Didn’t know what to make of this intense stranger who was in the place of the man she had called her best friend for so many years.

Except, was he a stranger? Or was this just the guardian unleashed? What happened to the man when he was pushed? And she’d pushed him. On purpose. Maybe this was her consequence. That he was here now. The warrior that she had always known existed beneath that protective exterior.

He had never even tried to rearrange the boundaries between them before. But he had always been capable of it, and she saw that now.

That everything he had ever done all these years had been him being controlling. Had been him protecting her. And suddenly, he wasn’t protecting her from him.

Suddenly, he was everything that she had sensed he might be in all of its terrifying glory.

The kind of man that she had avoided all this time. She had favored those concave chests and smooth faces he had accused her of liking earlier.

Men who didn’t just assume that she might want a certain kind of kiss, but who couldn’t seem to figure out which one she did want even when she told them outright.

Almost as if Ryder knew something that she didn’t.

None of this is about that.

She had to wonder if her body was doing some kind of weird female hormone thing.

And maybe that was true. Maybe it was more of a weird hormone thing. Suddenly, her body had identified that he would make a spectacular protector for a baby.

And why not? He had been the protector for her for all this time; of course he would make a great father.

Biologically.

But he was demanding all of these other things, and she didn’t know how you were supposed to compromise with a brick wall.

They couldn’t bend; you could only break them down.

And she had a feeling that she could grab hold of this one white-knuckled and still not come out the winner. Only come away with bleeding hands and destroyed fingernails, and he would remain as he had always been.

She waited. She waited for him to do something to make her comfortable. Waited for him to do something to defuse all of this between them. Because surely at some point he would crack a smile and revert back to being her friend.

Wind back the clock so that he was the man she had known for the past seventeen years, and not the stranger who had pulled her into his arms and scalded her with his heat. But he didn’t. Instead, all of that intensity only seemed to grow as he moved closer. And she didn’t have the heart to back away.

“Don’t do it,” he said, his voice rough. “I couldn’t stand it.”

She tried to breathe around the tightness in her chest. “You couldn’t stand it?”

“No. Don’t let another man touch you. Not after that.”

“It was just a kiss.”