The Bodyguard
Katherine Center
Orion
2023, 302p
Received as a Christmas gift
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: She’s got his back. He’s got her heart. They’ve got a secret. What could possibly go wrong?
Hannah Brooks looks more like a kindergarten teacher than somebody who could kill you with her bare hands. But the truth is, she’s an elite bodyguard and she’s just been hired to protect a superstar actor from his stalker.
Jack Stapleton’s a Hollywood heartthrob – captured by paparazzi on beaches the world over, rising out of the waves in clingy board shorts and glistening like a Roman deity.
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.
Protecting Jack should be easy. But protecting her own heart? That’s the hardest thing she’s ever done…
I really, really enjoyed this.
I thought it had just the right amount of humour and balanced it out with some family issues (for both characters) really well. I liked both the main characters and got super invested.
Hannah is a protection agent – bodyguard. Despite her small stature, she’s one of the best at her job. She’s not the sort of bodyguard you hire when you want everyone to know you have a bodyguard. She’s excellent at blending in, at looking like she belongs and most people tend to assume she’s the Nanny or assistant of the client, the person she’s assigned to protect. Hannah can kill you in multiple ways but she feels that if you get close enough for her to need to demonstrate it, she’s failing already. Her job is to remove threats before they even become threats – to assess a situation, make a move before anything can even be obvious to the client.
After a personal tragedy and her boyfriend dumping her, the boss of her agency decides Hannah will be the main agent in protecting Jack – a big Hollywood actor who kind of dropped off the radar a couple of years ago after the death of his brother. Jack’s mother is sick, which has brought him back to Texas to see her and Jack has what is probably described as a minor stalker. A lady who breeds corgis and enjoys knitting him sweaters. But no one is taking any chances, especially as Jack’s mother is unwell and Jack is adamant that she not be worried about anything, so it’ll be Hannah’s job to shadow Jack. And this time, being assumed to be the Nanny isn’t going to work as Jack doesn’t have kids. To allow her unfettered access to the family, Hannah will be posing as Jack’s girlfriend.
Jack is like a Chris Hemsworth sort, he made a big action movie a few years ago, he’s made some rom coms and a few others. He’s very good looking and intimidating and Hannah does occasionally have trouble around him but he’s also one of those ‘nice boys made good’. He’s a big name actor with a big name public ‘girlfriend’ but he doesn’t really have that persona in private. He’s definitely against the idea of a bodyguard (the scene where he meets Hannah and queries if she can even protect him is hilarious) but he also definitely seems to need not just physical support but emotional support in terms of dealing with his family. Hannah becomes that for him when his mother insists they stay at the house whilst she is recovering. Jack’s brother is the only one not happy to see him – it’s clear that there’s a lot of tension and unresolved issues over the death of their other brother and that Jack is square in the blame for it.
I really liked the way this story built and the way that Jack and Hannah kept finding ways to connect in different ways. Hannah is dumped just at the beginning of this book in a way that made me want to inflict bodily harm and she thinks that Jack is off limits both because of his “relationship” that’s always in the media and because she’s aggressively ordinary. It’s how people describe her, how she blends in. Her ex taps into her insecurities about this, telling her that someone like Jack would never be interested in someone like her. That’s kind of what I like about romances between famous people and regular people. Because despite the fact that Jack is very famous and has made a big name for himself, he’s spent the past two years completely off the grid somewhere remote and it’s clear that when he comes back to Texas, it’s reluctantly and only because his mother is sick. Even though it’s his home turf, he’s uncomfortable being there and it reduces him from the big star to a regular person, the sort of person that Hannah gets to know. Hannah is good at reading people, she has to be for her job but Jack is an actor so she does constantly second guess herself.
The family stuff was done very well – Jack’s family are a shaken up bottle ready to explode and Hannah clearly has a lot of issues from her upbringing, the death of her mother, etc. There’s serious topics underneath the humour and it’s a bit of a rollercoaster of emotions. This is the sort of book that makes you laugh out loud, the sort of book that makes you furious on behalf of a character and the sort of book that makes you tear up with emotion. There’s a scene in this that I felt in my soul and I was like what are you doing to me, Katherine Center?
This author has a pretty extensive backlist and I am definitely going to be going back and reading their other books as well as looking forward to The Rom-Commers which is coming out this year.
9/10
Book #10 of 2024
The Bodyguard is on my 24 in 2024 list. It’s the 1st book read for the challenge.
All The Books I Can Read 
Looking so forward to this novel and as you say, many of the other titles by Katherine that I haven’t read. The only one I did read was Happiness for Beginners, which surprised me, so I’m hoping I enjoy many of Katherine’s other novels, too!