The Watcher

Wren Ashby has spent three years rebuilding a life out of the wreckage of the one someone tried to take from her. New name. New town. New silence where the screaming used to be. She doesn't know that the reason she made it out — the reason a masked man never finished what he started in that parking garage — is the same reason a stranger has been three streets behind her, every single day, ever since.

Rourke Calloway isn't a stranger. Not to himself. He knows the sound of her key in her door at 11:47 p.m. He knows she hums when she's scared and goes silent when she's furious. He knows, because he's the off-book operator who was supposed to walk away clean after the job that put her in danger in the first place — and instead walked straight into an addiction he's never once tried to break. Watching her is the only thing that's kept the war out of his head for five years.

Then the man who hired her attacker resurfaces — closer, colder, done waiting — and Wren runs the only direction she has left: into a town she's never been to, renting the only house left standing at the end of a dead-end road. Rourke's road. Rourke's town. Rourke's rules now.

He tells himself it's protection. It is. It's also five years of restraint finally running out, in a house with one bed, one exit, and a man who has already decided he is not letting this woman walk out of his life a second time — not to a killer, and maybe not at all.

As the threat closes in from both sides of Wren's past, she has to decide whether the man keeping her alive is her rescue or just a different kind of captivity — and Rourke has to decide how far he's willing to go, and how much blood he's willing to spend, to make sure the answer is never tested again.

Tropes: Possessive Hero | Secret Protector / Years of Surveillance | Forced Proximity, One Bed | Small Town Safehouse | Morally Grey Hero | HEA, Villain Neutralized