Page 51 of Duty and Desire
Smithie had only mentioned I had a bodyguard, and ugly stuff had gone down at the club in the past. Ugly stuff thattore Smithie up. So I put it down to him being overcautious, something he was now on a normal basis.
Hawk Delgado was either reaching the extremes of overcautious or shit was serious.
And my guess was, Smithie didn’t tell me about Hawk because he was parceling out the bad news.
Shit.
“Right. Hawk,” I said. “Now how freaked out should I be that Smithie brought in a guy like Hawk Delgado for whatever is going on?”
This guy made no reply.
He just kept looking me in the eye.
“Mo—”
“Hawk’ll get into that,” he repeated.
I threw up a hand. “Listen, I’m sure this is no big thing. It isn’t unusual to have guys fixate on me. It’s happened before. They’re typically harmless.”
Mo had nothing to say to that either.
“Or Smithie has a word with him or sends in Joaquim or Jaylen and they back off. If they had the guts, they’d just approach me from the beginning.”
Mo still didn’t feel like replying.
“If Smithie’s freaked and called in Hawk, that says to me I should be seriously freaked,” I pointed out.
Again, no input from Mo, but it cut through my freakout that he might not be moving his mouth, but his eyes said, “Yes, you should be seriously freaked.”
So I went from getting seriously freaked tobeingseriouslyfreakingfreaked.
“Ohmigod,” I whispered, my hand drifting to my belly. “This is bad.”
That was when it happened.
That exact moment was when my entire life changed.
His gaze moved down to my belly.
And his face went from harsh and impassive to wholly beautiful.
This was because it softened.
Whatever was happening, he hated it was happening.
Whatever had Smithie freaked, me freaked, Hawk Delgado (of all people) pulled in to deal with it, Mo didn’t want it to be happening. He didn’t want me to feel what I was feeling, what I would feel until this situation was brought to an end.
He hated I would be feeling that too.
He was there. He was going to get paid to protect me from it.
But it was not just a job to him.
It was more.
He did not know me, and I wasn’t just a great pair of tits and a fantastic head of hair any guy with a dick would want to see go unharmed.
I was a person who was feeling something sucky and he was a person who didn’t like people to feel sucky.
