Page 2 of Guarded Knight (Echo Valley #3)

We’ve been sitting in this car for three hours, parked on a quiet street outside a McMansion two hours from Echo Valley. The whole neighborhood smells like sprinklers and overpriced fertilizer. Not one sighting. Not even a flicker in our binoculars moves behind those picture-perfect windows.

Anton lets out a long, suffering groan beside me, stretching his legs and propping his boot against the dashboard.

“So this is what my life has come to…”

I don’t need to look at him to see his exaggerated misery. I hear it in his voice, feel it in the way he drags his hand down his face.

“I survived the SEALs, then thirteen years in captivity, and now, all that grit is truly being put to the test tracking cheating spouses.” He waves a hand toward the house, a monument to suburban monotony. “I swear, if I have to sit through one more night shift like this, I’m gonna lose my mind.”

“Put in your two weeks,” I say, adjusting the rearview mirror, not because I need to, but because I need something to do.

Anton snorts. “Yeah, right. Like you’d survive without me.”

I sure as hell wouldn’t be here without him.

After leaving the SEALs, I spent years bouncing from place to place, never putting down roots. Never wanting to. Hell, even when I visited Starlight Canyon or Echo Valley to see family, I never stayed long.

But that was the point. Keep running, and the demons won’t catch up.

Only they did. Every damn time.

After finally spending some time in therapy, seeing my brother, Enzo, get engaged and my sister, Shay, with another baby on the way, hell…I guessed it was time to at least try to enjoy the good things I have left in my life.

Maybe I’ll break the cycle of my flight response. Maybe I won’t. But I have to try. My therapist gave me an assignment to stay here for three months, and for the first time in my life, I figured the homework would be good for me.

When I came back and found Anton living in the house at Monarch Hills my brothers built for me, I wasn’t happy. At first, I wanted him out, the way I want most people out of my space. But Anton isn’t like most people.

He invited me in and made me a fancy, undersized coffee from a Nespresso machine he’d bought for the place.

I planned to throw him out, but that coffee turned into a cold one.

One beer turned into a night swapping war stories, the kind you don’t tell normal civilians.

The kind only another SEAL, another man with ghosts, would understand.

His stories blew me away.

But more than that, something about the sheer impossibility of how un-fucked-up he is, despite everything, earned not only my respect but my friendship.

And maybe that’s why, by the time we chucked a twenty on the table at the bar in Echo Valley, I was sold on his idea for Shadow Justice.

Anton had described it like some badass vigilante firm, an adventure, something edgier, less douchey than the celebrity bodyguard jobs I’d been picking up in between drifting.

But now? We’re watching a businessman’s wife sit in her bathrobe, eating ice cream, binge-watching true crime instead of screwing the pool boy.

“This is depressing,” I mutter, watching the lifeless house. “Maybe we should’ve opened up shop somewhere that isn’t a town with more horses than crime.”

Anton smirks. “Yeah, but then we wouldn’t get the joy of watching people ruin their marriages for a living.”

“You say that like this lady’s even having an affair.” I gesture toward the house. “I bet her husband’s the one screwing around. Probably hired us to make himself feel better.”

“Trust me, this isn’t my idea of a dream gig.” Anton sighs, tossing his phone onto the dashboard. “But I’m not leaving Ava now that she’s getting married. She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a family, and soon enough, I’m sure she’ll have one. I’m not missing that.”

Anton isn’t old enough to be Ava’s father, but I can see how he feels like one, or at least a big brother, after what they went through together. How young she must have seemed when he took her under his wing back when they were in captivity.

I spin my cell around between my fingers. “Ava doesn’t seem ready for kids. Enzo told me she’s planning a world tour.”

He puts the binoculars to his eyes. “Maybe…” Anton huffs. “I’m catching something, even if it’s someone leaving dog crap on their driveway.”

Before I can laugh, my phone buzzes on the console. I glance at the screen.

Xander Young.

We grew up together in Starlight Canyon, my best friend, my brother in the SEALs. Thankfully, he’s found a lot more meaning on this side of the military than I have and has become an advisor in Washington.

I swipe to answer. “Young? You all right?”

“Hey G… I got a favor to ask.” He sounds hurried, but that’s nothing new. “I need you to do something for me.”

Xander doesn’t ask for help. I sit up a little straighter. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Lara.”

Her name has my gut feeling full and empty at the same time. It still feels impossible that we shared so many years of…shit, I don’t know what to call it. Closeness? A bond? She was everything to me at the time, like we were soulmates who had found each other but had yet to fuse.

How we shared our entire childhoods, the same root system, and now don’t even talk is bittersweet. She’s still there filling up my heart, my thoughts, even though she won’t let me close to her.

My grip on the phone tightens. “Start talking.”

“It’s her ex.”

My jaw clenches involuntarily. Xander mentioned Lara’s ex, Cameron, the last time he was in Echo Valley. He told me she should’ve never gotten involved with him in the first place and that he had a bad feeling about him.

He never even had to breathe the bastard’s name in front of me. I already knew the man didn’t deserve her. Nobody does.

Not even me.

Maybe once I did. The fateful day I decided to kiss her, I thought we were meant to be. But she deserves more than my baggage, and the more I know about the human race, the more I know we all have it, so yeah, no man deserves her.

Least of all when the clock has always ticked louder for her than for the rest of us.

Lara’s time might be shorter than most, and she deserves to fly free. Her cystic fibrosis is under control now, but it’s impossible not to remember that when she was born, before all these treatments and medications were invented, everyone thought she’d only have thirty years.

She’s two years younger than me.

Thirty-four.

I’ve only ever asked God for two things. First was to get my mom through cancer. Second was that Lara would be given a full life. She’s the reason I still have faith despite so many reasons in the world not to.

Xander interrupts my drifting mind. “I knew this guy was trouble, and when she finally broke up with him, I was glad. Until I heard he was stalking her. Fucking bastard has been leaving notes and broke into her place twice now. And there was no sign of how he even got in.”

My chest fills with adrenaline, instantly ready to fight. “You fucking kidding me? Is she okay?”

“She only just told me about this now. Shit. I wish she would have said something straight away.”

I know he’s squeezing his eyes shut like he does when he needs to reset.

He clears his throat. “I need you to look after her. I leave Starlight Canyon for DC tomorrow and I can’t do it from there.”

I’d never refuse to help my best friend or Lara, but calling me in will not be what Lara wants.

“She won’t want a bodyguard,” I say, not in protest but to hear if he’s already figured a way around this fact.

“No shit,” Xander mutters. “What’s new?”

That’s not the answer I was hoping for.

I stare through the windshield, focusing on nothing, slowing my pulse, which now thrums in my neck.

I’ve known Lara for nearly as long as I can remember. She’s part of my fabric. This isn’t the first time the Youngs have asked me to look out for her.

Lara went through lots of hell as a kid with archaic treatments and hospitalizations. Dave and Stef, their parents, tried to stuff her in bubble wrap. Didn’t matter. She ran us ragged anyway.

One time, Lara slipped away at the mall while we were supposed to be watching her. She vanished for forty-five minutes. Xander nearly lost his mind thinking she was breathless, suffering an attack in some dressing room somewhere. And when we finally found her? She’d been tracking us.

She’d been trouble even at twelve.

When she started a new medication four years ago, it gave her a new lease on life, and she moved to Santa Fe to get out from under that watch.

And now? She’s trouble in a whole new way. She’s stunning, charismatic, and utterly reckless. Not to mention she’s still holding our past against me.

Not that I blame her. I hold it against me, too. I wish like hell I could have taken her as mine when I came back from deployment but… I couldn’t. I told her I wasn’t in a good headspace to be exact. She said she understood.

But I guess my not sticking around hurt us both, because now, she hardly says a word to me, if she even stays in the same room.

Shit, maybe Xander wouldn’t even be asking me if he knew how much I hurt her. Hurt us. If he knew that the last feeling I ever had for her still lives in my veins and it isn’t platonic. Not that I’d cross the line again.

He can trust me in that.

“She’s going to hate this,” I say, not an excuse, a statement.

“She actually agreed.”

He throws the words out casually, but they land like a nuclear blast. She agreed to be… with me?

For a split second, hope rushes through me.

But then Xan continues. “Not to you per se, but to leaving Santa Fe anyway. She must be scared if she agreed to leave. She loved that place.” His tone is somber.

Anger rushes back in. How dare this stalker asshole steal even a second of joy from her?

I dart my gaze to Anton, who I can tell is listening intently despite not having taken the binoculars from his face. “So she agreed to coming to Echo Valley? Is that what you’re saying?”