Diva (Ironclad Bodyguards Book 2) (11 page)

His kindness filled her with self-loathing. Confusion. Shame. It was so difficult to admit she needed help. Rather than taunt her for her weakness, he was offering his strength, even after she’d almost gotten him fired. He wasn’t an asshole at all. He was a good guy, a hero.

If she wasn’t careful, she’d fall in love with him. She buried her head in her hands.

“You okay?”

She nodded so he wouldn’t touch her face again in that tender way, or come any closer. “I’ll be okay. When’s the next show?”

“Five days away. Saturday, in France, if you’re well enough to perform.”

“Paris?”

“Lyon.”

She massaged her temples. “Do you think I’ll be able to do it?”

“I think you’ll bounce back stronger than ever, if you stop medicating yourself and get your shit in order. I don’t think you want to live like this.”

Her eyes leaked a few residual tears. “I don’t. But I think I perform better when I’m…medicating.”

“You only think you perform better. The pills make you think you’re doing better sets, but you were sober in Hamburg and you were amazing. You don’t need the drugs.”

“Yeah, but…” She bit her lip.

“But what?”

“If I don’t use drugs, then maybe I won’t be…” She blinked her eyes against a new flood. Damn.

“You won’t be what?” he asked.

“You know. Fun enough. Crazy enough. People expect this person…”

“What person? They expect you.”

“No, they expect Lady Paradise!” She said it too loud, with too much freaked out anger. Where was the nurse? Why was she stuck here with him, melting down, tethered by machines and IVs? “You don’t understand how hard it is to be this famous, exciting person all the time.”

“Don’t be, then.” He sighed, brushing away her tears. “Rest sometimes. Be human. You’re an amazing human, believe me.” He wiped away more tears, then pushed her bangs back from her eyes. “I keep meaning to ask…are you naturally pink? Or do you dye this?”

A choked laugh escaped her. It kind of hurt her chest. “It’s not natural,” she admitted. “I’m a blonde.”

He gave her a look that pretty much substituted for a blonde joke. He wasn’t an asshole, but he wasn’t always nice either. “I like your pink hair,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to more sober performances. I think they’re better. I think you’re more real when you’re not wacked out on chemicals. What do you think?”

“Maybe.” That was all she was going to give him for now. Maybe she mixed better when she was sober. It was hard to know. “The Lyon festival’s not that big,” she said. “There’s a bigger one the week after, outside Paris.”

“I know. You have a few days to get up to speed.”

A few days? She was scared. She didn’t know when she’d become such a coward. She thought maybe it was the first time she’d taken the drugs Marty offered her.
It’ll make things easier
, he’d said. So not true.

The nurse returned with a tray of food that looked surprisingly appetizing. “I ordered one for you, too,” she said to Ransom, “even though you aren’t a patient here. You will be,” she scolded in a thicker accent, “if you do not get some rest.”

The woman looked between the two of them. Lola wondered if she knew their story, that she was a performer, and that this was her bodyguard, who was sometimes a jerk but also sometimes a rock for her to cling to. Maybe he could help her. He was pretty damn strong.

Ransom thanked the nurse as another woman entered with a tray. Both of them stared at him far longer than necessary before filing out. Lola thought she heard them giggling in the hall.

She couldn’t blame them. Ransom was hot, which was fucking hard to live with since she wasn’t getting any sex. She tried not to dwell on that as she took inventory of her tray. Chicken, gravy, roll, some kind of white substance that might be mashed potatoes or cauliflower. Apple slices and a pink soufflé thing for dessert.
I like your pink hair.
That meant a lot, coming from a guy so straitlaced he hardly ever took off his tie.

He sat back in the chair where he’d slept, and balanced his tray on his lap while she ate in her hospital bed. She wondered how much they were paying him to work with her. This was combat duty for sure, sleeping in a chair in a hospital room, and eating bland hospital food.

“I don’t want to be in any more hospitals,” she said.

He looked up at her, mid-bite. She could tell by the way he ate that he’d been really hungry, but he hadn’t left her to go get some food. He’d stayed with her instead so she wouldn’t wake up alone. He was her bodyguard, her protector. Maybe, a little bit, her friend. Crap, she was dissolving in tears again.

“It’s okay.” His firm, steady voice really made things seem okay. “No more hospitals. We’ll figure things out.”

Lightning

R
ansom opened the
ecstasy test kit and lined up the reagent bottles beside the white ceramic plate he’d borrowed from the hotel kitchen. They were lingering in Lyon, taking a couple days off before Paris. Lola was mostly better, but her brush with death still haunted him. He had nightmares about running with her to the medical tent, and woke in a cold sweat, gasping for breath.

They’d spent the last week or so getting her stronger, taking walks, eating healthier, getting more sleep. She was mostly cooperative. Her overdose had gone a long way to scaring her straight. But you never knew when someone might relapse, especially if they were stressed. Lola butted heads with the new manager daily. Belligerent, pushy Don was the opposite of laid-back Greg, and Ransom suspected MadDance had hired the prickly manager to put the screws to Lola.

Ransom tried to stay out of their spats, but it fell to him to calm her down afterward—and she couldn’t always be calmed. If she decided to buy drugs again in some rebellious fit, he wanted her to know how to test them for adulterants. He opened the ecstasy kit’s chemical indicator chart, a meticulously laid out rainbow of danger and death.

Lola glanced at the ladder of colored rectangles and crossed her eyes. He ignored that vote of non-confidence and pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and made her do the same. Then he used a knife to scrape some powder from the ecstasy tablet onto different quadrants of the plate.

“We don’t have to do this,” she said.

“Yes, we do. If you take ecstasy, you need to know how to test it.”

“I’m not going to take it anymore.”

“Anymore is a very long time, and I can’t be your watchdog forever,” he said, brushing the powder into separate sections.

“But—”

“Lola, please. I just want to know that you know how to do this.”

She relented, pressed her lips shut, and turned her attention back to the kit. He put the first reagent bottle in her hand.

“Okay, take off the cap and squeeze a single drop onto the first bit of powder. Don’t get any in your eyes, or on your skin.”

She wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell. “Jesus, what’s in this shit?”

Your safety
, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Caustic compounds. Sulfuric acid and other dangerous chemicals. Just be careful.”

He hovered over her as she dripped the various chemicals on the tiny hills of powder he’d created. There were six tests, because there were so many things they were adding to tablets these days.
Just be careful.

He needed her to stop being reckless and start being careful, because something had happened in the past few days. He’d stopped thinking of her as an irritating work duty and started thinking of her as more of a friend. He’d come to recognize not just her bad behaviors, but her internal struggles with the unrelenting pressure of fame.

As she fought to turn her life around in this three ring circus of a rave tour, he’d become more and more aware of her resilience and strength.

“Okay,” he said. “Show me how to read the test. Look at the colors of the powder. What do you see as far as adulterants?”

She sighed, glancing at the chart. “I told you, this is pointless. I’m not going to take drugs anymore. I’m done.”

“Show me,” he insisted.

Done, my ass. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her, which wasn’t very far, even with the positive strides she’d taken. A month and a half from now she’d be back in L.A. with her party posse, and he expected her to go crazy and do a bunch of stupid shit.

“This pill has caffeine mixed into it,” she finally said, poring over the indicator chart.

He nodded. “Most of them do. It’s a cheap stimulant, often mixed with amphetamines—and you remember what amphetamines do.”

She wouldn’t look at him. He wondered if she remembered that night as clearly as he did, if she remembered how fast her heart had hammered in her chest. “What else?” he asked.

She looked back at the chart. “Looks like there’s…pa-ra-cee… How the fuck do you pronounce this?”

“Paracetamol. It’s a painkiller.”

“They sure do put a lot of random shit in these pills.”

“Some of it more benign than others. A tablet mixed with PMA can kill you. Bath salts, ketamine, heroin, they’ve all been found in ecstasy tablets. One bad batch full of fentanyl, and dozens of people die. The truth is, you don’t know what you’re getting unless you do one of these tests.” He sounded like a cop giving the Just Say No talk to a bunch of sixth graders. Whatever. She needed it. “So, having done the tests, we understand that this pill’s not too bad. You could take this and not have too many problems.”

He looked at her and waited. She blinked at him.

“No, Ransom. I would never, ever consider taking that. Sooo unsafe, even if it’s relatively pure. Where’d you get it?”

“None of your business.”

He’d bummed it from someone in the groupie crowd outside the bus last night. Two guys and one girl had offered ecstasy to him in hopes their favorite DJ would get high off it. Ransom had accepted all three tablets even though he only needed one. Did he think taking three measly pills out of circulation would do anything about EDM’s rampant drug culture?

Sadly, no.

He capped the test reagents, then went to the bathroom to wash the tablet and powder down the drain. By the time he returned, Lola was curled up in a pile of pillows, strumming through a series of chords. She hadn’t offered him any more lessons since the bus ride to Amsterdam, but he’d come to enjoy her impromptu concerts. As it turned out, she’d written a lot of songs, some of which she played for him, quietly, like secrets.

He understood why she kept them a secret. If her sweet, folksy emo songs ever got out, they would mortally wound her dance cred. Her guitar tunes had no beats, no rolls, no drops, nor were they very much like the heavy blues her father played.

Ransom had searched
Mo Reynolds
online and watched a few videos of concert footage from crowded Memphis clubs. In one of them, he’d seen little Lola Mae sitting off to one side, knobby knees resting against the side of a speaker. She’d been about seven years old in the video, nodding her head to the thumping cadences of southern blues. He hadn’t been sure it was her until the little blonde smiled. That impish grin had barely changed in the ensuing years.

No, her music was nothing like her dad’s, even if she’d watched him play back then with worshipful eyes. A couple minutes in, Ransom had closed out the video, feeling like a stalker. He’d only searched “Mo Reynolds blues” because of his fascination with Lola, and that was inappropriate because she was a client, and almost two decades younger than him.

He took off his tie and sat back on the bed to rest his mind before they headed out to dinner.
Grandpa needs a nap.
Between the two of them, he was more fit, but she had boundless energy and amazing creativity. She never did her hair the same twice. She wore outfits that both puzzled and attracted him. Then there were the wistful tunes she played on her guitar.

“Are you going to sleep?” she asked, switching to a lullaby.

“No.”

“Your eyes are closed.”

He sighed. “I’m not going to sleep.” He never slept unless she slept, and she only slept at night. He didn’t trust her to be awake and on her own, even trapped in the room with the door alarm.

He cracked an eye open as she began to sing in a soft, sweet voice.
“Lullaby, and good night, go to sleep Mr. Ransom. Lullaby, and good night, time for bodyguards to sleep.”

“I’m not sleeping,” he muttered.

She ignored him, continuing her made-up song.
“I won’t take off your clothes. Or at least I’ll try not to. I’ll protect you from harm…”
She thought a moment.
“As I stare at your arms.
Hmm, that’s kind of tame. Oh, I know!” She started the phrase over.
“I’ll protect you from shock, as I stare at your co—”

“Lola.” His sharp voice brought a high-pitched spate of giggles. He wanted to be irritated by those giggles, but the sound of her laughter aroused him just like everything else.
No, man. No. Get over it.

He knew he wouldn’t feel so drawn to her if she wasn’t always flirting with him. She had no clue about couth and professional relationships, or maybe she just didn’t care. He wished he didn’t have to care. He wished he could act out the fantasies churning in his brain, but he knew he’d end up hurting her. For all her sexual bravado, she was an emotionally fragile, frequently tearful twenty year old who probably had no idea what a real man could do in bed.

Not that it was his job to teach her.

Sometimes being the older, more responsible one sucked.

He braced as she started a new verse.
“Lullaby, my sweet knight, with your five o’clock shadow. Such a handsome face to lick, how I’d love to suck your—”

“Seriously, stop it. That’s crass. Why are you singing lullabies anyway? It’s light outside. We’re going to dinner soon.”

She grinned. The more he tried to be the distant, professional bodyguard, the more she poked at his growing frustration. “I like lullabies, Ransom. And you like to listen to me sing. You said my voice was pretty.”

“It is pretty, when you’re not singing profane lyrics.” He turned to her with his head on his hand. “You shouldn’t come onto me. Don’t you understand how inappropriate it is?”