Page 110 of The Bodyguard's Fall

There was a sultry look in his eyes as “Yours” by Russel Dickerson came over the speakers. It was a look I didn’t trust myself around. Somewhere outside of this room was a man who had made a grown woman scared of the dark. Scared of life. But now, I was dancing to our song with my husband, and the feel of his strong body against mine made me feel alive again. Safe. I liked the fact that we had a song. I liked the way he pushed me in our boxing lessons. I liked the way he brought me back to life. And I really liked the way he tucked that wayward piece of hair behind my ear, like it was something he always did.

He could kiss me so easily right now.

In one of my attempts at bravery, I looked up at him. The song was almost over, our chance almost gone.

“I’m not going to kiss you, Rawlins,” he said, his voice low with an annoyed edge. “Your brother is standing over there glaring at me. So get that out of your head.”

I laughed, my head falling on his shoulder. “I thought you weren’t scared of him.”

He wrinkled his nose, barely containing his grin. “I’m not. I’m just letting him have this one.”

I was no longer going to entertain the thought that I was just a job to him. It was more than that. Our shared history and love of my brother put us in a different category than just a job.

But this was a job. His job.

And I wasn’t sure where that left us.

Will: Liv sounds happy, you moron.

Tate: And that’s a problem, how?

Will: It’s not. I want her to be happy. A small part of me even wants you to be happy. But she’s got a stalker who knows where she lives, and he’s probably ticked off that she’s married. We don’t know what we’re dealing with, and all this tells me is that you’re getting distracted.

Tate: How is this my fault?

Will: Because I’m worried sick over here and you’re busy trying to date your wife.

Tate: It’s fine.

Will: Come on, man.

Tate: I admit that it’s been harder than I thought to be married to her.

Will: If you can’t rein it in, I’m going to come get her. It’s not worth her life.

Tate: I can handle it. I’ve got more reason than ever to take this guy out.

Over the next few days, I’d capitalized on the slower mornings and evenings to work on my manuscript. For as slow as I’d begun, the writing had picked up easily when I started putting in things familiar to me. I was nearly finished, with only a few tweaks to fix. As a writer, I was used to focusing on just the tension, but now, adding romance to that proved tricky.

First, I thought I could get away with having the villain looming in the shadows, building anticipation throughout the story before he pops out at the end. I thought the budding romance between my librarian and cop/part-time farmer would be enough, but it wasn’t.

According to Elaine, if you promise your viewers tension, you need to deliver. So somewhere near the middle, I staged a run-in. He’d found her. And scared the heck out of her. It worked to heighten the tension as well as re-secure the boundaries between my two characters. They’d been getting too relaxed. Too comfortable in their cozy setup.

The problem was, in a manuscript sense, the boundaries seemed more like guidelines. In a four-letter-word-sense, they were crap. They didn’t make sense. There was very little to resist about a charming cop who played the role of a bodyguard. He was too sweet. Too easy to fall for. So the danger had to be always lurking, if only to keep him focused.

Because it was too easy to fall.

I’d written a couple of self-defense scenes for my girl. And though it was completely unrelated, I noticed that Tate and I had slowed down on our self-defense lately—a lot, actually. True to his word, Tate hadn’t moved to kiss me since I’d changed his bandage. He never again requested movie nights in our bed, and he’d gone back to sleeping on the floor. We were polite strangers who occasionally stared at each other a beat too long, moving in and out of each other’s orbit.

We could all feel something coming on the stalker front. Leroy was here. He knew where I lived. And he’d gone quiet. We were in limbo again, and I hated it. Tate and the boys were watching the cameras around the house almost religiously.

I was currently sitting on the floor of a tractor while Tate drove, pulling a large disc behind the machine, breaking down the stalks and crops from this year's harvest. My unopened laptop sat on my lap as I stared out the window.

He cleared his throat, his voice sounding heavy. “I got called back to work.”

“What?” I asked, startled.

He looked at me before flicking his eyes back to the fields. “As of this morning, the investigation is officially wrapped up. There was no wrongdoing. We were justified in everything we did, except the two of us splitting up, but we’ll just get a slap on the wrist for that.”