Diva (Ironclad Bodyguards Book 2) (9 page)

“It’s Amsterdam,” her manager said, waving his hands like there were still beats. “Everyone’s high here. She played the set of the century. Didn’t you see?”

Oh, yeah, Ransom had seen it. She’d been pure joy, pure genius. Pure ecstasy. He’d thought she was sober. He’d been so fucking impressed with her performance until he realized she was chemically altered.

He’d fallen in love with her a little as she reigned over that massive crowd and spun a seamless set of pounding melodies. He hated this electronic shit, but even he had to admit the set was inspired. She’d inspired him, and then she’d devastated him because after all his efforts to reform her, his client was high again. He had to figure out how, and why, and keep it from happening again. He’d only left her alone for the sound check, entrusting her to Greg’s supervision.

He scowled at her tripping manager. Lesson learned.

Now she was clinging to him, a quivering bundle of sexualized nerve endings riding a chemical high. She reached down again to fondle him. The worst thing was, his body responded to her. It responded to her energy and boldness. It responded to Lady Paradise, who’d stood on that stage and made the world a million different sounds and colors.

“Stop that,” he said, pushing her hand away from his thickening cock.

“I love you. I want you to fuck me.”

“I know you want me to fuck you, but I didn’t give you permission to touch me that way.”

She didn’t seem to care. He patted her down at the same time she groped his body. He found what he was searching for in her left zippered pocket. He removed the bag of ecstasy tablets and held it out of her reach when she started grabbing for it. She climbed him like a junkie and he let her fall when she lost her grip on him. Greg laughed while Lola wailed, and then she laughed too. “Oh, fuck,” she giggled, clutching her chest. “My heart. Jesus.” Her features tensed, then she burst into laughter again.

Ransom stood over her, watching her. “What do you mean, your heart?”

“I love you,” she said. “I love you, bodyguard.”

He knelt beside her and tried to take her pulse, but she squirmed and reached for him again. “Stay down,” he ordered, in a voice harsh enough to subdue her even though she was high.

She lay back and watched him, winding her fingers through her wrecked hair. Her pulse rate was alarmingly high. He put a hand over her chest, over her skimpy bikini top, and felt her heart pumping faster than any of the beats she’d played.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

She gazed up at him through dilated eyes. “I love you.”

“Besides loving me, how do you feel? Lola, this is serious. Answer me.”

She put her hand on top of his. “My chest hurts. It burns.”

“Stay there, okay? Don’t move.” He turned to Greg. “Help me out, man. Keep her still.”

Greg got down on the floor beside her, his eyes as dark and dilated as Lola’s. Ransom muttered a curse and dug an ecstasy test kit out of the first aid bag. The tests were as ubiquitous as the drugs at these festivals. They helped identify if the tablets exchanging hands were pure and safe, or adulterated with hazardous shit like meth, BZP, or fentanyl. While Lola and Greg stared at each other and made fucked up conversation, Ransom crushed one of the tablets and added the reagents.

Shit, shit, shit.
The test lit up hard for mCPP and amphetamines. He looked over at his client. Greg was still talking but Lola had gone silent.

“You okay?” he asked. She looked so fragile. She reached out to him with trembling fingers.

He knelt next to her and propped her against his side. Greg was still talking to himself, soft, gentle babbling as he caressed his own face.

“How’s your breathing?” Ransom asked.

She tried to lick him again. “You’re beautiful.”

“Fuck. Come down. Come the fuck down. How much did you fucking take?” He tapped her face as she zoned out. “How many tablets did you take, Lola?”

Her eyes darted around, seeing nothing. She wasn’t there anymore. She was somewhere else, probably thanks to the mCPP, which caused hallucinatory trips. The meth was wreaking havoc with her heart rate, and she was too small to metabolize it the way an adult male might.

“Lola Mae,” he said, shaking her. “Stay here. Come back to me.”

“Don’t.” She trembled in his grip. “I’m tired. It burns.”

He put a finger on her neck and started counting. 180 beats per minute. 200. 220. She was too small. The veins stood out in her neck as she sucked in air.

“Greg.” He kicked her useless tour manager. “Greg, go get the medics.”

He giggled and turned over. Useless.

“Greg. Fucker. Wake the fuck up.” He kicked him harder. Nothing. He picked up Lola and carried her to the door. The bus driver stood outside, smoking a cigarette.

“Are you high?” he asked.

He was an older man. He had a kind face. “I’m not high,” he said, flicking down his cigarette. He glanced at Lola. “Need something?”

“I need medical help, as quickly as possible.”

“The medical station’s right over there,” he said, gesturing to a tent about five hundred yards away.

“Help me get there. Please. Help me make my way through this crowd. It’s an emergency.”

The man nodded and set off with him toward the tent, nudging a path through the sparkling, flashing festival goers who pointed and squealed as Lady Paradise went by.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Ransom pressed Lola to his chest to make sure she was still breathing. “It’s going to be okay,” he told her. “You have bad stuff in your system, but it’s only temporary.”

“I can’t… I can’t…”

“Don’t panic. Slow breaths.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, shuddering, panting against his neck. She was probably on a scary trip above and beyond the physical suffering. Part of him thought,
well, she deserves it.
Part of him thought,
don’t die.
He pulled her closer, rubbing her back as they neared the red and white tent.

“Breathe with me, Lola Mae.” He moved his hand up and down her spine like that might stop her heart’s dangerous acceleration. “Take deep breaths, in and out.”

“I can’t,” she gasped, a broken whisper. “I can’t feel my brain. I took—I took three.”

“When?”

“And a half.”

“Jesus Christ. When?”

“Just—Before—Help.”

He closed his eyes and rested his head against her soft pink hair, and prayed. Three and a half shitty, amphetamine-laced pills. She was a brat, but he didn’t want her to die. He knew CPR. He could keep her alive if her heart stopped, but what if they couldn’t start it again?

When he jostled her to keep her awake, she started babbling about drowning, flailing at the slack mouthed ravers they passed. He tried to keep her from hurting anyone. Whatever she’d ingested had sent her into chemical, mental breakdown.

“Breathe,” he said. “Breathe with me. You’re gonna be okay.”

The medics looked up as they barged into the tent. The bus driver explained the situation as Ransom soothed Lola through another flailing panic. They waved him through the back, to a waiting ambulance with open doors.

“I can’t breathe,” she sobbed as the medics climbed in behind them. “Can’t… Drowning… Scared… Stay…”

“I’m here.”

They had to strap her down on the gurney, and even then she kept trying to reach for him.

“H-help m-me.”

I’m trying. I’m trying to help but you fucked up this time.
He told the EMTs what he knew about the drugs, and when she’d taken them. In the back of his mind, he kept thinking,
I threw away the tablets Marty got her.
Marty was an asshole, but he would have known enough to test the drugs he bought for her. Lola, on the other hand, must have bought from the first dealer she could find, and taken the shit without testing it first. His fault for letting her out of his sight. His fault for underestimating her craziness.

His fault for taking away her safe pills.

“Deep breaths,” he said as they struggled to start an IV in her jerking arm. He kept repeating it, like he could fix what was wrong with her. “Deep breaths, kid. Come on. Please.”

“Can’t…”

“You have to. Stay calm. Breathe in, breathe out.”

“Just wanted…fun…”

She went limp and passed out, panting even in unconsciousness. The medics said something to each other in Dutch, and Ransom didn’t ask for a translation. You could tell, in just about any language, when something wasn’t good.

The Money

“I
llegal drugs,” said
Mr. Fuckhead, CEO of MadDance Fucking Incorporated. “This is exactly what we were afraid of.”

Ransom bit his tongue rather than point out that their entire rave business was built on the backs of illegal drugs.

The MadDance contingent consisted of Mr. Fuckhead and Mr. Asshole, both of them gray-haired businessmen who cared more about money than the human being they discussed. It made Ransom furious.

His boss at Ironclad, Liam Wilder, leaned forward to address Fuckhead and Asshole in a polite but firm voice.

“I’d like to reiterate that it was
your
tour manager who enabled Miss Reynolds this time. My agent left her under Greg Plume’s supervision, and that was when she procured the adulterated drugs.”

Liam was in a suit like them, but he didn’t have gray hair, and he wasn’t an asshole. Unlike the other suits, he’d actually visited Lola’s hospital bed and gazed down at her sleeping figure with true concern in his eyes.

As for Greg, he was gone. The manager’s firing had been the first order of business. The rest of the “team” was huddled in a lounge down the hall from Lola’s hospital room.

The taller man, Fuckhead, frowned down at the paperwork in front of him. “You must understand our concern. We hired Mr. Gutierrez because you said he was the best. We hired him to keep our performer sober.”

“You also hired Greg Plume,” countered Liam. “If not for Mr. Gutierrez’s presence—and his sobriety—Lola might have died last night.”

Ransom suppressed a shudder. It had been so close. He’d seen death in her heaving chest and pained features. Her pulse had raced into the mid 200s. If she’d gone into cardiac arrest, he wasn’t sure they would have been able to bring her back.

He’d paced outside her room for the last twelve hours, unable to sleep, unable to regroup. The MadDance jerkoffs had filed a complaint with Ironclad, and the CEO had flown in from London to assist him with the situation. Ransom was both horrified and relieved when Liam showed up. He was horrified because Liam Wilder was the big fucking boss, and he was here to clean up Ransom’s mess. He was relieved because he couldn’t have dealt with these assholes himself.

“Do you deny that my agent saved Lola’s life last night?” asked Liam.

Fuckhead and Asshole exchanged a look. “He may have saved her life, but we’re not impressed with his ability to keep her sober.”

“I left her with the manager,” Ransom said. That was his mistake, one that would haunt him.

“Mr. Gutierrez is one of the top agents in the world for this type of protection,” Liam said to the gray-hairs. “I’d consider long and hard before I replaced him with someone else. I don’t have anyone better.”

And Ironclad was the best security company on the planet. The math added up, but Ransom had failed. Why? Because Lola was a reckless, brainless brat? Or because he’d been distracted by an unprofessional fascination with his client? That was the root of his mental anguish. From the moment he’d seen her twerking on top of that sound console in Brussels, he’d entertained inappropriate thoughts.

He’d fantasized about what it might be like to grasp that ass in his hands and fuck her. He wanted to throw Lola Reynolds down and go feral on her body, client or not. He never got emotional or physical with clients, but he’d gotten flustered—and hard—when she climbed all over him yesterday, and not noticed her medical crisis until it was almost too late.

He looked up at the expectant pause in the conversation. They’d asked him something. His mind was a million miles away, or just down the hall, where Lola slept. “I’m sorry. It’s been a long night. Can you repeat what you just said?”

“How confident are you in your ability to keep our client safe from this point forward?” asked Liam.

“With a sober tour manager? Very confident.” He cracked his knuckles under the table. “From now on, I won’t let her out of my sight.”

Mr. Asshole piped up. “You must understand how essential it is for Lady Paradise to complete the entire tour.”

“I get it,” said Ransom. “She’s the money. Her name is Lola, by the way.”

Mr. Asshole scowled. “Do you have any idea how much we’ve invested in her?”

“Probably way less than you’ve made.”

Liam nudged his leg under the table. Ransom mashed his lips shut.

“At the end of the day, this is business,” said Mr. Fuckhead, being fuck-all honest about their mercenary interests. “There’s no one popular enough to replace Lady Paradise if she can’t perform. Without her, the monetary loss would trickle down not just to us but to all the other artists in this festival. Her absence would disappoint attendees and create bad feelings in the EDM community toward our future promotions.”

With every word, Ransom clenched his fists tighter. They didn’t give a writhing fuck about Lola, who’d almost died last night. They cared about profits and future attendance. He wanted to take the contracts spread out in front of them, set them on fire, and shove them down the men’s throats.

But that wouldn’t accomplish anything but his firing, not just from this job, but from Ironclad altogether.

“Can we have a moment, gentlemen?” asked Liam.

Thank God. He had to get out of this room. Liam gestured for Ransom to precede him into the hall. Without thinking, he turned in the direction of Lola’s room. His boss walked beside him, his tall frame almost as large as Ransom’s. Female agents swooned over Liam’s handsome features and shoulder length hair, but Ransom respected him for being a thoughtful person. Another boss would have fired him by now. Maybe Liam still would.

“I’m sorry,” Ransom said. “I just can’t stand the way they talk about her, like she’s a…a commodity.”