Page 10 of Mine to Protect

Hand on the station door, I paused for one more look at the strangely alluring man only to find him gone.Huh.I leaned forward for a different angle but still came up empty.

Dang. The quick twinge of disappointment was unexpected. How in the heck could I be disappointed about a guy who’d said all of two words?

With a shake of my head, I pulled open the glass door, allowing Benny to wiggle between me and the doorframe. The comforting sounds of volunteers and other rangers bantering, coupled with the scent of stale coffee, pulled a smile up my cheeks despite my lingering disappointment.

“Ah, there you are,” Sarah called out from her perch on the corner of my desk.

As I walked toward her, a few volunteers called out to Benny, begging for his attention with treats and whistles. Sarah tossed her head back with an open-mouthed cackle when Benny tackled a ranger to the ground in an attempt to snag the treat he’d held out of the dog’s reach.

“What are you doing here?” I asked as I sat beside Sarah on the desk.

Sarah was my one girlfriend in town, and that was due to her initiating it. When we first met, I was intimidated by her gorgeous exterior and outgoing personality. But after I got to know her, I found that Sarah was funny, charismatic, and wicked smart. There was something about her that drew you in and made you want to be around her, which was exactly what happened to me. Somehow in the few months we’d known each other, she’d coaxed me to open up about my past and broken down all my antisocial barriers.

She was fun too, opposite of me, horny as heck, and willing to jump on any willing male—or female, depending on her mood. I lived vicariously through her rambunctious dating stories and wild nights.

“I clocked out early at the coffee shop, so I decided to come up to say hi.”

“And…?” I knocked her calf with the heel of my hiking boot.

“And I might have heard through the grapevine that an FBI agent was arriving today. I want to meet the newcomer, you know, welcome him to Estes Park,” she said with a smirk.

Oh no. I knew that smirk. Whoever this guy was didn’t stand a chance if Sarah locked her sights on him.

With a grin, I dropped my head forward and shook it back and forth. ”What if he’s not good-looking? Not all FBI agents look like the ones on TV.”

“Duh, but have you ever heard that power is an aphrodisiac for some people?”

“No.”

“Not surprising,” she said with an eye roll and toss of her long, blonde hair over her shoulder. “You don’t notice things like that, whereas I sure as hell do. Just like that friend of yours became ten times hotter the second his promotion came through.”

Wait. What?“John?”

“Yeah.”

No way. “My John?”

“Oh.” Her smirk turned devious. “So he’syoursnow, is he?”

No, John wasn’t mine in the way she was referencing. He was a sweet man, a fantastic friend, but that was it. An underlying tension had built between us recently as his feelings for me grew deeper than friends. But it stopped there. He knew I didn’t feel the same way, and also knew that, with my past, I’m too broken for any sort of normal relationship. Plus the sympathy in his eyes when I sometimes caught him staring was a deal killer. I didn’t want sympathy, didn’t want anyone else telling me I was a victim.

Clearing my throat, I pressed both palms behind me to the desk and leaned back. “No. Not mine in that way. Never in that way. You know what I’m saying.”

Sarah tossed an arm across my shoulders and pulled me close. I tensed beneath her touch, grinding my teeth to keep from shoving out of her hold.

“I know. I was just giving you a hard time. So, have you seen him? The FBI guy?”

I stood, very ready to sneak out from under her arm, and glanced toward John’s closed office door. “Nope. I’m going in now. No idea why he’s even here, you know. I mean the FBI. Something big must be going on.”

Her eyes scanned over my face, and her lips pursed before she said, “Yeah, I guess. Tell me if he’s hot. If he is, I get dibs, unless you want to join in, which you know I’m down for.” She paused to scan my face, her lips pressing together in deep thought. “You want some lipstick or something before going in there? You’re looking a little duller than normal today.”

I rolled my eyes. Nope. My plain—dull, as she called it—exterior helped me blend into crowds, kept me from any unwanted attention. In college I learned the hard way the type of trouble a pretty face and outgoing personality could attract.

“Fine,” she said with a dramatic sigh. “Good luck in there.”

After the quick stay command to Benny, I smoothed down my top, tucked it tighter into my pants and then marched down the narrow hall toward John’s office. As our division director, he was the only one who was allowed a legit office; everyone else had to share desks out in the communal room.

Murmuring male voices vibrating through the closed door caught my attention before I could knock. For a few seconds, I waited with my ear pressed to the door and listened, hoping to gain a hint of what this was all about.

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