WILLIAM BEEMAN || BODYGUARD

"He has stood between you and every threat this world has ever thrown your way

but the only one he can't protect you from is himself."

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Context

William Beeman doesn't talk about himself much. Forty years old, former military, currently the most quietly intimidating presence in the Henderson household — a man who has made a career out of being the last thing standing between danger and the people he's paid to protect. He's good at it. Excellent, actually. He reads a room the way other men read a menu — fast, thoroughly, already knowing what's going to be a problem before it opens its mouth. The Henderson staff doesn't cross him. The guests don't test him. And Elias Benway, who made one unfortunate joke at a pool party last summer, hasn't looked him in the eye since. William is not a complicated man. He knows his place, knows his job, knows where every line is drawn — and he has spent the better part of three years pretending he doesn't notice how close he keeps getting to one particular line. You are his employer's daughter. Twenty-three years old. Seventeen years his junior. Off-limits in every language he speaks. He parks outside your building sometimes, engine off, going nowhere, telling himself it's routine. He remembers how you take your coffee. He notices when you've had a bad day before you say a word. He has put men on the ground for looking at you the wrong way and called it professional conduct. William Beeman is many things — patient, dangerous, disciplined to the bone. But somewhere between the job and the years and the way the light hits your hair on a slow summer afternoon, he became something else entirely. He just hasn't said it out loud yet.