Guarding Caroline by itsvlada
Guarding Caroline
Description
Caroline Davenport is twenty-one, a virgin, and beginning to suspect the reason has nothing to do with the boys she keeps dating. Her new bodyguard is former military. Blue eyes, scarred eyebrow, calloused hands. Trauma keeps her up at night and she looks at Caroline's father like she wants to set his house on fire. Regan Halstead has every reason to hate the Davenport name. Richard Davenport destroyed her father - framed him, imprisoned him, transferred the debt to Regan's shoulders. Now she works inside his household, obedient on the surface. Caroline is supposed to be collateral damage. A rich man's sheltered daughter. Easy to dismiss, easy to sacrifice. She is none of those things. And every day Regan spends close enough to know that is another day the mission and the woman become impossible to hold in the same hand.
Chapter 1
Jun 22, 2026
Caroline's POV
Twenty-one feels exactly like twenty, which felt exactly like nineteen, which felt exactly like every year before it where I sat at a table surrounded by people who loved me and tried to figure out why I still felt like I'm performing the role of Caroline Davenport instead of being her.
"She's staring at you again," Priya says, tilting her champagne flute toward the far wall.
Regan Halstead stands near the emergency exit with her back against the wall, arms crossed, scanning the room with a focus that makes everyone else in the restaurant look like they're sleepwalking.
Nice fucking birthday present, Dad.
Two weeks she's been assigned to me, and in those two weeks I've learned exactly three things about her: she's former military, she drinks her coffee black, and she looks at my father's house like she wants to set it on fire.
"She's not staring at me," I say. "She's doing her job."
"Her job is to watch your body." Priya grins over the rim of her glass. "And she is definitely watching your body."
Priya Rao is the only person at this table who would openly flirt with my bodyguard by proxy, mostly because Priya flirts with every woman who crosses her field of vision.
"I'm serious, C." She leans closer, dark curls brushing her bare shoulder. "That woman has main-character energy and… look at that posture. Ten bucks says daddy issues." Priya squints. "My two favorite things."
"She works for my actual daddy, Priya. That's not a selling point."
"Then I'll be respectful." Priya pauses. "Respectfully obsessed."
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing, because laughing only fuels her. "I'm adding that to your dating profile bio. Right under 'will propose to your barista.'"
Priya tucks her chin and narrows her eyes. "She remembered my oat milk order, Caroline. That's basically a vow." She swirls her champagne. "Have you even talked to her? Like, beyond 'please don't follow me into the bathroom'?"
"I've tried. She gives me three-word answers and then does the jaw thing."
"The jaw thing?"
"This tight little clench." I mimic it, and Priya nearly spits her drink. "Like I'm personally inconveniencing her by existing."
"That's restraint, babe." Priya raises her glass toward Regan in a toast. "She's tall, she's got that hot scar through her eyebrow, and she could definitely bench-press both of us. I want to know everything."
I open my mouth to tell Priya that two months ago, a man in a ski mask dragged me into an unmarked van outside my father's fundraiser.
My previous bodyguard, Dave, took a knife getting me out. My father fired him from the hospital and hired Regan.
But before I can get any of that out, Gemma Whitfield, our one and only gossip girl, materializes behind my chair and grabs my shoulders.
"Cake is incoming and Nate has been pacing by the bar for ten minutes trying to figure out how to give you your present, so everyone act surprised."
The cake arrives on a silver tray, and behind it comes Nate Pearson, tall and sandy-haired and smiling. He sets a small velvet box on the table, leans down, and kisses me.
I kiss him back because that's what girlfriends do, even almost-girlfriends, even whatever I am to Nate after three weeks of dinners and hand-holding and absolutely zero desire to take any of it further.
He pulls back and searches my face. I give him a smile, wide enough to buy me another week of not having to explain.
I've dated four perfectly fine boyfriends, and I felt more putting on chapstick than I ever felt kissing any of them.
At twenty-one, I'm still a virgin, which is how I know something is fundamentally wrong with me.
I blow out the candles while my friends sing off-key and sparklers hiss into the frosting. I close my eyes and make a wish I will never say out loud.
I want to want someone. That's the whole pathetic wish. I want to lose my virginity to a person who makes my hands shake.
I open my eyes.
"Twenty-one!" Gemma clinks her glass against mine. "And on behalf of everyone at this table, we all wish that someone finally pops your cherry this year."
The table erupts. Priya chokes on her drink and Nate turns the color of the roses in the centerpiece.
"Gemma, what the hell?" I manage, but she's already high-fiving someone across the table.
"Relax, it's not like I said anything new." She tips her glass toward Nate. "Right, Nate?"
Nate opens his mouth. Nothing comes out.
Heat crawls up my neck and settles across my cheekbones. My eyes track to the exit.
Regan hasn't moved. Arms still crossed, jaw still set. But her gaze is on me.
Those blue eyes hold mine across the length of the restaurant, steady and unreadable, and I feel my pulse trip over itself.
Then she looks away, back to the room, back to the exits, and I'm left with a flush I can't explain to anyone at this table.
Gemma refills her glass, champagne splashing over the rim. She's been drinking faster than the rest of us, her laugh louder with every pour.
"So, Nate." Gemma props her chin on her hand and leans across the table toward him. "Now that you've given her the bracelet and the birthday kiss, when are you actually going to close the deal?"
Nate's mouth thins. "Gemma, drop it."
"I'm just saying." She gestures at me with her champagne flute. "She hasn't even let you stay past ten. At some point a girl has to wonder if the problem is the product or the customer."
"The problem," Priya says, her voice sharp for the first time tonight, "is that you're four glasses past your personality limit."
Gemma's eyes narrow. Her grip tightens on the flute, the gossip-girl mask slipping to reveal the thing that makes people at our college step out of Gemma's path without being asked.
"You know what, Priya? Nobody invited your opinion." She turns back to me, and her smile has edges now. "I'm trying to help, C."
She reaches across the table to grab the champagne bottle and her elbow catches my hand, the one resting next to my water glass, and knocks it hard against the edge of the table.
My knuckles crack against marble and I gasp, yanking my hand back on instinct. The pain is sharp and immediate.
My ring finger and middle finger throb with a deep ache that radiates up through my wrist.
My first thought is about rehearsal on Monday and the Elgar concerto I've been drilling for six weeks and how my teacher will look at me if I can't hold a proper vibrato.
"Oops." Gemma blinks at me with wide, exaggerated innocence. "Sorry, C. Clumsy."
She isn't sorry. I've known Gemma Whitfield since we were fourteen, and she has never once been clumsy in her life.
Before I can respond, a hand closes around mine.
Regan is beside me. I didn't hear her cross the room, didn't see a single person at this table react before she was simply there, standing over my chair with my injured hand cradled in both of hers.
Her fingers are calloused and warm. She turns my hand palm-up under the candlelight.
"Flex," she says. One word, low, directed only at me.
I curl my fingers. They all bend. The pain spikes on the middle knuckle but the movement is full, nothing grinding, nothing wrong.
"Again," she commands.
I flex again. Regan watches my tendons move under the skin, her thumb pressed gently to my wrist where my pulse is hammering so hard she can definitely feel it.
"Bruised," she says. "You'll want ice on it tonight."
"I'm fine," I whisper, though the word comes out unsteady because her thumb is still on my pulse point and her face is closer than it's ever been.
Regan's eyes lift from my hand to my face.
This close, the blue is startling — deep, like the Atlantic from a boat, water that looks calm until you're in it.
"You don't get to decide that." Her eyes don't leave my hand. "I do."
Then she releases me, steps back, and returns to her post without a word or a glance at the rest of the table.
My hand is still tingling where her fingers were.
"Well." Gemma recovers first. She picks up her champagne and tips it toward Regan. "That was intense. Does she do that every time you stub a toe, or is it just when your hands are involved?"
I don't answer. I'm pressing my thumb into the place on my wrist where Regan's thumb just was, holding the warmth there.
Come back. Hold it again. I don't care what excuse you use.
Guarding Caroline
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