To Guard and Protect: A Bodyguard to Lovers Romance Read online

  To Guard and Protect

  A Bodyguard to Lovers Romance

  By Liz Peters

   Copyright 2019 by- Liz Peters -All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. The characters in this book are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. WARNING: Contains mature themes and language.

  To Guard and Protect

  Chapter One

  Delia

  Chapter Two

  Cole

  Chapter Three

  Delia

  Chapter Four

  Cole

  Chapter Five

  Delia

  Chapter Six

  Cole

  Chapter Seven

  Delia

  Chapter Eight

  Cole

  Chapter Nine

  Delia

  Chapter Ten

  Cole

  Chapter Eleven

  Delia

  Chapter Twelve

  Cole

  Chapter Thirteen

  Delia

  Chapter Fourteen

  Cole

  Chapter Fifteen

  Delia

  Chapter Sixteen

  Cole

  Chapter One

  Delia

  Delia Morgan sat and stared out of her window at the Los Angeles skyline in the late evening light. The sun was setting in brilliant oranges and purples just beyond the skyscrapers. Unfortunately, she had a face that almost anyone would have recognized out on the street below. It was usually the one thing that stopped her from just hopping on an elevator and heading down to the street to get lost in the sea of humanity in any city she was in. It didn’t help that she could see a billboard that held her face along with the rest of her body sprawled out across a piano and decked in nothing but a fur coat and a string of pearls.

  It was a perfume ad—one she wasn’t sure why she’d signed up for as a matter of fact— but it was far from the only thing that people would know her from. Even the chance of being spotted on the street had only been a slight hinderance until the past few weeks. Usually, she would have thrown on a hoodie and a pair of sunglasses before walking out onto the sidewalk to keep anyone but the most vigilant people watchers from recognizing her. Or she would have called for a driver to take her out to one of the thousands of clubs that were in this part of town. Instead, she was stuck in the penthouse apartment that she rented and took up residence in for the short amount of time she actually spent in Los Angeles, even though that was supposed to be her home base.

  In reality, she spent more time on the road than anywhere else. It was a lifestyle that Delia had gotten used to ever since she landed a television job when she was twelve years old. After the show she’d been famous for ended, she wound up on the road with a tour after her first album was released. Acting in a teen hit might have been her big break, but singing and songwriting had always been her passion, and by now, she was far more well known for that than for anything else she had ever done. Delia still acted in a movie or did a cameo in a tv show, once in awhile, but most of the time, she was either on tour or in the studio working on her next song. Occasionally, she did a modeling job, photo shoot, ad campaign, or commercial, but for the most part, she breathed, ate, slept and drank the music industry.

  It had also made for a childhood that most people would have considered strange at a minimum. She’d left school in the seventh grade, instead being tutored on the set of her show in between scenes. Half the time, she was working on algebra problems while someone was dealing with the long, dark brown waves of hair that cascaded down her back or fixing her makeup that was starting to smudge from her day’s work. She was known to be very hands-on when it came to making sure things were right on the sound stage. She hadn’t been to a prom or a homecoming dance; none of the normal rights of passage that came along with being a high school student. She hadn’t had a graduation ceremony or a first day of college. She’d missed moving into a dorm room to share a tiny space with a roommate for four years. Most women her age were just graduating and being released into the world to really live on their own for the first time in their lives.

  At twenty-two, she’d already been on her own for six and a half years. Her dad and mom had basically let her go at age sixteen. That was the year that she’d finished all her studies and earned a high school diploma that had been mailed to her with all of the pomp and circumstance of a tax return. It had just been a formality anyway since her life was going to be exactly the same with or without that simple piece of paper.

  In all honesty, Delia didn’t know exactly what had even happened to that certificate in the intervening years. It certainly hadn’t gotten packed up in the boxes of things that were split between her mom and dad in the divorce or the ones that had come with Delia when she’d had herself emancipated. She’d moved out on her own rather than choose between living with whichever one of them decided they wanted to mooch off of her earnings that year. She still got the odd call from her father from time to time, though she could never pinpoint where it would come from next—Canada one week and Bangladesh the next. Daniel Morgan was trying to find himself by getting lost, and Delia couldn’t empathize in the slightest. She’d spent so much of her life traveling the world that one place began to blend into the next. They were all just the next performance, a set list to remember, a meet and greet filled with unfamiliar faces and none of it seemed like anything that was going to make her feel closer to God or more in tune with herself. Mostly it was just a series of concert venues and parking lots that were wherever her tour bus wound up crashing for the night.

  Rather than running away from the world like Daniel, Cassandra Morgan, her mother, decided that she was going to throw herself into it full steam ahead, becoming a fixture at nearly every party that was thrown in the greater Los Angeles area. Delia was certain her name got thrown around at those more often than confetti on New Year’s Eve. There was always one more designer that Cassandra had to have a dress from, one more purse to buy or one more plastic surgery she just had to have. Delia had more than a few calls from her mother’s cell phone number that ended in her calling her accountant to send Cassandra whatever money she needed for her latest procedure.

  It made Delia feel a little cynical to think about it all, but being back in Los Angeles always put her in this frame of mind. There was a reason she spent so much of her life on tour. Most artists took a few months or even a couple of years off here and there, but Delia was almost always traveling or recording. She refused to give herself enough downtime to think about everything or really anything most of the time, and being stuck in this apartment made it all come flooding back a little too readily.

  Delia was itching for some kind of distraction, but there was a police officer stationed on the other side of her front door that wasn’t going to let that happen. It was frustrating, but her manager had insisted that the local police keep someone there until he could find a more permanent solution. In fact, that solution was due to arrive first thing in the morning, along with a whole new set of chains that were going to keep her just as trapped even though he insisted they were supposed to give her the freedom to wander around the city without worry.

  Delia had been in this business a long time, and she’d had more than her fair share of bodyguards for one event or another, but they were always temporary employees.
These people wandered in and out of her life as needed to cover her on movie sets and meet and greets. Mostly, they were just security hired by whatever venue she was working in for the night. They would do their job and get lost, leaving her to do whatever she wanted. Now, she was going to be stuck with someone twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It was beyond frustrating, and it was unfortunately very necessary.

  Her eye caught the barely folded paper sitting on top of the desk in one corner of her bedroom. That was usually where her assistant Emma was perched with a laptop and a cell phone making sure that the day to day business of Delia’s life was taken care of without Delia having to think about it. It made her life that much easier, and it made distracting herself from the real world a full-time pursuit, whether that was through music or alcohol or whatever party she’d managed to find for herself.

  Tonight, no one else was in the room. Delia had kicked them all out a couple of hours ago and ordered a pizza that was due to arrive at any moment, though the cop on the other side of the door was going to have to be the one who intercepted it since no one was getting through that door other than the short list of authorized personnel that did not include a pizza delivery man.

  That damned letter… It had ruined everything. One tiny piece of paper, typed up on some ancient typewriter had been enough to turn her entire world on end and make her a prisoner in her own life once more. It was even worse now than it had been when she was a teenager and had to do everything her parents told her to do because she’d had a taste of freedom. She was twenty-two years old, stuck up in her room like she was grounded or on house arrest, and she hadn’t even done anything to earn this particular punishment except be herself.

  She hadn’t really known what it was when she stumbled across it. It was in her dressing room at the last venue she’d played in. This one happened to be in downtown LA, a fitting place to end the international leg of her tour. She intended to take some time off, though it would only have been a few days before she started the next part that would have her traipsing across the midwest into the rest of the country. Now she had the time off, but it was going to be spent on lockdown.

  Delia didn’t have the heart to go pick up the paper and read it again. She’d thought it was nothing but a letter from a fan, maybe one of the daughters of the concert hall’s staff. People left little things in her dressing room from time to time, and it wasn’t any sort of shock to find a letter. She’d made the mistake of reading it before she walked out on stage though, and it meant she’d needed to put on a brave face while she played to a packed house for the rest of the night, trying to pretend like her entire world hadn’t been turned upside down by a simple slip of paper.

  Delia had every word of it memorized. It was now at the police office, filed away and locked in a safe for evidence’s sake, though her assistant had asked the local investigators for a copy. Delia wasn’t sure what Emma was thinking. She’d spent the entire day today going through the rest of Delia’s mail with a fine tooth comb, and she held each one gingerly as if it was going to jump out and bite her if she wasn’t careful.

  Delia just let Em get on with it. She didn’t have it in her to go through any of the mail, and she didn’t want to read whatever this person had to say again. Once had been more than enough to burn it into her brain indelibly. It had definitely been more than enough to send Emma running for a phone. The first call she’d made had been to Delia’s manager, Harold, but the second one had been to the LAPD at Harold’s insistence. The concert had gone on as scheduled, but all of the plans for afterward had been called off. The normal after party was canceled. The meet and greet where she usually signed t-shirts, copies of her last album, posters, or whatever someone put down in front of her ended before it ever began. Her life turned into a series of questions, and interviews, with Delia closed in the four walls of her bedroom for the last twenty hours without a chance of escape.

  As much as she longed for freedom, Delia knew what potential harm lay in her sneaking out of this place. Honestly, the cop on the other side of the door was meant to keep the rest of the world out, not Delia locked inside. The letter’s contents were enough to do that without any help from someone on the other side.

  She’d been in the spotlight long enough that this definitely wasn’t the first creepy letter she had received. Eleven years was too long to have paparazzi taking your photo and fans screaming when you walk into a room to not have someone say something out of line in a letter. She’d gotten more than her fair share of weird letters, weird photos, and weird gifts. They came in the mail and usually got screened out by her assistant. This one was left personally for her, which was a switch from the usual, and it was by far the weirdest thing she’d ever read.

  Most of it was a blur. The general gist of the entire thing was that whoever this person was thought they were connected to Delia in some sort of spiritual way.

  It’s like we’re practically the same person.

  That line was one of the least creepy ones. She’d heard that in a friendly way from fans plenty of times.

  Your music is like someone put my thoughts on paper.

  Another line that she’d heard from a lot of people in the past.

  I think we’re meant to be one.

  That was where it really started to feel creepy, but it was the ending along with the tiny piece of metal taped to the letter just below the last line that had sent her into a full on panic attack.

  You’ll never know where I got this, but there are plenty more copies where this one came from. Don’t bother changing the locks because I’ll just be able to get another one.

  There was a key there, taped to the letter with an arrow drawn from the last sentence to the key. It was innocuous enough on its own. It could have come from anywhere. The key was just a key, the kind that you could get made at any local hardware store or even one of the machines that popped up in malls and department stores. It was silver with no distinguishing features, but when she peeled the tape off the paper and fished her own keys out of the purse sitting on the dressing table her heart skipped a beat.

  Every single line of this key matched the one on her own keyring that belonged to the front door of her apartment to a tee. Someone who sent her this creepy letter also had a key to her front door.

  Delia had always had this invisible faith in locks and keys, this belief that they could hold the bad parts of the world at bay, but it had suddenly become very clear that the lock on her front door wasn’t holding anything bad at bay now. Usually, she would have let a creepy letter slide, but this one wasn’t like the rest. That key had set it apart immediately. It was the one thing that had led her into all of this and what was going to make her a prisoner of a bodyguard she didn’t really want. The irony was that she wasn’t going to be able to survive without him until all of this was figured out.

  The manager of her building had already been up to change the locks, assuring her that no one was going to have a copy of this key but Delia. He had even made a big show of opening the package in front of her and passing over both copies of the key that had been included with the new lock to her. It made her feel a little better, but that didn’t mean she was safe. Someone had managed to get a copy of her key before, and she had no idea who it was or how she was supposed to stop it from happening again.

  All Delia knew was that she had never felt so much like a caged animal in all her life, though she knew the cage was supposed to be for her own protection. She could only feel that it was holding her exactly where whoever this monster was wanted her to be. She didn’t know what any kind of bodyguard Harold came up with on such short notice was supposed to do against any of this.

  Chapter Two

  Cole

  Cole Hayes looked in the full-length mirror that hung on the back of his bathroom door. He gave himself a quick once over before he headed out of the house in the suburbs of Los Angeles that he’d grown up in. It had only made sense for him to move back in here after being medically
retired from the Navy. No one had moved into it since his parents died a couple of years back. Technically, it belonged to him and his brother Will, but Will had long since relocated to Denver. He didn’t care if his younger brother took up residence in the empty house, now that he needed a place to crash and recuperate from everything he’d been through in the last twelve years.

  He was dressed in a suit, though he had a duffel bag of more casual clothes waiting on the bed in the next room to sling over his shoulder before he left the house. It was his first day on the job, and he had no idea what to expect. There was just no way he was going to show up in jeans and a t-shirt and not make a good impression on his new employer, even though he had no idea who that was. All he had was an address and instructions on where to report once he got there.

  The call had come in out of the blue last night from an old buddy who knew Cole was looking for work. He’d been out of the Navy for six months, all the time trying to figure out something he could do with the set of skills he’d learned as a Navy SEAL. It wasn’t like they were always looking for someone who could break a guy in half with their bare hands to sell insurance or anything. He had to spend some time resting, making sure all the body parts he’d screwed up in the military weren’t too broken to function normally before he decided what was coming up next for him. He just knew he wasn’t going to be able to spend the rest of his life sitting behind a desk doing paperwork after the way the first twelve years of his career had gone.

  Most of the guys he knew went into law enforcement or security. He’d reached out to a few of them, and it looked like no one was hiring at the moment, though every one of them told him they would keep him on their lists. That’s why it wasn’t any kind of a surprise when one of his old friends called him with an offer for a job in private security, even though he told him he couldn’t give him any details over the phone except for the pay they were offering. It was enough to make Cole accept the job on the spot without asking any more questions, though he had to admit he was pretty damned curious about what was going to happen once he got to his destination for the morning.