by Em Petrova
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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
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Rescued by the Cowboy
WEST Protection
Book 1
Copyright Em Petrova 2021
Ebook Edition
Electronic book publication 2021
Cover Art by Bookin’ It Designs
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More in this series:
GUARDED BY THE COWBOY
COWBOY CONSPIRACY THEORY
COWBOY IN THE CROSSHAIRS
PROTECTED BY THE COWBOY
Ross Wynton, leader of WEST Protection.
He’s got a head for the tactical and an instinct for danger.
Then in walks the one person who reminds him that he’s also a man.
After a big breakthrough with her gene editing project, Doctor Pippa Hamlin is neck-deep in danger and threats. On the run, she turns to the only person she knows who can protect her—the hot cowboy crush from her gawky teen years. While she still burns for the man, she hopes he’ll help her reach Seattle for a big conference without meeting more danger.
Discovering who is threatening Pippa becomes Ross’s number one priority. So does easing that fear he sees in her beautiful hazel eyes…and fighting to keep his hands off her tallies is a close second.
Ross fears he’s too distracted and missing something, while Pippa battles to keep her wits to fight for the medical discovery she believes in. Traveling with a sexy, alpha, muscled bodyguard who brings all the heat to places a nerdy doctor ignores is hard enough without wondering if Ross will save her—or break her.
Rescued
By the
Cowboy
by
Em Petrova
Chapter One
Ross raised the glass of whiskey to his lips, but he never got to take a sip because a sexy woman wearing only a red, sheer thong shoved his drink aside.
She grabbed him by the western string tie he wore and leaned in close. “You want a piece of this, sugar?” She lifted one dainty foot sporting a red stiletto with feathers and planted it on the chair between his thighs, an inch from his balls.
His brothers, a couple cousins and his lifelong buddies at the table hooted and started tossing dollar bills his direction. Music pulsed and the women dancing onstage looked like disco balls with colored lights hitting their scanty costumes. Two were completely naked.
“Who picked this place for our weekly meeting anyway?” He snagged a handful of crumpled bills off the table. The dancer swished around to present her ass. With a coy glance over her shoulder, she bent over for him.
“Stick the bills in her thong!” his brother called when Ross sat immobile for a heartbeat too long.
He pulled the string out of the crack of her ass and wedged the bills under it. When he let it snap back in place, she whipped to face him with a glare.
She sashayed to the next table and straddled a businessman who was three sheets to the wind and probably had more money to waste.
Ross took his whiskey in hand and relished the slow burn slipping into his stomach. Christ, what a week. The guys who made up WEST Protection probably thought that holding their weekly meeting at a strip club would be a good way to unwind. But he didn’t need a silk-covered ass waving her goods in his face to let loose.
Hell, he partied at least once a…
He thought long and hard about the last time he knocked down more than a drink or two or took a beautiful woman up against a wall. His brows scrunched, and he caught his little brother, Boone, looking at him.
“What are you starin’ at?” He slugged down his whiskey and breathed through the flames.
“You didn’t even look twice at that woman. She was waving her ass in your face! Did you even notice her clit was pierced?” Boone’s white Stetson flashed with rainbow lights from the nearby stage.
“She had her clit pierced? How did I miss that?” His other little brother jumped to his feet and waved at the dancer to come back, but she simply blew him a kiss and moved on to another table.
“Shiiiiieeet, Ross. Running a company’s making you old before your time.” Boone motioned to a waitress to bring the table another round of Jameson. They’d shoved together four tables to make enough room for all ten of them working for WEST Protection security company.
Wynton, Shanie and Trace made up three of the letters of WEST. A short year ago, Ross, his cousin and his best buddy had formed the company that served the Western part of the US, and Ross’s brothers jumped on board.
But only he seemed to be on task tonight. The guys were all either drinking, eyeing up beautiful women or both.
Maybe Boone was right—he was getting old before his time. But that happened to men who were driven to reach goals, right? His plan to scale up in the course of a year had exploded them onto the map, and now they couldn’t even handle the calls they were receiving for security details, requests for personal protection officers and even help with guarding identities over the internet with their tech branch.
Wait until he told the guys about putting his next plan into action in order to take over the western US before spreading south.
Boone said something to him, and he blinked away his thoughts. “What was that?”
“You got too much manure in your ears, brother! If you’re not on the ranch, you’ve got your head in a business plan or a case file. I said that dancer was waving at you from across the room.”
He didn’t bother to look. He wasn’t interested in a woman who would wiggle her ass in the face of any man waving a buck. He sipped his whiskey and kicked back instead, watching his employees’ interest in the scheduled meeting fade fast.
A dancer with big, perky tits headed their way, and all nine of his men whipped off their white Stetsons in her honor. Ross grunted, watching their antics as they plied her with money in trade for a peek at those big, hard nipples up close.
They needed to discuss so many things. The agenda he’d memorized floated away as he realized they weren’t going to talk about protecting the governor from death threats, or even how to reduce the hundreds he received a day to a dozen. There wasn’t an opportunity to go over details about security at the banks being hit with armed robberies or the countless security systems they were being paid to plug holes in.
The dancer moved on, and the guys placed their hats on their heads.
He tugged the brim of his own white Stetson, a trademark of WEST Protection, and raised his voice. “I have an announcement.”
They all stopped talking and focused on him.
“I received a call from a woman who heads the planning team for the Grammys.”
Nobody spoke.
“As in Grammy Wynton?”
Ross’s lips twisted. “Not that type o’ Grammy. I mean the Grammys. The big awards that happen annually.”
Everyone blinked at him. All except for Boone, who stared at Ross as though he’d lost the ability to close his eyelids.
“You got…us a job…working security…for…the…Grammys?” Boone spaced out the words in a slow drawl.
He shook his head. “Nothing’s finalized. No contrac
ts signed.”
“But they’ll offer,” Boone put in with stone-cold conviction.
Ross ducked his head in the Wynton nod handed down through the men of his family, along with a deep dimple in each of their cheeks. “Looks like it might happen. And if it does, we need more men. The best of the best, ya hear?” He pointed to his youngest brother Noah.
“Damn, brother, I admit I never believed you when you said WEST would be the biggest security company in the US.” His middle brother Josiah pinned a stare on him.
“Not yet we aren’t. And if we do reach the top—”
“Which we will,” interjected Boone.
Ross went on, “Then we can’t get lazy. We have to actually be the best. We haven’t invested in all this training, infrastructure, top-of-the-line computer systems and other high-priced gear only to let it all go with laziness.”
“Look around you, Ross. Is there a single man here you’d call lazy?” Josiah spoke up.
If their determined expressions and muscled shoulders didn’t say enough, he’d witnessed firsthand how damn lethal every man seated at this table was. Upon inception of the company, the first thing he did was fly everyone to Michigan to a top facility for training with elite soldiers from all over the world. At this point, they could handle everything including hostage rescues, reconnaissance, military combative techniques and could even treat trauma patients. And that was only the bodyguard division. The tech team had their own top training.
He started to answer Josiah, but his phone vibrated on the table next to his hand. He glanced at the number and didn’t recognize it.
But he never let a call go. As a result, he listened to a lot of spam calls about his car’s extended warranty. Often, the people who contacted him were clients sent to him by word of mouth.
“That the girl you were twirling around the dancefloor the other night, Ross?” his brother teased.
“Don’t you guys know I’m older than my years and my personal life’s in the shitter?” His comment had them all laughing. He snatched the phone on the second buzz and brought it to his ear.
“Ross Wynton.”
“Uh…Ross?” The feminine voice came off as breathy, but maybe it was the music drowning her out.
“Yes, who is this?”
“It’s Pippa.”
He froze. He only knew one woman named Pippa.
“Pippa Hamlin.”
His brain threw up a mental file of her containing her image and description. Pippa, daughter of his father’s best friend. Last he’d heard, she graduated Yale or some other Ivy League school with magna cum laude and a degree in molecular something or other. He hadn’t seen her since a big family barbecue when her family came from Seattle to visit his in Stone Pass, Montana. He couldn’t recall much about that last gathering besides her being in that colt-like stage of her teens where guys didn’t take notice.
That and she’d taken a fall off a horse, despite convincing him and his brothers that she could ride.
“Pippa?” He stood and wove his way through the club to the exit so he could hear her better. Passing several dancers who stopped to wink at him, he listened to the silence projecting into his ear on the other end of the line.
Once he burst outside into the cold, pine-scented Montana air, he said, “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
Her voice still came out too soft.
“Is everything all right?”
A beat of silence followed. Then she said, “No. All wrong. I’m boarding flight 68 to Montana right now. I need you to pick me up at the airport.”
His protective senses kicked in. “Pippa, where are you? What’s going on?”
Another long pause and then her whisper sent shivers through him. “I’m being followed, Ross.”
* * * * *
Pippa gripped the armrests as the jet angled toward the runway. She hated landings. And taking off. She hated planes, and now she had a brand-new terror of airports.
Fleeing Detroit was the only option, though. At first, things came up missing in her office—her favorite pair of earrings that her momma gave her after she graduated from Yale. She shouldn’t have left them on her desk, but nobody went in the small, cramped space off the lab where she worked.
Next, a photo on her corkboard vanished. Since it was a photo of her with an old girlfriend on a camping trip, she started looking to the men in the lab. Maybe one was interested in her or the friend? Or perhaps the tack fell out and the cleaning personnel swept up the photo.
But then came the notes. Two in total, which wasn’t many, except they shot her through with black fear, and she was pretty sure the company frowned upon death threats.
When she spotted the slip of paper on top of her data printouts, she’d nearly passed out.
I got rid of others like you.
Breathing hard, she crumpled the paper in her fist, and heart pounding, looked at her surroundings, but nobody had been around her at the time.
Then the second threat hit this afternoon. This one couldn’t be mistaken for somebody wanting to foist her from her job overseeing a special gene project. I will kill you was pretty self-explanatory.
With her bowels watery and her heart racing, she’d quickly gathered her belongings from her office and left for the day. She even managed not to run out the doors and across the parking lot to her car, though in retrospect, she didn’t know how when she was so shaken.
The only thought burning through her brain was to find a person to help her. The police would ask a lot of questions she didn’t have answers to. They’d stir things up at the lab by interrogating her coworkers. In the end, one name popped into her mind.
Ross Wynton.
His name had been brought up at Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house in Seattle. He’d started some security company specializing in personal protection, and it’d taken off immediately.
She didn’t stop to think when she ran to her apartment to throw some clothes in a bag and purchase a flight before hastening to the airport. She hadn’t considered calling Ross first. But holding a calm phone call with the man to share her fears wasn’t possible—not when someone in her city, her lab wanted her dead.
After she was on her way and felt she could breathe a little easier, she was attacked.
When she heard something heavy like a trash can being shoved across the airport restroom floor, she didn’t question why. Her logical brain told her it was a janitor taking out the trash. But the minute she opened the stall door and faced a man, all logical thought flew out her ear, and her reflexes kicked in.
He yanked her out of the stall and locked an arm around her neck. She still felt her heels dragging across the tile floor. With her air cut off and stars blasting in front of her eyes like a fireworks display, her training kicked in. She hadn’t spent two years studying with top scientists in her field in Japan without learning a martial art.
Aikido came to her rescue, and with all her strength, she’d used her body as a lever to lift the man and flip him. When he slammed off the floor and lay still, she feared she might have killed him.
No such luck.
In a blink, he came at her a second time, this time with a handgun with a long barrel, and she’d seen enough action flicks to know it was a silencer.
She could turn and flee, but he’d only come after her. So she steeled herself for round two, and when he lay on the floor again, this time with his eyes rolled up in his head, she didn’t hesitate to run.
The long strap of her computer bag stuck out from under the stall door. She grabbed it and fled, leaving behind her carryon. Since she’d already gone through security, she was clear to board, and she jumped on that plane faster than she ever thought possible.
Which was how she ended up in Bozeman Airport with bumps, bruises and only her precious laptop with her personal research concerning the new gene project and a miasma of fear clouding her.
The jet taxied and came to a stop. Long minutes later she followed the res
t of the passengers down the aisle, throwing covert glances around her for more attackers. She gripped her bag tight and pushed down the burning bile from everything that happened.
In the airport, she paused to throw a look around. She didn’t expect Ross to be standing there holding a WELCOME PIPPA sign, but seeing his face would be nice.
Releasing a shaky sigh, she followed the herd of people to the baggage claim. There was safety in numbers, right? Nobody would jump out and attack her with a chance of being caught.
Though she didn’t have any luggage, Ross could be waiting there for her, just as his family had waited for hers in the days when they visited.
The last time, she’d been fifteen. Seeing the huge, hunky Wynton boys hadn’t eased her gawkiness or shyness one bit, and she hadn’t set eyes on any of them since. She finished high school a year and a half early and went straight into college. While her family continued to see the Wyntons for fly-fishing trips, she hadn’t made it.
So she’d taken a huge chance on Ross being the good man his father was and coming to her rescue.
Being above average height for a woman, she didn’t have to crane her neck to see over the group. When she spotted a white cowboy hat, her lungs gave out and she couldn’t find any air to draw back in. Two people in front of her moved, giving her a clear view of Ross Wynton.
He was even taller than her—and taller than last time she’d seen him. Broader too, but she recognized that twinkle in his dark green eyes as the same one she’d seen when he teased her after falling off a horse and into a thorn bush that last summer they were together.
In a few long-legged strides, he reached her. She looked up at his face and neither of them moved. Did they embrace? Their mothers and fathers did. But that felt too far from her comfort zone, so she stuck out her hand.
Ross enveloped it in his callused grip. “Pippa, we’re going to get your luggage and then you’re going to stick by my side and do everything I tell you to as we walk to my truck.”
