Page 20 of The Bodyguard
The other nice perk to my cleaning lady was she loved to cook and she said I was too skinny for a man. She’d made it her mission in life to fatten me up. While I didn’t think it was possible, if she wanted to indulge me with some of the finest homemade Mexican food this side of the border, I wasn’t going to object.
As I made my way into the living room I turned on the TV, anticipating the basketball game that was going to be on tonight. The sixty-inch wide-screen TV was one of the improvements I had made to the place when my parents gave me the ranch.
Surround sound, big picture. It was a TV system for a man.
I blinked when, instead of sporting news, I was watching a beautiful woman fill up the television.
A beautiful woman I knew.
“Sabrina. What I have in this box is going to scare you so much you’re going to scream.”
It was Brin in her LA house with some friends who had come over. It wasn’t like I actively watchedCowboy Princess, but I wasn’t necessarily oblivious to it, either. Juanita liked her reality shows on the tube when she came over to clean.
I watched as Brin poured the two women champagne. That seemed like a constant theme on the program. They were always, all the time, drinking champagne. One woman put a box on the granite kitchen counter of Sabrina’s swanky LA digs.
“Open it! You have to.”
Clearly buying into the gag, Brin scrunched up her nose. Something she’d done even as a kid. She popped the lid off the box and pulled out a shoe.
Seemed like a normal shoe to me, but the look on her face was pure horror.
“What is this?”
“They’re from the discount rack!”
At which point, she dropped the shoe like it was suddenly burning her hands and ran from the room while her friends laughed hysterically at their own joke.
I got plenty of my shoes off the discount rack.
I was about to change the channel when something scrolling along the bottom of the screen caught my attention. A breaking news tag announced that Sabrina King was leaving LA to escape the threat of a Hollywood stalker.
I snorted. “Yeah. Right.” I knew how Sabrina loved her stunts. No doubt this one was an attempt to get the ratings up on her show. Although, if you asked Juanita (I may have asked her once),Cowboy Princesswas already pretty popular.
On-screen, Brin poked her head around a wall into the kitchen, her face the picture of fear.
“Are they gone? Did you put them away? Is it safe to come back? Because if it isn’t, someone is going to have to bring my champagne to me.”
I smiled. She really was a goofball.
I shouldn’t have been so harsh with her that one time…
Stop!
I put the mental brakes on those thoughts. Because those thoughts led back to Betty, and that place only made me an angry asshole.
I had been an angry asshole for too long.
Unable to look away, I stood there and continued to watch her for a bit. She was still beautiful, but thinner than I remembered from five years ago. Almost frail. Like a stiff breeze could carry her away. I thought someone around her should tell her to eat a damn cheeseburger instead of drinking all that champagne.
I didn’t know why I was thinking about her at all.
Didn’t she fall into the category of women who had lied to me?
And I hated that category. So much so that I hadn’t let a woman into my life other than for a quick fuck. Fuck ’em and forget ’em was my official motto.
Which I suppose made me acynicalangry asshole, but I had earned the title the hard way.
Suddenly pissed that I was even thinking about Sabrina, or women in general, I changed the channel to sports and felt a sense of relief.
Which brought with it a little bit of sadness, too. Maybe I was never going to recover from what Betty did to me.
