Stone Cold Christmas Ranger. Nicole Helm
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has been my partner for a long time. I care about your friends. They’re my friends, too. Nothing’s going to happen to them.”
“My, you are a confident one.”
But no matter how sarcastically she’d said it, he could see a slight relaxation in her. His confidence gave her comfort. “Confidence is everything.”
“Except when you have nothing.”
Bennet didn’t know what to say to that, so he led her down a hallway to the bedrooms. The farthest one from his. It would be the best room for her, not just for keeping her far away from him. He wasn’t that weak to need a barrier, or so he’d tell himself.
“That door back there leads to a private bathroom. Feel free to use it and anything in it. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Hey, have you heard anything from Vaughn about Nat?”
Bennet looked down at his phone. “I don’t have any messages.”
“I don’t know what to tell them. They’ll expect me to visit, and...” She shook her head, looking young and vulnerable for the first time since she’d seen the picture of her mother.
He wanted to help. He wanted to soothe. Which was just his nature. He was a guy who wanted to help. It had nothing to do with soft brown eyes and a pretty mouth.
“You’re a bounty hunter, right? Well, an unauthorized and illegal one, anyway.”
She frowned at him. “Yes. I have my reasons.”
“Criminals always do.” But he grinned, hoping the joke, the teasing, would lighten her up, take that vulnerable cast of her mouth away. “Tell them you had an important case, and you’ll be back as soon as possible. You’re not going back to your place, so it’s not like they’ll have any reason to believe you’re in town.”
“I don’t like lying to them.”
“It’s not my favorite either, but—”
“I know. It’ll keep them safe, and that is the most important thing to me.”
“It’s important to me, too. Never doubt that.”
She nodded, hugging herself and looking around the room. “You know this kind of insane show of wealth is usually the sign of a small dick, right?”
He choked on his own spit. That had not been at all what he’d expected her to say, but from her grin he could tell that’s exactly why she’d said it.
“I suppose that’s something you’d have to take up with my father, since this is neither my show of wealth, nor is that a complaint I’ve ever received.”
Two twin blotches of pink showed up on her cheeks, and Bennet knew it was time to close the door and walk away before there were any more jokes about...that.
“Are you sure your parents won’t get wind of this?”
“Unless it furthers their political agenda, my parents won’t be sticking their nose anywhere near it. They’ll stay out of it and safe.”
“Political agenda?”
“Oh, didn’t you put it together?” he asked casually, because he knew much like her small-dick comment had caught him off guard, this little tidbit would catch her off guard.
“Put what together?”
“My father is Gary L. Stevens, US senator and former presidential candidate. My mother is Lynette Stevens, pioneer lawyer and Texas state senator. You may have heard of them.”
She stared slack-jawed at him, and he couldn’t ignore the pleasure he got out of leaving her in shock. So he flashed a grin, his politicians’ son grin.
“Good night, Alyssa.”
And Bennet left her room, closing the door behind him.
* * *
ALYSSA TOSSED AND TURNED. Between trying to come to full grips with the fact that Bennet Stevens was the son of two wealthy and influential politicians, and Gabby being mad about her taking a job before coming to see the baby, she couldn’t get her mind to stop running in circles.
She hated when someone was mad at her and had every right to be. She hated disappointing Gabby and Nat. But this was keeping them safe, and she had to remember that.
And more than all of that, the thing she kept trying to pretend wasn’t true.
Her mother had been murdered. She knew Ranger Stevens suspected her brothers. No matter what horrible things they were capable of, though—and they were enormously capable—Alyssa rejected the idea they could be behind the murder of her mother. Their mother.
Maybe she could see it if her father was still in his right mind, but he had succumbed to some kind of dementia before she’d even been kidnapped. He was nothing but a titular figure now, one her brothers kept as a weapon of their own.
Once it was finally a reasonable hour to get up, Alyssa crawled out of the too-comfortable bed and looked at herself in the gigantic mirror. She looked like a bedraggled sewer animal in the midst of all this pristine white.
It was such a glaring contrast. Though she’d grown up surrounded by a certain amount of wealth, it had all been the dark-and-dirty kind. She’d lived in a sketchy guarded-to-the-hilt home for most of her life, and then been kidnapped into a glorified bunker.
But what did contrasts matter when she was simply out for the truth? She tiptoed down the hallway, wondering where Ranger Stevens had secreted himself off to last night. What would he look like sleep-rumpled in one of those big white beds?
She was seriously losing it. Clearly she needed something to eat to clear her head. She headed for the kitchen, but stopped short at the entrance when she saw Ranger Stevens was already sitting there in a little breakfast nook surrounded by windows.
“Good morning,” he offered, as if it wasn’t five in the morning and as if this wasn’t weird as all get out.
“Morning,” she replied.
On the glossy black table in front of him, he had a laptop open. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and while the button-down shirt he’d been wearing last night hadn’t exactly hidden the fact this man was no pencil pusher, this was a whole other experience.
He had muscles. Actual biceps. Whether it was on purpose or not, the sleeves of his T-shirt hugged them perfectly and made her realize, again, how unbearably hot this man was. And how unbearably unfair that was.
“There’s coffee already brewed. Mugs are in the cabinet above it. As for breakfast, feel free to poke around and find what you’d like.”
“Not much of a breakfast eater,” she lied. She didn’t know why she lied. She just felt off-kilter and weird and didn’t want to be here.
“I’d try to eat something. Got a lot of work to do today.”
“Don’t you have to go to, like, actual work?”
“My actual work is investigating this case.”
“If my brothers get ahold of you and you don’t report for work, what’s going to happen then?”
He looked at her over his laptop with that hard, implacable Texas Ranger look she thought maybe he practiced in the mirror. Because it was effective, both in shutting her up and making those weird lower-belly flutters intensify.
“I’ll handle my work responsibilities,” he said, his voice deep and certain.
Alyssa rolled her eyes in an effort to appear wholly unaffected. She walked over to the coffeepot. She didn’t drink coffee, but she figured she might as well start. That’s what adults did after all. They drank coffee and handled their work responsibilities.
“Sugar is right next to the pot. No cream, but milk is in the fridge.”
“I