crossed the deck. Impossible for him not to note her curves twitching with each determined stride she took.
Dammit, he had to stop thinking of her in terms of her movies. She wasn’t saving a friend from a gunman in an apocalyptic world. She wouldn’t be outrunning a band of drug runners in the jungles of South America after witnessing a heinous crime.
Thank God she wasn’t involved in either of those things. This mission was one of the simpler cases he’d ever dealt with.
She pivoted on her heel, and his body responded with a leap of awareness…and attraction. Even more reason to keep his distance. Now he regretted turning down the last few women who asked more of him, though. He hadn’t felt a soft woman beneath him since before his injury months ago. The pretty nurse in charge of his care had offered herself in not so uncertain terms, but he couldn’t dally with someone who changed his bandages and helped him to bed.
But the last time he had a human connection? Hell, he couldn’t even remember one. He avoided relationships. Leaving behind a woman or a family didn’t set well with him. In the Church, almost all of them remained single by choice. Dragging a significant other into this life was out of the question.
Fuck, North wouldn’t even keep a dog. Though he loved animals, the idea that he could be killed…never return to a dog who didn’t understand why… He shook himself. Best to have no attachments. Volunteering at the shelter whenever he could was the all he could manage.
Sloane paced to the chair and dropped to it. She sat there only a split second before jumping up again.
“Madeline, I’ve got to go.”
“Think about it, North.”
He ended the call and drifted to the door, watching Sloane in what could only be some internal struggle. His gut told him this went below the depths of her situation. Something was clawing at her from the inside, and he would learn what tried to get out.
When he walked onto the deck, she tossed him a look he’d seen from her several times in the movies.
“Sloane.”
She didn’t stop pacing, striding by him again and again like a caged animal.
He reached out and caught her arm, stopping her. She jerked her gaze up to his. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said.
Carefully, she shrugged from his grasp and distanced herself from him by a few paces. Watching her make five more rotations, and then six, he considered the possibilities.
She had to be hiding something.
“Do you know any of the people after you?”
She stopped dead in her tracks, face blank.
“In the drilling industry?” he prompted.
All at once, her eyes cleared as if she understood what he asked but didn’t a minute ago.
“No, I don’t know anybody at all. I told you before—I only acted the part. While I do care about the environment, I don’t have any ties to this type of thing. The most I do is support the ASPCA.”
Something about that twist of her lips had him narrowing his gaze. Maybe she didn’t only perform that gesture while trying to hide her drawl. Years in this business had long ago woken him up to underlying danger, and the alarms blaring in the recesses of his mind weren’t for nothing.
Sloane was hiding something.
Madeline’s offer to settle behind his computer monitors suddenly seemed alluring as hell. Analyzing maps he could do—women not so much. Maybe he should leave behind wards and flying bullets.
He could place Sloane in a safehouse with heavy security, and return to life as he knew it.
The haunted expression in her eyes burned through him like a flame to dry leaves.
He rocked on his heels, staring at the beautiful woman. No denying he reacted far too strongly to her. Why? What was different about this ward? They all gave him looks to tug at his heart, but he couldn’t even fathom leaving this one with another guard.
His analytical mind helped him in many ways, but right now, he wished he could switch it off. It kept asking him the same difficult question on repeat.
How can I leave her when she’s looking at me that way?
* * * * *
“I can’t stay here.” Sloane’s statement fell on dead air and had as much effect as her making demands to an unmoving boulder.
North didn’t shift his gaze from her, and once again, she felt that dark awareness that this man could—under different circumstances—rock her world. The tiny bubbles in her lower belly reminded