Page 57 of The Bodyguard

“Should I move?” she finally asked.

That question wasn’t easy. He couldn’t be anything like she needed. Safe. Secure. Stable. In it for the long haul. The realization made his empty heart ache. Still, he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you want to?” Hope, unfamiliar and unwelcome, danced in his chest. He’d asked too much. “I mean.” He cleared his throat. “If you’re comfortable, stay. No big deal.”

She scoffed and shook her head. “No big deal…” She repositioned herself and stared blankly at the wall. Her walls of control and scripted narrative would arrive shortly. Sawyer hated them and was just as annoyed at himself.

He closed his eyes. Soon enough, the plane would land, and everything would return to normal. He hated it even as much as he needed it.

“Sawyer?”

Her no-nonsense tone made him smile. “Hm?”

“I have a proposition for you,” she said.

His curiosity was piqued. A proposition wasn’t what he had on his bingo card. “What’s that?”

She propped onto her elbow and rested her head in the palm of her hand. “Well, don’t decide right now.”

He grinned.

“You don’t do relationships—”

“Ange—”

“Don’t interrupt either.” She waved him to shut up. “Like I was saying. You don’t do relationships.” She gave him a stern look to keep his mouth closed.

Sawyer managed to stay quiet.

“And I have a lot of figuring out to do,” she said.

Angela paused, waiting for him to slip up and ask questions before she was ready. But this wasn’t his first rodeo when it cameto her speeches. He didn’t take the bait, though he was curious as all hell.

“We’re on this trip where everyone has already told me we’ll hit dead ends and have nothing to do…” She blushed in a way that went straight to his groin. “What if we mess around?”

Straight, straight, straight to his groin. The woman had knocked the air from his lungs without moving a muscle.

“Like for practice or something,” Angela tried to explain as if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. “Or fun. I don’t know.” Her blush intensified. “I don’t have practice doing this. But you do.”

Was that insulting? He couldn’t parse underlying meanings and possible jabs when all the blood in his body had caught fire. Sawyer swallowed hard and arched his eyebrows, failing to assume the unaffected manner he’d hoped to achieve. “I do?”

“Yeah. Sure. Your dates. No relationship. That kind of stuff.”

Everyone he’d dated casually was very different from her.

“For a finite amount of time,” she continued. “For the duration of this job.”

He blinked and tried to match her words to meanings, but his brain wasn’t operating as expected.

“We’d have rules. Expectations. Safe words?” Her brow furrowed. “No, that’s probably not what we’re going for.”

She was negotiating a contract for them to go to bed, and he hadn’t managed to speak yet.

“So that’s my proposition.” Now her face skewed. “If you could say something, I’d feel less like an idiot.”

“Ange…” The warmth from lying beside her was gone. She was leaning into her role as the queen of control, asking for a time-boxed friends-with-benefits situation, all while he’d been enamored with—and confused by—the fact he held a woman while she slept. They’d inched close to something very personal, and she ran. Hell, worse than that, Angela was asking for awalking, talking vibrator to teach her the ropes. A distant cousin of disappointment bubbled thickly in his chest. “I don’t think I can do that.”

Her face fell. She played her change in mood off with a shrug. “It was just an idea.”

She wanted a teacher? Why didn’t she want romance? Angela deserved to be swept off her feet after a ho-hum time with the ex who should not be named. Not that Sawyer was the right guy to shower her with attention. “I’m just… not in the right headspace for something like that.”

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