Mad Season (3 page)

FOUR

Adam tensed, searching her gaze, trying to determine what she meant. Was she confirming that she knew about the cameras? "Do you...," he began, but chickened out. "Do you wanna get cleaned up? We can take a shower."

Her smile told him she knew he was evading, but she was going to let him get away with it, for now.

He let his softened cock slide out of her and she shivered beneath him. Climbing off her and crawling to the edge of the bed, he turned and offered her his hand. She took it, pulling herself up with a groan.

"You all right?" he asked, a little concerned that he'd hurt her.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she said, smiling at him. "You're just bigger than my vibrator, and that is all I've had inside me for the last six months. It's so much easier to have a man than trying to get the right angle with Mr. Nubby."

Adam didn't have to ask what "Mr. Nubby" was. "Well, I'm glad to hear I measure up better than a rubber dong with a battery pack," he said with a laugh.

She laughed too, following along as he tugged her hand and headed for the bathroom. "Way better than a rubber dong, and hell, better than any dick I've had in...." She paused to think. "Years. Yeah. Years."

Maybe ever
, he wanted her to say.

He reached into the shower and turned it on, giving the spray a chance to warm up before he stepped in, then stepped aside to let her under the water first.

"Think you can go another round?" she asked as she reached for his cock to clean it off. It gave a faint twitch, but....

"Nope. Isn't going to happen. Your horny ass done did me in."

They washed each other with soap—him with the loofa and her using a washcloth—and Adam truly wished he had it in him to take her against the shower wall. Who knew if she would ever come back over? He hated the thought of never having her again and knowing that she was right next door was going to kill him. Especially if she made him take out the cameras and promise never to spy on her again.

Not that a promise would necessarily stop him....

***

Callum woke in the late morning with a hangover. The blowjob hadn't been quite enough to knock him out, so he'd resorted to hitting on a fifth of Johnny Walker. The old bastard was pretty resilient, though, and Cal felt as though he'd gone the distance with two fighters a weight class above him.

It was a moment before he realized that the pounding in his head wasn't just the hangover. Trevor was banging on his bedroom door from his adjoining room.

"Get up, asshole!" Trevor shouted. "We have twenty minutes to get to Kincaid & Masters. Get up!"

"Everywhere in LA is twenty minutes," Cal said, and threw his pillow at the door. "I'm up!"

He didn't care that he didn't have time to take a shower and shave before leaving. Rolling off the bed, he searched the floor for the shorts he'd discarded the night before, and found a tank top draped over the weight bench on his way to the door. When he unlocked the door and pulled it open, Trevor frowned at him.

"Just great!" Trevor muttered, and didn't bother trying to make him change clothes. He knew by now it didn't make any difference what he said. Callum was going to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. "By the way, we're not in LA anymore, asshole!"

Cal blinked as he followed Trevor to the door. It took a moment before he remembered they had just moved to Las Vegas. "Oh yeah," he mumbled, snagging his phone off the desk on his way to the front door. "Well, they still need to know what they're getting themselves into."

It was already scorching hot when they hit the sidewalk in front of the Golden Nugget, and Cal squinted in the sun while Trevor hailed a cab. The street-wide canopy overhead was surely reducing the brightness and heat, but to Cal's aching head it didn't seem to be doing that great of a job. A few passersby eyed him curiously, but Fremont Street was pretty well deserted this time of day.

Within moments Trevor was all but stuffing his bulky frame into a taxi, and telling the driver some address Cal didn't catch. He slumped in the seat and closed his eyes. It seemed like mere seconds later when they pulled up to an unpretentious office somewhere. It was off-strip, and Cal had no idea where they were.

He climbed to his feet and stepped onto the curb, looking around vaguely while Trevor paid the fare.

"Inside," Trevor said, giving him a push.

The elevator ride to the ninth floor was silent. Trevor was mad at him. Again. "Trev, I'm sorry...," he began, just as the doors opened. They passed through a pair of glass doors and into a simple reception area where a pretty brunette behind a glass desk looked up as they stepped in.

"Save it, Cal," Trevor said. "In a few minutes, your social life will be out of my hands."

"Welcome to Kincaid & Masters," the brunette said in a sultry voice. She fondled the boom of her headset as she watched Callum. "Mr. Kincaid and Mr. Masters are waiting for you in the conference room."

"Which way?" Trevor asked, and Cal watched, bemused, as she pointed daintily at a door off to the left. Trevor headed over. Cal lingered a moment and, sensing his interest, she uncrossed her legs and re-crossed them, giving him a definite view of her kitty through the glass desktop. She wasn't wearing any underwear under that nearly non-existent skirt.

He couldn't help the smirk that came to his face as Trevor reached out and grabbed his arm, pulling him toward the conference room.

A part of his hick soul still could not believe women like her existed. Back in his hometown before he started winning fights, he would never have dreamed that one day hot women of many stripes would be baring their snatch and their tits, trying to get his attention long enough for him to nail them to the wall, or against whatever surface was convenient.

How was he supposed to have resisted, coming out to LA to fight and finding a whole world of sexy women existed, and wanted
him?

He was still grinning over his shoulder at the brunette when he walked into the next room and turned around to find two men standing up to greet him. He shook hands, not catching which one was Masters and which was Kincaid.

A flash of red off to his right caught his attention, and he turned to see a red-haired woman standing at a table in the corner, pouring coffee into mugs.

Nice ass
, he thought, noting the curves against the black of the skinny dress she wore. She either wasn't wearing any panties, or had a thong on. He wondered about her rack, hoping she didn't have those huge fake titties. He preferred a balanced proportion of tits to waistline to ass.

As if on cue, she turned with two coffee cups in her hands and walked them to the table, handing one to each of the men.

B cup
, he estimated, tipping his head to the side.
Perfect
.

She went back to the little table, but stopped to look at them over the top of her glasses.

"Cream and sugar?" she asked, her voice carrying an alluring note of sass that Cal immediately liked. It rankled her to be the one who had to serve the men, Cal could tell. He took in her power suit and the burnished red hair she'd pulled back into a clasp at the base of her neck, and decided she thought she was above the demeaning task.

Cal decided she surely must be.

He also noted the puffiness of her eyes and a little hitch in her step, and leveled a knowing smile at her. He knew a sex-hangover when he saw one. This little fireball had been bouncing on some lucky bastard's dick, and recently.

Trevor indicated he'd take a splash of cream, but Cal moved to pour his own mug, gently taking the carafe from her, letting his fingers brush against hers in the process. "Black," he murmured, for her ears alone. "I would never want to take the edge off your kick."

She glanced at him sharply, and he noted a slight flush creeping up her cheeks as he leaned across her to put the carafe back on its hotplate.

Someone behind them cleared his throat, and she ducked her head and poured two more mugs, one with cream for Trevor, and another black for herself.

Cal turned, in no hurry to face the two suits that were still standing at the far end of the table, watching with small frowns on their faces.

His day had just gotten infinitely more interesting.

FIVE

Lyla couldn't believe she'd given away a reaction to Callum Reed within moments of him walking through the door. She knew the instant she laid eyes on him that he was trouble with a capital T. But then he'd poured himself his own cup of coffee, pointedly, as though knowing the task was beneath her. That was unexpected.

He looked like shit warmed over. His clothes were rumpled—who comes to a business meeting in a tank top and athletic shorts, even in Vegas?—and there were dark circles under his red-rimmed eyes. He was wearing flip-flops instead of proper shoes, and she could swear she saw pillow creases on his bald head. He must have just rolled out of bed and into a taxi.

But now he was sitting across the table from her, giving her a smile over the rim of his cup, and she was glad she was seated. She suspected she'd have had wobbly knees and melted in the presence of the heat in that smile.

She tried to focus on what Dean was saying. He was going on about how "we" had all winter to get Reed's image in shape in order to attract the sponsors he'd need for next season. What Dean really meant was that
she
had all winter. He and David had both made it clear that Reed was her baby. That way, if he was intractable, they could claim she had pushed for the account, and if she went down in flames they'd be able to salvage the rest of the agency by firing her and kicking her to the curb.

So not fair
.

She realized a silence had fallen, and that Dean must have given her the cue to lay out her plan. Not that she had much of a plan, yet. She'd been up most of the night after leaving Adam's place, going over Reed's file and looking for ways she could forge something positive out of all the negatives he'd been racking up.

Lyla cleared her throat and flipped the stand up on the iPad in front of her so she could start her presentation, turning the screen for the benefit of Reed and his trainer to see.

"Mr. Reed has an image problem," she stated as the screenshots of headline after tweet after instagram after facebook post flowed by in a swift slideshow; photos of him in compromising situations, interspersed with representations from nearly every media outlet known to the internet, from ABC to TMZ. Even one still from the infamous elevator security footage.

"We all know this. It's why you are here. You need our help." She paused while the slideshow continued, knowing the sheer quantity of photos was making a marked impression on the pair. Reed even widened his eyes at a few of them, and she knew there was probably a lot of stuff he hadn't seen.

"What the world needs to see is the young man, fresh off the farm in Moses Lake, Washington. A man dropped into the sinful fight scene of LA, where he was briefly overcome by the temptations he found there. They need to see a man un-versed in the finer nuances of social media. A man swept away by the pretty women vying for his attention. The sadly naive responses to women who just want to exploit his celebrity and good looks." She felt her cheeks heat at the mention of his looks, but thankfully Reed was the only one who caught her blush. He winked at her before looking back at the iPad.

"They need to see a man who is a fighter in more ways than one. A man who has seen the black hole that he's fallen into and who is fighting his way back to the light. Gentlemen, I give you Callum Reed, the reformed!"

The screen was blank for a moment, having finally run out of material. Then it slowly filled with a red sunrise, clouds clearing from the horizon in time-lapse as the orb of the sun rose higher in the sky.

"What does the 'new' Callum Reed look like?" she asked the room at large, letting the iPad down to lay flat on the table. "Well, for starters, he's going to wear clean clothes in public." She glanced pointedly at his tank top, which had something staining the front of it. "Ideally, he'll even wear proper shoes."

She stared at him for a moment or two, then inhaled sharply. "We'll have to see what happens from there. I'm not expecting you to change overnight, Mr. Reed. And really, we're only changing the public's perception of you, not the real you. If you try to fake it, people will figure it out and they'll crucify you in social media. At least all that was genuine." She waved a hand at her iPad.

"No, what we want to do is manage what people see. If you want to go out drinking, we'll make sure people see you helping the homeless vet who is just trying to get across the street."

She saw the appreciative glint in his eye as he recognized that little-known story.

"If you want to get laid, we'll make sure the women are discreet, and that they check their phones outside the room to keep those sex videos from showing up. You, by the way, need to be publicly mortified for the sake of the women's reputation any time those are mentioned. You feel as though they were victimized by those videos, and you must implore the world to delete them.

"Speaking of that," she went on, blithely ignoring the way her bosses were smiling at each other, and the way Reed and his trainer were staring at her. "I've entered negotiations with a.... Well, let's just call him an associate of mine, who is going to scrub the internet to get rid of as many instances of Mr. Reed's indiscretions as he can. They will disappear from the Cloud and any social media site that hasn't already taken them down, as well as any other storage space that hasn't been directly downloaded onto a private hard drive. My associate assures me that any time a flagged image resurfaces, his scrubbers will automatically clean it. And since
there will be no more new photos
, the online world will soon forget the negatives and focus on the new positive images we will feed them."

***

Cal stared at the redhead across the table from him. What she was saying wasn't half bad. He'd been expecting some prick in a suit to put him in a chastity belt and lecture him about morals. But the things she said made sense. He understood her perfectly...when he wasn't thinking about that red hair spread across his lap while she gave him a blowjob....

The suits were talking again, and Cal tuned them out. They reminded him of the adults in those old Charlie Brown cartoons. "Wa waa wa waaaa, wa wa waaahh...."

While Trevor talked with them, he slipped his flip-flop off and stretched his foot out under the table, searching for and finding her knee. Oh, she was a cool customer. She didn't even flinch, just slowly looked over at him as his toes found the hem of her skirt and lifted. He wished the table wasn't quite so wide. He couldn't do more than that without sliding down under the table....

"Cal?" Trevor asked, nudging him with his elbow.

"What?" he asked, refusing to jump guiltily. If she could play it cool, so could he.

"What do you think?"

"About what?"

"About the plan?" Trevor was exasperated, again.

"Sure," he said, thinking only of the things the redhead had talked about. He realized the room had gone quiet, as if everyone was waiting for him to say more. He looked around to see four expectant faces. "What? It's a good plan."

The corner of Trevor's mouth lifted slightly. Of all of them, he was the only one who might have known that Cal hadn't been listening. His friend knew him well enough to know when he'd tuned out. Without a word, Trevor pushed a paper in front of him and held out a pen.

Cal looked down, saw an X and signed, trusting his best friend wouldn't have him sign anything that was bad for him. Trevor was just as invested—if not more—in Cal's career.

"Great," the redhead said once the paper was signed and safely back in her folder. "First order of business is shopping. Find Mr. Reed some suitable clothes." She was looking at Trevor, who shook his head.

"He's all yours, Ms. Mason," Trevor said. "I've got a meeting with the property managers to attend." Trevor stood and shook hands with the suits. "Thank you for taking him on, gentlemen. I leave him in your capable hands."

With that, Trevor stood and left the room without a backwards glance. Feeling slightly alarmed, Cal looked around as the others stood. He scrambled to his feet, too.

"Once the lease is signed," one of the suits said, "we'll have the movers take over. We'll have you installed in your new apartment by this evening."

"What?!" All three of them turned to look at him, and any further protest died on his lips. "I mean, wow, you guys move fast."

He had his first inkling that he might just have made a huge mistake.