Hard Line

She didn't want a bodyguard. He didn't want a complication.

Investigative journalist Maren Cole is three days from publishing the biggest story of her career - an exposé of a defense contractor's $412 million fraud - when someone breaks into her apartment and leaves a voicemail threatening her family. Her editor pulls the story. A security firm sends Eli Voss.

Ex-Delta Force. Precise. Controlled. And entirely unimpressed by her insistence that she doesn't need protection.

Relocated to a safe house in rural Maryland, Maren and Eli are stuck together with limited internet, a single laptop, and the specific tension of two people who are very good at their jobs and very bad at maintaining professional distance.

He makes eggs in the morning. She works past midnight. He checks the perimeter. She pushes every boundary he sets. And somewhere between the source meetings and the storm and the story she reads him at the kitchen table, the hard line between protector and client starts to blur.

Hard Line is a steamy bodyguard romance about a journalist who refuses to be silenced, a man who builds things that last, and the specific danger of falling for someone you're supposed to keep alive.