MARCUS (Dragon Security Book 4) by Glenna Sinclair

an end by morning. I slipped out of bed and dressed, covering myself with a bathrobe that was heavy enough to keep me warm in the chill of the room. I shoved another piece of wood into the stove and brewed some coffee, holding a mug between my hands as I stood at the windows, staring out at the acres and acres of snow that spread out between us and the road.
    “Hey,” Marcus said, moving up behind me and kissing my throat. I leaned back into him for a minute, the memory of last night still fresh in my mind.
    “We should probably talk,” I said.
    I thought I’d feel tension come into him when I said that, but I didn’t. He just wrapped his arms around me and held me close for a long second. Then he pulled away, going into the kitchen to grab a cup of coffee before joining me at the counter. We sat side by side on the low stools, both staring into the depths of our coffee cups.
    He reached over after a time and tugged my robe open, exposing my injured thigh. He touched the stitches, running his fingertip over the ridges of them slowly.
    “I never meant for you to get hurt.”
    “Why would you do something like that?’
    He didn’t answer me; he just kept running his finger over the stitches that held my skin together. I touched his hand and pressed his palm to my thigh.
    “It’s complicated.”
    “What is?”
    “My relationship with Blake. Your relationship with Blake. It seems like he just attracts these odd situations.”
    “What did he do to you to make you want to hurt him?”
    “I didn’t want to hurt him, exactly. I just wanted him to know what it felt like to lose something he wanted.”
    I shook my head. “You’re talking in riddles.”
    “I was hired to protect you. Isn’t that a riddle all in itself?”
    I sat back a little so I could see his face clearer. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean I work for a security firm, and we were hired to protect you. But I was supposed to keep my distance because Blake didn’t want to stress you out during this very important time.”
    I shook my head, remembering the way Blake had checked my apartment the day he came to drop off the keys to the cabin.
    “From what?”
    “He thinks someone is trying to hurt you. He said that someone tried to run you over outside the lawyer’s office.”
    I snorted. “That was just a stupid accident. I never should have told him about it.”
    “Do you think someone’s after you?”
    “Besides you?”
    He looked a little shameful. “Besides me.”
    I shook my head. “Why would they be? No one knows about me, no one has reason to want me dead. And the only people who know about the surrogacy are Blake and Annie, their doctor and lawyer. That’s all.”
    “What about other aspects of your life? Someone from your past?”
    “I have no past.” I laughed when he shot me a funny look. “I grew up with my grandma. My mother’s dead, I don’t know who my father was—she probably didn’t, either. I have a small handful of friends. No enemies that I’m aware of. No crazy ex-boyfriends. Just…”
    “What?”
    I shrugged, a thought I didn’t like floating through my head. “There was this one guy, but…”
    Leon. He’d known about my grandma’s thrifty lifestyle, about the money she squirreled away for me before she died. He’d wanted me to invest in some crazy scheme of his and was pretty angry when I refused. That’s probably the closest I ever came to the whole crazy ex idea.
    “I don’t think anyone in my past would want to hurt me.”
    “Your mom? How did she die?”
    “Drug overdose. But that was when I was just an infant.”
    Marcus nodded, his attention turned back to his mug of coffee. I could almost see the wheels turning in his head.
    “Who hired you?”
    He looked up. “Blake.”
    “No, I mean who hired you to scare me away?”
    “No one. I did that on my own.”
    “Why?”
    He got up and walked around the counter, going to the stove to check the fire. I got up to follow, watching him move,