Confined with the CEO and the Bodyguard

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Confined with the CEO and the Bodyguard:
Sadie
Jordana Pearce


Contents
1. Sadie
2. Dakota
3. Beau
4. Sadie
5. Dakota
6. Beau
7. Sadie
8. Dakota
9. Sadie
10. Beau
11. Dakota
12. Sadie
13. Dakota
14. Beau
Epilogue: Sadie
Acknowledgments
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Excerpt: CONFINED WITH THE CEO & THE BODYGUARD: Gabriela
Excerpt - CONFINED WITH THE CEO & THE BODYGUARD: KELSEY
Coming Soon


1
Sadie
This is an Advance Reader Copy. There may be minor typos or sentence shifts. If this will bother you, please contact the ARC coordinator.
Thank you for your honest review.
“Damn it!” I kick a pebble against the curb. It promptly bounces back to hit me in the shin. “Double damn,” I mutter, rubbing it through my jeans. Ain’t that some kind of metaphor.
My stomach growls. It’s been six hours since I ate my last stale protein bar.
I’m used to hardship. But this pandemic has kicked away every bit of hard-won progress I’ve made as surely as if a malevolent god had chopped down a ladder I was climbing. If I don’t find a way to get out of this spiral...Well, it’s not like things could get much worse. I can always—
Not going to happen.
My mind shuts down the thought before I can even finish it. I won’t go back to stripping. I’ve left that behind, now. I just need to find a perch, a ledge, any toehold to latch onto so I can survive the next few weeks.
At least, I hope the pandemic shutdown will only last a few weeks. I don’t know what I’ll do if we can’t get it under control. I can’t afford not to work, and I also can’t catch this thing. It’s not like I have health insurance. Getting sick would be a calamity for me.
Sunlight on silver metal spears me in the eyes. I wince and blink. My sunglasses are scratched but I pull them down over my face. The mask steams the lenses. I snatch them off again and scowl.
“Face it, Sadie Banes. You’re up Schitt Creek without a paddle,” I say to myself.
Ten minutes ago, I had an appointment with the benefits office in which a harried, masked clerk behind a plexiglass barrier informed me that because I worked part-time as a contractor, I am ineligible for unemployment. All I have to get through this out-of-control pandemic is one beat-up, gas-guzzling van that doubles as my home, nineteen crumpled dollar bills in my pocket, and a freshly-printed massage therapist’s license that I suddenly can’t use.
Who in their right mind wants to get a massage in the midst of a pandemic? Nobody, that’s who.
Which means everything I’ve worked toward for the past two years has gone poof.
The license I trained to obtain? Worthless.
The table I bought new, even though I couldn’t afford my own studio to set up in? Useless.
My ambition to rent a live-work space so I can stop living out of my van? On hold—permanently.
I’d cry if I had any tears left, but hardship wrung those out of me years ago. I’ve been kicked around New Mexico’s foster care system since I was a baby. My mother was estranged from her family due to her spiraling drug addiction. When I was twelve, her sister finally agreed to let me live with them—but by then I’d already been kicked around the foster care system for a decade.
Still, they gave me a taste of a life I want so badly. One with stability, where I am not constantly scrambling to pay bills and my stomach is never hollow with hunger.
I tried; I really did. I had goals. Dreams. I wanted to be a nurse, because I like helping people and staying healthy is important to me.
But when I was seventeen, I made a mistake. A big one.
On some level, I can’t really blame my aunt and uncle for throwing me out when they discovered I was working as a teen cam girl—though I still think they could have held a little closer to their religious convictions, especially the part about forgiveness. But I can see why they didn’t want me corrupting their real kids.
Yes, that’s what they called my cousins. To my face.
When they showed me the door, I was determined to prove that they’d been wrong about me by pure force of will. I graduated early from high school and enrolled in college, but even though I worked two and three jobs, tuition kept going up, while my grades started going down.
I did the sensible thing and gave up cam work for stripping. Dancing paid better, and I’d rather gyrate on a stage wearing nothing but heels and a thong than juggle a bunch of minimum-wage jobs.
But then, my boyfriend found out how I was paying half of the rent and he, too, threw me out. Hence, the van. It’s not much of a home, but no one can take it away from me.
I always intended to go back to school. I needed a quick degree, and settled on massage therapy. It’s not nursing, but it’s still health-related, and the training was fast and relatively affordable.
Then I graduated into a pandemic—ain’t that just my luck.
Now, I can’t even rely on my fallback career.
I kick another rock at the curb. “Triple damn it.”
There has to be an option. My mind races. Dancing is out of the question. While there are men who would absolutely pay to watch a woman in a mask dance next to naked on a stage, I am not willing to contract a deadly disease for the sake of a few bucks. I can’t exactly go back to cam work, either—not while living in a van with no internet access apart from a battered cell phone.
I need a job—any job.
My stomach rumbles. I am light-headed. I’ll think better with a bit of food in me.
I’m parked across the street from a