Grumpy Bodyguard

GRUMPY BODYGUARD A SMALL-TOWN ENEMIES TO LOVERS ROMANCE CASSANDRA RUSSELL MOONLIGHT PUBLISHING Copyright © 2022 by Cassandra Russell All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. CONTENTS Chapter 1 - Minerva Chapter 2 - Cal Chapter 3 - Minerva Chapter 4 - Cal Chapter 5 - Minerva Chapter 6 - Cal Chapter 7 - Minerva Chapter 8 - Cal Chapter 9 - Minerva Chapter 10 - Cal Chapter 11 - Minerva Chapter 12 - Cal Chapter 13 - Minerva Chapter 14 - Cal Chapter 15 - Minerva Chapter 16 - Cal Chapter 17 - Minerva Chapter 18 - Cal Chapter 19 - Minerva Chapter 20 - Cal Chapter 21 - Minerva Chapter 22 - Cal Chapter 23 - Minerva Chapter 24 - Cal Epilogue - Minerva Grumpy Hero: A Fake Marriage Pregnancy Romance Chapter 1 - Olivia CHAPTER 1 - MINERVA “Ms. Castle, the line is around the block!” The bookstore owner is practically giddy with excitement. Who knew that my sprawling signature would one day be so coveted? I can still remember scribbling out my first attempts at book-writing in high school. In fact, I think I still have some of the old tattered spiral notebooks. The thought of handwriting everything back then makes my hand cramp up. I look past him, and he is indeed correct. I still find it difficult to believe all these people showed up for me. My eyes linger for a moment on a haggard looking man in line who doesn’t fit in with the others. He looks unshaven and has a weird sort of wild look in his eye. “Do you need a rest, Minerva?” my assistant, Brooke, says from beside me, snapping me out of my thoughts. She must have noticed me stretching my hand. “No,” I chuckle, not even realizing I’d done it. “I was just thinking about how strange it feels to hold a pen again for more than a hot minute.” Brooke laughs. She’s a couple of years younger than me, maybe around twenty-five or so, and I don’t think I have ever seen her without a laptop, tablet, or smartphone in her hand. I’m not even sure she knows how to write her name without a keyboard in front of her. “Well, you sure are drawing a crowd here today. I guess New Yorkers find your scandalous, small-town novels very appealing,” she says as she sets down a fresh water pitcher and a new supply of signing pens on my table. I thank her and nod my head, slightly amused at the fact that my books have become popular enough that I even need an assistant. Brooke is the best though; she anticipates my every move before I even make it. I take a short break for a moment while Brooke entertains the line of fans who are all clenching my latest novel to their chests as if it’s a prized possession. I watch as she works the crowd.She’s good at that, and much more extroverted than I am. I might be living in New York City now—and have even upgraded my aesthetic to look more ‘city girl’ and less ‘small-town hick’—but years of spending most of my youth indoors trying to hide from the world isn’t something that wears off easily. I wish I could shed my past like a snakeskin, but unfortunately it still sometimes clings to me. “Ms. Castle, I am such a huge fan,” the next woman in line says as she approaches the table and carefully sets her book down in front of me. “Your stories are so well written that I feel as if I’m actually there in the places you describe.” “Thank you,” I smile as I sign the inside of her book. “I’m glad you enjoy them.” “Oh, I do,” she gushes, lifting her book back up before the ink has even dried. “But you must have made a lot of enemies back in your hometown.” For a second, I look at her without saying anything. All the towns in my books have fictional names, and all the characters, too. But I guess it’s not hard to tell they all follow along the same thread. “Well, it’s all just fiction,” I say. “No named towns or people; just some good stories for entertainment.” “Of course!” she says looking as though she hadn’t meant to offend me in any way. “I wasn’t at all implying differently. It’s just that I’ve read every book you ever wrote, and they all do seem to have a very similar feel, as if they have all stemmed from the same source.” “Well,” I say with a polite smile. “I guess that source is me. Those poor, unfortunate stories are all getting filtered through my brain.” She laughs goodheartedly and thanks me for the autograph before stepping aside and letting the next person come up in line. As much as I wish I could claim to be a native New Yorker who just crafted all these fictional novels out of my pure imagination, that’s only half true. I didn’t rise to fame on pure, ingenious, creativity alone. My roots as an author came from a much more dismal place—a place of feeling outcast and bullied, a place that had me escaping into my writing to avoid thinking about being made fun of at school. Pigdukah High wasn’t the most accepting and open-minded place. The best decision I ever made was to get the hell out of that small town and go to NYU when I was eighteen. The second-best decision I ever made was changing my last name to Castle before publishing my books. I have done everything I can to leave small-town Kentucky behind. I spent almost all of high school being called Minnie Puke simply because my last