m not doing that. But this is fast and with my dad and…other things going on, I need to focus.”
“Reassess,” he said quietly, finding the meaning behind my words that I wasn’t able to say out loud. “Do you regret what happened between us?”
I blinked and shook my head. “No. Not at all. But where do we go from here?”
“I want more. More of you—more of us. And like I said before, we’re in this together. I want to help. There are things we still need to talk about.”
“I don’t know where we go from here, but I’m not walking away,” I told him.
I didn’t want to. It would be easy to go home with him—to his house in the foothills or the city. To let my guard down and be with him. But I couldn’t set my real life aside. I needed perspective. And I needed to make sure I was keeping my head on straight.
“Can you take me home?” I asked him.
Declan’s jaw clenched but he stepped back. “Of course.”
I caught his hand as we walked to the elevator, and after a moment, he squeezed it tightly.
I blew out a quiet breath of relief. I knew he wanted more but the only assurance I could give him right now was that I wasn’t running away. I was just taking a minute.
When we got in the car, Declan turned to me. “In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll be stationing one of my men outside your building. Just in case.”
My stomach clenched. “You think someone might do something?” I thought about my dad and what might have really happened on the road.
What if someone wanted the information I had? Or to stop it from getting out?
“Hey.” Declan squeezed my hand. “It’s not to worry you. It’s just in case. There are people out there that would kill to have the kind of information you have.”
“And you think they know about me?” I asked, then tried at a small joke. “Because I told you I was discreet.”
He offered a small smile, but it faded as quickly as it had come. “As I said, I don’t want to worry you. Do what you need to do at home and then…”
He turned to face the window, leaving his sentence unfinished.
Then what? He probably wanted to ask. He was a hundred steps ahead of me and clearly worried that I wouldn’t catch up anytime soon.
Or at all.
“I’ll call you,” I told him when we reached my apartment. “Okay?”
He leaned over to cup the nape of my neck. “I hope you do,” he murmured before giving me a lush kiss that had me remembering his powerful hard thrusts into my body back in his bedroom.
When he finally released me, he got out with me on the sidewalk and made sure I made it into the building safely.
My legs wobbled but I managed to get inside and cast him a wave before going upstairs to the apartment.
My lips were still buzzing from Declan’s kiss, my cheeks flushed from the memory of his mouth on other parts of my body when I stepped inside and Xander started to yell at me.
“I swear, I was just about to call the police! Do you know how many years you shaved off my life? Royal, you—”
“I know. I’m sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. “Please. Just let me sit down first and then you can keep yelling at me.”
He folded his arms, waiting for me to seat myself on the couch. Once I kicked off my shoes and pulled my legs up to get comfortable, he started again.
“I can’t believe you didn’t call me back! What the hell were you thinking?” Xander asked.
Uh… I couldn’t very well tell him I’d been distracted with sex. Though, under any other circumstance, Xander would want all the details.
“I was distracted,” I said. “I found Declan’s house and then I went in there—”
“You went in there? Are you crazy? What happened? Did he come after you with a knife or just—”
“No,” I said, choking on a laugh. Xander’s eyes widened. “Sorry, I know that’s not funny, but if Declan really wanted to hurt me, he could snap me like a twig.”
His eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t make me feel better. But that’s also interesting.”
“It really is,” I told him, pointing to the couch. “If you can forgive me, I’ll give you all the details—or what I know for now.”
He glanced to the kitchen and his frown softened. “I guess I could open a bottle of wine.”
I checked my phone. “It’s only three in the afternoon.”
“Yeah, in real people time. We were both up early and I’ve spent the last several hours worrying about you. So in adult, stressed people time, it’s well after five and the perfect time for wine.”
“Good point.”
“So,” he called from the kitchen. “What’s his house
