Page 12 of Fergus

“Thea!Thea, if you’re in there I advise you to open this damned door!” Fergus warned after pounding his knuckles loudly on the wooden door to her hotel suite for several minutes and receiving no answer. “I mean it, Thea!”

To say he was furious would be to seriously understate the level of anger coursing through him both now and when he had turned around after ending his call with Angel to find Thea had disappeared.

Her disappearance was so sudden that at first, he’d wondered if her stalker had somehow taken her. But then good sense had kicked in and told him that the Champs-Élysées was far too crowded for anyone to have kidnapped a reluctant female off the street in broad daylight without someone noticing and raising an alarm.

Which meant that Thea had deliberately chosen to leave.

Which was when Fergus had become angry. He had become angrier still the more he thought about the situation.

Thea had invaded his space and disturbed his peace of mind for the past two days. Even more so once he had confronted her and he had learned exactly who she was.

His attraction to Thea—to her beauty and the delectable curve of her bottom—was just as unwelcome.

What the hellrightdid she have to just up and disappear? Especially when nothing had been settled in regard to the reason she had said she came here in the first place, namely her stalker problem?

Fergus had initially tried to reason himself out of the anger. After all, he had been the one to take a phone call in the middle of their conversation.

But the call had been personal and important to him. Angel was important to him.

His current level of anger made him suspect Thea might become even more important to him.

Might?

He was a forty-two-year-old man, and this instant attraction and fierce physical response to a woman, any woman, was unprecedented.

In the same way his brother Magnus’s attraction to Sapphie had been, Fergus wondered?

And the same way his cousin Rufus’s attraction to Molly had also been?

Instant attractions and inexplicable emotional reactions, which had resulted in Magnus and Rufus now being married to the women responsible.

Fergus’s attraction to Thea aside, he had also begun to accept that her stalker was real and she really did need help. If not his, then someone else’s.

At which point, Fergus’s anger had deepened because he had realized he didn’twantanyone else to help her. Thathewanted to be the one to protect Thea.

Which was when he was forced to accept that his attraction to Thea was far stronger than he had previously been willing to admit. Or wanted.

It was fucked-up, bloody illogical, after the way her mother had lied and tried to trick him all those years ago. But Fergus couldn’t get Thea’s shadowed golden eyes out of his head. Or the worried frown that marred the smoothness of her otherwise unblemished brow.

He had no doubt both those things were caused by the fact that she really did have a stalker.

Someone was deliberately messing with her, frightening her, with the result that she was afraid to trust anyone already in her life for fear they might have been paid or coerced into being involved in this deliberate emotional torment. Damn it, that distrust ran so deep Thea had felt she had no choice but to come to Paristo ask forhishelp. A man she had already known, considering their history, might just laugh in her face.

Fergushadtreated her with disbelief and a certain amount of lingering suspicion at first. Not because he disliked Thea—how could he when he didn’t even know her?—but because of her mother’s devious actions in the past.

None of which Thea had been responsible for then, nor should she be held accountable for them now.

Fergus knew he, like everyone else in her life, from what she had told him, had let Thea down. Worse, he had taken a phone call in the middle of their conversation, proving how unimportant she and what she was telling him were to him.

Fergus had rung his office and asked his assistant to cancel his appointments for the rest of the day before coming to the hotel where Thea had told him she was staying.

After a brief and flirtatious conversation with one of the hotel receptionists, Fergus was able, by the stealth of listening and watching when she rang Thea to tell her she had a visitor waiting in reception, to know exactly on which floor Thea’s suite was situated. The call had gone unanswered, which had troubled Fergus even further as he wondered where else Thea might have gone after leaving him in the Champs-Élysées.

The fact that she wasn’t responding to his knocking troubled him even more. “Thea, I am going to count to three, and if you haven’t opened the door by then, I’m going to—” He broke off when he heard the lock on the other side of the door disengage before it was opened a couple of inches.

Golden eyes peered at him around that slight opening. “Yes, what are you going to do?” Thea prompted dully.

Fergus knew immediately that something was wrong. That this wasn’t the same determined and fiery young woman he had met earlier.

---