Safe and Sound (Twist of Fate 2)

“Ass,” I muttered under my breath as I typed out a response. Wrong show, buttmunch.

The fact that I was resorting to calling him by the very nickname I’d called him when we’d been younger was proof of how tired I was. Normally I was rock-solid with the comebacks, but not today.

Last night’s dream had been the worst so far. While it had started off the same as the night before, its ending had been crueler than usual.

Because it hadn’t just been Bennett in the water, calling for me. No, this time there’d been another calling to me. I hadn’t recognized the voice, but the words had been eerily familiar.

What’s the point of surfacing if I don’t have the strength to take another breath?

The line from the journal had been haunting me for nearly twenty-four hours now, and I regretted that I’d taken the damn thing in the first place. I hated that I’d read the whole thing from cover to cover twice already and that even now, the urge to hole up in my office and read it again was strong. I should’ve been focusing on the proposal I needed to be putting together, not wondering what kind of pain the mysterious author of the journal must have been going through to have written such haunting prose.

There’d been no clue as to the owner’s identity, and the journal had seemed to serve multiple purposes. It included a mix of poems, random lines, and even diary entries. There were also a few lines of music and a drawing here and there. I’d felt incredibly guilty, especially reading the diary entries, because they’d been addressed to someone named Billy. In reality, they were more like letters, and the content had pointed to a troubled relationship— the author often questioning themselves about what they’d done wrong. Whoever had written the prose was mourning the loss of something, and I desperately wanted to know what it was.

But I also didn’t.

I shook my head, even as my fingers itched to pull the little book from my coat pocket so I could once again skim it for some evidence of who the owner was.

Fuck, it didn’t matter. Seeking a distraction, I pulled up the browser on my phone and began scanning the latest sports news for anything about what I hoped would soon be VP Associates’ newest client. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for. I let my eyes drift over the picture of the young man with a gorgeous woman draped on his arm as he smiled wide at the reporters. I could practically hear his voice dripping with fake Southern charm as he answered questions and gave the reporters the poses they wanted.

Bomber Flynn was a pompous ass.

There was just no way around it.

And he sucked at pretending to be anything other than what he was— an arrogant, over-the-top jock who believed he was God’s greatest gift to football and women. In his very short, albeit hugely successful career, he’d managed to alienate most of his teammates, piss off various coaches and owners, and flit from one model or actress to another as he spouted off his drivel about carrying his team to a second Super Bowl win this year. That shit wasn’t playing well in the press, and while I suspected Bomber didn’t mind, since he thrived on any attention he could get— positive or negative— his savvy agent had decided it was time for some serious damage control before Bomber’s bottom line felt the impact of his runaway mouth.

That was where I came in.

I was a spin doctor and I was fucking great at it. That wasn’t arrogance talking, it was just plain fact. And the proof was in the fact that of all the potential PR firms Shirley Frost, agent to some of the biggest names in professional sports, had reached out to, she’d included VP Associates in her top two choices to figure out how to make Bomber Flynn look like an overzealous, misunderstood good old Southern boy who was just living his dream to its fullest.

It was utter bullshit.

Because there was pretty much nothing redeemable about the guy. I’d hated him from the second he’d walked into our conference room the day before and gripped my hand in a “my dick is bigger than yours” handshake.

The guy was a high-maintenance jerk who seriously rubbed me the wrong way. But, regardless of my personal opinion, it would be an enormous coup for our agency if we could land him as a client. So I’d play my part and get the asshole to sign with us and then I’d hand him over to my brother to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

The sound of a dish breaking had me glancing up from my phone. Nearly every single person in the coffee shop looked up from their own phones or computers and stared at the young man behind the counter who was standing in shocked silence as he stared at the floor.