Page 8 of When He Fights (Protector & Defender #3)

Chapter Three

Grayson slapped the keys down on the counter and held his hands, palms out, toward Ana. “I’m not here to fight.”

She heaved and twisted but Kane was not letting her go.

He didn’t hurt her. The man had complete control of his strength, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to break free.

Her feet dangled in the air because he’d lifted her up, and she kicked back at him, aiming for his shins, but Kane didn’t even grunt at the impact.

“Why do you have keys to my house?” she snapped at Grayson.

He winced. Looked vaguely guilty. “In the event of an emergency, I thought it best to have backup keys and to know your alarm codes.”

“This isn’t an emergency!”

“Well, how did I know that?” His hands fell back to his sides as he appeared disgruntled.

“I mean, I talk to you on the phone. You seem panicked. You don’t let me fully explain.

I call in Kane, and he basically hangs up on me.

Then I’m at your back door, I see your car and his motorcycle, but neither of you respond to my polite knocks. ”

Polite? It had sounded as if the person on the other side of the door had been trying to pound his way inside her home!

“So I got worried.” A roll of one shoulder.

Grayson wore a crisp, white shirt, black pants, and gleaming, black dress shoes.

His dark hair was shoved back from his face.

“Being the concerned friend that I am, I decided to let myself in the house to make sure you were both all right.” His gaze dropped to take in Ana’s heaving body and her kicking feet.

“How about you promise not to try ripping off my head? If you make that promise, I bet your new bodyguard will let you down. Sound like a plan, hmm?”

“Fuck yourself,” she enunciated clearly and precisely. Like any refined lady would. “And, Kane, if you don’t let me go right this minute, you will be sorry.”

“Can’t let you kill him.” Kane’s breath blew over the shell of her ear.

A tremble slid through her.

“He’s annoying,” Kane added, “but he’s useful.” His breath teased her again, and, oh, damn, had she just felt a lick of his tongue against her? Surely not.

Surely. Not.

“I get that you’re stressed,” Grayson announced.

“Oh, you get that? Fantastic.” She rolled her eyes at him. “Give yourself a couple of cookies.”

“I have a plan.”

“Do you?” she challenged.

He nodded.

“I have one, too,” she revealed to Grayson and to Kane because they should both be aware of it.

“My plan involves me not being used as bait. It involves me not finding a knife shoved into my side because my freak ex gets to me again and pins me to a bed and tells me that he won’t cut my face but the rest of me is fair game and?—”

Kane put her down. Her feet touched the floor, but before she could launch for freedom, he’d spun her around. His head lowered. He got really close. All up in her space.

As if he hadn’t been in my space before.

“That will never happen again,” Kane vowed. “I will not let him ever put a knife to you, and if you hadn’t stopped me before, he’d be cold in the ground right now. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

For a moment, she could not breathe. The past was between them in that instance.

She could see Kane as he held the gun to Logan’s head.

Kane had wanted to pull the trigger. She’d known it.

She had never seen such hate and fury on Kane’s face before that time.

But Logan hadn’t been armed by that point. He hadn’t been fighting back. And…

I couldn’t let Kane become a killer. Not for me. Not because of me.

“It will never happen again,” Kane promised. “I don’t make the same mistake twice.”

Her head moved in the slightest nod.

“Great!” A loud and pleased exclamation from Grayson. “This is what I am talking about.”

She peered over her shoulder at him.

Grayson fired a happy smile her way. “Motivation,” he elaborated. “Kane has it. He will do anything to keep you safe. Sure, I could bring in a new guard—or even guards, plural—to keep you safe, but would they have Kane’s motivation? His drive? His…personal interest?”

“Gray. ” A sharp warning from Kane.

Grayson pursed his lips. “I don’t think they would,” he said after a brief pause, answering his own set of rambling questions. “I think Kane is the perfect man for the job, and I also think that, deep down, you’re happy to see him, Ana.”

Happy wasn’t quite the right word. But then again, she didn’t exactly hate seeing him so… dammit . She was all messed up. “I won’t be bait.” There. Ana stepped away from Kane and Kane’s tempting scent. Like, masculinity in a bottle or something. Rich and sandalwoody and just…sexy.

She exhaled. Put a bit more space between them. The better to not drink in his scent. Ana positioned her body between Grayson and Kane. “Not bait,” she repeated.

“Let’s not use the B word,” Grayson offered. “Let’s think of this situation more as…the FBI helped you quite extensively in the past. You wanted a new life. We gave you one. And now, it’s time to pay back the debt.”

Her brows shot up. “Excuse me? I paid that debt when I wore a wire and got all the evidence for you. And then when I testified against Logan—and against the mob guys I’d seen him with back in New York.

Let’s not forget all that.” Logan wasn’t her only enemy.

She’d spilled all that she’d seen and heard.

Plenty of people had been caught in the FBI’s web—uh, her web—and sentenced to prison.

She’d needed a new life so that she could keep breathing after all of that.

“Logan could have fled the country.” Grayson began to amble around her kitchen. Poking and prodding at things. “And, it’s a possibility that he actually did leave. We should not overlook that scenario.”

“If you believed that possibility, you wouldn’t be here right now.” She darted a look at Kane and found his hazel eyes locked and loaded on her. “Neither of you.” Because Kane would never have come back into her life.

He was the walk-away-and-never-look-back type.

Not the… I’m-dying-without-you-and-I-need-you-to-make-my-life-complete type. Unfortunately.

“Logan has a great many connections in this world.” Grayson’s voice had turned musing. “But, according to the psychiatrist who worked with him, he also has quite a fixation. On you.”

“Some girls just have all the luck,” she muttered. Goosebumps rose on her arms.

“The psychiatrist believes that Logan will seek you out. Considering the, ah, hack at the FBI, I also believe he is seeking you out. He’s a moth. You’re the flame. I’d like for you to draw him in until he gets burned.”

“Or until I get burned,” she said. She still had the scar from her last encounter with Logan.

“Not happening,” Kane promised in that rumbly voice of his.

Each time he spoke, she felt the impact of that deep voice flooding through her body. When he actually touched her… hello, hypersensitivity. She quivered. She yearned.

She had serious problems.

Two years had passed. Two years. And three days. She should be over him. No, she was over him. Way over. So over that…

She hadn’t been with another man in two years.

Two years. No lover. Since leaving Logan, the closest she’d come to being intimate had been when she’d basically thrown herself at Kane.

Crap. Ana shoved back a heavy lock of hair that had tumbled over her left eye.

“How about we sit down?” Grayson had stopped near her kitchen table. “We can talk like rational adults. No one will attempt to physically attack anyone else. We’ll discuss just how we are going to work together in order to trap a wanted criminal.”

Sure, they could do that. “Or I could run out of the door, hop in my Jeep, and vanish.”

Grayson stared at her. His face subtly changed. His jaw hardened. His gaze sharpened. His expression stopped being quite so warm and became calculating. Assessing.

“You’ve made friends in this town, haven’t you?” Grayson asked her. “After all, you’ve been here for two years. You’ve put down roots.”

She had. One of the reasons she wanted to flee from Gulfport was because she didn’t want any of her new friends getting pulled into the madness that had been her previous life.

“Logan has intel that will tell him where you are. Here.” Grayson motioned around him. “We both know that Logan Catalano is an apex predator. He will be able to get close to the individuals you consider to be friends. He will make them talk. Make them tell him everything that they know about you.”

“They won’t know where I’ve gone.” Ana was suddenly very, very cold.

“Do you think that will matter to him?” Grayson closed in on her with his slow, deliberate steps.

“Or do you think that he’ll still slice the throat of your next-door neighbor, that sweet widow?

Eighty-three-year-old Shirley Hosier? Or that he’ll just let your dolphin training buddy, Felicia Vickory, go right about her business?

You and Felicia hang out together once a week for dinner.

You think he’ll let her walk away or do you think he might decide to hold her head under water and to stop her from breathing at the Gulfport Aquarium where she works because Logan doesn’t give a shit who he hurts?

And, honestly, making the people you care about suffer would probably make him feel a whole lot of pleasure.

Oh, hey, and let’s not forget your best friend Zuri—Zuri and that restaurant she loves so much.

She’s the manager there, right? It’d be a shame if she got cut with one of those giant butcher knives that are kept in the kitchen?—”

“Enough.” A roar from Kane. Suddenly, he was between her and Grayson.

Her breath heaved in and out.

“ Don’t scare her,” he snapped at Grayson.

Too late. She was suitably terrified. And incredibly pissed off.

“She needs to be afraid. She knows exactly what her lover was.”

A deep growl came from Kane.