Chloe wrinkled her nose at the mixture of onions and kissing. “Can I just have my hot dog with ketchup?”
Theo looked taken aback. “I suppose you can…”
“One children’s dog coming up,” the vendor said.
A couple of minutes later, Theo held his mustard-and-onion-slathered hot dog out to her. “Just humor me. Take a bite.”
Chloe took the smallest bite she could and then paused as the flavors exploded over her tongue. Theo was right: it was surprisingly good. She could do without the onions, but the mustard… She held her ketchup-covered dog out to the vendor. “Do you think I could get some mustard with this, please?”
“Ah, I see you have graduated to teenager,” the vendor said approvingly.
The three laughed, and Chloe and Theo continued through the park, enjoying the pleasant spring day. This was nice. Almost like a date. And Chloe lost herself in the moment.
When they finished their hot dogs, Theo turned to her and said, “So I know this doesn’t really check anything off of your list, but is there something else that you want to do?”
“Other than you?” she said with a wink.
He pointed to a cop on horseback nearby. “I don’t think that he’s really up for voyeurism.”
“And I’m not really an exhibitionist. So let’s not.” She thought about it. “I know that it’s super touristy—”
“Please tell me you don’t want to go to Times Square,” Theo said, interrupting her. “The Elmos are scary, and you can get M&M’s anywhere.”
She blinked; that seemed random. “What? Uh, no. I wanted to go ice skating at Rockefeller Center.” She blushed and mumbled, “I may have read one too many romantic comedy scripts where the couple goes and does that.”
He gave her a look, then said, “Let me check on something.” He pulled out his phone and typed something. “Supposedly the rink is still running.” He glanced around the park. “But considering the temperature, we might want to hurry.”
Theo texted the limo driver, and they headed toward the pickup point. As they were leaving the park, Theo’s phone rang. Theo pulled it out, looked at it, and frowned. “I told Annabelle not to bother me unless it was an emergency.”
Disappointment welled up within her. “Then you should take it.”
He nodded once and accepted the call.
She didn’t hear much of the conversation, as Theo had walked away, but she was able to make out his frustrated shout of, “What do you mean, he canceled? We’ve got a contract!” A few seconds later, Theo rejoined her, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Fucking DJ.”
“Do I want to know?”
“Not here,” he said, eyeing the crowd. He led her to the waiting limo, and they got inside. “Remember when I told you about that DJ on our practice date?”
“Vaguely.”
“So, apparently Julius Seizure—that’s the DJ, by the way—has decided that it would be bad luck to play Alto’s Saint Patrick’s Day event. I don’t know why, apparently he said something about the full moon, never mind that Saint Patrick’s Day is two days after that.”
Chloe patted his arm sympathetically. If anyone could understand the temperamental nature of creatives, it was her. Exhibit A: Ethan Doyle. Exhibit B: Aiden Doyle. Exhibit C: her entire client list.
Theo rested his head in his hands. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. We’ve got a deal with MTV to stream the event on their website. It’ll be great publicity for the club—and for our company. Julius Seizure was our headliner. Without a big name, MTV could pull out.”
What Theo was describing wasn’t that unusual in her line of work. She ran into this kind of thing all the time. Contracts in entertainment lived and died based on who was headlining or starring in any given project. Studios were notoriously quick to pull the plug at any sign of trouble. Hell, it had happened to Aiden. As an agent, she’d spent hours going over the cancellation clauses in her clients’ contracts to make sure that they weren’t screwed over if some network executive got cold feet.
“I know that this really isn’t any of my business,” she said tentatively, “but what exactly does your pull-out clause with MTV state?”
He stared at her. “Pull-out clause?”
“It’s not the technical term, but it’s what will cause MTV to cancel. Is Julius Seizure in the contract by name, or is it just ‘the headliner’?”
“Let me find out.” He called his office, getting Blake on the phone. Unlike the phone call with Annabelle, this time she could hear Blake’s side of the conversation. Blake sounded even more panicked than Theo, demanding that Theo come back to the office to deal with this mess. But once Theo calmed his brother down enough to actually read the contract, they discovered that, thankfully, Julius Seizure wasn’t named in it.
“Okay, this is good news,” Chloe said, her mind landing on a possible solution.
