Spotlight & Giveaway: The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Katherine Center’s new release: THE BODYGUARD

I’m thrilled to share this excerpt from THE BODYGUARD, when Executive Protection Agent (aka Bodyguard) Hannah Brooks, receives her latest assignment: protecting superstar actor Jack Stapleton from his middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker.

 
She’s got his back.
Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with a wine bottle opener. Or a ballpoint pen. Or a dinner napkin. But the truth is, she’s an Executive Protection Agent (aka “bodyguard”), and she just got hired to protect superstar actor Jack Stapleton from his middle-aged, corgi-breeding stalker.

He’s got her heart.
Jack Stapleton’s a household name—captured by paparazzi on beaches the world over, famous for, among other things, rising out of the waves in all manner of clingy board shorts and glistening like a Roman deity. But a few years back, in the wake of a family tragedy, he dropped from the public eye and went off the grid.

They’ve got a secret.
When Jack’s mom gets sick, he comes home to the family’s Texas ranch to help out. Only one catch: He doesn’t want his family to know about his stalker. Or the bodyguard thing. And so Hannah—against her will and her better judgment—finds herself pretending to be Jack’s girlfriend as a cover. Even though her ex, like a jerk, says no one will believe it.

What could possibly go wrong???
Hannah hardly believes it, herself. But the more time she spends with Jack, the more real it all starts to seem. And there lies the heartbreak. Because it’s easy for Hannah to protect Jack. But protecting her own, long-neglected heart? That’s the hardest thing she’s ever done.

Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Bodyguard

From The Bodyguard by Katherine Center. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Three
The first person to arrive in the conference room was Taylor. My best friend. Freshly back from Madrid with my ex. Though that wasn’t her fault.
Her hair was shorter—a little European bob—and tucked behind her ears, and she was wearing mascara, which was new, and made her green eyes pop. I squealed at the sight of her and took off running, catapulting myself into her arms.
“You’re back!” I said, hugging tight around her neck.
She hugged me back.
“I killed all your houseplants,” I said, “but that’s the price you pay for leaving.”
“You killed my plants?”
“Didn’t you see the corpses?”
“On purpose?”
“By accident,” I said. “A combination of neglect and overattention.”
“That does sound lethal.”
Taylor gave me that big smile she’s famous for.
We’d talked on the phone much more this time than we usually would on assignment. Mostly because I kept crying and calling her.
She was good about it, she really was. She let me process and vent and agonize to my heart’s content—even when I kept waking her up.
Seeing her now, I realized how long it had been since I’d asked her about her.
“How was the trip?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said.
Not much of an answer.
As we sat down, I could not rein in the impulse to lower my voice and say, “And how is he?”
“How is who?” Taylor asked.
“A person who rhymes with ‘Blobby.’ ”
“Ah,” Taylor said, her face tightening a little in a way that made me feel rooted-for. “I think he’s fine.”
“ ‘Fine’ is a thing for you today.”
“It means he’s not . . . not okay.”
“That’s a shame.”
“More importantly,” she asked. “How are you?”
“I’ve been stuck here for a month,” I said. “I’m dying.”
Taylor nodded. “Because you need water in your gills.”
“Thank you!” I said, like At last. “Thank you for believing in my gills.”
Just then, Glenn walked in. “Stop talking about your gills,” he said.
“She’s a shark,” Taylor said, in my defense.
“Don’t encourage her.”
Other folks followed him in, and the conference room filled up. Amadi—so ever-likable
with his round nose and wide smile—was back from Nigeria. Doghouse, back from Burkina Faso, had grown a beard to cover the burn scar on his jaw. Kelly was just back from Dubai with some gold hoop earrings that exactly matched her blond curls.
I tried not to watch the door for Robby.
I maintained good posture. I arranged my face into a pleasant, fine-thanks-and-how-are-you expression so precisely that my cheek muscles started quivering. I ignored the white noise shh-ing in my ears.
Finally, just as Glenn was clearing his throat to begin, Robby strolled in.
His buzz cut was longer. He wore a new, slim-cut suit, a tie I’d never seen, and his famous Vuarnets—even though we were inside. Though he whipped them off just as he entered the room.
Dammit. He made it work.
He’d always been better at style than at substance.
Did it ache to see him? Did it suck all the air out of my chest? Incapacitate me with emotion? Feel like I’d just swigged down a whole bottle of heartbreak?
No, actually.
This is good, I thought.
Wait. Was this good?
This meant I was over him, right? My endless time in Houston-slash-purgatory had done the trick. They say time heals all wounds. Was that it? Was I done?
Or had the past month just destroyed my ability to feel anything at all?
As Glenn revved up the meeting, I held my breath.
Please, please, please, I found myself thinking. For once, just let me get off easy.
Sometimes I wonder if I jinxed myself in that moment.
Because when Glenn started the meeting—leading with my new assignment—it hit me pretty fast that it was not going to be the escape I’d been holding my breath for.
“First things first,” Glenn said, as the room quieted, pointing at me. “Let’s talk about the new assignment for Brooks.” Glenn always called me ‘Brooks.’ I couldn’t guarantee he even knew my first name. “It’s a juicy one,” Glenn went on. “Outside our normal wheelhouse. Should be pretty absorbing. It’s actually a new assignment for everybody in here. Kind of an all-hands-on-deck situation. But Brooks will be the primary.”
Glenn gave me a little nod. “She’s earned it.”
“Where is it?” I asked.
“I think what you want to know is ‘Who is it?’”
“Nope,” I said. “I definitely want to know where.”
“Because this client,” Glenn went on, his voice reminding me of how people talk to their dogs before they give them treats, “is really, really famous.”
We didn’t protect a lot of famous people at Glenn Schultz Executive Protection. If we’d been based in LA, that would have been different. But we were based in Houston—so we got mostly oil executives and business people. The occasional entertainer coming through town. I once did some remote location assessments for Dolly Parton, and she sent me a lovely thank-you note.
But that was about it.
I looked at Glenn’s face. He was suppressing a smile.
He was actually excited. And Glenn never got excited about anything.
He went on. “This particular assignment happens to take place in the great state of Texas—”
“Texas?!” I demanded.
Glenn ignored me. “Just right here in our friendly hometown of Houston, so—”
“Houston?!” I scooted my chair back.
In eight years of receiving assignments, I had never once protested a location. That’s just not how this job works. You don’t care where you go. You go where they send you. It’s fine.
But.
It had been a rough month.
Let’s just say I was right on the verge of doing something unprofessional.
But then Glenn told us who the principal was.
Pulling his lips back into a very pleased-with-himself smile, as if this good news would cancel out any bad news that might ever happen again, Glenn did his big reveal. “The principal for this one,” he said, clicking the remote for the whiteboard and flashing a movie poster up for us all to see, “is Jack Stapleton.”
The whole room gasped.
Robby launched into a coughing fit.
Kelly let out a shriek like she was at a Beatles concert.
And that’s when, despite everything I had just decided about how getting myself to London would be the answer to all my problems, I said, “You know what? I quit.”

From The Bodyguard by Katherine Center. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Excerpt. ©KATHERINE CENTER. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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Meet the Author:

BookPage calls Katherine Center “the reigning queen of comfort reads.” She’s the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including How to Walk Away, Things You Save in a Fire, and her newest, What You Wish For. Katherine writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. She’s been compared to both Jane Austen and Nora Ephron, and the Dallas Morning News calls her stories, “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way.” Her books have made countless Best-Of lists, including RealSimple’s Best Books of 2020, Amazon’s Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads’ Best Books of the Year, and many more. Bestselling author Emily Henry calls her summer 2022 book, The Bodyguard, “a shot of pure joy.” The movie adaptation of Katherine’s novel The Lost Husband (starring Josh Duhamel) hit #1 on Netflix, and her novel Happiness for Beginners is in production now as a Netflix original starring Ellie Kemper. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, two kids, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.

Buy: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250219398/thebodyguard