Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 57423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 287(@200wpm)___ 230(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57423 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 287(@200wpm)___ 230(@250wpm)___ 191(@300wpm)
“Fine.” Wade frowned at him. “If you’re going into the job and you don’t care if the client lives or dies, you’re not the man for this.”
He sighed. “I didn’t say that. I said I don’t want to deal with another Princess Amelia with the octopus hands. She’s not the only one. I hate it when the client is awful to the people around them. They act like the rest of the world is nothing but staff, and the staff is so far beneath them they aren’t human.”
“I get it.” His brother’s expression had turned sympathetic. “We all want to be treated with some dignity. If you’d told me about the princess, I would have reassigned you. I would have put Tessa on her, and if she comes back, that’s what I’ll do. No one at this company wants to set you up for sexual harassment.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want to complain.”
“But you complain so well and so often,” his brother countered, a ghost of a smile on his face. “Come on, West. This isn’t a terrible assignment. She’ll probably ignore you most of the time. She’s here to work. She’s going to be rehearsing for a week or two, and then they’re shooting around the city. I think they’ve got a lot of time in a studio here, too. You can sit there and read or play on your tablet when she’s working. You would be her twenty-four seven guard for most of the week, and I’ll rotate in two other guards to make sure you have time off. If that’s too much, I’ll think about splitting it further.”
Whoa. Twenty-four seven for three months? It was insane because none of the married agents could do it. Most of the singles wouldn’t want the assignment either. He would get maybe two days a week off, and he would be on all the rest of the time. “How much?”
McKay-Taggart paid overtime for anything beyond forty hours, and they also had hefty per diems.
A brow rose over his brother’s eyes. “You really didn’t read it?”
He had to explain this away because now he saw the upside. “Look, you remember when I was going out with Rhonda?”
“The one who kept trying to get you to propose and take her away to the big city?” Wade snorted slightly. “She thought the big city was Harlingen.”
“Oh, she wanted to move to LA so she could be like her girl crush.” West pointed to the folder. “Ally Pearson. Have you ever had to watch that show? It’s mind-numbingly boring, and those people are so full of themselves. All they do is party and spend money like it’s water. I had this whole family thrown at me for a year and a half.”
“You could have walked away,” Wade pointed out.
He didn’t understand how hard the dating scene was in Broken Bend. There wasn’t a lot to do but work and hang out. “I liked her otherwise. But that show put all kinds of notions in her head. She wanted to be an actress, thought I was holding her back when I didn’t support her dreams. It got to be too much.”
“I find it ironic that you’re here in Dallas while she’s back in Broken Bend,” Wade pointed out.
“She went to LA for a while. She came back with an infant and not much else.” It was a sad story because it was one that happened a lot to people in Broken Bend. “She’s living with her momma again and working at the diner.”
Where she would probably be for the rest of her life.
“You do know that’s not Ally Pearson’s fault, right?” Wade asked. “She didn’t make Rhonda’s choices for her. She’s an actress playing a part.”
The part was her life. Reality TV blurred a lot of lines, but he did believe in personal responsibility. “I just wished Rhonda had been obsessed with someone else.”
“Well, now someone else is obsessed with Ally Pearson, and not in a fangirl way.” Wade tapped the folder. “Read it if you want to consider the assignment because she has a serious stalker. And the job estimate is over a hundred thousand. Her parents are paying the bill. Your part of that would easily be fifty K.”
Fifty thousand dollars. Between that and what he had saved up, he could get his own place. It was past time for him to move out of the condo he and his twin had bought when they’d come to Dallas. “All right. I’ll do it.”
It was probably a mistake, but it would be a mistake that paid.
Chapter One
“Ms. Pearson, am I boring you?”
She forced herself to look up from her phone and directly at the big guy who seemed to be the boss of this particular company. He was big and broad and totally gorgeous. “Oh, yes.”
The hot guy at the end of the table snorted and started to laugh but quickly covered it up when the hot dude beside him sent him a death stare. It was a good death stare, as those went. She believed it.