Page 77 of Conrad

“You’d make a good bodyguard with that resolve.”

“Don’t give me that much credit.” No smile, but the flames of the fire flickered in his eyes.

Oh. Okay then. “I fell for my bodyguard when I was fifteen. He was twenty-eight, so way too old for me. And for his part, he didn’t know. It was all in my head. But I had dreams of him rescuing me?—”

“Were you lost?”

“No. I was Veronica Mars.”

“Who?”

“Oh, it’s this old television show about a high-school girl who becomes a PI with her father. But she has this nemesis named Logan who turns out to be the hero of the show. He’s a rich kid but troubled, but being with her sort of straightens him out. And whenever she gets in over her head, he’s right there to help pull her out.” She folded her legs inside the comforter. “Although, she rescues him plenty of times too.”

“I’m sure she does.” His gaze held hers. “In more ways than one.”

“He just needed someone to focus all his energy on. And Veronica needed someone who had her back, even if she didn’t want to admit it.”

He smiled then. “Sounds like a good team.”

A beat, and the quiet settled between them. It was all she could do not to get up, walk over, settle herself in his lap.

He ran his hands over the arms of the chair. “When I was ten years old, I went through the ice.”

She frowned.

“It was in March, late in the year, when the King’s Inn closes for a month—shoulder season—so my parents can take a vacation. Usually we went with them, but that year, they were celebrating twenty years, so they left us with our grandparents. We’d been told not to play on the ice, but we were a little obsessed with broomball, so Stein talked us all into playing. Doyle shot the ball into the snow outside the boundary, where the snowpack warmed the ice—and when I went to get it, I just went through.”

“Oh wow. Terrifying.”

“Yeah. I thought I was going to die. Jack was super coolheaded. He told everybody to make a chain out to me, and they laid on the ice—all of them holding on to each other’s feet—and then Jack crawled out to the edge and grabbed me. He held on to me while they all pulled him back.”

“You could have all gone in.”

“I know. It’s a sort of recurring nightmare. Thankfully, the distributed weight kept the ice from breaking. My grandfather was there with a ladder when they dragged me in—he saw me go in and grabbed it to rescue me, but they’d already hauled me out. I’d never seen him so upset, the way he held on to us. And me. But he called them all heroes.”

“They were.”

“Yes. And we realized that we were braver and stronger together than on our own.”

“Are you trying to make a point here, King Con?”

“Just saying that you don’t have to sit in the cellar alone, Penny.”

Silence fell, his words landing.What? Because . . . wait.Was he saying . . .

He stilled. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear—”

He held out his hand, got up, the comforter falling off his shoulders. “Shh.”

The wind moaning and—“Voices.”

He walked over to her, pulled her up. “Into the bedroom.”

“The—why?”

He had already started to move her toward the door of the main-floor bedroom. “Because what if it’s the guy who tried to mow us down?”

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