Game Changer Read Online Free

no problem being nearly naked save for a pair of dark purple bikini briefs that showed every ridge and bulge of his family jewels, but he did mind the makeup, even though he looked damn good in it. The photographer, Mutt, had gushed about the black eyeliner adding to his air of intensity and making his blue eyes pop. Brandon agreed.
    Then Terrance, his agent, said, “Damn, man, I hate to say this, but you look pretty.”
    He hated that Terrance had said that, too, because Brandon had zero interest in getting in touch with his feminine side. But he was getting paid a pretty penny for this gig, so whatever.
    It wasn’t like the makeup artist had painted him up to be a drag queen. He wore no eye shadow and only a neutral shade of lip balm. Yes, highlights had been added to his cheekbones and his whole body was slick with baby oil, but he had enough experience in the biz to know that none of that shit except the eyeliner would be apparent in the finished photographs. Even still, if his Bomb Squad teammates would have been at the shoot, they would have laughed themselves unconscious.
    â€œHook your finger into the bottom of your briefs like you’re tugging them back into place,” murmured Mutt, a gruff man in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper goatee, his eye glued to the camera.
    With a confident smirk pasted on his lips, Brandon reached around and slid his index finger between the cotton and his skin, then tugged.
    â€œThat’s it. Pull the fabric away from your skin. Show us that famous ass.”
    Brandon’s ass was many a splendor thing because he tortured himself at the gym every day to make sure it was. Of course, if seven years ago, while he’d been lying in a hospital bed staring at the spot where his right foot should have been, someone had told him that his ass was going to be famous someday, he would have buzzed the nurse to request a psych exam.
    Mutt straightened, lowering the camera. “Your eyes are distant. Get out of your head.”
    Brandon cleared his throat. “Sorry.”
    â€œIt’s okay. How about we try something fresh? Shift your weight to your left leg and scoot your right leg back toward the camera. Yeah, give us a view of that bionic foot.”
    He shifted on command, jutting his hips, tightening his right glute, and giving the camera a great view of his artificial foot.
    Brandon had to believe that he wasn’t exploiting his disfiguring injury by modeling or appearing on
Meet the Groom
, as Harper had worried. Was it twisted that Brandon enjoyed it—not just the attention and money but, despite the occasionally frustrating drawbacks of being an amputee, the prosthesis itself? How could he not, with its sleek, state-of-the-art technology and its ability to get him any girl’s number, any time? Maybe that was twisted of him or maybe not. The only thing he knew for sure was this: there was a specific reason he’d survived the IED blast that had killed nine other soldiers that night seven years ago. Nine of his brothers-in-arms.
    If Brandon had been riding shotgun in the deuce-and-a-half he’d been assigned to near the front of the CLP—combat logistics patrol—or if either the Husky or gun truck in front of the deuce had been going a few klicks per hour faster, then the explosion would have turned him into vulture food, too.
    So Brandon knew there had to be an important reason that God or whoever was up there pulling the strings had left Brandon alive, the only survivor of those first three vehicles in the forty-plus vehicle convoy. If only the Powers That Be had bothered to spell out that reason for Brandon, then he’d be golden. Piece of cake. But there was no such instruction manual for discovering and fulfilling the purpose he’d been kept alive for, and he was starting to feel like this whole trial-and-error method was bullshit.
    All he had to go on was the fire inside him telling him to live full throttle, to not