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I was zipping my cello case in the empty rehearsal hall when I heard Priya's laugh in the corridor. The shameless one. The one she reserves for targets she has no intention of missing. I stayed where I was, one hand on the zipper, and I listened. "If you ever get a night off from babysitting duty," Priya was saying, "Toni's place does this thing on Fridays. Ladies' night. Though I guess every night is ladies' night there." "You've been to Toni's?" Regan's voice. Not flirtation. But the door to it. Propped open one inch. The same door she slammed in my face twelve hours ago in a queer bar bathroom while I was still wiping my own lipstick off the back of her wrist. "Twice," Priya said. "I got a bartender's number once. She never called, but the rejection built character." A pause. "You could make it up to me. Buy me a drink." "My entire gender?" "Women who look like you. Is that too direct? I've been told I'm too direct." "No," Regan said. "Direct is fine." Direct is fine. Two weeks of jaw clenches and monosyllables and being called kid and princess and the job, and Priya gets direct is fine. Something hot and ugly crawled up the back of my throat. And I knew right then exactly what I was going to do. Chapter 1 Caroline's POV Twenty-one feels exactly like twenty, which felt exactly like nineteen, which felt exactly like every year before it where I sat at a table surrounded by people who loved me and tried to figure out why I still felt like I was performing the role of Caroline Davenport instead of being her. The restaurant my father booked doesn't list prices on the menu, which has never stopped me from mentally calculating them anyway. Ivory tablecloths, candlelight in gilded holders, a string quartet playing something so tasteful it's practically beige. My father's taste. My father's money. My father's guilt — repackaged as a reservation for twelve and a card that reads 'Happy Birthday, sweetheart. Make it a good one. — R.D.' Not "love, Dad." Not even his full name. Just initials, like he's signing off on a memo. "She's staring at you again," Priya says, tilting her champagne flute toward the far wall. Regan Halstead stands near the emergency exit with her back against the wall, arms crossed, scanning the room with a focus that makes everyone else in the restaurant look like they're sleepwalking. Two weeks she's been assigned to me, and in those two weeks I've learned exactly three things about her: she's former military, she drinks her coffee black, and she looks at my father's house like she wants to set it on fire. "She's not staring at me," I say. "She's doing her job." "Her job is to watch your body." Priya grins. "And she is definitely watching your body." "She works for my actual daddy, Priya. That's not a selling point." "Then I'll be respectful." Priya pauses. "Respectfully obsessed." "She's tall, she's got that hot scar through her eyebrow, and she could definitely bench-press both of us," Priya adds. "I want to know everything." I open my mouth to tell Priya that two months ago, a man in a ski mask yanked me by the hair into an unmarked van outside my father's fundraiser and the only reason I'm sitting here tonight is because my previous bodyguard, Dave, threw himself between me and the door and took a knife to the shoulder for it. My father fired him for "poor performance" from the hospital bed and hired Regan. But before I can get any of that out, Gemma Whitfield, our one and only gossip girl, materializes behind my chair and grabs my shoulders. "Cake is incoming and Nate has been pacing by the bar for ten minutes trying to figure out how to give you your present, so everyone act surprised." The cake arrives — three tiers, vanilla buttercream, sparklers fizzing — and behind it comes Nate Pearson, tall and sandy-haired and smiling. He sets a small velvet box on the table, leans down, and kisses me. His lips are warm. His hand cups my jaw. I tell myself to stay in it, to lean in, to notice how he smells, to let the warmth of his mouth be enough, because it has to be. I kiss him back because that's what girlfriends do, even almost-girlfriends, even whatever I am to Nate after three weeks of dinners and hand-holding and absolutely zero desire to take any of it further. He pulls back and searches my face. I give him a smile, wide enough to be convincing, warm enough to buy me another week of not having to explain. I've dated four perfectly fine boyfriends, and I felt more putting on chapstick than I ever felt kissing any of them. At twenty-one, I'm still a virgin, which is how I know something is fundamentally wrong with me. I blow out the candles while my friends sing off-key and sparklers hiss into the frosting. I close my eyes and make a wish I will never say out loud because it sounds desperate even inside my own head. I want to want someone. That's the whole pathetic wish. I want to lose my virginity to a person who makes my hands shake. The bar is literally underground. "Twenty-one!" Gemma clinks her glass against mine, already two champagnes ahead of the rest of us. She leans into the center of the table with a grin. "And on behalf of everyone at this table, we all wish that someone finally pops your cherry this year." The table erupts. Priya chokes on her drink and Nate turns the color of the roses in the centerpiece. "Gemma, what the hell," I manage, but she's already high-fiving someone across the table. "Relax, it's not like I said anything everyone at this table doesn't already discuss behind your back." Heat crawls up my neck and settles across my cheekbones. My eyes track to the exit. Regan hasn't moved. Arms still crossed, jaw still set. But her gaze is on me. Those blue eyes hold mine across the length of the restaurant, steady and unreadable, and I feel my pulse trip over itself. The eye contact lasts one beat longer than professional. Two beats. Three. She heard. She definitely heard. Then Regan looks away, back to the room, back to the exits, and I'm left sitting in the aftermath of a look I can't interpret. My eyes trace the tendons in Regan's forearms where her sleeves are pushed back, the way her weight shifts to the balls of her feet like she's ready to move before anyone else in this room processes the need to. There's a stillness to her that's the opposite of calm. It's everything held at bay, muscles locked, breath controlled, the composure that costs something to maintain every single second. I've watched her stand outside my bedroom door for six hours without sitting down. I've heard her pace the hallway at 3 a.m. when the rest of the house is dead silent. "Careful, C." Gemma's voice cuts through. She's followed my gaze across the room, and when I turn back, her eyebrows are raised and her smirk has sharpened. She lifts her champagne. "Stare any longer and she might think you're into her." "I wasn't staring," I say, but even I can hear how thin it sounds. "Sure you weren't." Gemma pats my hand. "And I wasn't just watching you kiss your boyfriend like you were waiting for a bus." I reach for my glass and drink, because if I open my mouth right now, I don't know what truth might fall out.Read Guarding Caroline now 🔥