“You’re welcome,” I told him, trying not to think about all the reasons he shouldn’t be thanking me. He knew the score as well as I did. No point dwelling on it; we both needed to start moving forward.
Chapter 9
Daniel
I COULDN’T REMEMBER ever feeling this hungover before, and I couldn’t help looking back at the previous night and wishing that Austin had cut me off sooner, or that I hadn’t done any more drinking when I had gotten home, or that I had at least stuck to beer when I did get home and decided to continue drinking on my own. But that was hindsight for you.
Plenty of things I would have done differently with the whole Abby situation too, if I had the chance to go back and redo them. That didn’t mean things were ever going to be any different. It was all just wishful thinking.
Talking to Abby on Tuesday morning felt good, though. She relaxed me, and I already felt a lot less shitty than I had when I had woken up that morning. Not just because of the Tylenol she had given me, either.
I felt so stupid for assuming that because she had baby Tylenol in her purse, she must have children that she hadn’t told me about. But fortunately, she hadn’t seemed offended when I’d said that. Instead, she just seemed amused. She had been so good to me, even though I knew I must have left her in the lurch by not showing up this morning. I hadn’t really told her what her tasks were going to be for the coming week, because I was honestly still surprised she had really agreed to come back to work with me.
It made me wish that things could be different between us. But I could tell that she was keeping things strictly professional, not even letting our fingers brush as she handed me the pill bottle. I forced myself to respond with the same.
And I vowed that this wasn’t going to become the new norm for me. I couldn’t let my whole business tank just because I had lost Abby. If that was a fear of mine, then I was going to need to turn the business over to someone else while I took a sabbatical or something.
The idea of doing that, though, left me feeling cold inside. What the hell would I do with myself if I had nothing I needed to do with my day-to-day life?
No, that wasn’t the way to solve this. Instead, I’d just focus on work to the exclusion of everything else. More late nights so that I wouldn’t have to spend as much time home alone in the house. I’d send Abby home if I had to. Order her to leave. Whatever it took. Eventually, she would get the idea.
With that in mind, I took a deep breath and opened up my emails, scrolling through for anything important. I had until Abby came back after lunch to compose myself. Then, we would have a quick discussion about that afternoon’s plan, and then we would be in meetings. I needed to stay focused.
But I was dragged away from my business focus when a new message came in from Austin. I grimaced, already worried to click on the link. Austin was good about sending me the latest stories about myself so that I would see them before anyone else commented on them. But that didn’t mean I always wanted to open the stories he sent me.
Especially not on a day when it already felt like I had been kicked halfway to New York before I’d even gotten out of bed that morning.
I sighed and clicked on the link, though, knowing there was no putting it off. Abby was on her lunch break, so for all I knew, she might have already seen this. Whatever it was.
I grimaced when I saw the header image. It was a picture of me, plastered at the top of the article, as I was leaving work the previous day—actually a series of three images pasted side by side—just before I had gotten in the car with Austin.
Didn’t the media have anything better to do? What the hell kind of story did they think they could make out of that anyway? Would the article talk about how I was slacking off, heading home early? As though I didn’t put in enough hours at this business. But it wouldn’t be the first time they had accused me of caring more about partying than business.
Fortunately, most of the guys I did business with were more than willing to let my actions speak for me. I had never, once, slacked off as far as they were concerned.
I grimaced. That was even more reason to not let something like this morning happen ever again. I had a reputation to protect, and the last thing I needed was people thinking I was so busy partying until late at night that I couldn’t get myself to the office first thing in the morning like everyone else.
But the article wasn’t about my work ethic at all. Or at least, not directly. Instead, it was all about my relationship with Abby James. I groaned, hoping beyond hope that Abby hadn’t seen this. Would she be angry with me all over again? It wasn’t my fault that the press were all over us. What could I have done differently to protect her from this? I didn’t have a easy answer for that one.
But I couldn’t help remembering those stupid words I had said before, when her brother was worried about her coming to work for me. Words that Gerrard had echoed the night I’d hit him at the bar. I had told her that I used articles like this to keep my company in the news, to keep us at the top of the search results.
Would she think I was the one behind the article? The timing couldn’t have been worse.
I read on. The article was a bunch of bullshit about how I’d been dumped by my recent fling, my advisor. An anonymous source claimed that I had been known to have other quick relationships with my employees before they cast me aside. That Abby wasn’t the first person to find herself in this position.
There was speculation about what I would do now. Would I manage to keep working with Abby? Would she even want to stay on as my advisor now that she had grown bored with me? Would she maybe take a different position with McGregor Enterprises, or would she head to a different company? And if she did leave her position as advisor, would I replace her with someone even sexier next time?
I felt sick to my stomach even though I knew that none of it was true. Just the thought that someone would write all of this, I couldn’t believe it. It was one thing to have the press speculating on my work-to-party ratio. But to have them talking about my relationships, things that they clearly didn’t know the first thing about, and then slandering me by talking about how this wasn’t the first time I’d had relationships like this with my employees?
I suddenly knew that this wasn’t just the work of some bored member of the paparazzi, though. No, this smacked of Gerrard. I sighed and put my head down in my hands, wondering just how to approach this. The trouble was that I didn’t have any proof. And Gerrard wasn’t stupid; he wouldn’t ever admit to having gone to the press about this. Or he’d figure out some way to twist things, say that the press were just being too free with the words he’d said, that he hadn’t meant to insinuate that.
And the person who wrote the article would never give up their sources, either. I knew that from previous stories that had been posted about me. They knew that as soon as they gave up someone like Gerrard, they were never going to get another story from him. So they’d keep going back for more and more.
Gerrard would probably never run out of stories to tell them about me. Especially not if he kept fabricating them as he went.
I spared another moment of pity for myself over having ended up in this position. Gerrard had been a loyal employee of the company for more than two decades. And he’d been my advisor for the last five. But somewhere along the line, he must have wanted something more, and I must have missed the signs of it. He had started going to the press, selling them stories, telling them my whereabouts. All for a little bit of an extra paycheck.
I’d had to fire him when I found out what he was doing. But that hadn’t made that decision any easier. And now, he was practically goading me into taking him to court over all of it. I hated the idea of doing that, almost as much as I hated myself for having punched the man in a fucking bar.