My limbs felt warm and relaxed as I jogged down the stairs. I was still on a high from the morning in Tomas’s office. I was choosing not to think about Ryan standing outside the house or why he was there. My safety was Tomas’s number one priority—I knew it, I believed it. He’d keep me safe, and I wanted to do the same for him.
I tapped on his office door and walked in. “So do you want to—”
The room was empty.
At the sound of footsteps on the tile floor, I turned.
Arthur smiled warmly. “Good morning.”
“And good morning to you, too.” I smiled back. I liked Arthur; he was good people. “Hey, have you seen, Tomas?”
“He had to step out. He wanted me to tell you he’d be back late, but he’d call you.”
Dread filled me. Had Tomas gone after Ryan? Had his men caught him this morning? I forced a smile. “Thanks for letting me know.”
He dipped his chin. “Do you need anything? Food? Coffee? Juice?”
“I’m fine, but thanks.”
He gave me another warm smile and headed off into the opposite direction.
There was no way I could eat right then, not when Tomas could be out there doing something that could put him behind bars. I slid into the big chair behind his desk, not sure what to do, and on the verge of freaking out. I tried to tell myself I was overreacting, that he’d spent so much time here with me the last couple of weeks he probably had lots to catch up on away from the house.
But the niggling feeling wouldn’t leave me, and the feeling of dread got worse.
Willa’s man, Jude, was a private investigator, an ex-cop, and had known Tomas since they were kids. They weren’t exactly besties or anything, from what she could gather, but there was still a friendship of sorts, a mutual respect.
Without giving myself too much time to think about it, I pulled my phone from my pocket and hit Willa’s number.
She answered on the second ring. “What’s up?”
“Hey, so I wanted to ask you something.” I tried to think of the best way to approach the conversation.
“Are you ready for another night out?”
I’d have smiled if I hadn’t been stressing out. “I actually called for another reason.”
“Shoot,” Willa said.
There was no way to sugarcoat it. Willa could handle it. Jude worked dangerous cases, doing things that made Willa sick with worry all the time. If anyone would understand, it was her. “I’m not sure, but I think Tomas might do something…um, my ex showed up here earlier and I think he might—”
“He didn’t tell you where he was going?” she said.
“I was asleep when he left, and I’m kinda freaking out.”
“He’s with Jude. I promise you’ve got nothing to worry about,” Willa said. “The guys from the agency are helping him with Ryan. They won’t let him do anything reckless.”
I slumped back in Tomas’s big chair. “Thank God.”
“Your man’s kind of intense, huh?”
Willa had worked at the club when Tomas used to come in for his dances, so she’d witnessed that side of him firsthand. “You could say that,” I said.
Willa chuckled but sobered quickly. “It will be okay. Jude will make sure he doesn’t end up in an orange jumpsuit. He promised me nothing bad would happen.” She snorted. “And that man never breaks a promise.”
Her voice had softened talking about her guy, and I loved that my friend had found someone as good as Jude. They were perfect for each other.
“Did Tomas tell you he helped me out a while back?” Willa said.
I sat forward. “No, he didn’t say anything.”
“All that trouble I had with Trent—the blackmail. I went to Tomas for a loan, and instead of holding me to it, he went to Jude.” There was a beat of silence. “If he hadn’t done that…yeah, I can’t even bear to think about where I might be now, what my life would be.”
Trent was Willa’s brother-in-law, and Willa had been raising his and her sister’s daughter since her sister died. Trent decided to use his child, Tilly, to blackmail Willa when he got out of prison for dealing drugs. Things had gotten really bad. But she’d finally allowed Jude in, had trusted him, and since then her world had changed for the better.
I gripped the phone tighter. “He did that?” I knew Tomas did a lot of things that weren’t exactly legal, and I knew lending money was one of those things, but I had no idea Willa had gone to him.
“Yeah.” She was quiet again for a few seconds. “Tell me, how are you? Really?”
I started to say fine, brush it off, hold everything tight to my chest like I always had before. But I didn’t want to be that Stephanie anymore, and Willa wouldn’t let me anyway. She hadn’t let me retreat, not since we started this friendship, and I was glad of it. “I’m scared,” I said. “Scared that this won’t last, that it’ll all go away.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I’m happy, Willa, happier than I’ve been in so damn long. What if I lose him? What if he gets tired of dealing with all my crap?” I took a shuddering breath. “What if he sees how broken I am and gives up on me?”
There, I’d said it. My biggest fear. I believed Tomas cared for me, that I could trust him with every part of me, but I was broken and I always would be. What I went through with Ryan wouldn’t just go away, not completely. How could I expect Tomas to deal with that—my brokenness, the nightmares, the insecurities, the fear—when it reared its ugly head? Because it would.
I came with baggage.
“You deserve happiness, Steph, so much. You deserve every good thing. I’ve seen the way Tomas looks at you, the way he’s been looking at you for the last year. I can’t believe that he’ll ever give up on you. He loves you. You don’t give up on the people you love.”
He loved me? Did he? Could he?
“Look, Jude doesn’t know much about Tomas’s family, but he did say that his father was the kind of man who demanded obedience from his family,” Willa said.
My stomach flipped. “And if they disobeyed?”
“Jude saw…bruises. Tomas tried to hide them, but they all saw. His mother, too. People knew he hit her, but she would always cover for him. She—”
“I…I need to go.” I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.
“Steph—”
“Thank you for sharing that with me. Tomas doesn’t talk much about himself. That was…it was helpful.”
“Stephanie—”
“I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up, finding it suddenly hard to breathe.
A repetitive sound like little bells came from the bottom drawer of Tomas’s desk—a familiar sound, the one I’d chosen on my old phone for text messages. I opened the drawer and sure enough, there it was. With a trembling hand, I picked it up and looked down at the messages.
I scrolled through them, hundreds that Ryan had sent me since Tomas took my phone. Some pleading, begging me to come back. My lack of response saw them getting more and more vicious, violent.
There was one reply to Ryan.
It had been sent this morning after we’d seen him across the street, after Tomas had carried me back up to bed. Two words.
She’s mine.
I blinked down at those two words, then the ones below them. Ryan’s response.
You’re dead. I’m going to cut you into tiny pieces and deliver them to her then I’m going to kill her as well, nice and slow.
I started shaking. Ryan would do it. He’d kill Tomas the first chance he got. He’d kill him without a second thought.
Losing Tomas…I couldn’t think about it.
I loved him.
The shaking got more intense.
And now I knew what drove him, the reason Tomas was so determined to protect me. His father had been abusive to him and his mother. Was that the real reason he kept coming back? Why he was so single minded; why he chose me? Was it more to do with his own past? Perhaps unresolved feelings drove him. Seeing his mother being hurt had to have been traumatic for a child. Add in his own abuse—
I stood and strode from his office. I needed to move, to get out of my own head, away from the swirling thoughts in my mind.
As I ran down the hallway, I felt the walls closing in.
Had he ever stopped seeing me as that broken little bird? Could he? Or was that the attraction in the first place?
Someone to save.

Tomas
I strode from my room and headed back downstairs. Stephanie wasn’t up there and she wasn’t in the kitchen or my office. There was one place left to check, and if she wasn’t there I was going to fucking lose my mind and tear this city apart.
I was flat-out running by the time I reached the gym and nearly collapsed against the door when I heard the music pumping through it.
She was inside. She was dancing. Thank fuck.
After seeing Ryan outside, after trying to hunt the fucker down all day, I was out of patience. She was safe here. I’d made this place near impenetrable, but Ryan wasn’t going away. He was getting careless. He was obsessed with Stephanie, with my angel, which meant he was capable of anything.
I shoved the door open, desperate to see her, and halted in my tracks. I’d seen her lose herself on stage at Stilettos and here in this room, but this was something different, something much more. She didn’t even glance up when I walked in, like she always did, like she could sense me whenever I was near.
No, right now she wasn’t even in this room, she was so deep in her own head. Christ, her eyes were blank…when she wasn’t squeezing them shut.
Fuck that. I couldn’t watch her suffer. Whatever this was, I couldn’t leave her in pain. Never again.
I moved up to her, and fuck me, she didn’t even look at me when I was a foot away. She was so far gone she jumped when I reached out and touched her. She spun to face me, hand to her pounding chest.
What the fuck?
When I reached for her, she shook her head and tried to move out of reach. “I…I need to keep dancing.”
She’d lost her mind if she thought I’d walk away now. I closed the distance between us and took her shoulders in my hands. “Talk to me, Stephanie.”
She shook her head again. “Please, Tomas.”
I didn’t know what she was pleading for, and going by the lost look in her eyes I didn’t think she did either. I grabbed her phone and turned off the music, then pulled her to me. She started to struggle and, fuck, that killed me. I would have never forced her to do anything she didn’t want, but the way she was acting was scaring the shit out of me. When the first sob broke from her, I did the only thing I could think of. I wrapped her in a bear hug and sank to the floor, taking her with me.
She grabbed onto my jacket and buried her face against my chest, tears soaking it almost instantly.
“You’re scaring me, Steph. Please, Angel, talk to me.”
“He’s not going to give up, is he?” she said, panic clear in her voice.
I held her tighter. “Steph…”
She gripped the front of my shirt. “I found my old phone in your desk. I saw Ryan’s texts. He means it, he does. He’s going to hurt you, he’s going to—”
“He won’t, Stephanie. That fucker won’t come near either of us. He’s living rough, making it hard to find him, but I will. I promise you that.” I gently lifted her chin so I could see her face but she kept her eyes averted. “But that’s not what this is about, not really, is it?”
She didn’t answer and still wouldn’t look at me.
“Steph?”
Finally, she looked up at me and, shit, the look in her eyes destroyed me, but not as much as the words that came out of her mouth. “This…this isn’t real, is it?”
“What?” I whispered.
“How can you want me?” she said, starting to sound hysterical. “You see me as this broken…thing. Not a woman; a broken, damaged bird, her wings clipped. Pathetic, helpless. That how you see me.”
I stared at her, stunned. How could she think that? “Where’s this coming from?”
“Or do you look at me, the scars, remember the bruises I had after you saved me, and see your mother?” Her lips trembled, tears streaming down her face.
I froze. There was no accusation in her voice, just pain and fear. Fear that what she was saying was the truth. Jesus fucking Christ. I brushed her hair back carefully, trying to control my own fear that I could lose her. That she could walk away from me if she believed this bullshit. “Who told you about my mother?”
“Does it matter?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you hide your past from me? It’s because it’s true, isn’t it? You want to save me because you were too young to save your mother from your father?”
Her words were a knife to the chest, cracking what was left of the stone around my heart, releasing all the pain and hurt I’d locked away. It wasn’t hard to figure out who told her about my family. Willa and her were close. Jude knew my history, had seen the bruises. I shook my head. “You’re wrong, Angel, so fucking wrong.”
“Am I?” More tears streamed down her face.
I brushed them away, the knife twisting. “I told you that I’ve wanted you since I first saw you, and I wasn’t lying. Christ, Stephanie, I’m in love with you.”
She stilled in my arms, her eyes widening. “What did you say?”
“I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for a fucking long time, but you weren’t ready for me, not back then and not a year ago. Why do you think I came in to see you nearly every day? I was waiting for you, for that emptiness to leave your eyes, for you to tell me you were ready, that you wanted me, too.” My voice sounded wrecked, my words coming out harsher than I’d intended, but, fuck, I was so in love with this woman and she couldn’t see it. That hurt. I knew it was unreasonable of me, but it hurt all the same.
“You love me?” she whispered.
“Jesus, woman, of course I do. I’d give it all up for you, all of this. I’ve already started. I closed down several of my operations right after you came back into my life. Shit that I didn’t want any part of anymore. Because you make me want to be a better man, Stephanie.”
She blinked up at me, the tears not slowing. “You did that for me?” she said.
“Nothing else matters but you,” I said simply.
Her hand lifted to my face, her eyes searching mine. “I love you, too, you know?”
All the breath was punched from my lungs. I stared into her green eyes, heart pounding. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to hear that from you?”
“This is the first time I’ve truly understood what it meant,” she said.
“Kiss me,” I growled.
Her fingers curled around the back of my neck and she did as I asked. She kissed me. A press of lips that wasn’t enough. I was about to take over when she pulled back a little.
“Make love to me, Tomas,” she said, a breathless hitch to her voice that had my gut in knots. “Please.” And then she kissed me again, this time holding nothing back.