Safehouse

One note on her mirror. One mountain in a snowstorm. One man who has never broken his only rule.

Simone Laurent is thirty-one, a soul singer with a voice that sells out ballrooms and a habit of arguing with every instruction she's ever been given. Tonight she walked off a stage in Denver in a sapphire-blue satin gown cut far lower than her manager liked, long sleek black hair down her back, gold hoops at her ears, all deep brown skin and generous curves, and found a stranger's message waiting in her dressing room. Ten minutes later she was in the back of a black SUV. Two and a half hours later she's in a stone-and-timber chalet high above the snowline, with the road gone, the fire lit, and the one person she has spent fourteen months pretending not to want.

Bastian Kerr has guarded her for fourteen months. Thirty-eight, six foot four, short ash-blond hair, a short dark-blond beard, grey-blue eyes that notice everything, and a body built like a locked door. He knows how she takes her coffee, which ankle she favors, and what she hums in elevators when she thinks nobody's listening. He has stood two feet behind her in a hundred dresses and never once let himself look.

Now his shirt is soaked through from the woodpile and drying by the fire, the moon is coming out over the peaks, and there is nobody on this mountain but the two of them.

He has one rule. She has one night to make him break it. And when he finally does, he is going to do it the way he does everything: carefully, completely, and entirely his way.