Home > Fall into Me(9)

Fall into Me(9)
Author: Mila Gray

I take a deep breath, but in this dress it’s impossible to breathe properly, and my head starts to spin. I want to put my head between my knees, but I can’t really bend, either, due to how tight it is. I have to comfort myself with leaning forward, tapping Will on the shoulder, and asking him to turn up the AC.

He complies without a word.

“New bodyguard?” Natalie asks in a loud whisper, poking me in the ribs until I’m forced to tune back in. She nods toward Will. “What’s his name?”

I shrug. “I don’t know.”

“I hope he sticks around longer than the last one,” she whispers.

“I hope he doesn’t,” I mutter. I’m already planning on acting the diva so he quits, like the last guy did.

Will turns his head then, just a fraction, giving me a glimpse of his profile. Did he hear? He turns again to face forward. He isn’t hot. What are Natalie and Carla thinking?

 

 

WILL


I can hear Luna and her friend with the red hair whispering in the back of the limo, but I tune it out. My phone buzzes and I glance at the screen. It’s Dahlia, asking about the tux. After Mrs. Rivera told me I needed one for tonight, I called the only person who I thought might have an idea where I could get one on such late notice. She hooked me up with a stylist friend of hers, who lent me one for the evening. I feel like a penguin in it and it’s too tight in the shoulders, but that’s okay. I don’t think anyone is going to be looking at me. It’s safe to say all eyes will be on Luna tonight.

I text Dahlia, then stick my phone back in my pocket and concentrate. As we pull out through the gates, I check for any cars lurking on the street that might be following, and what do you know, a white truck parked a block down switches on its headlights and pulls out behind us. It follows us all the way down the canyon and onto Hollywood Boulevard.

I wonder if it’s a fan or if it’s the person who’s making the threats against Luna. I turn to the driver, a guy in his fifties, and tell him to take the next right. He’s in the left-hand lane, and he looks at me with a frown.

“What?” he asks.

“Take a right. Just do it,” I tell him.

His gaze falls to my holster, which I know is visible, thanks to the tightness of the jacket, and then he obeys, swinging across lanes and making Luna and her friend let out shrieks of alarm. When I turn around, Luna is staring right at me, eyes narrowed.

“What’s going on?” she demands.

“Detour,” I tell her, looking in the side mirrors to see if the white truck that was following us is still on our tail. It is. It jumps the red light to follow us.

“That’s Donny,” Luna says, sighing.

“Excuse me?” I say, eyes still on the mirror.

“He’s a photographer.”

I glance her way. She jerks her head out the window toward the truck behind us. “It’s Donny, behind us in the white truck,” she says.

She knew we were being followed?

“So if you’re done with the Fast and Furious driving tactics,” she snarks, “can we get to where we’re meant to be going? I’m already late.”

Face burning, I turn to the driver and offer him an apologetic shrug. He purses his lips and sighs, taking the next right to bring us full circle back to where we were. There are giggles from the back seat.

“Donny’s always following Luna,” the girl with the red hair says. “We joke that she pays all his bills.”

I shake my head, confused.

The girl smiles at me. “He’s a paparazzo,” she explains. “A photo of Luna can earn him five hundred dollars. He sells them to magazines, newspapers, gossip sites.”

I shake my head at the weirdness of a stranger following you around taking pictures of you with a zoom lens and the even greater weirdness that people pay that much money for a photo of Luna, or of anyone.

“I can speak to him if you like,” I say, looking over at Luna. “Make him stop.”

“No,” she answers, without even looking in my direction. “It’s fine.”

I guess she likes the attention. I glance at the red-haired girl, who smiles at me some more and gives me the eye. She’s not shy about it either. She’s pretty, with sharp cheekbones and wide-set brown eyes. I smile back at her, then turn to glance once again in the side mirrors. There’s Donny right behind us in his white truck, still on our tail.

My phone buzzes again. This time it’s my sixteen-year-old sister, Kate, who’s found out about my new job and is now harassing me for insider intel. She’s already sent a dozen texts demanding gossip. I ignore this one just like I ignored all the others. I’ll call her tomorrow when I have some downtime. If I have any downtime. I’ve been told I’m on call 24/7. Wherever Luna goes, I go. I’m not to let her out of my sight whenever we’re in public.

When we arrive at the award ceremony, I’m momentarily thrown. There’s an actual red carpet and hundreds of people crowding the sidewalk, held back behind metal railings. As we pull up in front of the theater, I’m half-blinded by flashes going off and wish I’d had more time to prepare a plan. I only had thirty minutes to go over the location’s blueprints and to map the exits in my head, and I had no idea there would be this level of pandemonium outside. There must be over five hundred people in the crowd.

Before I can get out of the car and assess for threats, I hear the back door of the limo opening. I leap out and find Luna already stepping out. A man in a suit, wearing an earpiece, is about to open the door for her. I push in front of him.

“I’ve got this,” I tell him.

He steps aside and I block Luna’s exit from the car with my body. I scan the crowd quickly, my eyes skipping over faces. I don’t know who I’m looking for, or what, but I’m trained in VIP protection and it’s the first thing we do before we allow the person we’re protecting into a public space. We assess the situation for danger. Right now I’m scouring the faces in the crowd, memorizing them, looking for things out of the ordinary. Given the threats made against her, ideally I’d have wanted her to enter via a private back door or side entrance, away from the crowds, but when I mentioned it to Marty earlier, he dismissed the idea with a snort, saying something about not wasting a good PR opportunity.

A middle-aged man in the crowd stands out like a sore thumb and immediately grabs my attention. He’s the only man among a sea of screaming teenage girls. But then I see he’s holding hands with two young girls and that he looks pretty bored, and I figure he’s probably their dad, accompanying his daughters here against his will.

I’m knocked back a step as the car door smashes into me. Luna, tired of waiting for me to open it, has shoved all her weight against it. She gives me a death stare as she steps out, but then she turns toward the crowd and the glare is gone. In its place is a megawatt smile. Luna waves, and the screaming from the sea of teenage girls gets louder.

As she walks forward onto the red carpet, ushered by a woman in a cocktail dress who is holding an iPad, I start to follow, at a distance to give her space but staying close enough to reach her if I need to.

Luna poses in front of a cluster of photographers, hand on hip, her chin raised and tilted slightly. She’s smiling and laughing and acting like she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world but right there in front of them, having her photo taken. The transformation from the sulky girl in the back of the limo is so extreme that I am mesmerized by it, by her. She comes alive under the lights, her skin glittering like she’s made of diamonds, but it’s more than the makeup doing it. She seems to glow from the inside, and it’s hard to pull my eyes away in order to do my job. For the first time in my life I understand the meaning of the phrase “star power.” Whatever it is, Luna has it in spades.

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