Page 66 of Sweet Temptation

“I did not bang around. I was quiet.” He must’ve had some serious Spidey senses or something, because I was quiet as a mouse.

“You were not quiet.”

“I was totally quiet,” I insisted, planting my hands on my hips. Was he seriously arguing with me in the middle of the night? “And what are you doing out here? You don’t even have a blanket.”

“I’m fine.”

He rubbed his eyes, watching as I picked up his sad little plastic bag. One of his guys had dropped it off just after dinner, along with his car. Presumably, it held a change of clothes and some toiletries and stuff. He was now wearing a dark T-shirt and sweatpants.

I reached to take his hand and tugged him to his feet.

“What’s going on?” he said.

“Come here, tough guy.”

I led him up the hall to the guest room he’d been using to work. I turned on a small lamp and set his bag down on the floor. Then I peeled back the covers on the bed.

“Sleep here,” I told him, and left him there.

Chapter Nine

Ronan

I was up early again, around five-thirty. I’d fallen asleep just before midnight, and other than the wake-up in the middle of the night when Summer escorted my ass into one of her guest rooms, I’d slept pretty solid. Five hours’ sleep was usually more than enough to do it for me.

My mind was already in overdrive as I took a shower in the guest bathroom, then went about my work.

Besides the work I was doing for Brody and Jude, providing personal security for Summer and assessing security needs for the Players, I had other tasks that required my attention.

My security firm, Sentinel Security Group, had been founded by my uncle Rob and two of his buddies, over three decades ago. Rob was ex-military, one of his partners was ex-RCMP, and the other had worked at CSIS as a covert agent. So when the three of them brought their combined expertise to the private security sector, they were no joke.

And good thing.

When I was a teenager, my uncle had hired me on to SSG in an attempt to save me from the dark road I was headed down.

Summer had called it; I was Trouble with a capital T when I was a kid.

By the time I was sixteen, I’d been arrested twice and gotten away with breaking way more laws than I’d been caught for. I was hanging out with other troubled kids, getting up to no fucking good, and I really might have ended up fucked for life if Uncle Rob hadn’t stepped in and set me straight.

I’d always be grateful to him for that.

At the time, I wasn’t grateful. But he’d basically given me an ultimatum. My parents had complained to him that I was getting out of hand; said they were thinking of encouraging me to join the military. Maybe they thought he’d be amenable to that, since he’d been in the military himself.

Not so much.

Instead, Rob sat me down and informed me that I was too smart to be wasted as a “bullet catcher.” That I’d be better off working for him. I was young and stubborn, but my uncle Rob was a smart man and a role model to me, and he won me over.

He hired me on part-time while I was still in high school, got me working in the office, and started training me. I didn’t love it, at first. I was a hotheaded kid who thought he knew everything, as kids do.

But I soon came around when I realized how fucking cool my uncle’s job was. I basically got trained to be a badass.

Physical fitness, martial arts, criminal psychology, weapons handling, advanced driving, crowd control, covert security operations… I got to learn all kinds of interesting shit. I got to work alongside city police, the RCMP, and major security organizations, in a position of respect.

Not so bad for a kid who’d been headed for a life of mediocrity, or worse.

I’d worked for many years as a bodyguard, doing VIP close protection; that was my specialty in the company. My uncle had identified, early on, that I had a natural ability to make VIPs feel safe in my presence, to instill confidence and trust, and time and again, I landed the most elite assignments.

Several years ago, when my uncle’s partners both retired, he made me his partner.

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