Guardian

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

She discovered she’d dropped her purse. She squatted to grab it at the same time he spotted it and dropped to a crouch to grab it and they slammed heads together hard enough her ears rang.

  And his sunglasses were knocked askew.

  And she got a glimpse of the strangest eyes she had ever seen.

  He righted the glasses and tried to help her up.

  “No! I’m fine,” Marilyn said absently. “I have to …. Everything fell out of my purse.”

  He shoved her back anyway, held her arm until he was sure she wouldn’t fall, and then grabbed the purse and the contents and began shoveling quickly and efficiently—and without any regard for what he was grabbing and stuffing into the purse.

  When he’d finished, he shot upward again, shoved the purse at her chest and waited till she grabbed it. “You ok?”

  Marilyn gaped at him and finally managed to nod.

  He nodded back, stepped around her and left at a brisk, purposeful, ground eating stride—completely unlike the stride she’d seen before—which was generally slow and meandering with a not infrequent stumble for punctuation.

  Still struggling with shock at the collision, Marilyn wandered inside and made it to the elevator. She went all the way to the top floor before she thought to punch the button for her floor—the second.

  She usually took the stairs—for the exercise—but she was addled. She’d just walked into the elevator because it was sitting there, waiting, with the door open.

  The forced wait went a long way toward scaling down on the shock. She was still in emotional turmoil when the cubicle reached her floor, dinged, and the doors opened, but her brain was functioning on a higher level than animal instinct.

  She wandered down the hallway for a little bit, because she wasn’t used to arriving via elevator, and finally found her door—which looked like every other door in the building—unlocked it, went inside and then collapsed, slid down her door and covered her face with her hands.

  “Oh my god! Omg! Omg! I can’t believe I did that!”

  She dwelt for a while on the humiliation of making a total, clumsy fool out of herself right in front of the sexiest man she’d ever seen so close in her entire life—probably the sexiest she was ever going to see.

  When the embarrassment began to wane, guilt and horror rose up to take its place.

  She’d just tried to run down the guy she’d just been to the police about!

  Did he know she’d just come from the police station? Had he seen her come out, saw she was distracted and somehow managed to circle around and ‘accidently’ bump into her?

  As scary as that thought was, she just couldn’t accept that there was any possibility of that being reality.

  Even if he had seen her, she reasoned, why would he think it had anything to do with him?

  And the contrived ‘accident’?

  That was just plain silly.

  The cops were right, she thought miserably.

  She’d let her imagination run wild.

  Because she did live alone and she was bored because nothing ever happened. There was no excitement of any kind in her life. And she was lonely because she wasn’t even allowed to talk to anybody when she was at work except the exchange of information—not actual conversation.

  She had spotted the guy one day, moving along the sidewalk outside in a way that made her belly shimmy. She couldn’t put her finger on exactly what there was about it that seemed so sexy to her, but there was no lying to herself that she wasn’t next door to orgasm by the time he moved beyond her view.

  Naturally enough, it was way too far away for her to get a real look at his face, but she had liked the way he moved and she had been turned on by his build.

  She had no idea why she’d raced to her door to stare out of the peephole when she had no reason to think he would even enter the building where she lived, let alone pass her door.

  She’d certainly never seen him before to recognize him as a resident.

  Maybe it was just plain hopefulness?

  Maybe it was a sixth sense she had no idea she had.

  But she’d stood with her eye to the peep hole while the excitement pumping through her slowly cooled. Then, just as she had given up hope of another glimpse, he’d strode right past her door and she’d almost fainted.

  She’d still had the presence of mind to press her ear to the door panel and listen intently, and she’d heard the jingle of keys and the subtle working of metal against metal, as of hinges moving, as the door opened and then closed again.

  He not only lived in her building!

  He lived just a couple of doors down on her very own floor!

  She was downright giddy for hours after that ‘encounter’, making up all sorts of fanciful stories about who he was and where he’d come from—imagining one chance encounter after another that led to an introduction and then more.

  It was absolutely the best night she’d had in her life!

  She’d come down by morning, but there was still a low buzz of excitement inside of her that refused to be subdued.

  But reality had reared its head with the rising sun and the jarring buzz of her alarm clock and she’d begun to pick the incident apart.

  Which was when it finally dawned on her that the guy that passed her door was ‘different’ somehow from the one she’d spotted on the street.

  She’d began to pick the whole thing apart then, everything she’d seen, everything she’d felt, every random thought that had flickered through her mind.

  And she’d come to the conclusion that had led her to do the most idiotic thing she’d ever done in her life.

  She’d done her best to ignore him after that, because she had concluded that he was dangerous—not just in the sense that she could fall for him from afar and make a complete ass out of herself, but because he actually was up to something nefarious and was dangerous in that sense. But it seemed she was constantly running in to him thereafter, when she had never seen him before, and she began to think he was going out of his way to make sure they kept passing one another.

  Instead of feeling flattered, which she might have before if that had occurred to her, she felt … stalked. She felt a budding of uneasiness since that seemed to reinforce her suspicion that he was up to something very bad.

  She would have loved to have believed that he had been just as addled from their encounter and she’d been, but she just wasn’t that good at self deception.

  * * * *

  Dillard was pleased but almost amazed at how easy it had been to track the woman down with nothing more than her name to go on and a hint that she worked at a library. With just a handful of phone calls, he’d traced her to an apartment building just blocks away from the precinct in a matter of minutes. Roughly fifteen minutes after the interview, he passed her walking along the street and pulled his car into a parking space a little more than a block further down the street and settled to studying the apartment building where she lived and the foot traffic in an out of it.

  Spotting the ‘character’, as it turned out, wasn’t hard either.

  He wasn’t just ‘tall’ and dark. He looked tall enough to be a basketball player and there weren’t a lot of people around that were that tall, especially white people.

  Beyond that, he had to admit the guy fit the ‘drop dead gorgeous’ too—not that he was in to men, but he thought he could judge what drop dead gorgeous was to the female of the species.

  Pretty much the opposite of what he was.

  Which meant he disliked the bastard on sight and it didn’t take him five minutes to decide the little lady was right. Something was just ‘wrong’.

  The very first clue was that he was loitering like he was waiting for somebody.

  When he put that together with the fact that he had passed miss library on the way over he was pretty sure the guy was stalking her.

  Unless the two of them were into something together?

  Not a farfetched conclusion. Probably half the tips they got wer
e from exs—or current squeezes who had a beef with their ‘loved one’.

  Sure enough, here comes miss library and suddenly the kook is as alert as a blood hound, comes to attention, and just stares at her, waiting.

  And little miss, all distracted, just walks right into him like a tree grew out of the sidewalk since the last time she passed.

  What really convinced him not to just discard the possibility that it was just some poor dumbass being led around by his dick, though, was the fact that he ‘helped’ her with her purse and palmed the can of mace she’d been carrying.

  Now why would he want that?

  * * * *

  It was rare for Jarrowd to second guess his decisions or regret some action he had taken, even when he had acted on impulse, because he generally found that it was honed instincts that had compelled him and his action was not only warranted, it was precisely the right thing to have done. It had saved his life more times than he could count. And it had led him to remove dangerous criminals from freedom to the cages they needed to occupy enough times that he had practically flown from the ground to top detective faster than anyone else in his graduating class—actually almost anyone else who had ever graduated the intergalactic ranger academy.

  His most recent impulse, unfortunately, did not fall into that category.

  He knew it was based on instinct alright—animal rutting instinct—and had nothing to do with survival or ‘catching the bad guy’.

  The truth, as hard as it was to swallow, was that he had been so focused on his physical attraction to his neighbor that he’d screwed up royally. Maybe.

  Irritation, flickered through him as he acknowledged that he might well have just attracted precisely the sort of attention he was trying hard to avoid when he had his close encounter with his pretty neighbor—whom he had already been too interested in physically and whom he suspected was more than just interested in him on a physical level.

  He had, in fact, begun to have some concern that she was suspicious of his activities.

  Under other circumstances, he might simply have dismissed those … inconvenient possibilities and pursued the object of his desires. It wasn’t for nothing that the general consensus of his co-workers and his superiors was that he had an unfortunate proclivity toward being a cowboy and a loose cannon.

  Struggling with his resentment over his current situation, he finally acknowledged that he couldn’t afford to get involved with her no matter how attractive she was to him. His work was too sensitive—they might have to relocate any number of protected witnesses if he was discovered, and worse, he might have to relocate, and he was really reluctant to do that even though he wasn’t happy about the assignment when he had first arrived.

  He liked the planet and he liked the occupants.

  He felt more ‘at home’ than he ever had anywhere else—because they were ‘cowboys’ like he was, he supposed with some amusement.

  The reluctance in his gut, though, was hard to ignore even though he refused to acknowledge that the biggest reason he did not want to be removed and reassigned was the pretty little neighbor that tied him in knots every time she looked at him.

  Because, he suspected, he had walked right into the invisible web of mating pheromones she was giving off whenever she saw him.

  He just needed to watch his ass.

  And keep a closer eye on her.

  Chapter Three

  Cold fingers crept down Marilyn’s spine when she had upended her purse to search the contents.

  Her mace was gone.

  She did tend to be just an itsy bit absentminded from to time, though, and that resulted in losing—misplacing—things from time to time because she was bad about carrying things around unconsciously while she was looking for something and then setting it down when she found that thing. And since it ended up in a place where it shouldn’t be, where she would never have consciously put it or used it, she had to take her place apart to find it.

  To her dismay, however, even though she took her place apart as she was prone to do at least once a week looking for something she’d misplaced, it didn’t turn up.

  She was ready to cry when it suddenly occurred to her that she’d dropped the purse and spilled everything out when she’d run into her neighbor. With that thought girding her, she barreled out of her door to search the sidewalk and came all around running into the man again!

  Jesus! She couldn’t move without falling over him!

  She couldn’t decide if it was something like … kismet, or his fault or some subconscious behavior on her own part.

  Like maybe she’d heard his tread and ran out in the hope of running into him?

  He’d picked up her purse for her and threw everything back in—including dirt, pebbles and blades of grass and yet, somehow, he’d managed to miss the shiny canister of mace?

  No! Don’t go there, Marilyn!

  Begging pardon, she brushed past him and damned near tripped on the stairs and rolled to the bottom because she was so self-conscious she couldn’t dismiss the suspicion that he was watching her.

  She was so certain, in point of fact, that she glanced back when she’d made it to the ground floor.

  Sure enough, she could see the bottom part of his legs at the top of the second floor landing, with his shoes point toward the stairs.

  Her heart skipped three beats and then rushed to catch up.

  Panting a little, she headed outside, trying to remember where she’d been, exactly, when she’d run into her neighbor.

  For the life of her, she couldn’t, but she checked all the way down one side of the walk until she got to the crosswalk she knew she’d taken and then she started back studying the other side.

  She stopped when she encountered a pair of men’s shoes—size twelve, at least, if she wasn’t mistaken.

  With her gaze, she followed the shoe to the ankles, up the calves and thighs and belly and chest until she was looking up at her neighbor.

  “Did I miss something?”

  “I … uh ….” Jesus! She didn’t want to tell him he’d missed the mace she’d bought … in case she had to fight him off.

  A cold wave washed over her.

  What if he hadn’t missed it?

  What if he’d palmed it?

  She stared at him, trying to jumpstart brain function. “I … uh … I thought I’d just make sure you didn’t miss anything … just in case you missed something important.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, frowning. “You did not check?”

  She blinked at him, feeling her face go white and then neon red. “I … uh … well, actually, I don’t know every little thing in my purse,” she said a little indignantly.

  “Ah,” he said, nodding. “I will help you look.”

  She was instantly torn. She had longed for a chance to meet him and see if anything nice came out of it, but she knew, realistically, he couldn’t possibly have any interest in her. She looked ok, and she knew it, but she was bookish and guys just weren’t interested in to smart girls that liked books.

  If she’d been able to generate any interest in the sort of things that interested them—like fucking and drinking beer and watching sports or playing sports or fishing or hunting ….

  Maybe.

  Not that she was against fucking altogether.

  Especially a man that looked like …. “Sorry. I don’t even know your name.”

  He stared at her as if he was thinking. “Jarrowd,” he said finally.

  Marilyn frowned, trying to interpret the strange name spoken with the unfamiliar accent. “Jarrod?”

  “Yes.” Close enough.

  She stuck her hand out and smiled at him. He was really close and really tall. She was starting to get a crick in the neck from tilting her head back so far. “I’m Marilyn.”

  He stared at her hand for a long moment—as if he wasn’t entirely sure of why she’d stuck it out or what he was supposed to do with it, but just as she grew uncomfortable and began to withd
rawn her hand, he captured it between both of his. “I am honored.”

  Marilyn gaped at him.

  How very, very odd.

  Delightful. She felt tingly all over, warm, a little faint, actually.

  But even in the midst of rapture, she was disconcerted.

  They stood as they were, frozen, for so long that Marilyn began to feel uncomfortable. She really didn’t want to snatch her hand back, but she also wasn’t comfortable with him holding it.

  He let go, thankfully. “I will walk you back, then.”

  “Than … what?”

  “You are not going back to your habitat?”

  What a strange way to refer to her apartment! “Uh … well, actually … uh ….” With some reluctance, she gave up the idea of ditching her neighbor so that she could go check the dumpster for the missing mace.

  Just in case she’d inadvertently thrown it in the trashcan and then taken it out.

  Because, really, it could be argued that it was a weapon and shouldn’t be handled so recklessly.

  “Apartment,” he corrected himself.

  “Ok.”

  He walked her to the elevator, which surprised her because, as far as she knew, he always took the stairs like she did.

  Immediately, she began to visualize a scenario of him slinging her back against the wall, making a sandwich with his hard body and the wall of the elevator, and kissing her deeply while he hunched her ….

  Nothing happened, unfortunately. Despite her penchant for romance novels—a lot of women’s weakness—men didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

  Or maybe it was the ‘me too’ movement?

  Damn it!

  Which would never have happened, of course, if men weren’t so damned convinced all they had to do was to drag it out of their pants and wag it at a woman and she would eagerly fall upon their ‘sword’.

  Because there were still way too damned many Neanderthals in the world.

  Regardless, she was practically floating on air by the time he had left her at the door of her apartment and strode off toward his.

  She frowned, though, as she watched his gait.

  Absolutely everything about the way he held himself, and moved, spoke to supreme male confidence and dexterity that bordered art—as if he was a finely honed gymnaist or some other sportsman—strong, lithe, powerful … like a jungle cat.