Page 19 of My Bodyguard’s The Boss

“I’ll see you in thirty,” Dominic said.

It wasn’t a yes, Austin, I’ll be around all the time and make sure you never go to bed lonely. But it also wasn’t a no. Austin would take it.

After emerging from a steaming hot shower and throwing on some clothes he refused to think too hard about, Austin headed out onto the balcony to call Levi.

Levi answered either straight away or three days later. Today was a straight-away situation.

“Hello, hi, what’s up?” Levi droned as he appeared onscreen. He had giant sunglasses and a drink in his hand, looking every inch the twenty-five-year-old model who only had to work on runways.

Austin was about to joke about it being a little early for a drink, then he stopped.

There was a beach behind Levi. The sun was at a different place in the sky than the morning sun above Austin. Wherever Levi was, they were in very different time zones.

“Where are you?” Austin asked. “I thought you were in New York for a shoot.”

“I was,” Levi said. “Now I’m in Barcelona! What’s up? Since when do we call without texting first?”

“We do sometimes,” Austin argued, leaning on the balcony and staring out at the trees bordering the back of his property. He didn’t like them, but it was either that or have paparazzi taking photos of his bedroom window through the fence.

“When something big happens,” Levi said. He took a sip of his drink, then made a face. “Ew. Pineapple. So, what happened?”

Austin had been trying to think of a way to say it that wouldn’t make Levi laugh at him. He still had nothing.

“So, you know my hot bodyguard?” he began.

“Boss bodyguard,” Levi agreed. “Sure. You finally talked him into it?”

“I didn’t talk him into anything,” Austin protested, the back of his neck suddenly hot. “We slept together.”

To his surprise, Levi didn’t laugh yet. He just tilted his drink toward Austin in congratulations.

“Nice, cool, great,” he said distractedly, eyes on something beyond the phone. “How was it?”

“Uh, good. Really good.” Austin scratched the rapidly heating back of his neck, wondering how much he should say. They were a pretty open family, but Levi didn’t know details. Except for one or two things Austin might have hinted at when he was drunk, but that was neither here nor there.

“Why do you look weird about that?” Levi asked, muffled by the chunk of ice he was crunching, because he was a freak who ate ice out of his drinks. “Are you having feelings?”

“Fuck off,” Austin told him. “I’m not going to fall for my bodyguard. I’m not an idiot.”

“I don’t know, man,” Levi said, still crunching. “Every time you talk about him— Hey, should you be talking about this here?”

“What?” Austin looked around the balcony. “It’s my house.”

“It’s your balcony,” Levi corrected. “Thought you stopped talking about shit out here since you caught that paparazzi climbing the tree.”

“Dominic took care of that,” Austin said, scanning the trees anyway. “They’re too intimidated to try it again.”

“Paparazzi can’t be intimidated,” Levi said darkly. “They have money where a fear response should be. And a heart.”

The doorbell rang.

“I gotta go,” Austin told his brother. “Talk later.”

“Cool, bye, see ya,” said Levi, still crunching his ice, looking the kind of unbothered that could only be achieved by a twenty-something model who could afford to go to Barcelona on a whim.

Austin shoved his phone in his pocket and headed for the front door, heart in his throat as he wondered what the hell Dominic was going to make him wear after breakfast.

CHAPTER 6