Damage Control

by M. S. Parker

  Five

  Paige

  I didn’t want to do this.

  I really didn’t want to do this.

  Most women would be thrilled at the chance to work with Reb Union. I’d never heard any of his music, but I doubted that was the draw. I’d seen enough pictures of him to know it wasn’t just the money either. He had the sort of features that could only be described as pretty, and was six four, with an amazing body, and bronze hair that always looked like he’d just climbed out of bed. Added to that, the most uniquely colored irises I’d ever seen, and wow. Indigo. As in almost purple.

  One of his endorsement deals was with a suit company, and someone on the marketing team had been absolutely brilliant. They’d had the color leached from everything except his eyes.

  I might not like musicians – or most people, for that matter – but I wasn’t a nun. He was gorgeous.

  Not that it mattered. I knew better than to let a pretty face and hard body be anything more than fantasy fodder. The fact that he was a musician just made it easier to remember.

  It hadn’t been easy yesterday, not giving Sybil a list of reasons why this was a bad idea. If I had, she would’ve wanted to know why, and that wasn’t anything I wanted to share, not with my boss, not with anyone. I loved my mother, and I was proud of everything she’d done to raise me on her own. I’d never let anyone say anything bad about her.

  But that didn’t mean I wanted to advertise the fact that she didn’t know who my father was.

  Just after she turned sixteen, she ran off to follow her boyfriend’s band, but they’d broken up only a few weeks into the tour. Instead of going home, she’d moved on to a different member of a different band. For nearly six years, she gone from one musician to another, sometimes between a couple guys. Sometimes they shared her. She’d been into the whole sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll thing, never thinking about the future.

  She’d always been honest about that, about why, and when she realized she was pregnant, she didn’t have any way to figure out who my father was unless she asked for paternity tests. It hadn’t mattered to her back then because she’d known that, whoever it was, he wouldn’t want to be a father, and she’d never be able to count on him for any sort of support.

  So, my father was either a washed-up wanna-be rock god, or he’d actually managed to accomplish his dream, but either way, he wasn’t the sort of man my mom had been able to count on. Which meant I’d learned young to not count on anyone other than myself and my mother.

  “Are you going to get in the elevator, or just stand there, staring at it?”

  The snide question pulled my attention back to the immediate present, and I managed not to scowl at the woman impatiently tapping her toe at me.

  “Sorry about that,” I offered as I stepped onto the elevator. That was the best she was going to get from me. I didn’t appreciate getting a dirty look from someone who looked like she was doing a late walk of shame.

  Her glare didn’t get any friendlier when I pushed the button for the top floor. It was on the tip of my tongue to make up some lie about dating Reb, but I couldn’t bring myself to even joke about it.

  She got off on the seventh floor, and I rode the rest of the way up on my own. I didn’t fall back into memories of my past though. No, I kept those firmly pushed down. This wasn’t about me or my dislike of a particular group of people. This was work. I needed to be professional.

  When I knocked on his door, I was focused and ready for anything.

  Anything but realizing that Reb was better-looking in real life than he was in any of the pictures I’d seen.

  He looked down at me, his eyes blood-shot and half-focused, then gave me one of those far-too-charming grins that guys like him seemed to master in the cradle.

  “Mr. Union?” I bit back a moan at how lame I sounded. Like he was anyone else. “I’m Paige Ryce, your PR rep.”

  He stepped back from the door and made a sweeping gesture with one tattooed arm. I couldn’t make out what the designs were without staring, so I ignored my curiosity and went inside.

  “If I would’ve known I could order someone like you, I might not have been so pissed at Chester for doing it without asking.”

  I turned as he closed the door, folding my arms so I could give him a stern look. The alcohol fumes wafting off him were almost enough to make my eyes water. He was drunk. No surprise there.

  “I’m here to discuss what my firm will do for you.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted choosing them. His gaze narrowed in on me, something predatory in his eyes. I had to fight to stop from taking a step back. He wouldn’t hurt me. That wasn’t the underlying danger I saw. No, it was the kind that made my stomach twist.

  “I can think of a whole lot of things that fine ass can do for me.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “How much have you had to drink today, Mr. Union?”

  He gave me that grin again, the one that I knew he thought was so charming. “It’s a compliment, Ms. Ryce.”

  “Today is just a preliminary meeting,” I went back to the speech I’d originally planned. “We’ll discuss the image issues we’ll be working to correct, as well as any suggestions we can come up with to give us a place to start.”

  “Really?” He sauntered toward me with far more grace than an intoxicated person should have. “That’s what you want to do? Talk? I can think of a lot of things that are more fun than talking.”

  If this was the way our conversations were going to go, I could think of a lot of things I’d rather be doing, but I wasn’t going to take the bait. This might be a giant joke to him, but it wasn’t to me. This was my job, my future, and I’d be damned if some drunken rock star ruined it for me.

  Six

  Reb

  Full, pouting lips wrapped around my cock, and I buried my hand in her raven-black waves. Hair, soft as silk, slipped between my fingers, each lock in stark contrast to porcelain skin. Blue-green eyes looked up between thick lashes, desire visible in their ocean-like depths…

  “Fuck me,” I muttered as I flopped down on the couch.

  I wrote notes and lyrics, not prose, but that didn’t mean my imagination wasn’t vivid enough to make me hard. And my imagination had been working overtime from the moment I opened my door to see my PR rep giving me a look full of enough disdain that I probably would’ve felt ashamed if the alcohol flowing through my body had allowed me to give a damn.

  I didn’t need a PR rep. I shouldn’t need one. Wasn’t everyone entitled to fuck up once in a while? I’d been in the music industry for nearly ten years, and all that time, I’d behaved myself. No scandals, no tabloid fodder beyond what the vultures made up. I showed up to things on time and always sober. I didn’t have temper tantrums or make outrageous requests. I worked my ass off, and still found time to do charity work. I had casual sex, but it was always safe and consensual.

  The only part of my life before this that could have caused issues, I made sure I kept private. Being into BDSM wasn’t even really that shocking anymore. If I’d been a teacher or politician, the kind of guy parents wanted their children to emulate, sure, I’d understand. Even now, my sexual preferences wasn’t something I wanted advertised, but it wasn’t like I had some fucking morality clause in my contract that dictated what sort of sex I was allowed to like.

  What had happened with Mitzi changed all of it. Everyone who’d gotten wind of the story had painted a sympathetic picture of me. At first.

  Chester had made an agreement with Mitzi that I’d keep my mouth shut about certain aspects of the break-up if she did the same, but most fans figured out that Mitzi had cheated. I started losing sympathy points when my brooding over a beer or two became reclusive behavior with too much alcohol, especially when Mitzi seemed to be appropriately ashamed in public.

  I understood that some poor choices over the weekend deserved head-shaking and finger-wagging, to use some of my mother’s favorite phrases, but I could have done a lot worse thi
ngs than trash a hotel room during a consensual threesome and punch a senator’s son for making disparaging remarks about my dead father. The way I saw it, that incident was completely justified.

  Okay, maybe I would’ve had a bit more self-control if I hadn’t been drunk. But that didn’t mean he deserved a punch any less.

  I picked up my remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels too fast to really see what was on. I wasn’t much of a TV or movie watcher. Sometimes something would catch my interest, but I preferred music and reading. I hadn’t been doing much of either recently though. Too much thought was involved in reading, and listening to music was a reminder of how little I’d written over the last six months.

  I couldn’t even blame that one on the break-up. I knew that part of the reason the studio had less patience with me than they would have in the past had to do with the fact that they had to keep pushing back the release date of my next album because I hadn’t written anything beyond the first song. And that one was a steaming pile of bullshit.

  I was still buzzed, walking a fine line between drunk and sober, but as everything piled up, reminding me of all the ways my life was fucked up at the moment, I wanted to get completely shit-faced. And why shouldn’t I? I was in my apartment. If I wanted to get black-out drunk, whose business was it but mine? After all the times I’d made the smart, responsible choices, I deserved a break from dealing with my life.

  I was still wallowing in self-pity and lethargy when someone knocked on my door.

  For a moment, I thought Paige had come back, that my attempt at being flirtatious and charming had actually worked and she would let me lose myself in her body for a few blissful hours.

  But then I remembered how disgusted she’d looked by the time she left. Disgusted…and relieved.

  “Reb, open up! I have a key, but if you make me walk in on you naked again, I swear I’ll take a picture and sell it to the highest bidder.”

  Erik.

  Great.

  I forced myself up and to the door. When I opened it, I saw it wasn’t just Erik, but Jace and Alix too.

  Even better.

  “Come in,” I said, not even bothering to try to curb my annoyance. “Shouldn’t you all be living out your happily-ever-afters or whatever it is you do now?”

  “Don’t be an ass, Reb,” Erik said mildly.

  Sanders had been my college roommate at Columbia during the two years I’d gone there. I’d met his cousin one of the times Alix had come up to visit. The three of us had met Jace Randell at Gilded Cage, a club where people like us went to explore our desires without judgment.

  These three were my closest friends, and in a lot of ways, they were closer to me than my own sisters. Each one was an artist of some kind. Jace was a painter slash sculptor. Alix, a photographer. Erik was the writer of the group. The four of us understood what it meant to think and create differently than most. If I told them that I was struggling with my music, they’d immediately know that it meant more than simply an issue with work. Because they’d all been there too.

  Not now though, I remembered as I caught a glimpse of the ring on Alix’s left hand. All three of them hadn’t just found the loves of their lives recently, but also their muses. All of them were creating bigger and better things than they had before they’d met their soulmates.

  Erik’s newest book was flying off the shelves, and everyone wanted to know the real identity of Erika Summers. Being around him and his girlfriend, Tanya, was like having a front-row seat to the sappiest romantic comedy in the world.

  Jace and his ‘true love,’ Savannah Birch, had another of those sickeningly sweet relationships, complete with overcoming odds. She’d woken up something in him, in his art, that I’d never seen before. His most recent show had been fantastic.

  Then there was Alix. He’d just married his muse, Sine McNiven, even though she’d left him for more than a month without a word about where she’d gone or why she’d left. He hadn’t been able to work the entire time she’d been gone, and the two of us had commiserated over our artistic block and the women responsible for them. Then she’d come back from Ireland, announced she was pregnant, and now the two of them were planning their nursery.

  I was happy for them. Granted, the odds weren’t exactly in their favor when it came to long-term happiness. If they didn’t crash and burn like most couples, then chances were they’d end up like my parents, with one outliving the other, always aware of that aching, bleeding emptiness where their other half had been. I hoped that my friends would make it work, that they’d build something lasting that wouldn’t get their hearts broken in the end.

  But I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

  “You look like shit,” Jace said as the guys followed me back into my living room. “And so does your place. Don’t you have a cleaning service?”

  I shrugged and sat back down. “I canceled it for a while. Didn’t want anyone bugging me.”

  “I figured that staying at a hotel would manage that,” Alix said as he disappeared into the kitchen.

  “You guys have been listening to the news.” I made it a statement rather than a question.

  “Is it wrong?” Erik asked, his expression serious. “Are they exaggerating?”

  I reached for one of the beers Alix brought out, but he handed it to Erik instead. I glared at him, but answered Erik’s question, “Depends on who’s telling the story.”

  “You really punched Senator Mitchell’s son in the middle of a fundraiser?” Alix chuckled.

  Less than a month ago, Alix had been devastated, barely sleeping, drinking too much, and now he was laughing. He’d been as pathetic as I was, and I hadn’t even loved Mitzi.

  The revelation made me frown. I’d never actually stopped to think about it, but it was the truth. She’d been my first serious girlfriend, the only serious one, and we’d been together for ten months before the shit hit the fan.

  But I didn’t love her. I hadn’t ever loved her.

  Which meant I couldn’t blame a broken heart for what I’d been doing.

  Shit.

  Before I could become too introspective, Alix spoke, “Look, I’m not going to bust your balls. I’ve been there. But if you miss my show this weekend, or you come in wasted, I’m going to kick your ass.”

  I didn’t need to look at him to know he was serious. I nodded slowly. “Fair enough.”

  Erik leaned forward. “All right, Reb, let’s cut the shit. This has been going on long enough. You need to get your act together.”

  I stared at him for a moment before laughing. “Come on. I watched all three of you do your own downward spirals after you had women problems. I was there for you and didn’t tell you what to do.”

  “That’s true,” Jace said.

  “But we didn’t carry on for three months, cause random destruction of property, and commit an assault,” Alix pointed out.

  “Also true,” Jace added.

  Rather than snapping at them like I wanted to, telling them that they didn’t get it because they’d all found what they’d been looking for, I flipped them off. “I think, after a lifetime of being the guy who always does the right thing I’ve earned the right to a couple mistakes.”

  I didn’t see them look at each other, but I felt it. I knew they were trying to figure out how far to push because I’d been on their side of things, needing to decide what to say and how to say it.

  “You guys don’t have to worry,” I said, swiping Alix’s drink. “Chester got me a PR rep.”

  “Seriously?” Erik said, his expression incredulous. “That’s his solution for all of this?”

  I glanced at him. “He trusts me to deal with my shit on my own. Paige’s job is to fix my image.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Jace asked, “Your PR rep’s name is Paige?”

  The tension in the air eased. “That it is,” I said. “And she’s hot. A pain in the ass, but what a fine ass.”

  As my friends laughed and started ta
lking about their significant others, I let my thoughts turn to my hot PR rep and that fine ass of hers.

  Seven

  Paige

  “He needs to be accessible,” I said, dictating to my phone as I twisted my chair back and forth. My fingers worked a stress ball as I passed it back and forth between my hands. The repetitive movement was soothing, helping me stay focused on the task at hand.

  Or as focused as I could be when my attention kept wanting to wander in inappropriate directions.

  Like to the way his jeans had shown off strong, lean legs and a firm ass that made me want to sink my teeth–

  “If we want people to forgive him for being human, he has to show them that he’s human. No suits or tuxes. He needs to avoid the black-tie charity events where the attendees are all wealthy.”

  He definitely looked good in a tux. Something about the contrast between his tattoos and slightly scruffy rock star image, and the polished, debonair look just did it for me.

  No. I needed to stop. Not just because he was a client, but because even if he wasn’t, nothing would happen between us. I wasn’t interested in being another notch on his bedpost. I had too much self-respect to act like I needed someone like him if I wanted to get off.

  “During initial discussions, Mr. Union was unable to offer any suggestions about what could be done to improve his image. Recommendations to abstain from alcohol were met with silence and barely concealed hostility, so there’s a possibility – probability – that Mr. Union’s antics aren’t yet over. We need to have a plan in place to deal with future instances.”

  I really hoped that wasn’t going to be the case. I knew that, technically, it would be financially advantageous to have a client who repeatedly got into trouble and needed us to fix things. The bigger the project, the more billable hours. But I didn’t want this thing with Reb to turn out that way. Which meant I needed to go beyond a surface fix and find out the reasons behind his behavior.