Diva (Ironclad Bodyguards Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

Mae.”
    Yeah, maybe she did, but every time he called her Lola Mae she wanted to punch him. Even Lola threw her off, because for the past two years everyone had called her Lady Paradise, and she’d come to think of it not just as her stage name, but her persona. Lady Paradise was the deity who stood behind the sound console and reigned over the worshipping masses.
    Lola was the real her, the awkward, emo geek who’d lost her mother at five and her father at fifteen, which was the worst possible age to lose the bedrock of your life. After his heart attack, she’d moved to L.A. to live with a rich aunt and uncle and attend a rich-kid high school. Her pop had never emphasized school in Memphis, so she was far behind her classmates. They’d called her stupid, redneck, slow .
    To cope, she’d remade herself into the school’s crazy party girl, the rave head, the slut, so the boys at least would like her. When they made fun of her Memphis twang, she stopped talking and made beats instead. Those beats eventually won her a recording contract, but Lola would always be the sad, desperate outcast masquerading as a goddess.
    And Lola Mae…
    Lola Mae was that girl with the twang, her pop’s special girl, and this bodyguard wasn’t her pop. He wasn’t even her friend.
    “What are you thinking about?” he asked, an abrupt poke into painful memories.
    “Nothing.”
    Fuck him. She wasn’t letting this guy into her thoughts, not telling him about anything going on inside her. The last guy she’d let in was Marty. Now he was gone and she thought maybe, maybe Ransom was right, that Marty had done bad things for her. To her. Maybe Marty had been using her for her money, but she’d allowed it. He’d kept her too drug-happy to care.
    Drug-happy? Or drug-sad?
    Oh, she was going to need more pharmaceuticals. A few pre-show happy tablets quieted her neuroses and gave her confidence and energy. They helped the beats flow. The bodyguard would never understand that, because he had no flow. He was unrelentingly businesslike. He walked too fast, and he got way more attention from passersby than she did. Men and women both slowed to look him over. One woman almost walked into him, she was mentally undressing him so hard. So he was tall and big, and dark, and disgustingly masculine and handsome. So what? What a cliché.
    She didn’t care how sexy he looked. He did nothing for her, because she liked interesting men. Complicated men. Ransom was so boring and wholesome. For fuck’s sake, he was still wearing that fucking red tie.
    The only break she got from her bodyguard over the next twenty-four hours was the radio interview Greg had arranged, which was awkward and stressful. By the time they returned to the hotel, Ransom had showered and changed—into another suit and tie.
    It freaked her out that she had to share a hotel room with the man. She complained to Greg but he said he couldn’t do anything. “You chose this consequence,” he told her. “You started partying too hard.”
    Now she was standing in the shower before dinner, looking at a stranger’s soap and shampoo. A male stranger’s. He’d been respectful so far, even waiting to take a shower until she was out with Greg, but still…she didn’t know him. How was she supposed to live like this?
    She needed something to help her cope. She’d have settled for a bottle of wine at this point, even though she hated the taste of it, even though it gave her worse headaches than the drugs. But she had no wine, and no drugs either, thanks to Ransom. She could probably subsist on some hot, monkey sex…
    A therapist had warned her once that she had sex for unhealthy reasons. Nope. She had sex because it was fun and passed the time. Tonight, at the clubs, she’d find a good, strong candidate and invite him back to the hotel room. Maybe more than one guy. Maybe a whole slew of hot, horny guys to work her over and make the tension go away.
    Ransom could stay and watch if he wanted to