Defended & Desired by Kristi Avalon

if you agree upfront that I’m paying.”
    She nodded, glancing at him with a hint of shyness he’d never seen before. “You’re quite the gentleman, aren’t you?”
    “That’s the way I was raised.” He thought fondly of his dad and the cracks to the back of his head when Trey missed the opportunity to put a lady first. “My father would roll over in his grave if I ever forgot to open a door for a woman.”
    Intrigue glowed in her eyes. “Can I ask you a question?”
    “Sure. Anything.”
    “What made you leave your bounty hunter business in Las Vegas to come here and buy Logan’s bodyguard company?”
    Caught off guard, he ran a hand through his hair. She was the first person to ask that since he’d arrived in Denver. “To be honest—necessity.”
    She tilted her head. “How so?”
    He liked that she wanted to know more about him, that maybe it meant her attraction to him went beyond the physical.
    Thinking about how to phrase it, he slid his palm down his thigh, smoothing the center crease of his suit pants. “Things were getting dark.” He stopped and realized how lame that sounded. He tried again. “You have to understand, we grew up in the environment. Adam and Liam’s dad was my father’s brother. At twenty and twenty-two, they went from blue-collar mechanics to owning their own business. They had young wives and small mouths to feed, and they wanted a better life for us than what they had growing up.”
    “I respect that a lot,” Devon said, running her finger along the rim of her wineglass. “My single mom worked in a sewing factory, then came home and started her second job as a seamstress on the side for extra money. It isn’t easy to raise a child on minimum wage, and somehow my mom managed to save enough for me to go to college for two years and supplement my ROTC financial aid.” With the hint of a smile, she held up her hand. “Before you ask, I can’t sew to save my life.”
    He shrugged. “Neither can I.”
    She threw her head back and laughed. “Well, I won’t hold it against you. Okay, go on. You grew up in that world…”
    “Starting their own business was a huge leap for them. We all walked around with that badge of honor.”
    “I take it you inherited the family business.”
    He nodded. “Dad gave me my first job the day I got my driver’s license. I became a repo man.”
    Devon swallowed the sip of wine she’d taken. “Wait. You repossessed somebody’s car at sixteen?”
    “That’s not the best part.” He grinned at the memory. “Keep in mind my dad dropped me off at the site then waited for me down the street. So I sneaked onto the property of the guy who’d defaulted on his payments. He had one of those wide-open yards in the desert littered with half-stripped cars on cinderblocks, engines and mufflers and spare parts scattered everywhere. I spent an hour moving scrap out of the way so I could make a clean break with his car.”
    Her eyes gleamed. “You were out there in the desert at night? Did you even have a flashlight?”
    “Hell, no. I wasn’t about to give myself away. People go crazy when you try to take something they think belongs to them. Anyway, I finally tiptoed up to the car, picked the lock—you could do that back then—and managed to hotwire the engine. When the beater roared to life, this guy bursts out his front door wearing boots and a robe and ran toward me. I slammed the car in reverse and punched the gas. Then he opened fire.”
    Her hand flew to her mouth. “He shot at you?”
    “Pumped about six shells into the trunk before I peeled out onto the highway. My dad could barely keep up with me on the drive home.”
    “Were you scared?”
    “Shitless.” He chuckled. “But when we dropped the car off to the authorities the next day, he slapped me on the back, told me I’d done a great job and he was proud. And that my second repo was waiting for me that night.”
    “That’s crazy. Did the family business start out doing