Close Protection

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He was hired to protect him. Not to break him open.

Nico Ashworth is a disaster in designer clothes. At twenty-two, he’s the heir to a $14 billion tech empire, a permanent fixture in the tabloids, and the single biggest headache his father’s security division has ever produced. He ditches his bodyguards for sport. He provokes everyone he meets. And the night he slips his detail at a Lower Manhattan nightclub, two men corner him in an alley who aren’t interested in his autograph.

Declan Shaw is six-four, two hundred forty pounds, and the most dangerous man in any room he enters. An ex-Special Forces operative turned head of security, he tracks Nico down, neutralizes the threat in under ten seconds, and throws a kicking, screaming billionaire heir over his shoulder like a piece of luggage.

Then he fires the entire security team and locks them both in the penthouse.

The rules are simple: don’t leave without permission. Don’t touch without permission. And don’t push unless you’re ready for what happens when he pushes back.

Nico has spent his whole life pushing. Every wall crumbles. Every authority figure gives way. Every boundary breaks — until Declan. Because Declan Shaw doesn’t crumble, doesn’t give way, and doesn’t break. He holds the line with a discipline that borders on inhuman and a patience that borders on cruel, and the thing that’s building between them — the tension, the heat, the devastating pull of a man who sees straight through every performance — is the most dangerous thing in the penthouse.

What starts as a lockdown becomes a power exchange. What starts as control becomes worship. And what starts as a bodyguard’s iron discipline becomes something neither of them can classify under any contract — because the bratty billionaire heir has never been held like this, and the man holding him has never wanted to hold on.

Close Protection is a 91,000-word high-heat MM romance with a grumpy ex-military bodyguard, a bratty billionaire who just needs someone to hold the line, four days of edging that should be classified as a war crime, a gala with an earpiece, a cabin in the mountains, scrambled eggs as a love language, and a guaranteed HEA. Dual first-person POV. No breakup. No cheating. Just a wall and the person who finally made it worth staying.