His to Protect

Declan O'Rourke hits the office door with his shoulder because his hands are full of coffee and regret. Three whiskeys the night before, four maybe, after the nightmare about sand and heat and the wrong kind of quiet. He woke at three in the morning with his sheets soaked and his hand reaching for a rifle that wasn't there. His boss slides a folder across the desk. Jasper Finch, wildlife photographer, contracted to document the last pair of marbled murrelets on Blackthorn Island before the property changes hands. He has had a stalker for six months. The Port Townsend police are useless. Jasper does not want a bodyguard. He wants somebody to tell Sloane Maddox he is not interested in her comprehensive security package. Then his phone buzzes face-down on the table, and the image on the screen is Jasper's own back, shot from above, walking toward the studio door Declan has just walked through. *That's not a nuisance. That's a rehearsal.* Jasper's sister Maren comes through the studio door with her photographer's vest flapping: the darkroom has been broken into. The negatives are gone, the entire roll, the only images of the murrelet nest site, and a handwritten note has been pinned to the developing tank. The list of people with access to that studio is short, and the last name on it is the one Jasper does not offer first. Vance. His half-brother, who turned up at their father's funeral saying the island should have been his, and has been demanding the deed by letter and email ever since. What neither of them sees coming is that Vance did not get this far alone. He reached out to Sloane, and Sloane knows everyone who wants something on that island. She is also the person who assigned this case to Declan, directly, and told the office to prioritise it. Declan has been guarding other people since the ambush he did not call and did not fire a shot in, the one where Leo Vasquez lost a leg dragging him out of the kill zone. He has decided he is not allowed to want anything. Jasper keeps handing it to him anyway. *I can't love someone and watch them die.* *You're not protecting him. You're abandoning him.* A male-male romantic suspense set around Port Townsend and the Salish Sea, with a bodyguard who does not trust his own hands, a photographer whose inheritance is the motive, a security firm running the danger it was hired to stop, and a small brass key that everybody wants. Closed-door.