Cosmic Trifecta

by Anna Lewis

  THE END

  = Bonus Book 5 of 20 =

  Her Protector

  Smoke. Drugs. Booze. Glitter. That’s what you got when you woke up one day and decided that your life was crap boring and that you needed a little fun to spice it up, then proceeded to call the one male friend that you knew could help without trying to get in your pants first, and that had been exactly what Shelly Duke had done. It didn’t help that thirty minutes after said male friend took her to a strip club, she was wishing she was at home, under her sheets, watching Netflix.

  “Having fun?”

  “Loads,” she replied sarcastically.

  She and Eric had gone to the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York together. But where Eric had come from money and hadn’t had a problem paying his tuition, or starting his own design house immediately after school, Shelly was still finding it a very long and tedious process to finish paying off her student loans. She silently thanked God that she was down to the last one.

  “C’mon Shelly,” Eric said. “Loosen up. How many times are you going to get a chance to have some fun? Use any opportunity you can get.” His hands were down some strippers g-string, stuffing a rolled up hundred-dollar bill in it, while the stripper gave off a string of fake giggles and then leaned over, ass to front to show him just how much she appreciated the gesture.

  “Ever the cheerful giver,” Shelly said, rolling her eyes. She wondered why she was being like this, she had been the one to call Eric up tonight, and she should be the one stuffing cash down some stripper’s g-string. With new determination, she leaned over and grabbed her drink of Henny and coke, chugging it all up in one swing.

  “That’s more like it,” hailed Eric, smiling and standing up. “Now if you would excuse me, I believe I am owed a private dance by this beautiful young lady here.” The stripper gave out some more fake giggles, took Eric’s hand and started to lead the way to the back room.

  Shelly had never been one to be so in touch with her sexual side. She was no virgin, but she had always seen sex as a means to an end and not something to be savored or enjoyed in all its totality. She had never been able to see what guys saw in it that they would pay so much to get into places like this. She usually just hopped along for the seductive music and the poles, she loved to dance. Standing up, she started to move towards the center of the room where a pole was kept for guests who decided they wanted to see how it felt to be a stripper for a day. She walked towards it just as “Earned It” by The Weeknd came on the speakers, she began to move her hips and sway using the pole as a tool of her very own seduction.

  Dancing had always been a favorite pastime for Shelly, and it was something she was very good at. It also didn’t hurt that she had the body for it and knew how to use it. Shaking her well rounded ass, she twerked on the pole to The Weeknd’s voice telling her that she deserved it. The catcalls started coming in, and she wasn’t very much surprised. She was dressed in a mesh see through body suit with pasties covering her nipples and a very short basket net skirt. If she wasn’t wearing three-hundred dollar Louis Vuitton shoes, which mind you Eric had given her on her last birthday, she could have passed as one of the strippers.

  “C’mon baby,” some man at a table nearby shouted. “Come dance for me.”

  “Yeah, how much for a lap dance,” another one shouted over the music. Shelly looked over to see a set of three guys all casually dressed with some really expensive drinks on their table. They looked like people she wouldn’t have liked very much when she was still in school so she threw back her head at them, cocked her lips and sashayed away.

  “You can’t afford me fellas,” she said as she walked past, she wasn’t going to be dancing for anybody, not tonight, she didn’t have enough alcohol in her system for that.

  “How does two-thousand dollars sound to you?” a completely different voice called, more masculine sounding than the other two had been, calmer. On second thought, maybe she did have enough alcohol in her system to dance for somebody.

  Turning around, she sighted the man that had just spoken. “You know I’m not a stripper, right?” she said, not wanting to mislead anybody.

  “Yea I know,” was all he said as he brought out two five-hundred dollar bills from his wallet. “Half now, half when you are done.” Maybe it was the alcohol already in her system, or it was her wanting to step out of her comfort zone and do something totally crazy for a change without having to think hard about it, or maybe it was the money. Shelly didn’t know, all she knew was that she found herself sashaying to where the man sat. He was at a table all by himself, his face hidden by dim lighting so she couldn’t take in all his features, but she could tell that he smelled good, that was encouraging. She got closer to him and stretched out her hands for the bills without saying anything. She was half surprised when he dropped them in her hands without saying anything as well. Well, she thought, here goes nothing.

  Anthony had noticed the woman from the moment she had walked into the club, it was hard not to notice such beauty. Her hair had been the first thing to catch his eye, so beautiful in its wildness. Her brown skin had called him to taste it, and her seductive attire had encouraged that longing in him. He had been unable to stop staring, wanting to take her to the bathroom and fuck the wildness—that he suspected she had plenty of—out of her.

  Sitting at the corner of the club staring at her, looking bored one minute and then as if by magic completely coming to life and giving him—and a ton of thirsty guys at the club—a pole dance better than any he had ever seen in any strip club, had only made him want her more. He wanted to feel her sweet juicy ass pressed against his already hard dick. He wanted to feel her soft looking skin brush against his, and he was willing to pay for this privilege.

  He usually came to the club to get away from his thoughts. Entering the navy SEALs at a young age and leaving when he was closing in on forty changed you in a way you couldn’t fathom. It had made him a good security specialist, but it also made him aware of every single thing that went on around him. For instance, he had noticed the man she had walked in with, he was sure it wasn’t her boyfriend, considering the guy had had his hands down some other girl’s undies, and even if he was he didn’t care so much about that.

  “What’s your name honey?” he talked to her like he would talk to any stripper, not really expecting her to answer him since she wasn’t one, but Anthony really wanted to know what he could call her.

  “What do you want it to be?” she asked, causing him to laugh.

  “That’s such a stripper answer,” he said.

  “Well I am your stripper right now, aren’t I?” She smiled as she turned around to show her very attractive derriere. “Call me whatever you want.” She moved her ass seductively against his dick, in rhythm to the song. Anthony grew harder.

  “That you are,” he managed to say, trying not to moan in pleasure. With the way she was dancing, Anthony was more than sure she was enjoying what she was doing to him in more ways than one, he sure as hell was. He had been turned on from just watching her dancing on the pole, and right now he was about losing his mind. She did some kind of twerk move that he had never seen before right before the song ended.

  “My money, boo,” she said, her hands outstretched. He took the money from his pocket and gave it to her, without a single word. Watching her leave gave him new understanding to Lil’ Wayne’s lyric “I hate to see her go but I love to watch her leave.”

  Twenty minutes later and with two thousand dollars in her pocket, Shelly was ready to go home but couldn’t find Eric anywhere. She didn’t know where he could be, calling his phone wasn’t much help.

  “Where the hell is he?” she asked out loud. She brought out her phone to call him again she saw that her battery was low. Darn it! And she had left her charger at work. She needed to be on a conference call by 7am sharp, and a low battery was definitely going to hinder that.

  “Great Shelly, now you have to go to back to the office. Just great.” She s
ighed as she tried Eric’s number one last time. No answer. She left him a message and left the club.

  Shelly pulled up to her office, it was a large fashion house that had been founded by Arianna Blueborth in the heart of Atlanta twenty years ago, and had grown to be a success. However the house had been unable to penetrate the market of the younger generation. So Arianna had hired Shelly, top of her class at The Fashion Institute of Technology in fashion design, and Shelly had been more than happy to work with Arianna, thinking that it would be a short term thing and a way to pay back her student loans. Two years later and she was still working for someone else when all she wanted to do was run her own fashion house, with her own name on it, and her very own designs, but that didn’t come cheap.

  As Shelly walked up to her office, she noticed an unusual puddle on the ground, it stood out because it hadn’t rained in a very long time and then there was what looked to be a naked wire just conveniently near the puddle. There was something seriously wrong here. Taking out her phone she called the in-house security guard afraid to go in, but Big Sam wasn’t picking up, strange. She looked through the giant glass doors that provided access for staff and customers alike, and almost dropped her phone seeing Big Sam on the floor, laying there unconscious. What the hell? Was he dead? Panicked, Shelly lifted her phone and dialed 911.

  ***

  “Now why would you want to start your own clothing line Shelly when you have a good job here with good people?” Arianna said in a fake accent that stank of deceit. Arianna Blueborth was Shelly’s boss and friend, but she was known to be petty sometimes and go running off to her rich husband when she didn’t get her way.

  She had married young to an amazing man that placed her high above everyone else, and although she was closing in on forty, she still looked like she was in her early thirties. She had long blond hair that reached the top of her butt and that she always kept bone straight in a high fashion sense, today she had on beautiful diamond earrings that matched her diamond pendant necklace, she was dressed from head to toe in high-end designer brands—she rarely wore anything from her own fashion house—it was safe to say that Shelly wasn’t on her level.

  “To have my name out there. Why else?” Shelly responded

  It was the next day and she was exhausted from the night before, she had been working on a design for Arianna’s new clothing line all morning, and hadn’t even had time to check up on Big Sam. The ordeal of the previous night flashed through her mind, and she shivered remembering how scared she had been that something bad may have happened to Big Sam.

  When the cops and paramedics had arrived at the scene, they had found Big Sam alive but badly hurt. They had gone through the security cameras and while they had seen the culprit who had assaulted Big Sam and put a naked cable and a puddle of water close together, they had however been unable to make out of it who it had been; a man or a woman. They had scanned the whole building for any threat whatsoever and had found a bomb under Shelly’s work chair set to go off when she sat down. This had made them deduce that the man or woman had been trying to kill her. Shelly was scared but trying not to be, who could possibly be after her? She couldn’t figure it out. She didn’t think she had anything that someone else would want, and that made it even more worrisome for her because if she had an enemy with nothing to her name, how many would she have if she started her own fashion house? Was Arianna right? Was she really better off working for someone else for the rest of her life? Thinking about it put her in a foul mood, she pressed her pencil hard on her sketch, leaving a dent.

  They didn’t know how the culprit had known she would come in to get her charger, she hadn’t told anyone that she was heading in to work, not even Eric, so she was surprised. But Shelly figured that the person that set the very convenient death trap must have been studying her for a while, because more often than not she was always the first person to get into work and the last person to leave.

  “Having your name on a brand is not all that it’s cracked up to be.” Arianna responded, jogging her out of her depressing thoughts. “There is more to fashion than that.”

  “You have a massive clothing line, you are blessed with people that love and follow your brand. You of all people should know how that feels like and should understand me,” she addressed Arianna. Shelly had asked Arianna for a loan to start her own clothing line, and she could see that the other woman was already making excuses of why she couldn’t help. Arianna was silent for a while, the silence growing uncomfortable.

  “Well I’m sorry you feel that way, but we just can’t think of investing at this very moment, especially not when our new line is going to be launched soon.” Arianna said, then she walked out. Shelly wasn’t surprised that Arianna was being like this, she had tried in the past to ask for a loan or something so she could get started on her own fashion line, but every single time she had asked, Arianna had tried to convince her that working for herself was a headache and instead she should be working for someone else.

  The accident the night before had been a more than adequate incentive for Shelly, she was going to start putting all the designs she had for her company down, and start looking for investors. She wasn’t going to hang around until Arianna maybe changed her mind, she was going to start doing something now.

  Matthew Blueborth was sure he was going to have constipation, there was no way the food he was eating was going to be able to go down properly, not with his wife of over ten years nagging him while he ate. “I’m telling you Matty, we need to protect her,” his wife said for the tenth time. She hadn’t even waited for him to finish his breakfast before she had started her nagging.

  “Who would want her dead though?” Matthew asked. “She is such a sweet girl.”

  “Isn’t it obvious? It’s the Style House, they want our best designer out of the way so they can be in the lead this year at the Dallas Fashion Show.” Was that how it worked? Matty was sure that it was somehow more than that. Shelly was a very pretty girl and he had seen the way people looked at her. Girls with hate and jealousy in their eyes, guys with interest. He wouldn’t be surprised if a jealous girlfriend was the one targeting her because of her exotic look that may have attracted an unfaithful boyfriend.

  “Matty!” his wife cried when he didn’t respond. “Do something.”

  “What am I to do Ari? I’m not an Avenger you know,” he cracked a dry joke, laughing when his wife didn’t.

  “Baby, I am serious!” she whined, her beautiful flawless skin wrinkling as she frowned.

  “Fine, I will do something about it.” He sighed. Done with his breakfast and now drinking his coffee Matty thought of what he could do. He hated to see his wife like this, he always wanted to see her happy, to see her smile. He would look for a way to beef up security in the company, if one employee was in danger, chances were his wife wasn’t safe either. He wouldn’t risk her life.

  They had gotten married when he had had nothing, he had been fresh out of school with just his clothes on his back and a job promise from his late father’s old friend when they had gone to a court in Atlanta to make their relationship legal. They had thought then that if they lived together, they could save cost on a lot of things that they could be buying separately. Matthew loved Arianna more than anyone in his life, she had been his muse and his lucky charm since they had met, but more than that she was the love of his life and his best friend. She didn’t have to nag him to do something about the shocking incident that had happened at her company, he was going to make sure that she was kept safe no matter what, but for now he was running late for his appointment at the golf course. He drank some juice and stood up.

  Thirty minutes later and Matty was already on the golf course shooting some holes with his boys when the attempted murder came up.

  “I heard someone tried to kill one of Ari’s employees yesterday Matty, is that true?” his best friend Anthony said, sounding very interested. He had wanted to keep it hush-hush, not wanting to draw attention to it until i
t was necessary. He didn’t want his friends knowing about the commotion going on with Ari and the company. But Anthony had a lot of friends on the police force, and being an ex-navy SEAL himself, he wasn’t surprised that Anthony knew about it.

  “It was nothing serious,” he played it down. “The culprit wasn’t very smart.”

  “That’s good, we wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a beauty, now would we?” Jay, Matty’s friend and business partner said.

  “Creepy much Jay? Why you gotta say it like that?” Matty laughed. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to such a beauty, now would we?” he mimicked, and they all laughed.

  “Now watch it Matty.” Jay said, not sounding offended at all.

  “Have you considered beefing up the security in the company?” Luke asked. He was another ex-navy SEAL, but while Tony had left because he had felt it was time, Luke had left because he had lost his leg. He used a prosthetic leg now, which he said was as good as the real one and that he was lucky not to have lost his life, everyone was grateful for that. Luke was always quiet and full of wisdom. “It’s probably a competitor trying to steal some information from you guys.”

  “Yes, you also need to provide a bodyguard especially for that designer. I heard she was the one attacked.”

  “She was the one who called it in,” Matty corrected. “She wasn’t attacked.” He knew Shelly enough to know that she wouldn’t want to be victimized. “She said it was an awful experience for her, she came to work to get something and saw Big Sam lying on the floor. She thought he was dead but couldn’t even go to find out because she was scared that some foul play was involved.”