AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Speaking of getting back into the normal world…” Troy straightened up, playing with a signet ring he’d inherited from our grandfather when we were kids, then his wedding ring. My eyes narrowed. Fidgeting only meant one thing, and I didn’t like it. “I swear it’s not bad.”
“But you’re about to spin your rings right off your fingers,” I said. “It has to be bad.”
“It’s notbad. It’s just big.” He bit the inside of his cheek for a moment. “I’ve hired you bodyguards. Three of them.”
“What? Bodyguards? Three of them?” My voice was a tad too loud, so I cleared my throat and lowered it. “Troy, you can’t be serious. I’m not royalty or anything.”
“You’re the closest thing to it these days,” Troy said. “The entire world now knows about your billionaire status because of your dad’s death. You’ve had too many scary incidents happen lately: being followed the other day, the threatening messages. And as the serial killer van incident shows, you’re not fully prepared for what that means. Not to mention that you broadcast the places you go to millions of people on social media. People can put together the dots with some sleuthing.”
I huffed, staring across the restaurant and chewing this over. I didn’t like the idea of having three strangers hovering around me like a baby bird needing protection. But Troy was totally right. I didn’t have an ounce of street smarts. The serial killer van incident today wasn’t even the first time I’d almost gotten myself into trouble. Troy’s husband, Micah, had stepped in to help me once or twice—okay, more like four times—when I was telling strangers at parties too much about my whereabouts.
Trying to pretend I knew a thing about how to protect myself was a recipe for something bad happening. But this felt extreme.
“But won’t it look weird? Having three men with me all the time?” I asked.
“Who cares if it looks weird if it’s keeping you safe?” Troy said. “They’ll be a deterrent. This is serious. It goes beyond your DMs. Remember those creepy texts you got from some random number? The ones with you just at the grocery store, along with that comment that said, ‘you look pretty in pink’?”
I did, unfortunately. I didn’t leave my apartment for days after that message, and we never figured out how they got my number or who they were. They weren’t the only ones to text me, though usually, it was just creepy texts and not pictures of me.
And they would not stop unless I had help.
Even so, having three people guarding me was going to take some getting used to. Were they going to hold me back from living my life? I needed to get back to normalcy as soon as possible, and a bunch of new people around would not help.
Or maybe it was just what I needed.
“I promise you they’re the best in the business. You’ll hardly notice that they’re there, but you can feel as safe as ever,” Troy added.
“I don’t like it. I love my freedom, and this feels like I’m losing my independence,” I said.
“Please,” was all Troy responded.
“I’ll think about it,” I relented. “I just want to meet them first.”
CHAPTER2
Harrison
I’d been a bodyguard for five years, starting not long after a hip injury cut my professional football career short. Protecting the wealthy and famous wasn’t all that exciting to me anymore. But something about this assignment had piqued my interest.
Maybe it was the opulence of the Bailey Corporation that had my attention. I’d been around some of the wealthiest people in the world, but none of them had offices that managed to be gilded right down to the tasteful doorknobs. The view outside of the conference room window was stunning, showing off Manhattan on one side and Central Park on another.
I glanced at my partners, Cody and Ethan. Ethan was impossibly stoic, so I couldn’t tell what was going through his head on the best of days. Cody was more open, scanning the room just like I had. We worked well together despite our differences, so at least I didn’t have to worry about that.
But we’d never worked with someone like Taylor. This gig was last minute, so we got a simple dossier on who she was. A billionaire heiress. An influencer. She was much younger than the people we usually worked for, too, at only twenty-three years old.
“Ms. Bailey will be here shortly. She’s stuck in traffic,” the receptionist who had brought us in said. “I’ll be back with coffee as well.”
“She’s late,” Ethan said after checking his watch.
“As if we don’t deal with people who run in their own time zone all the time,” I replied with a snort. Running late was extremely common among our clients, as much as we tried to hustle them places on time for security reasons. At least the receptionist told us what was happening.
A muscle in Ethan’s jaw twitched. “Still.”
“Relax,” Cody said, stretching out one of his legs. “We’ve barely started. You can’t start complaining about that yet.”
Ethan grumbled in response. The receptionist came back with the coffee, and a few minutes after that, a woman burst through the door. She was a blur of glossy dark hair and hot pink clothes.
“Sorry I’m late!” she said, out of breath. “Traffic was awful.”
