"You're an adult. What do you want to do?"

Marilee Ferguson has never been given a choice. Between midnight abductions and a day date that turned into the next headline in the Ferguson Family "How Not To Parent Your Troubled Teen" handbook, she's spent the last five years being thrust from one bad experience into the next.

She's failed out. She's been kicked out.
But now? Now, she's been rescued.

And when he looks at her and gives her a choice, she's unsure how to respond.

Years of military experience have taught Cooper Waddell to trust his gut and something is off with the Ferguson girl.

He did his job. He got her out of the religious cult.

But when she clearly has no desire in going home, he offers to take her back to Montana with him. She'll be trading a religious compound for a small town one, yet when he looks at the nineteen year old, he sees the scared girl his mom was before she was saved by the man he knows as his father.

He has no intention in being that same man for Mari. If anything, their age gap makes him more like his biological father in his mother's scenario.

Except little by little, Mari's shell cracks open. With each panic attack, each late night he spends helping her adjust to her new life, the possibilities of being her person grow larger in his mind.

In his heart.

Until he's not sure he's able to let her walk away.

Caged Lion is the third and final installment in the interconnected, standalone series, Douglas Group: The Protectors series. It is not necessary to read the previous two books, although those couples do make appearances in Caged Lion.