But she didn’t have a bad guy. She had good guys. Dozens of them. She had people like Paulette and Hilda, Lila and Dawn, her parents, even, to some extent, Oscar. Each and every one of them would put their life on the line to keep her safe, and they had no qualms about making sure everyone knew it.

What they couldn’t understand, however, was that Sophie didn’t want to be safe.

She wanted to be set alight.

“She’s right,” Harrison said, his voice quiet but determined. “It’s not a good idea to leave you here with me.”

Sophie whirled on him. The overwhelming solicitude from family and friends she could bear—she didn’t like it, but she could bear it.

But not from Harrison. Never Harrison. That was what made him so incredible. He didn’t look at her and see a hundred-and-ten-pound weakling who needed to be shielded from the world. He saw a strong, confident woman who had the power to seduce him. He saw someone to fear, to fight, and maybe even to fuck.

And, oh, how she wanted to be that strong, confident woman bringing him to his knees. She wanted it more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life.

“Don’t,” she said, her voice dangerous.

He didn’t flinch. “Go with your friends and family. We’ve done enough work here for one day.”

“So help me, if you take their side in this—”

“You’ll what, Sophie?” he asked. This time, his voice carried only kindness, his eyes touched with a smile. “Tell Oscar on me? Take my puppy away again?”

It was impossible not to answer that smile with one of her own. “Don’t think I won’t,” she warned. There were a dozen other things she longed to say—a dozen other things that needed to be addressed between them—but this was neither the time nor the place. And Harrison, for all his self-professed inability to understand people, knew it.

That’s because he does understand me.

“You and Bubbles should take a long weekend,” she eventually said. “Relax. Unwind. Have fun. We’ll pick up where we left off on Monday.”

Paulette’s harrumph signaled her displeasure with this plan, but Sophie wasn’t moved.

“I will be there,” she said, just in case he thought this was the last of the conversation. “And we will figure out what to do next about all this.”

To the bystanders in the room, all this could have easily meant Bubbles and the fire, the fact that Sophie was training a dog for a job that it appeared to have no qualifications to hold. To Harrison, however, her meaning was clear. She knew it the moment he caught her eye and nodded his consent.

“Sure thing, Soph,” he said. “We’ll take care of it first thing on Monday.”

Chapter 11