Page 27 of Israel

Chapter 12

Ashley stood in the back of the bus, shaking with anger and frustration.

They were going to do it. They were going to shut down the tour. Once again, a roomful of men who thought they knew everything were going to decide her fate. And there wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Why, oh why couldn’t she be calm and dignified and authoritative, like her Aunt Genevieve? Genevieve could send men scrambling and stuttering with a single raised eyebrow.

Ashley could only do that with a sailor mouth and rude gestures. Her anger always came out like a tantrum.

She knew Harrison and the others were all working on her behalf. She just hated getting shunted aside, everyone making decisions without ever talking to her. The men in her family were still ruling her from afar, assigning other men like Harrison and Israel to be their proxies.

Even screw-ups like the Malsueños got more respect from her family than she did, just because they had penises. It made her crazy.

She heard footsteps, and then Israel appeared in the doorway.

“Well?” she snapped. “What do you want?”

He leaned against the wall, his arms folded, but his eyes were uncertain.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

The question was so unexpected it stunned her. “I—what do you mean?”

His gaze on her was level and serious. “I’m your…bodyguard,” he said. “I’m supposed to take care of you, not just bark orders at people and drag you from place to place. This has been a hell of a fucked-up night, not to mention the scare I gave you this morning. So, how can I help you? What do you need?”

She sank down on the sofa, not knowing what to say. Nobody ever asked her that. Oh, they fetched and fussed and gave her the little things she demanded, but she knew Israel wasn’t talking about that.

He wanted to know what she really needed.

And she wasn’t even sure she knew.

“What I really need right now is a drink,” she said. “And in a perfect world, not to have to spend the night in a sardine can full of people whispering and speculating and feeling sorry for me.”

“Got the second one covered,” he said. “I kicked them all out.”

No way. She turned on him. “You what? You can’t do that. They sleep here.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t care. They were going to make you more upset, so I booted them. Except the driver—and Trevor, because I want to make sure there’s more security besides me, and Harrison trusts him completely.”

Ashley still couldn’t believe it. “How is everybody going to get to the next venue?”

He shrugged. “That’s Harrison’s problem.”

“Enzo and Carlos and Julio are going to be so pissed.”

Israel snorted. “Cry me a river. They don’t scare me.”

Which said a lot. There were very few people outside Ashley’s family who didn’t have a healthy respect for the Malsueño brothers. They acted like goofballs most of the time, but the literal translation of “mal sueño” was “nightmare.” They could be scary as hell when they wanted to be.

It was why Ashley’s family had entrusted her to them.

Which took her back to the fact that roomfuls of dick-waggers were still deciding her fate.

“So what did you and Harrison and everybody with a penis decide was going to happen to my tour?” she asked, with more than a touch of snark in her voice.

Israel was in the hall just outside the door now, rummaging in his luggage. He came back with a bottle of whiskey and held it up. “Does this work?” he asked.

Forget about his penis. He’d just been promoted to her best friend.