PERMISSION (Alpha Bodyguards Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epilogue

  Two days ago… In Seattle

  Three Years Ago…

  Chapter 3

  Two Days Ago… Seattle

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 11

  Yesterday… Portland

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Present Day

  Chapter 21

  About Sylvia Fox

  PERMISSION

  Alpha Bodyguards

  Sylvia Fox

  Copyright © 2017 by Sylvia Fox

  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.

  For news on Sylvia Fox releases and giveaways, sign up for her newsletter!

  Contents

  1. Two days ago… In Seattle

  2. Three Years Ago…

  Chapter 3

  4. Two Days Ago… Seattle

  5. Three Years Ago…

  Chapter 6

  7. Two Days Ago… Seattle

  8. Three Years Ago…

  9. Two Days Ago… Seattle

  10. Three Years Ago…

  Chapter 11

  12. Yesterday… Portland

  13. Three Years Ago…

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  20. Present Day

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  About Sylvia Fox

  1

  Two days ago… In Seattle

  “May I have it again? Please?” I tried to sound as sultry as possible, but it was useless. I knew I sounded pitiful. Hopeless. Desperate.

  In truth, I was all those things and more. Or less, actually, depending on your perspective. He held all the cards. Had all the power.

  And he knew it.

  I mean, I had crawled over to him. Crawled. I was kneeling next to the bed where he lay, watching television.

  “Can you have what, Liane?” he asked. His tone indicated that he knew exactly what I needed, but he wanted the satisfaction of hearing me say it.

  “Your cock.” Just saying the word aloud- such a base, filthy word- made me clench inside. My voice cracked, making “cock” sound multisyllabic.

  Without realizing I was doing it, I licked my lips after I spoke. He chuckled.

  Hours earlier, I’d been on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, most of them singing along with me, along with guys holding up signs with proposals on them. Their energy lifted me and filled me like nothing else could.

  But here I was, the lights of the arena having barely dimmed, groveling on the floor like a whore.

  I wondered which was the real me. I wondered what my fans would think if they could see me now.

  Looking down at me, where I knelt on the floor, he swung his legs around and let his feet come to rest on the floor on either side of me. He cradled my face in his large, rough hand. He let it slide back and into my hair, yanking my head back, not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to let me know he meant business- to emphasize his control.

  Holding me just like that, he rose and undid his jeans with his free hand. They fell to the floor, leaving him in just his black boxers. His tented black boxers.

  I swallowed hard.

  “It’s right there, Liane.” My head was tilted to look up at him, but all I wanted to see was his dick, his majestic slab of fuck muscle that had changed my entire life. And become my obsession.

  “You’re an addict, aren’t you? A junkie. And the only thing that can fix you is right here, isn’t it?” His large hand left my hair to envelop his dick through the silk of his boxers.

  I squirmed and whimpered as he massaged it. I wanted to be the one doing that. To feel it swell and pulse. To feel its power.

  I pleaded with him using my eyes. My mouth opened into the shape of an “O,” an invitation I was desperate for him to accept.

  He slid his boxers down slowly, revealing the object of my need inch by marvelous inch.

  My face was so flushed with lust and shame that I felt it might burst into flames.

  “Good girl. Stay just like that,” he commanded, aiming his growing cock for my mouth.

  2

  Three Years Ago…

  “There’s no way it’s really him, right?” I asked Shelby, my very best friend in the entire world.

  “I don’t know, Lia. He has a blue check mark by his name and everything. Can people fake stuff like that?” Shelby replied.

  “Stuff can look so real with Photoshop. I saw a picture the other day of a catfish that was, like, the size of a school bus. With all these guys around it- fishermen- on a dock, like they’d caught it. And it looked totally real. So, yeah, I don’t see why it couldn’t be faked. The alternative would be that Travis Zane has been watching my videos and thinks I’m a good singer. And how ridiculous is that?” I said, my voice shaking.

  Shelby and I sat on my bed, looking at my laptop, reading the message I’d received on Twitter. From Travis Zane. Yeah, that Travis Zane. Three consecutive #1 albums, Grammys, sold out world tours, MTV moon men galore, posters on the walls of every teenage girl on the planet. That Travis Zane.

  Shelby and I had walked home from school and after spending all of five minutes on our homework, we were online, checking our social media. My dad and Shelby’s parents had both confiscated our phones after we each got caught using them one too many times during class, but we could still use our laptops under the guise of needing to be online to study and complete our homework. So, as was our custom, we’d walked home, stopped by Shelby’s house to grab her laptop, and then over to my house which we’d have to ourselves while my dad was at work.

  I barely used my Twitter, so I was surprised when I noticed that I had a direct message at all, much less from somebody famous.

  “Hey Lia, I’m a big fan! Love your videos! What you did with ‘Fearless’ was AMAZING!!!”

  I’d been posting videos of myself performing cover songs on YouTube for almost a year, and I’d amassed a following of just over twelve hundred subscribers, with my most popular videos receiving over twenty-five thousand views. Not bad for a country girl from New Tazewell, Tennessee, right? And I’d gotten some feedback from viewers, comments on my videos that ran the gamut, from flattering (“You rock!” “Love your voice!”) to creepy guys telling me what they imagined doing to me and what they did to themselves while they watched my videos, to assholes telling me how pretty I’d be if I’d just lose twenty pounds.

  One guy, who judging by his profile picture looked older than my dad, told me that if I lost seventy-five pounds that he’d “let me touch it.” First, if I lost that much weight I probably wouldn’t be able to stand up, second, I’d rather touch an angry rattlesnake.

  After that one, my dad almost squashed the entire YouTube “empire” I’d built. It took every ounce of my seventeen-year-old daddy’s girl charm and pouting to convince him to relent. He knew I loved to sing, I mean he’d been the one who used to set up my gigs singing the national anthem at high school football and basketball games, performing at weddings, and putting on a show at the Bell County Fair across the state border in Kentucky.

  But performing songs on YouTube had opened me up to an entirely new audience. I’d started out doing country songs, which was only natural since where I lived was about as cou
ntry as it got. I could leave my house and walk in any direction and within five minutes I’d bump into a cow, pig, or goat. We only had chickens, but my dad wasn’t a farmer, he was a United States Marine turned county sheriff’s deputy.

  Female country stars like Carrie Underwood and Reba McEntire were my first inspirations, but I soon branched out and tried my hand at some pop music and even classic rock. I wanted very badly to conquer a Heart song, but I just didn’t have the lungpower to belt it out like Ann Wilson.

  At Shelby’s urging, I tried my version of Travis Zane’s hit song ‘Fearless’, and although I thought I came across screaming in places rather than singing, I was soon buried under an avalanche of positive feedback, including the message whose authenticity Shelby and I were currently debating.

  “Well, you definitely have to respond, right?” Shelby asked me. “I mean, if it’s real, it could be a golden ticket, you know? You two start conversing, he either helps make you into a star or he falls hopelessly in love with you. Maybe both.”

  I shook my head. “Or it’s a hoax and it’s some douchebag football player from school and I’m going to be the laughingstock of New Tazewell High School when I take it seriously,” I answered. “As for love, I’m so sure. Yes, Travis Zane is going to give up his quest to sleep with every Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and Victoria’s Secret Angel to get together with, what, the forty-third prettiest girl in the junior class at New Taze High?”

  “Whatever,” Shelby said, rolling off my bed to walk over to the window that faced the Cavanaugh farm next door, in the hopes that Isaac or Jesse might be working out by the barn, preferably shirtless.

  They were both a few years older than us, and the two undisputed sexiest hunks to walk the halls at our high school in at least a generation. Rumor had it that Jesse had even hooked up with two female teachers before he graduated, not to mention the entire cheerleading team.

  They were wild boys who had played whatever sport was in season and never lacked for female attention. Shelby was smitten by Isaac, with his sandy blonde hair, mischievous blue eyes, and broad shoulders.

  While I couldn’t deny Isaac and Jesse’s obvious physical gifts, they weren’t the Cavanaughs who got me hot and bothered.

  I never admitted it to anyone, not even Shelby, but it was Robert Cavanaugh, Jesse and Isaac’s father, who drove me wild with entirely inappropriate thoughts, given his age and relationship with my father.

  Robert and my dad had grown up together in New Tazewell. They’d been basketball and football teammates before serving together; Robert a senior when my dad was a sophomore. Robert passed on football scholarship offers from half a dozen schools to follow his own father’s footsteps by becoming a Marine.

  When my dad finished high school two years later, he did what he’d always done – exactly what his idol, Robert Cavanaugh did. He was off to Parris Island within days of graduation.

  They both married local Claiborne County girls, best friends Shirleen Adams and Kirsten Grant. Shirleen gave Robert his two sons and my mom, Kirsten, gave birth to yours truly.

  Two weeks before Christmas when I was six, Isaac was nine, and Jesse eleven, our moms, Shirleen and Kirsten, took a trip to Knoxville to do some holiday shopping, since New Tazewell doesn’t exactly have a mall. They hit an icy patch of road just before they got on I-40 which sent them sliding across the median and directly into the path of a semi going seventy miles per hour. Highway patrol assured us that their deaths were quick and painless, but that did little to ease the pain we felt as survivors.

  Neighbors and extended family pitched in to help my dad and Mr. Cavanaugh figure out what to do with three kids, no moms, and five hearts broken beyond repair. Neither the Cavanaugh boys nor I attended much school the rest of that year, and they even moved away to live with relatives in West Virginia briefly.

  When they returned to New Tazewell -as everyone from here eventually, inevitably does- we were closer than friends or neighbors. We were brothers and sisters, joined by tragedy. My dad and Mr. Cavanaugh were likewise more than friends, more than Marine buddies, they were as close as two men can be without sharing blood. Heck, without being twins.

  With the patriarchs of our two families too shattered, it made it difficult for them to help their own kids process their grief. It turned out that my dad had an easier time reaching Jesse and Isaac than their own father did, and I, in turn, had much more productive talks about missing my mom with Mr. Cavanaugh than with my own dad.

  We became some sort of weird co-parented clan, two brothers and a sister with two damaged men leaning on each other to provide the guidance and set the examples we needed.

  Which made my feelings for Robert Cavanaugh so wicked, so perverse, and so wrong.

  I knew it. I knew it then. I know it now. But I couldn’t help it then and certainly can’t now.

  Isaac and Jesse treated me just like a kid sister up until the summer between 8th and 9th grade. Puberty hit me hard over those three months, and boys started looking at me differently, almost overnight. Whereas the Cavanaugh boys always snuck off to the swimming hole without me, if they could help it, prior to that summer, they were quick to invite me once I started to develop.

  Shelby wasn’t as quick to fill out her own bikini, but being my friend meant getting to watch Isaac and Jesse splash around tanned, toned, and shirtless- which meant Shelby spent every sunny summer morning hanging around my house, hoping we’d hear a rap on the screen door asking if we wanted to climb in Jesse’s ugly old green pickup truck to head to the river.

  Along with my body changing, and me suddenly becoming interesting to boys all around town, I likewise began to develop… cravings.

  Not for Jesse or Isaac, not for guys like Travis Zane or some movie star, but for my next-door neighbor. My dad’s best friend, best man, and Marine buddy. A man three years older than my father. The last man I should have felt any sort of sexual stirrings for, for about a million different reasons. Robert Cavanaugh.

  3

  The next evening, after dinner, I replied to Travis Zane, or -more likely- the imposter posing as Travis Zane, with an innocent thank you, telling him that I really enjoyed singing his songs and that maybe I’d try to record another.

  To my surprise he replied almost instantly, making me further doubt his identity. Surely the real Travis Zane would be way too busy to reply to a nobody like me; if he even handled any of his own social media and didn’t have a team whose job was to handle his Tweets and Facebook updates.

  “Your voice would be perfect for Bliss,” he replied, referring to one of his earlier hits, a sexy song in which he sings to a woman about touching and kissing and their shared bliss. I’d sung it in the sanctity of my bedroom and showers many times, and knew it by heart, but it wasn’t nearly as playful as ‘Fearless’. It was a much more “grown up” sort of song, and although I’d been very sexual with myself, I hadn’t shared that part of me with anyone.

  My mind flashed to the music video for ‘Bliss’, in which Travis rolled around in silk sheets with a nearly-naked model, simulating sex in a way that made me gasp the first time I watched it (Okay, not just the first time, the second, third, and hundredth time, too).

  I hummed a few bars of it and tried my hand at singing it acapella. It was awful. No way did I have the confidence to pull off a song like that on YouTube.

  Going through Travis’s musical catalogue, I settled on two other songs that I thought fit my voice and my personal style a little better. I recorded them and went about dissecting them for the next hour, finding flat and sharp notes and off key spots in so many places I considered deleting my YouTube channel completely. Nerves were killing me.

  I could sing in front of a crowd at a game, for Shelby, or at a wedding, but the idea that Travis Zane might be listening had me completely flustered.

  “I’m working on a few of your songs. I’ll try to get something new up soon. Can’t believe it’s really you…”

  I sent him the Tweet and wai
ted. Five minutes later, my doubt was erased.

  I had a new direct message, which I opened to reveal a picture of Travis Zane, the Travis Zane, wearing a simple white t-shirt and a backwards blue baseball cap, holding a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled “Hello Lia!” He was smiling, his trademark dimples working their magic.

  Quickly as I could manage, I forwarded the image to Shelby, who magically teleported herself from her house to my bedroom in fifteen seconds. She was awestruck.

  “Let’s not get crazy, that paper could still be ‘shopped, but come on! Travis Zane is sending you messages! You! Liane Morris! My best friend! Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “Calm down, Shelby. I sang one of his songs, and he thought it was good, or cute, or something. It’s not like we’re getting backstage passes to one of his shows.”

  Ding!

  Another message.

  “In some of your videos you wear Vols stuff. Are you from Tennessee? How far is Charlotte from you? My tour is there next month.”

  Shelby and I stared at each other in wide-eyed shock.

  I had worn a favorite University of Tennessee Volunteers hoodie in a few of my videos.

  Shelby had played for a travel softball team when she was younger, and they’d played in a tournament in Charlotte a few times. I’d never been. So she knew the proximity.

  “Charlotte is like four hours away. Totally doable,” Shelby assured me, as she checked the calendar against Travis’s tour schedule.

  “Oh, my God. I’m freaking out here. It’s on a Saturday night!” she squealed. “We’re going to meet Travis Zane! And you’re going to have his babies!” Shelby was jumping up and down, practically screaming.