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about her posture screamed distress.
    How he could tell he had no idea, since her back was to him and he couldn’t see anything or anyone else inside the store’s shadowed recesses. All he knew was he had to get to her. Now.
    Zeke swerved across the street, thankful there were no cars to get in his way, and ran up to the store. He yanked open the door and took two steps inside, cataloguing details as he moved.
    Three people, a big bear of an older man with bed head and arms the size of anchors, an older woman impeccably dressed, and Sunshine, tension in the arch of her neck and the set of her shoulders, stood inside the store. She turned toward the entrance, her mouth curved in a totally fake smile.
    “Welcome to....” she trailed off. Scents of the Sea.
    “Are you okay?” he demanded. Zeke had enough training to realize that just because the two older people looked harmless didn’t mean they were, especially since the woman had her hand on Sunshine’s upper arm. And the man was awfully close to both of them. Coercion could be accomplished through many methods.
    Sunshine shot a furtive glance at the woman, then returned her gaze to Zeke, eyebrows raised, alarm on her face, suspicion in her voice. “What are you doing here?”
    “Do you need help?” He wanted clarification that she was fine and not being pressured or intimidated in any way. His body primed, muscles hardened, he readied for violence. He would protect her, he would defend her. “Are you being harassed?”
    “What?!”
    “Excuse me.” The older woman in the pale pink sweater stepped in front of Sunshine, placing her out of Zeke’s reach. As she stared at him hard, Zeke took in other details, the woman’s dirty blonde hair cut in a short pageboy, her slender build, and the familiar shape of her eyes. “And who are you?”
    Great. If he wasn’t mistaken he’d just accused Sunshine Smith’s mother of trying to harm her. Way to stay in the background, way to be a shadow, a ghost, Hawthorne.
    He ran his hands through the curls of his hair, pulled them out in front of his face and then let them spring back into place.
    “It’s fine.” Sunshine’s hands fluttered, then she placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “I’ll help him.”
    Zeke nodded to the older people who both still stared at him suspiciously.
    Sunshine floated around her mother, a long slate blue skirt with some sort of lace nearly brushed the ground and a paler blue sweater hung down almost over her hips and fell off one bare shoulder, revealing her delicate collarbone and the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
    As she leaned closer to him, the heat from her body and her perfume surrounded him. The scents of the ocean, the beach, the sand, the eucalyptus, and the cool foggy air flooded his body, awakening his hormones, and he reacted to her nearness. A flush of desire spiraled from his head to his groin, hitting his organs, brain, lungs, heart, sex in rapid succession as he pictured them together like they had been last night. Him between her thighs. Except this time they were naked.
    “What are you doing here?” she whispered with an unmistakable bite in her tone.
    So much for his hormones. He’d been fantasizing about taking her and she was taking him to task. Awkward.
    He took a moment to compose his thoughts, compose his answer. Because he’d messed up a minute ago by rushing in, by assuming that he would come in and defend her like the hero in the old black and white movies he’d watched with his Grandpop. He needed to formulate an appropriate answer for the level of intimacy they had right now—which was zero.
    Fuck it. There was no appropriate answer.
    “I thought you were in trouble.”
    “Trouble,” she said flatly. She looked very aware of the fact that her mother and the guy were still in the store near the back. And she stepped in closer to him. Her shoulder was nearly brushing the exposed skin of his bicep. “Why would you care?”
    Her look said she