Mister Bodyguard Read online

  Mister Bodyguard

  Ivy Oliver

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Thank you for reading Mister Bodyguard!

  Mister Bridesmaid, Chapter One

  Thanks again!

  About the Author

  1

  Matt

  I wake with a hand on my shoulder and jerk upright. As I do, the silk sheets slide away from me, and I yawn. For a moment, the hand seems like a dream, no different from waking with a loud noise in my ears that isn't there, or a feeling that I'm not alone in the room.

  Naturally, I'm naked. Sleeping with clothes on never came naturally to me. The older I get the more they feel like they just get in the way. So I throw my sheets back and sit up and stifle another yawn.

  Buck-assed naked, I open my eyes.

  Oh. There is someone in my room after all.

  Well, not room…trailer…but that isn't on my mind now. Standing in front of me is six feet and five inches of sex, a stunningly handsome mass of muscle and man, and sitting on the bed puts his bulge at right about face height.

  I've always been…curious, I think is the word. Maybe questioning, but it's never been a question I tried to answer. Preserve the mystery, maybe. Right now, in the naked moments between waking and putting the scrambled parts of my brain back into the right order to form thoughts and personality, I go from questioning to full thirst and rake my eyes up the form of the man standing in front of me.

  He’s tall, and the low ceiling makes him seem taller. He's broad, but with a narrow waist, huge in the way that's also trim, rippling with compact power even when standing still. He has the kind of physique that makes a man give up on wearing off-the-rack polos and just surrender to skin-tight water-wicking fabrics, a wall of sculpted muscle that invites the eye and, to be blunt, the tongue. It's hard to drag my eyes from the bulge in his khaki pants—he's clearly packing serious heat.

  Maybe I'm dreaming, but I swear he's getting hard, too. I can almost…maybe I really can see it growing, thickening, defined under the fabric. Too dull to do much else, I stare.

  Then, finally, I look up. He's gorgeous, movie star gorgeous, which is a little amusing considering the circumstances. The only thing marring his perfect features—sharp cheekbones and chin, strong nose, and deep, soulful gray eyes—is a thin, barely noticeable scar, little more than a white line sketched down his right cheek, so faint you have to stare at it to see it, and stare, I do.

  Me being me, and this being morning, and it being too early for my blood, I decide to make this interesting. I lean back. I throw my legs wide. I show off the goods.

  His eyes never leave mine, even as my own decide to roam again. I was so intent on his physique—his entire body seems built for thrusting—that I didn't notice the gun on his hip or the security badge around his neck that reads “Lucas Baxter. Security.”

  His eyes do not move, and I wilt just slightly. I was hoping he'd skim them down at least, check me out. I put a lot of work into this bod. No matter how much I pump iron and run and down protein shakes, I never seem to get more than a lithe swimmer's form, but the abs drive the ladies wild.

  “Are you going to get up?” he says.

  Considering how I sit, leaning back on my palms with my knees wide and all my goods on display, the double entendre is too perfect, but he delivers it in a heavy deadpan. His voice is sonorous, deep and rich like a hot sip of flavorful coffee. I can tell it can crack like a whip; this guy is used to giving orders. It could be silken, too, though.

  So yeah, I get up. Just not the way he intended. Still his eyes don't waver.

  Except…there, just a flash.

  Suddenly the rest of my brain comes online, and I drag my sheet over myself, remembering how to be embarrassed. I was already flying the flag from sleep, but now it's damn near painful, and I begin to avoid looking at him rather than staring.

  “Do you mind?” I say.

  “Nothing I haven't seen before,” he says, leaving me wondering if I imagined the faint, ironic crackle to his voice.

  Nothing he hasn't seen before, or nothing he hasn't seen before.

  “What time is it?” I demand, yawning for the third time.

  “It's two in the afternoon. Get up.”

  There's a hint of motion—a twitch of his arm—betraying the idea of pulling me to my feet. This guy's bearing says military.

  “Thirsty,” I mutter.

  Grunting, he turns to the fridge and fishes out a bottle of diet soda, grimacing at it like it offends him on a personal level. He knocks around several half empty liquor bottles in the process, throwing me a dirty look when he spots the banana schnapps.

  I'm too busy enjoying the show. His body is herculean. He would, of course, be wearing a skin-tight shirt over those bulging muscles, but this guy isn't finding a pair of loose pants, at least not in the seat. His ass looks like it could crack walnuts and throw out a lot of push, if you know what I mean.

  I shake that out of my head. Funny how in the life of hedonism I've lead so far, that's always been the one frontier I've never pushed. There's a little fear to it, and it's the fear that makes it so alluring, so common to my fantasies…

  Fantasies this man may as well have stepped out of. If I had to imagine a guy to, ah, explore my boundaries, he'd be just like this, and trust me, I've imagined that many a time.

  I should thank whoever sent him.

  He hands me the soda.

  “Who are you?” I ask.

  “I'm your bodyguard.”

  “Babysitter,” I mutter.

  “Let me guess,” I say.

  “Your mother hired me.”

  “That's a bingo,” he says.

  “On your feet. You're late for work.”

  “Alright, alright.”

  “Now,” he growls.

  Something in me, nice and hardwired for it, responds, and I'm instantly on my feet, saved from the foolishness of reflexively saluting only because, as I stand, my sheet skims down my body and just barely catches on my raging hard on, giving me time to grab it and cover my crotch, as if there were any point to modesty after all that.

  “Shower up and get outside in five,” he says. “I'll wait.”

  “What if I don't?” I say, hinting oh-so-subtly.

  “Then I come and get you,” he growls.

  I walk past him—cutting him off from the door—discarding my sheet as I walk past to the small bathroom on the far end of my trailer. The prickle I feel is electric, intoxicating. I know if I turned back he'd be out the door, not looking, but with my head facing the other way…

  I was right. In the mirror, I catch him looking. His eyes skim up my legs, his gaze gliding over the flesh of my hamstrings to my ass like caressing fingers, giving me that little tingle betwixt the cheeks I get when I fantasize about playing around with a man. He could be the one…

  Oh, wake up, Matt. Like it would be that perfect.

  I turn on the shower and look back. The door is swinging just as I do.

  After a quick shower, I dress from the basket of laundry the housekeeping people brought me and step outside into the burning desert sun.

  That, you see, is where I am. About sixty miles north of Las Vegas in the high desert, with mountains one way and endless scrubby flat the other. The perfect place to sit out and watch for shooting stars or the odd UFO buzzing its way up to the secret government bas
e by Groom Lake that the screenwriter told me all about.

  We're out here to make a movie. My movie, financed by my mother, a rich man's wife with nothing better to do than to propel me into stardom, or so she thinks, in some kind of attempt to make a man out of me.

  If she wanted to make a man out of me she should have just told Lucas Baxter, my new bodyguard, to take care of that. Only a man could handle him.

  Is he looking?

  In the bright sun he wears wraparound shades, military style, and everything about him screams secret service. He moves like a panther when he walks, and he seems to know everything around him, perfectly alert.

  Sweat beads on the back of his neck and his top lip, and a single bead of it glides down the skintight surface of his athletic shirt.

  “Well look at you,” my costar says.

  Her trailer is next to mine. Sandy Pines is old enough to be my mother—which isn't saying much, since I was born when mom was seventeen. They are, in fact, almost exactly the same age, and attended the same Bay Area high school. Both had similar career trajectories. Well, sort of.

  They were dancers. Mom married out of the career, having won the lottery in more ways than one. My dad's father was moderately wealthy. My dad, though, dropped out of his junior year at Caltech to join a startup and, well…

  Let's say conjuring a moderately budgeted movie out of thin air amounts to a rounding error on a day's interest.

  Sandy, in her casual dress, doesn't look much like herself, or rather like her public self, from her, ah, acting persona. She favors flannel shirts and cutoff shorts, flip flops and straw hats, and you could picture her on her knees and elbows deep in potting soil planting tulips in some suburban front yard. Except all the neighbors would wreck their cars; she's a ten by any measure, even if it took a little surgical help to get her all the way to the top of the scale.

  I really don't see her that way; to me, she's just my “Aunt” Sandy, and she acts like it. Most of the time.

  My new babysitter has her speechless, though, which is rare for her.

  “Wow,” she finally manages, after raking Lucas with her eyes.

  Something odd flares in my belly: Jealousy. It burns hotter when she seductively drags her big sunglasses down her nose and flashes her green eyes, one of her best-known features, at him.

  I am somewhat relieved when her come-hither stare breaks on Lucas like water on rocks. He looks at her as if she were a lamppost. He's not impolite, though.

  He offers her hand, and she shakes it.

  “Lucas Baxter, with Maximus Security.”

  “Sandy Pines. That's quite a piece you're packing there, Lucas. Planning to hunt Tyrannosaurs?”

  I stare at her for a second before I realize she means the gun on his hip, not the one in his shorts.

  “If any show up,” he says, shrugging.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she says, brushing her glasses back into place. She struts past him. Lucas barely spares her a glance.

  “She's nice,” I tell him.

  “You know her?”

  “She half raised me,” I say. “Until I was six or seven, my mom still worked. They worked together but not always on the same shift, so she babysat for me a lot.”

  He glances back at her, then at me again.

  “Well,” he says. “That's something.”

  I snort.

  “You're supposed to be in the tent for the table read.”

  I roll my eyes and clack my tongue.

  Lucas doesn't scowl, but somehow his blank look is more recriminating. His sheer presence makes me ashamed to complain. Which I really should be, given the life I've led, which to this point has been doing whatever and, frankly, whoever, I wanted.

  We walk over to the tent and step inside.

  “Matt? Matt!”

  The director, Nick, looks at me angrily, holding his folded-over script like he'll hit me with it. Taking it, I head for the table where I sit back in my seat, staring right back at him.

  “Could you please take this seriously?”

  I glance down at the script.

  The Adventures of Space-Prince

  As I flip through the script, Nick preps the actors seated 'round the table.

  “Alright everyone,” he says, “This is a table read. Since Matt and Sandy are new at this, let me run you through—”

  “I've done a table read before,” Sandy says calmly.

  One of the other cast members, a bit player seated across the table, says, “For what movie? Sandy Does DesMoines or Double Down in Sandy's Dunes?”

  She looks at him coolly. “Honey, I got a paycheck. You were the one paying to watch.”

  Nick lets out an exasperated sigh. Sandy continues staring the guy down, a combination of confidence and her oddly unsettling schoolmarm look, turned up to eleven by her peering sharply over reading glasses, shuts up the miscreant.

  Meanwhile, I take a quick flip through the phone book-sized script.

  How am I supposed to take the role of Prince Grabthar seriously? Everyone here is acting like we're making the next Blade Runner, but my costar is a porno actress and the director's only credits are a commercial for headache ointment and second unit work on Changeformers, a direct-to-video knockoff movie with special effects out of the '70s. I'm talking actual puppets and Claymation here.

  I'm supposed to launch my career with this?

  The constant feeling that I'm the only one who is in on the joke is starting to make me wonder if I'm the only one who is not in on the joke, like this is all some kind of elaborate twenty-first birthday surprise party scheme.

  The only thing I can think about right now is getting out of here…and my new babysitter. Oh, Mom has had people on me before, but she went whole hog on this guy. I think he's actual ex-military, like some kind of covert CIA secret agent for hire type, and frankly, he makes me a little nervous. Like, I'm not giving this dude the slip.

  Besides that…he made me feel weird.

  I've always been, well, a playboy. The lifestyle, not the magazine. When you're me—falling ass backwards into money and attention from every girl you see—it just sort of happens.

  Half the elite private high school I barely graduated from saw my cock during my tenure there, and the other half wanted to. If Mom found out what happened in my senior year with Miss Marshall, the brand spanking new, fresh out of college twenty-two-year-old English teacher, she'd have shipped me off to military school and probably taken out a hit on poor Miss Marshall with the Mob. As it is, it's just sheer luck that she didn't take maternity leave the next year.

  I mean, what was I supposed to do?

  After my antics—fooling around with two separate teachers, running with the craziest crowd in school, house parties, a few bookings and mug shots—I care about showing my dick during some swagger about as much as Sandy, sitting next to me, cares about hers.

  Today, for the first time I can really remember, I felt naked. What's weirder is that I had a raging hard on, and it wasn't morning wood; I woke up only at half mast. I had to throw on my jeans to keep from strutting around at full mast. Not that I mind; it's a good way to establish dominance, you know, letting it hang out.

  With no girls in the trailer (I'm pretty sure that's half the reason that Mom set this thing up to film in the burning desert, right beside the cosmic asshole of the universe) and just me and him, it's almost like his voice alone made me hard. I could half believe it; when he started shouting orders, I got this weird, turny sensation in my stomach, like I wanted to obey, and yet it would be more fun not to.

  Weird, isn't that? Obeying doesn't really come second nature to me. Or even third.

  “Matt!”

  I look up at Nick.

  “Oh, right, where was I?”

  He lifts his script and raises his glasses and, in very exaggerated fashion, reads the first few words of my line.

  I have to flip around until I find it. I guess they went through the prologue scene without me.

&n
bsp; “You'll never get away with this, Monstrothis,” he deadpans.

  Sandy guffaws.

  I roll my eyes and look at the script, finding my spot.

  “You'll never get away with this, Monstrothis. You may have me, but the Pirate Princess has escaped, and my allies—”

  The villain, who has third billing in this mess, is a veteran stuntman who's used to working behind heavy prosthetic makeup and clearly relishes the role of a mustache (tentacle?) twirling villain, even if it means he's going to be baking in this ungodly heat under fifty pounds of silicone and body paint.

  He spits his line like it wronged him.

  “You're the one who's done for, Grabthar! The princess will yet be mine, and when my Imperator Virus spreads across the stars, only those I deem worthy will survive! The weak and the unfit will be destroyed, starting with you!”

  Nick reads the script in a deadpan monotone.

  “Prince Grabthar struggles mightily against his bonds. He looks down in concentration. He flexes his mighty thews, and his restraints begin to loosen. As Monstrothis turns his back—”

  “Excuse me,” Sandy says.

  Nick glares at her. “What?”

  “If he could rip his way out of the restraints, why didn't he do it earlier?”

  Nick gives her a withering look and appears desperate to explain that he didn't write this. The screenwriter Mom hired is seated in the corner, wearing a black turtleneck and beret in the fucking desert, until he launches to his feet.

  “Because he could not summon his resolve until his lady love, the Pirate Princess, is threatened,” he says dramatically. He says everything dramatically, like he's in an audition every moment of his life.

  “Sit down, Maury,” Nick mutters.

  “Why are you letting these actors savage my script?”

  “I said sit down.”

  Another actor leans forward. “Honey, you got hired on to this for two reasons.”