Free To Kiss a King by Maureen Child

beast.
     
    Alex laughed in delight and Garrett couldn’t help grinning in response. In a few minutes, he was out of the harbor and headed for open water.
     
    “I love this boat,” she shouted over the engine noise. “It’s like the ones in that Indiana Jones movie!”
     
    “I love that you know that!” He grinned and gunned the engine harder, bringing the bow up to slap at the water as they careened across the surface.
     
    When they were far enough out that Garrett was convinced that Alex was perfectly safe, he eased back on the throttle. The roar of the engine became a vibrating purr as the sleek powerboat shifted from a wild run into a lazy prowl.
     
    Garrett slanted a look at her. “So, action movie fan are you?”
     
    “Oh, yes.” She turned her face up to the sun, closed her eyes and smiled. “It’s having three brothers, I think. They had no time for comedies or romance, so movie night at our house meant explosions and gunfire.”
     
    “Sounds like my house,” he said, remembering the many nights he and his brothers had spent reveling in movie violence. Garrett and Griffin especially had enjoyed the cops and robbers movies. The good guys tracking down the bad guys and saving the day in the end. Maybe that was why he and his twin had both ended up in the security business.
     
    “You have brothers?”
     
    “Four—one of them is my twin.”
     
    “A twin! I always thought it would be wonderful to be a twin. Was it?”
     
    “Wonderful?” He shook his head. “Never really thought about it, I guess. But yeah, I suppose so. Especially when we were kids. There was always someone there to listen. To play with and, later, to raise hell with.”
     
    Being a twin was such a part of who and what he was that he’d never really considered what it must look like from the outside. Griffin and he had done so much together, always right there, covering each other’s backs that Garrett couldn’t imagine not being a twin.
     
    “Did you? Raise a lot of hell?”
     
    “Our share,” he mused, lost briefly in memories of parties, football games and women. “When we were kids, being identical was just fun. Swapping classes, tricking teachers. As we got older, the fun got a little more…creative.”
     
    “Identical?” She took a long look at him. “You’re exactly alike?”
     
    He shook his head and gave her a half smile. “Nah. I’m the good-looking one.”
     
    She laughed as he’d hoped she would.
     
    “Must have been nice,” she said, “raising a little hell once in a while. Having someone to have fun with.”
     
    “No hell-raising in your house?” he asked, though he couldn’t imagine her and her brothers throwing any wild parties when the king and queen were out of town.
     
    “Not that you’d notice,” she said simply, then changed the subject. “Decker seemed very nice.” She ran her fingertips across the small brass plaque on the gleaming teak dashboard. King’s Kustom Krafts.
     
    “Decker King is his name?”
     
    “Yeah.” He hadn’t even considered that she would learn Decker’s last name. And what kind of thing was that for a man like him to admit? Hell, he made his living by always thinking three steps ahead. By knowing what he was going to do long before he actually did it. By being able to guess at what might happen so that his clients were always safe. But around Alex, his brain wasn’t really functioning. Nope, it was a completely different part of his body that was in charge now.
     
    And it was damned humbling to admit he couldn’t seem to get his blood flowing in the direction of his mind.
     
    “Yeah. Decker’s okay.”
     
    “He builds lovely boats.”
     
    “He really does,” Garrett said, relaxing again when she didn’t comment on Decker’s last name. “So, you’ve heard about my family, tell me about these brothers of yours.”
     
    She looked at him and he read the wary suspicion in her eyes. “Why?”
     
    “Curiosity.” He shrugged and