BODY GUARD
Auctioning your sister off so the winner could figure out how to get her across the country for your son’s birthday was beyond reckless. Melisande Bisset was used to Ana going a little overboard, but her newest scheme was way out there. Only she might’ve been onto something because a smoking hot security expert with a pilot’s license came to the rescue.
Devon Miller had seen too much during his years in the military to let the gorgeous graduate fend for herself. Except someone else already has their eye on Mel. For the first time ever, Devon’s reasons for protecting someone were personal instead of professional. Now that he’s claimed Mel as his own, nobody was going to take her away from him.
1
MELISANDE
My eyes were puffy as I lifted my head and squinted at the screen of my cell phone. After being pulled from a deep sleep by a text alert from the airline before the sun was anywhere close to coming up, I wanted nothing more than to climb back into bed and pull the covers over my head. But the cancellation of my flight tomorrow morning couldn’t be ignored, and neither could this call from my sister. I stabbed my finger at the green button and sighed, “The best the freaking airline can do is a flight that gets in a full day late.”
“No worries,” Ana chirped. “Are you near a computer? I’ve come up with the perfect solution.”
Driving wasn’t an option because even if I managed to stay awake for thirty-plus hours straight, I still wouldn’t make it on time. A train would take too long and booking a last-minute ticket with another airline was beyond the balance of my checking account. Since my sister and brother-in-law were still paying off my nephew’s medical bills, they couldn’t afford it either. I highly doubted there was an answer to my travel problems, let alone a perfect one. But there was always anoutside chance that my sister had stumbled on a miracle. Pulling up a new browser window, I asked, “What am I looking for?”
Ana rattled off a lengthy website address, and my jaw dropped when I realized what I was looking at. “You can’t put me up for sale on an auction site. It doesn’t work like that.”
“Show’s what you know,” my sister muttered.
“Wait. Hold up,” I hissed as I scrolled down the page and saw the “bid” button. “Is this thing live already?”
“Yup! Jeff helped me set everything up since he already had an account on the site, and showing it to you before I submitted it would’ve been a pain in the butt because you would have had to log in as him,” she explained.
I banged my head against the top of my kitchen table and groaned, “He was cool with you selling me on the internet?”
“Nah,” she laughed. “He thought my idea was ridiculous but figured it wouldn’t hurt anything.”
I rolled my eyes, picturing how that conversation had gone. “And he hates to tell you no.”
“Yeah, that probably had something to do with it, too,” she conceded.
“But seriously, this is a bad idea,” I muttered as I read through the description she’d included on the listing. “Who in their right mind is going to pay for the privilege to be my knight in shining armor?”
“It had better be someone who owns a private jet, or else I’m disqualifying them and moving on to the next bidder.” She was acting as if it was the most normal thing in the world to think that multiple rich people were going to vie for the right to pay her to let me use their jet to fly across the country tomorrow morning.
“I looked up a charter flight to see how expensive it would be, and the lowest estimate I got was more than thirty thousand dollars.” I’d known it would be an exercise in futility since Icouldn’t even afford to buy a ticket on a last-minute commercial flight, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I hadn’t been willing to rule anything out without doing the research first.
I could practically hear Ana shrug her shoulders through the phone. “Wealthy people spend their money on silly stuff all the time. Maybe there’s a humanitarian out there with lots of cash to burn who will see the news story and decide that you’re the perfect good deed to perform this week.”
“What news story?” I shrieked as I frantically typed my name into a search engine on another tab.
“Since we’re under a time crunch, I figured we needed help to get the word out about the auction. If I hadn’t, then your knight in shining armor wouldn’t be able to get you here in time.” Her tone—which sounded awfully similar to the one she used when she lectured her son—made it obvious that she was telling me something she thought I should already know. “So, I went next door and talked to my neighbor who works at the local news station. She thought it was an awesome human-interest story, and the producer for their morning segment agreed.”
“Please tell me you didn’t give an interview about selling me to some random stranger on the internet,” I begged, scrubbing my hand over my face.
“Not yet.” I heaved a deep sigh of relief, thinking that I still had time to stop her before this whole thing got way out of hand. But Ana proved me wrong when she added, “They just finished my hair and makeup. The reporter is waiting for me in the living room, and we’re on in ten minutes.”
I squinted at the time on the upper right corner of my laptop screen. With the two-hour time difference, Ana should just be waking up. “It’s still the ass crack of dawn in Portland. How have you already set this whole thing up and gotten a news team out to your house?”
“When I woke up to pee in the wee hours of the morning, I saw your text about the flight being cancelled. What was I supposed to do; just go back to sleep?” she scoffed.
I’d wanted to give her a heads-up as soon as possible just in case I wasn’t able to come up with a solution. It had felt like the right thing to do at the time, but now I regretted my decision. “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“It’s better than good. It’s freaking brilliant.” I was about to argue with her about it some more when I heard a feminine voice in the background. Then Ana whispered, “Sorry, sis. I have to run. They’re ready for me.”
The call disconnected, and I stared at my computer screen without really seeing anything for a good amount of time before several texts came through, all in a row. Glancing down at my phone, I wasn’t surprised to see they were from my sister.
Ana:Keep an eye on the bids!
