After the board had signed off and Bella, Gregory, and I were going over our notes and planning for the next meeting, Bella shot me a nervous look I could see quite plainly through the video link. “You don’t actually think that a rival engineered all the death threats and everything against you, do you?”
“Gregory’s theory is the most solid one we have, and it makes sense,” I said and watched her lips start trembling slightly. I tried not to react, but it confused me. Why did that worry her so much?
“I understand, I just…why would they do something like that?” Her voice cracked slightly. “Why manufacture a situation where people are threatening you and actually coming to try and kill you?”
I smiled sadly. Of course Bella was shocked. She was a good person who couldn’t understand how some people were just…evil.
Gregory spoke up. “They might have been trying to drive Ruth out of the public eye before she could parlay her fame into even more market share. They may have been trying to sabotage the timeline on one or more of her current projects with a big, alarming distraction. There could be spite involved, some kind of vendetta. Something having to do with personal emotions, if not a personal relationship.”
“O-oh. Oh, that’s terrible,” Bella mumbled.
“Regardless of the board’s opinion,” Gregory said, “it’s clear to me that the only people who could possibly profit from this harassment scheme in any way would be business rivals. You don’t have personal enemies, you don’t have any stalkers or problem exes, and you don’t have problems with your family.” He sounded tired.
Bella tapped away at her keyboard, continuing to take notes. “But how exactly would they profit from scaring her like this?”
“Cause a slowdown in work, discourage Ruth from continuing to make public appearances or speak out on issues, derail project timelines, create hesitation in business partners who don’t want their members similarly harassed.” Gregory rattled it off like he had been mulling the idea for weeks. He probably had. “Or this was only step one of a larger plan.”
“Wow. You don’t think anyone would go to all that trouble, do you?” Why was Bella’s voice so shaky? This couldn’t have upset her that much, could it? She had known about the basic problem for weeks.
“Most advertising guys would sell their souls for an extra percentage of market share,” I replied dryly.
It was more than a possibility. It seemed to fit. But if a harassment campaign was just the opening volley in whatever these people were doing, what was going to come next?
I did my best to go back to business as usual that afternoon, approving another campaign after advising some color shifts in a few of the images and having a look at the results. It was an accomplishment, given everything, but I wasn’t satisfied. It just wasn’t enough to get these worries out of my head.
Was someone railroading me somehow? Was I being pushed into a situation back in the city that I couldn’t anticipate? Would there be more protests and harassment? Maybe another would-be shooter?
God. If only I knew what the hell these people would pull next.
Clearly, I needed a distraction, and I was getting a little tired of Dallas’s radio silence.
As the heat started to ease off and the thought of a longish walk in it got more inviting, I changed into a cute little shorts number and made the trek over to his farmhouse. I wasn’t the clingy type; I didn’t mind if he needed some time to himself. But his doing it without even texting me with what was up worried me, and I was tired of just sitting with it and letting the feeling gnaw at my stomach.
I had a six-pack packed in ice in a cooler and a bag of frozen strawberries to go with it. I hummed as I walked, slapping at the occasional mosquito. Life on a real ranch was definitely an adjustment, and would be even more so if I ever actually took the plunge and did it full-time. But I still loved it—every muddy, itchy, sunburn-y lesson it taught me only made me proud that I could handle these unexpected things.
But Dallas? He was unexpected in more ways than one, and the closer I got to him, the more vulnerable I felt. The more that little things, like silence for twenty-four hours, could affect me. All the more reason to check in.
Nobody answered at first when I knocked on the door, and my worries started to bubble up inside of me, threatening to boil over and send me into a panic. Had something happened? No, of course not. I was being ridiculous. Dallas was a grown man—and I didn’t even know him that well.
Finally, I heard a clatter, and bare footsteps thumping toward the door. A heavy, throaty sigh—had I woken him from a nap? And then he was fumbling with the lock, and I took a deep breath and braced myself to face annoyance at best—or an unknown crisis at work.
The smell of bourbon trickled out with the rich male scent of Dallas’s sweat, and I knew at once why he looked so haggard. He looked at me with a tired, embarrassed smile, and I knew at once that he wasn’t annoyed with me. No, something else was going on altogether.
“Hi,” he said a little sheepishly. “Everything okay?”
“I was going to ask you that,” I said. “You went silent on me. It wasn’t your usual habit, so it got me worried. Did something happen?” I tried to keep my tone casual, but I had been really worried.
He laughed a little, gently, and I felt some of my worry dissolve.
“Oh, yeah, that. Got a bit of bad news. Sorry, sweetheart, I should have sent you a message, but I just wasn’t good company last night.”
“Not healthy to drink alone,” I chided him kindly, and he nodded. Then I winked at him. “Much more fun to drink with company.”
I pulled a longneck from the cooler, dripping with chunks of melting ice, and his sheepish smile turned into a grin.
He pushed the door wide to invite me in. “Well, okay then.”
Chapter 12
Ruth
“So what makes you want to buy a ranch so badly?” Dallas asked me two beers in. “I mean, now that you’ve seen a little of what it’s really like.”
We were lounging on his couch, his arm slung loosely around my shoulders. The smell of bourbon had dissipated as night fell and we were able to open the windows and let the cool air in. Now it was all beer and the barbecued chicken sizzling on his grill.
“I know they say the grass is always greener on the other side, and yes, I have idealized ranch life some. You don’t think about the mud and mosquitoes and shoveling cow pies when you’re dreaming about getting out of the city. You think about the clean air, the open sky, the animals, the privacy.”
He nodded. “I thought of it more as isolation. But I think a person can get their fill of the city just the same as I got my fill of country life.”
“Are you glad to be back to it?” I asked him, and he frowned slightly, surprising me.
“I am, and I’m not.” He scratched the back of his neck, making the short hairs stand up in little black spikes. “I wanted to perform. That was my whole thing, you know? My dream, just the same as ranching is yours. I wanted to be famous. I wanted to make good money doing something other than shoveling cow shit. Maybe it sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t. No more than my wanting to be a rancher is.” I leaned into his hand as he toyed with my hair. “But anyway, now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I’m actually not too discouraged.” I started chuckling. “Tired, sunburnt and mosquito-bitten, but not discouraged.”
“That’s good to hear. I know you’ve suffered more than your share of rude awakenings just vacationing here.” He reached into the cooler to grab us each our third beers, shaking off the last bits of ice before sitting back and handing me one. “Me, I’ve got some regrets about my big trip to the city to chase a star.”
“You mentioned it’s been pretty bad.” I took the bottle opener and got the cap off my beer after some fumbling. The cap was slippery, and Dallas lounging next to me playing with my hair made my hands all kinds of clumsy. I nearly dropped it before he grabbed the bottle to steady it for me.
“Ea
sy there. Yeah…it has.” He looked up at me and hesitated for a few moments, then offered that dazzling smile. “I’ll never stop wanting to be a performer, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to miss the way performers are treated, or what we have to do to get ahead in any way.” Something haunted flickered in his eyes for a moment.
I immediately turned to get a better look at him, worried all over again. “Seriously, did something happen yesterday? Is that why you holed up instead of talking to me?”
He winced, and for a moment I worried I had gone too far. But then he shrugged. “Yeah, I probably deserve some questioning on that. And yeah, that was pretty much the case. I still get phone calls, and some of them…I often just can’t tell whether I should take those requests as jokes or not.”
“Was it that outrageous?” It had to be. I could see from his face, but I wanted to coax him into unloading. Much healthier to do that with a caring person and some beer than alone with bourbon and regret.
“Yeah. You could definitely say that.” He opened his beer and took a long swallow. “Sometimes it makes me wish I never left the ranch in the first place.”
I ran my fingertips over his shoulder through his T-shirt. “It really was that bad, huh?”
His head drooped slightly as he nodded. “It’s not the job I expected to be doing,” he muttered after a moment. “It’s not the work itself so much as the people I work for, and the times they expect me to do…things different than are supposed to be on the menu.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You mean like the casting couch?”
He stared off out the window, the beer cradled in his hands. “Not in particular, this time. But that has definitely been part of the problem, especially early on. You really don’t do as well in any entertainment industry if you’re not willing to do anything, including sell yourself, to get the job.”
“Oh.” Mixed feelings rushed through me: worry over him, anger at anyone who would have humiliated him…and of course, the usual heat I felt when I thought about him doing anything sexual. But only a little bit of that third one. Coercion was definitely not my jam. “Don’t you have to have an agent to deal with any of that stuff?”
“I have an agent.” His gaze turned back to me, flicking over my face like a caress. “But he’s been in this business a long time, which means he’s basically a snake with a telephone and a lot of persuasion skills. Sleeping with clients is just the price of doing business to a guy like him. Believe me, I’ve been asked to do a lot of immoral, humiliating things that I wouldn’t normally do, and they all come through him. He doesn’t even blink when they get brought up.”
“Ugh, that’s horrible. In a way, it sounds like some of the assholes I have met in advertising,” I admitted with a sigh. “I mean, that’s pretty much who we suspect is behind the harassment I told you about. Just…messing up my life for the sake of market share.”
The look of horror he gave me caught me off guard. “So you think a business rival stirred up all those harassers against you? Just to drive you here?”
“Yeah. I guess they expected me to take a leisure vacation instead of a working vacation, but that’s not how I operate. So I’m not actually that behind. Anyway, I’m perfectly safe now. It’s not like whatever bastard is behind this knows where I am.”
“N-no, of course not.” He seemed even more shocked by this revelation than I had been. “How could he?”
I looked at him in surprise. “This is really bothering you, isn’t it? Even more than your own situation. Did you want to unload about that?”
“Not particularly,” he said. “That means thinking about it more. I already had the awkward conversation with my agent. It’s dealt with. Your problem is ongoing. I really kinda want to find whoever is responsible and kick his ass.”
That made me feel warm all over. Nobody was that protective of me but Gregory, and he was paid well for his trouble.
“Thank you,” I said. “But you’ll have to get in line, because I’ve got a pair of engineer boots with a space for his name on them, once I find out who he is.”
“Good. I hope you find him.” He was calming down, but for some reason, he couldn’t look at me directly.
“They say that sociopaths excel at business leadership, but I just don’t see it. Those who screw over their employees and clients get worse performance and less success.” The corner of my mouth tucked up. “And then they go and pull crap like this without even blinking.”
“That would explain Ho—Nashville,” he grumbled, and I wondered about the word he had just stumbled over. “Apparently, since the entertainment industry became big business, the damn sociopaths diversified. Next thing I know, they’re asking ordinary performers like me to do shit we would never normally do.”
I felt a prickle of horror go through me. “Like what?” I said.
“Like my last job with them, which I’m about to have to take a financial hit over because I won’t go through with it.” His eyes flashed with anger, but not at me.
“So you left without finishing a contract? What in the world did they want you to do?” The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end despite the heat, and I thought immediately of my lawyer. “Do you need some legal representation?”
His smile looked like another wince. “Thanks for the thought, but no. I know you probably have a badass legal team, but this is entertainment law, not corporate.”
“They could make a referral,” I started, but he shook his head.
“No, it’s already too damn complicated. I don’t want to get into it too much. Let’s just say that what they wanted isn’t right by any stretch. It just isn’t.” For a few moments, he couldn’t meet my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry.”
“It’s okay, I just really want to push it out of my head right now. I really shouldn’t have agreed to work with these people in the first place. It set all kinds of alarm bells off in my head from the beginning, but I needed the cash, so I didn’t listen. Now I feel like an asshole.” There was something so guilty in his look that I suddenly passed my worry threshold and got impatient.
“I’m sorry, but should I stop asking about this or not? You’re being very vague, but it’s clearly bothering you.” We were having a conversation about the wrong things he was expected to do to get entertainment gigs…or keep them. However, he hadn’t even brought up what those wrong things were.
“Well, I just refused one bad gig, and I’m about to break a performance contract on another one that would have made me a great big pile of money, largely because after working for these guys for a while, I’ve figured out that they’re complete scumbags. They’re out to manipulate someone who doesn’t deserve it, and they figure they’ll use my talents to do it. I’m sure they’d screw me over too if given half the chance.”
“So yesterday was about telling them to go screw themselves?” Good for him, if so. This was clearly weighing on him—but that didn’t mean that “firing” his clients would be easy on him in any case.
“No, yesterday was about finding out I couldn’t get out of the contract without taking a serious financial hit.” He took a long swallow of his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He had showered after his bender, but not shaved. His beard scruff made the tiniest rasping noise, making me want to reach over and run my hand over it. “And then realizing I probably need to do it anyway, just so I can live with myself.”
“So they want you to, what, help them con someone?”
“Something like that.” He suddenly looked very uncomfortable again. “It’s like I said. They exploited me when I was down, desperate and hungry. But I’d rather go back to shoveling horse shit for the rest of my life than go through with doing the wrong thing.”
My heart melted. “If it’s any consolation, I sure as hell don’t mind paying on dates.”
“So you wouldn’t care if I went totally broke, as long as I did the right thing?” There was something like hope in his eyes suddenl
y when he looked at me.
“Look, if it’s down to real problems and these guys are coercing you, don’t think I won’t offer to help to save your ranch or whatever.” Maybe it was a bit early in the relationship to be talking money, but the idea that someone was leveraging Dallas’s financial desperation to make him do things he felt were wrong pissed me off.
“I’m not asking you to pull your wallet out,” he protested.
“Normally I wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s not a cure-all. But if these guys have you on a financial leash—”
“They don’t, not if I walk away. I thought I couldn’t live without their damn money, but now I just want to find a way out that won’t leave me in serious trouble or owing anyone.” He rubbed his temples. “I’ve been thinking about nothing else since I hit my damn limit.”
“I see.” I slid my hand down his arm to his hand and gave it a squeeze. He squeezed back, a little weakly. His pulse was going fast. “If there’s anything I can do, anything at all, to help you get through this, you let me know, okay?”
I was weak for this guy. I knew it. But that was all right. He was a good man, and he wouldn’t do anything to hurt me.
His dazzling smile wavered a moment after it flashed into view, and filled with a tender sort of sadness. “Ruth,” he said, with so much heart it made mine ache harder, “I don’t deserve you. You’re too goddamn good for me, and that’s the truth.”
“Hey, isn’t it my decision who is good enough for me?” I countered, getting in his face with a smile. “I’m in your corner, Dallas. Deal with it.”
He answered with a kiss—not like the sweet, lingering ones from before, but hard and hungry, with a desperation to it that shocked me. I froze for a second, overwhelmed, then melted into his arms, letting out a whimper.
When we finally came up for air, he was smiling much more easily. “You’re amazing,” he told me. And then, as if he hadn’t just kissed me like he planned to carry me to bed, he pushed himself to his feet and turned toward the door. “But it’s really damn stuffy in here. Let’s go watch the sunset and have our ribs.”
Taming The Cowboy (She's in Charge Book 4) Page 8