do her in. It would finish her. So she did the only thing she could to protect her heart.
“I don't think you should come back with me, Gabe,” PJ said, standing taller and looking him in the eye. She saw the pain in his eyes, his confusion.
“What? Why, Pru?” His voice was quiet and low, sending an unwanted chill up her spine. He stepped in even closer to her and she had to put a hand out to his chest to steady herself.
Contact. Big mistake. She drew her hand back quickly.
“I think I need to do this on my own for now. I need to deal with this myself.”
His eyes went wide, and she could feel the intensity of his stare as she glanced away. “Look, Gabe, I...I haven’t really done very well in the relationship department. It.... They don’t tend to end very well for me. And, it’s just.... It’s not something I want to go through right now. I just need to deal with this – to focus on this stalker or blackmailer or whatever this person is. I just need to face this and stop running and deal with this…this—”
“Try ‘killer.’ Killer is the word you’re looking for. This person killed Jimmy, and now he’s flat out told you he’s coming after you, and you’re planning to run into his arms completely unprotected,” Gabe said, anger rolling off him, palpable and more than a little intense.
She raised her chin. “Fine. Killer. But I’m not going back completely unprotected. I’ll have Chad and Zach and their whole team with me. And, my own security guys,” she finished.
“Who haven’t actually been cleared by Chad and who’ve done a piss-poor job of protecting you so far. For all we know, it could be one of them,” Gabe all but growled.
PJ nodded slowly. She knew he wanted to protect her, but she couldn’t bring herself to allow it. She couldn’t rely on him. No.
Any time she’d tried to depend on a man sticking around, it had gone horribly wrong. She’d fix this herself and then decide where her career would go from here. Maybe it was time to think about retiring. Or, at least slowing down a bit.
“I’ll have Chad and Zach,” she said quietly and slipped out from between Gabe and the counter, taking the first deep breath since she’d decided to tell him she needed to stand on her own two feet.
She ducked into the guest room and shut the door, leaning her head back against it as she let a few tears fall. She swiped at them and squeezed her eyes shut. She was doing the right thing—she was sure of it.
It might feel like she’d just been run over by a Mack truck, both emotionally and physically, but pulling away before he hurt her was the smart decision. And, PJ was all about trying to be smarter nowadays. She’d made enough stupid mistakes to last a lifetime.
Gabe didn’t care what PJ said. He wouldn’t be leaving her alone anytime soon. His car left his Connecticut home just moments after hers. They’d drive to the airport in separate cars, and he’d be flying a separate plane to Denver, but he’d be there as soon as she arrived. With any luck, he might get in ahead of her.
Shit. He knew he was beginning to look a bit like a stalker himself. In fact, if PJ knew how much he’d tried to match his own work schedule to her tour dates in the past; how much he’d kept an eye on her when she was staying at his hotels; how many extra little services he’d arranged for that had nothing to do with her VIP status and everything to do with his feelings for her, well shit. She probably would have run from him a lot faster than she had.
He wasn’t sure when he’d started to fall for Pru. It hadn’t been when they first met. He knew that. At the time, she’d been nineteen and he was twenty-nine. He was still heavily entrenched in building his chain of hotels, in beating back the memories of a ruined family he would never be able to recover, and she’d been just a sweet teenage pop star who stayed at his hotels. And then, one day, he’d looked up while attending a fundraiser, and she wasn’t a teenager anymore. And, she no longer instilled sweet thoughts in him.
He had been about to approach her to say hello when one of his ex-girlfriends