by Lexi Wilson
He shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, too. I was just telling Bama, here, she’d be a natural for our show. I’d love it if they put us in a story together.”
Yeah, I’ll just bet you would, I thought at him. And, I’ll bet I know what kind of scenes you’d want to do with her, you play-acting scumbag. But. in actual words I replied, “Well, she’s under contract with PowerShot ‘til further notice, and she’s with me tonight. We’re working. If you’ll excuse us…”
And without another word, I offered Bama my arm and escorted her away and out of the reach of Mr. Show Business. She gave him a sheepish little look over her shoulder as we walked, and I steered us towards some people with cameras and microphones.
The evening continued, and I kept Bama within arm’s length of me at all times. Thankfully, the planners of this event didn’t seat us near either Bo Remington or the soap opera guy, so I didn’t have either of them to deal with for the rest of the evening.
As the night went on, we had dinner and the band played a couple of sets. There were photo ops with the band, and other photos we took together and individually, posed in front of banners for PowerShot. The marketing people made sure to get us holding cans of the beverage itself, for the magazines and Web ads. I could feel how excited Bama was about the whole thing, getting a little taste of greater fame than she’d gotten from leading the Rangers Cheerleaders. I had to admit I was happy for her.
But at odd moments during the night, I found myself questioning my own feelings. Why had I been so upset seeing her with the soap opera guy? Did I really see him as more than just intruding on our work? Seeing him hover over Bama, I had a feeling that wasn’t only professional annoyance. I’d reacted as if he weren’t just cutting in on our work. I’d hustled Bama away from him as if I thought he was cutting in on something else.
There wasn’t anything else, though. Bama and I were just there doing a job.
Weren’t we?
Chapter 11
Bama
As much as I played the part of the beautiful commercial spokeswoman who had her act together and was enjoying the evening for the cameras, I was confused as hell all night. What the hell was going on with Barrett?
The entire evening, he looked as if he were having a good time with me. But while the cameras and the press people might not have caught it, I could tell he was putting on a show of having a good time. A girl can tell these things.
I hadn’t been around nearly as much as Barrett had been; that was true. But a girl knows when a guy is really enjoying being with her and when he’s seeming to enjoy being with her. And that night of the big dinner and concert and photo ops, Barrett was definitely seeming. He only talked to me or looked at me when he absolutely had to, when he knew that we were “on.” He kept me close, but it was as if we were a couple of stage props for each other.
Granted, Barrett wasn’t really my date and we weren’t really a couple. Our relationship was no relationship at all; it was a commercial thing. We were meant to represent the fun that people were supposed to have when they drank PowerShot. I got that.
But, there was that one moment when something else seemed to be going on.
When Barrett came to my side when I was talking to Kevin Delaney, he gave off a clear vibe. It was unmistakable, the vibe that you pick up from a guy when he’s jealous. While I covered my reaction, it took me completely by surprise because before that little scene when he very pointedly led me away from Kevin, and then for the rest of the night afterward, he never acted as if there were anything between us but this job we were doing.
It was just then, when he pried me away from the soap star, that I picked up something else from him, something territorial. It was over as soon as it started, but I swear I wasn’t imagining it. For that moment, it was there.
And then...nothing.
The confused feeling of that evening followed me all night, all the way back up to my room and into bed.
I knew it was easier for men than for women to compartmentalize their feelings, to isolate their emotions and put them into boxes in their head as if all their feelings were separate things and not related. Was that what Barrett had done? Did he have some kind of feeling about me that only came out when it was necessary, that he could just mentally fold up like a shirt and stick in a drawer the rest of the time?
It was possible, I figured. If Barrett could just switch off the attraction that he felt for a woman after one night in bed, then yes, it was possible. I didn’t like the implications of that. I was pregnant by him, and he could flick his feelings about me on and off like a light switch. I was carrying his baby and he was capable of just putting me aside in his head. That wasn’t really a good reflection on me, was it?
We had one more day in Denver, where we were to have a photo op for a charity event. I still wanted to talk to him before we left. Whatever it was he was feeling about me, I needed Barrett to know what was going on with us. The three of us.
That’s what I was doing at his door the next day, this time wearing the off-white dress, preparing to play the same scene that I’d played before, but this time hoping for a different outcome.
I screwed up my courage one more time, and I rapped on his door once again. And man, did I ever get a different outcome – as “different” as it could possibly get, in a way that I never would have expected.
The door to Barrett’s room swung open fast and hard, but the first person to come through it was not Barrett. It was a brunette about my age, wearing a dress more expensive than mine and a look that seemed even more desperate and urgent than I felt.
I didn’t like at all the implications of what I saw when Barrett himself appeared in the doorway as I took a step back. Oh no! This can’t be! I cried in my head. He didn’t… I gulped at where my awful thoughts were inevitably going. DID he?
Barrett and I had been contracted to do a public-relations job where we were too look as if we were having fun enjoying each other’s company. I knew how he was about sex, but would he really take a risk like this? I wondered. Would he really jeopardize what we’d been hired to do by picking up some woman overnight and having private relations with her in the room that the commercial sponsor was picking up the tab for? Would he really be so reckless? So indiscreet?
Maybe the money didn’t mean that much to him, since he was already a millionaire so many times over, but what about the bad publicity? Did he really not care about that? And did he really not care about what he could be doing to my livelihood, let alone my reputation? How would it look if I turned out to be cavorting around for PowerShot with a guy who was cavorting with other women during the night? What would that do to my part of this deal?
As my thoughts swirled, I began to see Barrett Porter as the most thoughtless, selfish son of a bitch on the face of the Earth, and I wanted to punch his stupid, skirt-chasing lights out.
But, there was still the rest of this scene between Barrett and Miss Whoever She Was to play out, and like it or not, I was the audience.
Barrett put himself in the doorway, leaving the woman nowhere else to go but out into the hall where I had backed myself up against the wall to give them some room. The woman was close to tears, desperately upset, pleading with him, the way my teammate had – the way Lord knows how many women must have when facing him at such a moment. If I hadn’t wanted so badly to slug Barrett in the jaw, I could have almost pitied this woman.
She was adamant; I’d give her that. She was hurt in the way that only a woman can be hurt when some guy is giving her the old toss, but she was standing her ground.
“I won’t leave!” she cried. “I’m not going! You know how I feel about you, Barrett! You know how I’ve always felt about you. But, you never call. I never get an email. I never get a text – nothing. It’s like you don’t even care!”
For the first time, I was actually hearing the way Barrett talked to women. “I never led you to believe there’d be something going on between us, Kim. You shouldn’t have just jumped
on a plane and come all the way up here for nothing. I’m on a job, and I didn’t invite you.”
“You never invite me anymore!” Kim protested. “So, I had to invite myself. Barrett, that’s no way to treat me. Why do you act like you don’t want to see me, like you don’t even want to touch me?”
This was unreal. They were doing this whole scene as if I weren’t even standing there. I might as well have been invisible.
“Because I don’t, Kim,” said Barrett with a bluntness that shocked me. “I didn’t ask you to come here. I don’t want you here, and I don’t want you coming around me uninvited.”
“I’m not just some uninvited stranger!” Kim said, beginning to shout and starting to make me very nervous. “I love you!”
I flinched. Hearing this from her, seeing how little it affected him, made me want to run away back down the hall and hide in my room.
Stone cold serious, Barrett told her, “Look, I didn’t want to have it out with you like this, but by coming here uninvited – and let me say this one more time, Kim, I never want you to do that again – you’ve forced me. I don’t like doing this. I never want to hurt anybody. But, I don’t love you, and you have to get over me.”
There was a sob in her voice now. I could tell how he had stabbed her right in the heart. “You don’t love me? You can run around with every other woman like you think I haven’t heard, but you don’t love me?”
For the first time they acknowledged my presence, and I almost wished they hadn’t. Kim gestured over to me. “Have you been with her? She’s the one you’re doing the campaign with. Is she your new one? How can you be with everyone but the one who loves you, Barrett?”
“I’m not in love with anybody,” he said flatly.
Right then, this awful, cold silence fell over the hallway. I decided I liked the fighting better. Could they please go back to fighting and put an end to this freezing quiet?
Then Kim actually looked at me and addressed me, which made me nervous again. “Better watch yourself with him, honey,” she said. “This is what he does. He does it with all of them. He just did it to the one that cares about him the most. This is how he is.”
She paused and added, “And, you know something? I’d take him back. I’d still be with him again, even after that.” She turned back to Barrett. “That’s how good I still think you are. That’s how much I’ve always wanted you. Doesn’t say much for me, does it?”
He groaned, “Kim, please…”
She cut him off. “Never mind. I can’t go on like this, after the only man I ever loved told me he doesn’t love me back. I can’t. But sometime soon, Barrett, I hope you get tired of running around and come back to what’s real. What I feel is real.”
She faced me again. “Like I said, dear, you’d better watch yourself. Don’t let it be more than a job – or you’ll be next.”
And with a last painful glance at Barrett and without another word, Kim walked off down the hall. It actually made me sad for her, knowing how she’d been broken at this moment; broken in everything but her dignity. She just walked off, head held high, carrying the pieces of her broken heart with her.
That left just Barrett and me. What would he do next? For that matter, what would I do next after all that?
I soon found out. The only thing Barrett said to me with a total poker face once Kim was out of there was, “Follow me.”
And, I did.
_______________
Across the street from the hotel was a cafe. I didn’t know exactly why Barrett took me there. Perhaps it was because everyone knew he was in the hotel and he thought there might be people snooping around. Perhaps he wanted to try to throw someone off the scent. He might even have thought – and this was the most likely idea – that Kim was still lurking somewhere in the hotel. Whatever the case was, Barrett took me to this cafe and had us sit at a table, off in the back, with as few prying eyes as possible.
He asked me what I wanted to drink, and I told him just a bottle of juice. I’d started limiting caffeine, and I expected to have a chance now to tell him the reason why. Once we were seated and had drinks in front of us, Barrett began.
He minced no words. He pulled no punches. Barrett asked, poker-faced and point blank, “Listen...you don’t think you’re in love with me, do you?”
I was as unprepared for that question as I knew he would be for what I had to tell him. All I could do was blurt out, “What?”
“Are you falling for me? Do you think you’re in love with me?” he repeated.
“Why would you think that?” I asked, sucker-punched by his bluntness.
“You saw what just happened up there with Kim,” said Barrett. “I have to play that scene a lot with women. I want to know if I’m gonna have to play it with you.”
The question made me feel indignant, offended. In my head I answered, Well, maybe if you didn’t screw everything east of the Rio Grande, you wouldn’t have this problem.
Not bothering to hide the way I felt at being asked such a thing, I told him, as flatly as he’d asked me, “No.” I added in my head, in spite of the fact that you’ve knocked me up, you bed-hopping bastard.
“Good,” said Barrett. “Because if we’re gonna be working together on this campaign after...you know...that thing before the Super Bowl, I just wanted to say, we can’t have that coming up. I don’t want any emotional things about that happening to complicate what we’re doing now.”
I replied, “Well, neither do I. Listen, this is an important opportunity for me. You know how much I make cheerleading. It isn’t even a drop in the bucket compared to what you make from playing. Without this gig, I’d be out working temp jobs, waiting for the new season to start. I don’t want anything to mess this up.”
“Is that what you were doing, coming to my room? Is that what you wanted to tell me, that you just wanted to keep this as a work thing without any emotional crap?”
Inside my head I was practically screaming and pounding on the walls. AAAHHH! You jerk! You son of a bitch! You stupid, clueless idiot! Pigskin for brains, that’s what you are, you big walking ass! If you had even the slightest clue what I really came over to your room to tell you…
But in spite of how much I wanted to haul off and kick a field goal with his head, what I said instead was, “Yeah. That’s it. No…emotional crap. No complications. This is just a job.”
He took a gulp of his coffee and said, “Glad to hear it. I’m glad we’ve got that straight. Because I know how important this must be to you, and I’d hate to see you lose out on this.”
“Right,” I said, gritting my teeth.
I’d chickened out again. How many times was I going to fail to tell him he was going to be a father? How long would it take me? I had this picture of myself on the way to the hospital after my water broke, screaming at him, “Oh, by the way…”
Before I had the chance to feel any angrier at him or myself than I already did, his phone went off and he took it from his shirt pocket. “Yeah, Barrett. Talk to me.”
After listening to whoever was on the other end and whatever they had to say, he looked across the table at me again. “There’s something else I need to deal with. Will you be okay here?”
“Sure,” I said. Nothing for you to worry about here. It’s not like you’ve gotten me pregnant or anything.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll see you later.” Then, back into his phone, “Cole, buddy, I’m on my way.”
Barrett excused himself, leaving me alone – but not really alone – in the cafe.
Chapter 12
Barrett
In addition to my usual morning wood, which complained of not being serviced in a while (I’d have to take care of that when I got back to Dallas), I woke up in a crappy mood.
I don’t know what it was... The entrance she made in the lobby, the dress she wore. Or maybe the way she showed up outside my room right when I was having it out with Kim, which threw me for a loop. Whatever was the cause of it, Bama had gotten insid
e my head and I couldn’t get her the hell out. It was really pissing me off.
At least we knew where we stood, though. At least she’d told me she wasn’t in love with me and there wasn’t going to be any sticky emotional stuff to complicate things with the job we were doing. That should have been a load off my mind. But for some damn reason, I couldn’t get Bama herself off my mind.
Everything should be okay now. Everything should be smooth sailing. We had clear lines drawn. Work was work and what happened before the big game was in the past.
But still, bright and early, there she was in my head.
Needing something to take my mind off what was going on both in my head and under the covers, I called Cole.
The basic fact of business that I’d learned from knowing Cole was that at the beginning when you need start-up capital, you don’t use your own money. You get investors. Actually, I always knew this, but it was never something I thought about because I’ve always been an athlete, not a business person. It wasn’t until I started thinking about my future after football that any thoughts like this came into my head. Luckily, I had Cole to think about these things for me.
When I got him on the phone, we picked up from where our last conversation left off. He’d been making a list of potential investors in our sportswear line. Having the background and contacts that he had, Cole knew where to look for people like that. If it had all been in just my hands, I wouldn’t have had a clue. Cole was on it, though, and he’d put together his list and done his homework on all of them. He’d brought the whole thing to me and we’d gone over who we thought were the best ones to approach first.
It all looked really encouraging when the two of us sat down with all the facts and figures, and I was interested in knowing if it had started looking even more encouraging overnight. Cole told me that since we talked, he had been sending out his first emails and feelers to the parties we’d agreed were the most likely prospects, which again made me feel confident that I was working with the right man.
