Page 6 of Handsome Devil
“Your schedule will be cleared to attend to this,” she informed me. “This is your top priority in Vancouver. Your team will get the meetings scheduled for you. You can get started this afternoon.”
“I’ll speak with my team,” I forced out, knuckling my temple. “Just leave it with me.”
“Oh, I’ve already spoken with them.”
“You… what?”
Seriously… Was this happening? Had I regressed to adolescence overnight?
My mother had less control of my daily schedule in grade school.
“This will be good for you, Dane,” she said. “It’s an opportunity to familiarize yourself with our west coast holdings. You never get out there. You haven’t even met these people, and yetyoudecide if they have a job today or tomorrow. You know your grandmother prefers a more personable work environment, and she’s been asking you to make a trip out west for years.”
All true. But Valhalla had grown exponentially since my grandmother actually ran it day-to-day with my grandfather years ago. And sometimes her expectations were somewhat… old school.
“Yes,” I said, “but I couldn’t possibly shake hands with every human we employ these days, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
“I will not hear excuses on this,” my mother said. “A Davenport always shakes hands and you, thus far, are a Davenport. Unlike some people, your grandmother and I prefer to know exactly who we’re getting in bed with.”
Fuck. Me.
Low blow, Mom.
Andthus far? What the hell did that mean?
“The damage from what you’ve done will be far-reaching, Dane. Do you understand?”
“I understand.” I squeezed the bridge of my nose, waiting for this, the latest in a litany of lectures, to be over.
“This will hurt us across the board. It’s not just…the video,” she added with distaste. “It’s public perception. As soon as your…sex tape… hit the web,” she spat out, “it spun us upside-down—”
“It wasn’tmytape,” I reminded her. I’d tried to make this clear to her, but she’d gone selectively deaf in the last few days.
“You. Were. In. It,” she grit right back at me.
Yes. Yes, I was. And the fact that both she and my grandmother knew I was in it because they’dseenme in it—at least, part of it—would be addressed at a future therapy session or a thousand.
“This could drown a lesser family,” she warned me. “We need to get our heads back above water here, fast.”
“This will not capsize us, Mom.”
“Tell that to every person whose life was ever capsized by a sex scandal, son. A man in a leaked sex tape isn’t widely considered the epitome of class, discretion, trustworthiness… need I go on?”
“No need.”
“And I can tell you, Bradley is not liking the impact on our numbers.”
Big surprise. And when Bradley wasn’t happy, my mother was on the war path.
“The last thing we need now,” she went on, “is a wave of women with millions of followers popping up to Twitter ‘Me Too’ because they decide it’s high time they publicly divulged the fact that the defamed billionaire bachelor in the sex tape headlines slapped them on the ass at a party once.”
Really? This was really what she thought I did with my spare time?
“I don’t slap random women on the ass at parties, Mom. Just so you know.”
I could hear her nail tapping.Tap, tap, tap.Like an angry woodpecker trying to drill through her desk. “Fix this,” she hissed, with acid in her voice. It was herI’m-on-my-last-thread-with-youvoice. “That’s what you do, right? The Davenport empire’s illustrious corporate fixer, who can’t fix his way out of a mess involving two drunken bimbos and a video camera.”
“I’ll fix this,” I forced out. “I’ll fix everything.”
