Free DONOVAN: A Standalone Romance (Gray Wolf Security) by Glenna Sinclair

phone and call one of them. What did I need him for?
    So why did I feel like he’d just crushed my heart under his heel?
    ***
    I don’t know when I fell asleep. I thought I was never going to sleep. I watched a dozen episodes of Friends on Netflix, so many that my brain was beginning to feel like mush. It was sometime after I switched to cable and the lifetime movie of the week reruns that I finally drifted off, I guess. But I felt like it had only been a few seconds when I felt him shake my shoulder.
    “Don—”
    “Shh,” he said, pressing two fingers to my lips.
    He was shirtless, but he had on a pair of jeans and sneakers. And a gun. He had a gun in his hand.
    He tugged my arm and pulled me out of bed, his arm wrapped around my waist as he led me back down the hall to the living room. We were nearly to the garage and the SUV when I realized he was taking me out of the house wearing nothing but a shirt.
    “Donovan, I don’t have any clothes on.”
    He didn’t respond. He simply pushed me out the garage door and set me unceremoniously in the passenger seat of the SUV. Then he came around and climbed behind the wheel, pulling out of the garage so quickly that he probably left tire marks on the cement floor.
    “Where are we going?”
    “There’s a safe house about a mile from here.”
    “Safe house?”
    “There’ll be clothes there.”
    He didn’t say anything else. And I was frightened enough not to ask anything else.
    After a short drive, we pulled into the garage attached to a nondescript house in the middle of a street that sported dozens of nondescript houses. Donovan came around the side of the SUV and helped me out, keeping his arm around my waist as he led the way inside.
    “We’re here,” he said. But it was pretty obvious he wasn’t talking to me.
    The house was about the same size as mine. The kitchen was larger, big enough to sport a small table in the back corner. It was open to the living room, which appeared to be empty from where we were. And there was a small hallway that led to the back of the house, presumably where the bedrooms were.
    Donovan led the way to the living room and directed me to a couch.
    “What’s going on?”
    “One of the motion detectors went off outside your house.”
    “Someone was there?” I asked, starting to stand, but then realizing I really had nowhere to go. I sat back down, searching his face, looking for the fear that would send me into a panic. But he was calm, his eyes gentle as he returned my stare.
    “David has a crew checking it out.”
    “Shouldn’t he call the police?”
    “If they find any evidence that someone was there. He didn’t pick anything up on camera, so it could have been a false alarm.”
    “But you were concerned enough to drag me out of bed and bring me here.”
    “You can never be too cautious in these circumstances.”
    I sat forward and buried my face in my hands. I was fighting back the fear, but this…it seemed to make this whole thing seem a little more real. Before, it was just my dad being overcautious. But now?
    “You should go change,” he said. “There’s women’s clothing in the bedroom at the back.”
    I dragged my fingers through my hair and straightened up. “I’d rather just sit here for a minute.”
    “We’re going to have company very soon. You should probably go change.”
    I stood. “Come with me.”
    His eyes moved slowly over me. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
    “I don’t want to be alone. What if someone was outside my house? What if they saw us leave, if they followed us?”
    “No one followed us.”
    “You can’t know that for sure.”
    He hesitated, but then he offered me a hand. I took it and let him lead me down the hallway. There were four doors that opened off of the hallway. He stopped at the last and pushed it open, flipping on the light as he stepped inside. It was a large room, made larger by the fact that there were no furnishings. But the closet door was open and