Her mother sat down on the living room couch and pouted. “So, you’re going to work for the Winthrows, then?” The joy was quickly leaking from the room.
Heather pursed her lips. “I’ll be working on their ranch, but I’ll be a restaurant manager; hardly under their thumb.”
Constance took a deep breath and looked up at her daughter. “I’m proud of you. I really am, but do you think it’s wise to take a job there during a time like this? Who knows if they’ll even be around in a year? Hardly anyone around here even goes there anymore... might be why they even have any openings at all...”
“Mother...” Heather teased, trying to overcome her heavy heart with a little levity. “You don’t think I’m good enough to be hired on my own merits? A place has to be desperate to employ me?”
Constance scoffed. “You’re too good for them. They deserve to be going out of business and you don’t deserve to be dragged down with them. That boy has already dragged one member of this family down far enough...”
“Mom...” Heather pleaded, trying to fight off the heaviness. “It’s all we’ve got right now. I promise, I’ll look for other work while I do my job there, but as long as the ranch is still in business, we’re still in business. So, let’s just pray that we can both survive our troubles.”
That made Constance laugh. “Oh, honey. I know you’re strong enough to survive this all, I just don’t think anyone’s strong enough to survive what they’re going through. That’s an image problem they have, and it can’t be fixed through grit and grind. Although... maybe they’re hiring sweet people like you to try and help that...”
Heather giggled, lightness coming back over her. “And, if they were, would you cheer for them to succeed again, or would you still hope they failed?”
Constance sighed and rose up from the couch. “Never mind that,” she non-answered. “Let’s get an early start on dinner. We should celebrate. You deserve it.”
Heather watched her mom shuffle towards the kitchen. “I’ll be right there,” she called after her, before sitting back down on the couch and opening up her email again. She replied to her new boss’s message, telling her how happy she was to join the team and how much she looked forward to representing the ranch, then she went and helped her mother prepare dinner.
The rest of the night proceeded with a strange mixture of happiness and disappointment. Truth was, Heather wasn’t particular fond of the ranch anymore either, much for the same reasons as her mother. Neither of them had visited the sprawling property in years, and neither had most of the town folk. Sure, Heather and her mother had more personal reasons for staying away, but the reality was, Winthrow Ranch had huge public image problems, and they could all be traced back to one man: Nash Winthrow.
He may have been the most hated man in Colorado—ever since that fateful playoff game against the Outlaws all those years ago—and his family’s ranches all across the country had been suffering from the fallout of his sports villainy.
It was such a shame. Heather remembered idolizing Nash’s father, Talbot Winthrow, when she was younger, and even crushing on Nash before he left town for college—though, she was hardly the only one. At 27, she was only a few years younger than him, but that had seemed like an entire lifetime when they were younger. He was so far out of her league that they might as well have lived in different universes. She’d entered high school just as he was leaving and, though she’d never met him, the hallways had somehow seemed emptier without his massive presence to fill them.
It didn’t take much longer after that for his reputation to start running down the drain.
Heather and Constance didn’t talk about any of that during dinner. They mostly just reminisced about the good old times back when she was a kid and they were a full, happy family.
Afterwards, Heather helped her mother clean up and then the two of them watched a couple of recorded episodes of their favorite murder-mystery television show. By nightfall, Constance had already gone to bed and Heather was left to doze off on the couch alone.
She woke up early the next morning, anxious but well rested. When she checked her email, she saw a message from her new boss, asking if she could make it down to the restaurant before noon. Heather replied in the affirmative and quickly got ready for her first day at her new job.
She was nervous, but work was work and she needed a lot of it; she could only hope that there would be enough of it to go around at the struggling Winthrow ranch. Her mother hadn’t been lying last night, no one in town was sure if the franchise would even last until next year. The cross-country collection of lavish ranches was in serious trouble of going under, but, for now, the one just outside of her small Colorado town was still open, and it was Heather’s only hope.
She had to make it work out, otherwise her family was in real danger. No more savings and no income meant the death of them. So, Heather Hoover did herself up the best she could manage and left her mother’s house ready to give her best to a place that, just last week, she’d have been glad to see go out of business.
Chapter 3
Nash
Nash entered the large, lavish oakwood boardroom in the same cowboy clothes he had put on after his press conference the other day.
He hadn’t slept at all last night. The bags under his eyes felt like they were filled with heavy sand and his mind was desperately trying to steady itself against a raging stream that wouldn’t let him be still. He’d been trying to think up ways to mend his problems all through the witching hours, but to no avail. He wasn’t used to these types of problems. For so long, his only worry had been football—he’d made sure of that—but now he was being forced to deal with something far bigger and scarier: his family’s legacy.
“Mr. Winthrow,” offered a well-dressed man in a fine-tailored suit. “I’m Jason. This is my associate Samantha. We’re from Public Relations.”
A brunette woman in a black brushed tie dress stood up from her seat beside Jason; Nash greeted them both with a handshake, then he sat down at the head of the long, varnished table. Frenchie followed closely behind him and set up shop to his client’s left.
“Please, Mr. Winthrow was my father, call me Nash,” Nash insisted. The formality of the title made him uncomfortably aware of what position he was now in. He needed whatever relief he could get.
“Sure thing, Nash,” said Jason. “I also think, if I’d be so bold as to start the meeting now, that you would be wise to continue to say such things.”
Nash lifted his eyebrow in curiosity. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’re here to help you with your image problem. We’ve done our research and we’ve found that you have two main issues, at least, you do as far as how the public sees you. First, you have the ‘problem’ of being unfathomably rich. This immediately makes you seem unrelatable and distant. Everyone knows of your family; everyone knows of your father; everyone knows of your ranches, and they’re not going to forget it anytime soon. You need to start to appear more down to earth, and a small thing you can do to help with that is what you just did: connect to people on an informal level. Let them call you by your first name.”
Nash sighed and sunk into his chair. He didn’t like where this was going. Little did these two suits know, he had always preferred that people call him by his first name. This PR team might have done their research on what the public thought of him, but they obviously hadn’t done much research on how he actually was. He feared he might be wasting his time with these two, which was a shame, because they had come so highly recommended.
“What else can I do?” Nash asked, impatiently.
Jason sat on the table and slid a binder full of notes down to him. “You can read through this. A lot of the tips might seem obvious, but just going through them over and over again can remind you to act more, um, ‘normal’.”
That was enough. Nash stood up from his seat and anchored his fists into the oakwood. “Listen, guys, I appreciate you coming down here to talk to me, but
this isn’t what I’m looking for. I know how to act normal. I may have grown up with more money than most and I may have had a famous father, but I still paid my dues here on this ranch. I’ve been surrounded by cowboys and farmhands since I was born and they made sure I didn’t get a big head. I’m not some prissy dilettante. I know what it’s like to struggle, I know what it’s like to work hard, I know what it’s like to connect and work with people who don’t come from the same privileged background as me. Do you forget that I’m a football player? The only teammates I’ve ever had who grew up with an ounce of wealth were those who had fathers who played in the league before them, and even those were few and far between.”
Nash stopped to catch his breath. He was ranting. Jason and Samantha patiently waited for him to sit back down in his chair before they continued.
“You were a football player,” Samantha clarified, not harshly. “And that was part of your problem. Maybe, if you were a quarterback or a wide receiver, you could have parlayed that into some good public karma, but, instead, you made a living on the defensive end of the field. And when you’re job consists almost entirely of pulverising people; you’re going to have a harder time coming out of it all as the ‘good’ guy.”
Nash couldn’t exactly argue with that, so he nitpicked. “I didn’t make my living playing football,” he mumbled, averting eye contact.
“What do you mean?” Jason immediately piped in, clearly intrigued. Samantha lifted a pen and got ready to take notes.
“I never spent a single cent of my salary on myself,” Nash confessed. “I guess I’m just a trust fund kid, because I only ever lived off of what my family made from our ranches.”
“What did you do with the money you earned from football?” Samantha asked.
Nash bit his lip. He didn’t want to say. Only four people in the entire world had ever truly known what he did with that money. One of them was dead; another was in the room with him right now. He looked over at Frenchie. The agent had a better poker face than Nash; he just stared straight ahead—he was going to let Nash decide whether or not he’d reveal the truth.
Jason sensed his hesitancy. “Nash, listen. Samantha and I have had a lot of success in this field. We can help you, but you need to let us help you, and we can’t do that unless you’re completely honest with us. What did you do with the money you earned from football?”
Nash leaned back in his chair and looked up to the ceiling. He didn’t want to say. The idea of revealing this side of himself just to accumulate some good will made him feel nauseous, but he also knew it would be selfish now not to. Thousands of people worked at Winthrow ranches all across the country; his late father’s legacy rested on these properties; as did his mother’s future.
He took a deep breath and then, without looking at Samantha or Jason, he said it. “I donated it all to charity.”
A silence filled the room. Nash couldn’t even hear the sound of Samantha scribbling down notes anymore.
Finally, a voice broke through. “All of it!?” Jason asked, clearly stunned.
Nash pursed his lips and finally gazed back at the PR team. They were eyeing him intensely. He just nodded. “Yep.”
Samantha and Jason both looked over to Frenchie, who also just nodded.
“And you’ve never told anyone?” asked Samantha.
Nash shook his head.
“Why not?” asked Jason, incredulously.
“Because I didn’t do it for the publicity,” Nash stated.
“How has it never come out in the press?” Samantha asked.
“The only people who ever knew were those I’d trust with my life,” Nash replied, looking over at Frenchie. His long-time agent was calm and collected, but he swore he could see the glint of a smile in his eyes.
“How about the charities, wouldn’t they know?” asked Jason.
“I always made sure to donate anonymously,” Nash said, matter-of-factly. He hid all emotion in his voice. Truth was, he was obscenely proud of his philanthropic endeavours, but part of that pride came from knowing it was all because he wanted to help others and not himself. He never wanted it to become a PR stunt—now, though, revealing the truth might be his only option.
“Do you have records? Receipts? Tax filings? This could be huge,” said Jason.
Nash deferred to Frenchie. His agent nodded, “We have the proof, if Nash is okay with revealing it.”
“Nash, this could help speed up the process enough to make a huge difference. If you’re looking to save your family’s ranches, this could be the magic key to swaying public opinion quickly enough to do just that.” Samantha was furiously scribbling down notes as Jason pleaded with Nash.
“Would that be all I needed to do?” Nash asked, certain that it wouldn’t be.
Now it was Jason’s turn to hesitate. “Well...” he started, before taking another second to think. “Listen, it would be a big help, and it should definitely provide an important spike at the beginning of this process, but people have short memories when it comes to the good and long memories when it comes to the bad. Your time as a public figure, as a hard-nosed football player, isn’t going to be forgotten any time soon, especially not here in Colorado. You having been this secret philanthropist all along only helps with your second problem, which I was just getting to.”
Jason sat back down in his chair and let Samantha take charge. The smartly-dressed woman finished scribbling down her notes and then pulled out her own binder from a leather briefcase by her side. She slid it down to Nash and when he opened it up, he was immediately confronted by bad memories.
His first instinct was to close the binder and look away. The cover slapped against the thick pages inside and the sound echoed around the big, empty boardroom.
“What’s this have to do with anything?” he demanded, pulling his hand away from the binder like it was on fire.
“It’s to prove a point, Nash,” Samantha replied. “It’s your second problem. You’re seen as a villain and there’s mounds of evidence for that in there.” She pointed at the binder filled with negative articles about Nash. “You can donate to charity all you want, but unless you change how people see you on a personal level, you won’t ever really seem like anything other than a bad guy who’s trying to look good, and if there’s one thing people hate more than a bad guy embracing his role, it’s a bad guy who just won’t.”
Nash sneered. He had been trying so hard to isolate himself from the reality of what people thought of him, but Jason and Samantha were forcing him to confront it all. He didn’t know if he was ready.
“And so, how do I convince people that I’m actually a good guy?” he finally asked, after a tense stalemate between the four people in the big room.
“Well, that brings us back to your first problem,” Jason replied. “You’re not relatable, but if you were to become more relatable, then people might start to come around to you. A villainous billionaire is run out of town, but a billionaire you’d have a beer with? That’s how you get a president.”
Nash scoffed. “I don’t want to be president,” he said, pushing the binder away from him. “I just want to save my family’s business. People don’t want to support anything with my last name on it anymore. They all loved my father, but I’m nothing like him. I’m not a golden-boy quarterback with bleach-blonde hair and a flashy smile. I may come from privilege, but I’m a grinder. I hit hard, and I’ve probably accidently injured a player on every team in the league. People think I’m dirty; people don’t like dirty, I know—but I’m not. I just need some solutions. How do I get this dirt off of me?”
“You just need to show the world how clean and wholesome you really are,” Samantha replied.
“And how do I do that?” Nash asked impatiently. He was at his wits end; he didn’t like bringing up his sports villainy anymore than he liked being booed every time he was seen in public in a town outside of Houston.
“Well, we have a number of small solutions that should cascade into a big solut
ion,” Jason said, pointing towards his binder.
Nash grabbed the folder, ignoring Samantha’s, and opened it up. He quickly parsed through the laminated pages, searching for a big answer. He couldn’t find any one thing that could single-handedly get him out of his mess. “I don’t have time for a ‘slow-build’,” Nash said, throwing the book back down onto the oakwood table. He stood up and rubbed his temples. “I need something faster.”
He pinched his nose and closed his eyes and a silence followed him until he opened them back up. “So?” he asked.
“Well, we do have a more unorthodox solution,” Jason started. “It’s worked well for some of our high-profile clients in the past, but it’s not a guaranteed fix.”
“It’s gone wrong almost as many times as it’s worked,” added Samantha.
“If you combine it with the head start you’ve already given yourself by donating your salary to charities all these years, you might just be able to make the quickest turn-around we’ve ever had.” Jason looked at Samantha and Samantha looked back at him, then they both turned to Nash.
Nash’s heart clenched. He didn’t know what to expect, but he was sure he wouldn’t like it. “What do I have to do?”
Chapter 4
Heather
“You think you’ll like it here?”
Heather undid the apron that her new boss, Caroline, had lent her after a waitress hadn’t shown up for her shift earlier in the day. The middle-aged woman had asked Heather if she’d be comfortable filling in, since it would be one of her duties when she was sworn in as the full-fledged manager. Heather hadn’t even stopped to think about it, she had just immediately agreed. She knew full well that her main responsibility as restaurant manager would be to make sure the place ran smoothly; if someone didn’t show up, she’d have to find a replacement, and if she couldn’t find anyone, she’d have to do the job herself.
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