Mr Right Next Door

“Hey, I could still pull out the handcuffs,” he said.

“Do it and you won’t get a word from me about my trip or the guy I met there,” she threatened.

That got his attention. “There’s a guy?”

She nodded, her grin back full force as she looked up at him.

“Jax…” she sighed, knowing her voice had taken on a silly, dreamy quality and simply unable to help it. “I think… No, I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure that I’m in love!”

He looked completely taken aback for a moment, stopped dead in his tracks, the line of airline passengers behind them coming to a grumbling halt, some cursing softly as they made their way around her and him, all in a hurry to get somewhere.

“Okay, just…tell me he’s not one of the pirates?” he asked with a look that said he couldn’t handle that right now.

“No!”

“’Cause that could definitely give me gray hairs. That would be cause for handcuffs and sirens and maybe a jail cell—and you know I could arrange it—until you came to your senses.”

“He is not a pirate! He’s the guy who saved me from the pirates.” She beamed just thinking about it.

“Oh,” her brother said, finally giving in to the grumbling of the crowd now flowing around them and starting to walk again. “A cop?”

“No.”

“Rent-a-cop?” His disdainful label of anyone who worked security but wasn’t a real cop.

“No,” Kim said.

“Soldier?” he tried.

“No. Nothing like that. He was just there and… He was wonderful. He made sure I was completely safe and he even helped fight off the attack. It was amazing, really. You’re going to love him.”

“So that means I get to meet him, right? Preferably sooner than later?”

“Of course. He’s meeting me here in a few days, as soon as he gets back home—”

“Which is where?”

“California—”

“California? I don’t like him,” her brother insisted.

“You haven’t even met him. You can’t dislike him just because he’s from California.”

“Sure I can.”

They made it into the wide hallway connecting the main terminal to Baggage Claim, which was packed as usual, and headed toward the down escalator. Kim leaned back against her brother as they rode down.

“Jax? Come on. Don’t be like that.” She’d known from the start that he’d hate the idea of anyone taking her as far away from the family as California. Not that she wasn’t a bit apprehensive about that part herself.

Her family meant a lot to her, her brother and his wife, two older sisters and their husbands, one absolutely adorable two-year-old niece, a baby nephew, the teenager her oldest sister and husband had adopted and two more teens they were foster-parenting at the moment.

Their family life was rich, full and happy, more so than she’d ever thought it could be after losing their beloved mother to cancer four years ago and losing their father, also a cop, when Kim was just two years old.

How could she ever walk away from them?

“That’s it. I don’t like him. You’ll just have to fall for a local guy,” her brother said, looking more worried than he had been about the ridiculous pirates who’d tried to board her ship and rob them.

“Serves you right,” she claimed. “All those years of you making it so difficult for me to date locally… You should have known there’d be consequences one day.”

Jax frowned at that. He was overprotective to a fault at times, but he thought, when he wasn’t really annoying her, she could understand why. It couldn’t have been easy, taking over as surrogate father to three little girls when he’d been all of eleven years old when their father died.

Still, Kim was twenty-four years old now, something he couldn’t quite grasp in moments like this. It was time for him to back off.

“Just don’t be a jerk to him when he shows up, all right?” Kim asked as they found the luggage carousel for her flight, still empty at the moment, and stood there to wait.

“I won’t be a jerk—”

“And don’t try to scare him.”

“If he’s tough enough to save you from pirates, he should for damned sure be able to handle one older brother with a gun,” Jax said.

“No threatening him. And no dragging him off into the woods and beating him up, like you did with Joe.” Her middle sister, Kathie’s, husband. They’d had a rocky start, especially with her brother.

“I never beat him up in the woods,” Jax insisted.

“Just threatened him there?”

“Yeah. I just threatened him there.”

“And beat him up at the bank,” Kim quipped.

Jax gave her an exasperated look. “We’ve all moved on from there. You should, too.”

“I just don’t want anything to go wrong when he shows up.”

Because she was fairly certain that he was it.

The one.

The guy she’d been waiting her whole life to find.

It had been a little crazy with him on the ship after the attack. The whole thing had been a classic whirlwind romance, granted, but still…

Beside her, her brother gave a heavy sigh.

Kim linked her arm with his. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly fall in love in a week?”

“No, I was going to let Kate do that.”