a hell of an endorsement. Jepsen might look like a sports model but Linc trusted him with his son so that meant he had to have some skills.
Lachlyn listened as Linc and his friend confirmed arrangements for dropping Shaw off and within thirty seconds, the gorgeous man and the gregarious boy were gone and she was alone with Linc.
She wanted to know who Reame was and how he fit into Linc’s life. So, strangely for her, she asked.
“I’ve known him all my life. We lived in the same neighborhood as young kids,” Linc replied. “My mom got the job as Connor’s housekeeper and we moved into this house but, despite living totally different lives on opposite sides of the city, Reame and I remained friends.”
She shouldn’t ask anything more, but no man had ever affected her the way Reame had and, well, she was curious. “Does he work for you, at Ballantyne International?”
“God, no, we’d kill each other.” Linc shook his head, seemingly at ease with her questions. “Reame owns a security consulting company. He was in the military, in one of those hush-hush units that did hush-hush things. He has a hell of a military record, including some hefty commendations for bravery. For a couple of years, I didn’t see or hear from him for months at a time. That’s the life these Special Forces guys lived. Then...” Linc hesitated and Lachlyn gave him a sharp look. He wasn’t going to stop talking now, was he?
“Then?” Lachlyn prompted, accompanying the question with a mental slap.
“He had a crisis in his family and he needed to come home. His mom and sisters needed him. He left the military and started work as Connor’s bodyguard. He’s a natural entrepreneur, so after picking up more clients, he started employing his military friends as bodyguards and his security business was born. Add in cheating spouse investigations and cyber security for corporations, and Jepsen & Associates is one of the biggest security companies in the city,” Linc said, sounding proud.
Beauty, brawn and brains. It was a good thing that she’d never see him again; the man was trouble.
Big, beautiful trouble.
* * *
Walking away from The Den, Reame slowed his steps so that Shaw didn’t have to jog to keep up with him. “So, want to tell me why you sent me an SOS message? I thought we agreed that you can only use that message for emergencies.”
Reame hadn’t been worried when he received the “help me” picture-message sent from Tate’s phone two hours earlier since he’d been on a call with Linc at the time and knew that everything was fine at The Den.
“It was an emergency. Spike wanted you to take me to the batting cages.”
Yeah, right. “An emergency is when someone is hurt, or there’s a fire or there’s blood. Not a message about baseball from a bearded dragon, Shaw,” Reame told his godson. “Does Tate know that you used her phone?”
Tate was Linc’s fiancée and the reason his best mate now walked around with a dopey, having-great-sex look on his face. Actually, all the Ballantyne men had lucked out with their women. It was strange to see his childhood friends settled down. It wasn’t that long ago that they were all running around Manhattan, enjoying their status as the island’s most eligible bachelors. But recently, each of them had fallen and fallen hard. Reame, a die-hard bachelor and commitment-phobe, had laughed his ass off.
He liked Piper, Cady and Tate and respected his friends’ choices. But settling down wasn’t something he was interested in. The thought of placing himself in that situation caused his throat to close and his stomach to cramp.
Marriage, the emotional equivalent of antifreeze...
Pulling his attention back to Shaw, Reame realized that he had yet to answer his question. “Well?”
“Kind of.”
That meant no. Before Reame could chastise him, Shaw turned those big blue eyes on him. “It was a ’mergency, Uncle Ree. I would’ve had to go to Auntie Piper’s house ’cause dad wanted to talk to that lady. And I’d have to play with the babies,” Shaw complained. “Since you were only working, I thought we could hang out.”
Only working... If that’s what he could call running a multimillion-dollar international security business. “I needed you to save me from playing with the babies,” Shaw stated dramatically.
Master manipulator, Reame thought, but, damn, he was cute. Reame sighed and shook his head. He’d survived brutal training, fought in intense battles both in war and in the boardroom, but he was putty in Shaw’s hands. The reality was that if Shaw—or any of the Ballantynes—called he’d drop everything. They were family. It was what they did.
“That lady was pretty,” Shaw said, cleverly changing the subject.
Pretty? No. She was heart-stoppingly, spine-tinglingly beautiful and he hadn’t had such a primitive reaction to a woman in, well, years. Possibly not ever.
Reame looked down into the mischievous face of his godson and lifted his eyebrows. “Aren’t you a little young to be noticing pretty girls?” he asked.
Shaw wrinkled his nose, bunching his freckles together. God, he loved this kid. “She’s my Grandpa Connor’s real daughter. But she wasn’t ’dopted by him, like Dad was.”
“So I heard, bud.”
When the Ballantynes first heard of Lachlyn’s possible connection to their family—thanks to her brother, Tyce Latimore—Reame had immediately ordered his best investigator to dig into her life. On paper, she seemed like nothing special. She lived alone, worked at the New York Public Library, seemed to keep to herself. Nothing about her raised any flags but looking at the photo in the file, his stomach had flipped. Back then, for some reason, and although he’d yet to meet her, she’d bothered him. Despite not knowing anything about her except that she was Connor’s daughter, she’d made him feel queasy, unsettled.
The same instinct that had saved his ass on many hot situations as a Special Forces operative had screamed that Lachlyn Latimore would have some impact on his life.
Meeting her hadn’t done anything to quiet the raging bats-on-speed in his stomach, Reame thought, keeping a light hand on Shaw’s shoulder as they walked to a baseball center a few blocks away from The Den. The photos in Lachlyn’s file hadn’t done her justice. Her eyes and face were Connor’s but her eyes were a deeper blue, almost violet, her face finer, her cheekbones more pronounced, and her mouth looked like it was made to be kissed. She was tiny, she barely reached his shoulder, but curvy and strung tighter than a steel guitar.
It had taken every ounce of his willpower to wrench his eyes off her exquisite face in order to catch Shaw’s midair flight. Reame shuddered, thinking that if he’d taken a second longer to react, Shaw would have hit the deck at lightning speed. The kid really had to stop thinking he was a superhero. Or Reame had to keep his concentration around pretty women.
Not something he generally had a problem with.
Women liked him and he liked women, when he had time for them. He usually didn’t; running and growing a business took all his energy and what little free time he did have that wasn’t spent at work or with his friends—particularly the Ballantynes—was taken up by his demanding sisters and slightly neurotic mother.
But his me-time
