Page 37 of Mine to Protect

“That doesn’t sound good.” Next time she saw him, she was going to wring her brother’s neck, not hug him for putting her through this bullshit.

“Come on. I want to leave a message for him at the gate. If and when he shows up, Miles will be here.”

She reached out and grabbed Rhett’s arm. “I don’t know how to thank you for all this. Or your family. I know I’ve been all over the map and acting like a crazy woman, but—”

He pressed his finger to her lips. “There’s nothing abnormal about how you’re behaving, and I want to be the person who’s here for you.”

Her heart dropped to her toes and lurched to the back of her throat as his mouth took hers in a passionate kiss. It felt as if her entire body lifted right off the ground for a moment. It was quick, but it packed a ton of emotion that she didn’t know where to file.

“Why do you always do that?” she asked.

“Do what?”

She glared, pressing her fingers to her lips.

“I can’t help myself. Your mouth is a magnet for my lips.” He took her by the hand and tugged her toward the garage. “Let’s go.”

Her lips tingled, sending shockwaves through the rest of her system.

That kiss would get her through the rest of whatever the day brought.

* * *

Rhett triedChris four times on the ride to the police station, and it went straight to voicemail each time. That concerned him for two different reasons.

The first one could be because Chris had played Rhett—which he’d considered the second he’d agreed to have Chris come to the house. It had been something in the back of his mind immediately.

However, Rhett didn’t believe that Chris had stood him up. Not in that moment. And not now. Something else had happened. Either Chris got spooked or…something worse.

He pulled into his brother Nathan’s parking spot. It annoyed some of the other officers, but it was a perk of being the chief of police’s son. If one of his brothers or even his mom were off duty, and he knew, he could use the spot if—and only if—he was there on police business.

Or to visit family, which was kind of the same thing.

He turned his Jeep off and took Shelby’s hand. “Are you okay? You haven’t said a word the entire ride.”

She shifted in her seat and stared at him with an intense glare. Her eyes were wide with thick emotion.

Things he hadn’t seen before rose to the surface. She’d been broken when he first met her, and he knew it. It was something that’d bonded them in a weird way, but it was also the thing that had driven them apart. He couldn’t give himself until he fixed the things inside him that had his gut and heart twisted.

What he failed to understand then was that he’d been his own worst enemy, and all he needed was to let go of the toxicity and open his mind to reality.

But when reality walked in, he was blind to her, and she wasn’t ready to let go of the pains of the past.

“I’ve spent my entire life taking care of everyone in my family. I did it because I thought that was what family did. I thought that was what loyalty and love were all about.”

He squeezed her hand and smiled. “It is,” he said. “However, and please don’t take this the wrong way, you had to grow up too quickly. You were forced to take on a mothering role when you should have been playing dress-up with your friends. You never got a chance to be a kid, so you really take it to heart when your only living relative hurts. Or worse, disappears.” Rhett wanted her to understand that this wasn’t a typical situation. And that while what she was feeling wasn’t abnormal, perhaps her responses to her brother over the years had been overprotective and a bit overbearing.

Much like how Rhett had closed himself off to protecting his heart from being hurt. It was a defense mechanism, and all it did was hurt him in the long run. Where he thought he was living life in a way that gave him freedom, all he was doing was living in a cage.

She’d been doing the same thing. She wanted to take care of her family. If her brother was okay,shewas okay. He suspected that, in her mind, she felt she could journey out and find her life when that happened. Seek her inner happiness. But that was never the case because during those few years when it had been smooth-sailing with Chris, she was sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I’m angry that he didn’t come to me. I thought we were close.”

“That’s why he didn’t come to you,” Rhett said. “Look. I’ve got six brothers, and we’re as thick as thieves. We all have different relationships with one another. Seth and Nathan are two peas in a pod. Emmett and Emmerson are like the same person sometimes. And Jamison and Emmerson are tight. They did everything together growing up, which was weird. Miles and I are cut from the same cloth. But if I want advice about something, I go to either Emmett or Jamison. They get me in ways that my other brothers don’t. However, when I was going through my struggles with Krista really bad, I didn’t go to any of them. Not even Emmett, though he knew and sent me to Key West. And when I came home, I didn’t talk about you to anyone. Emmett had to practically beat it out of me.”

“I’m not really sure how to take that statement.”

He ran his thumb across her cheek. He hated seeing any kind of pain or anger etched in her expression. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t put it there, it still physically cut him to the bone. “My point is that sometimes I didn’t want to burden my brothers, especially when they were sick and tired of something they wanted me to be over. They were tired of Krista and her bullshit. They hated how she treated me and didn’t understand my obsession with her.”

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