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She pauses, letting it sink in that she not only knows that I ride but what I ride. I press my lips together, not willing to appreciate her attention to detail when they’re my details. Continuing with a self-satisfied smirk, she says, “Bikes create a bad boy image, if you will, something we need to move you away from.”
I hold up a finger, stopping her before she can roll on. “Correction. Motorcycle, not bike. I’m not riding in the Tour de France. And I’m not going to stop riding my motorcycle.”
“For the next three months, yes, you will.” Her glare pins me in place, and I am once again in slight awe of her brown eyes that are shot through with flecks of gold fire.
“Bossy looks good on you.” My charm doesn’t sway her in the slightest. If anything, her eyes go darker and her lips turn down. “What do you want me to do? Park my motorcycle and buy a damn sedan? Start listening to classical music as I drive in at a respectable fifty-five miles per hour every morning? If so, not just no, but hell no. You might as well tell me to neuter myself.”
Okay, I’m mad, and maybe my volume is a little high, but she can’t seriously think I’m going to turn into some real-life version of a Ken doll, all bland and boring. And dickless.
“On that subject, we need to address your social activities. No more boat trips to Catalina with random women,” she says, her finger underlining something written down in her notebook. I look closer and see that she’s written ‘be discreet with acquaintances,’ underlining it in green. “And we’ll need to vet anyone you’re, uhm . . . spending time with.”
“You’re making it sound like I’m picking up prostitutes,” I growl. “That weekend on the boat was with Nora, a woman I’ve been friends with for years.”
Why am I defending myself to her? Why is it important what she thinks of me? I try to tell myself that it’s because she’s a snapshot of what the general public is saying and thinking about me, but I’m not sure that’s true.
Jayme hums before reciting from memory. “Mmm-hmm. Nora Wilson, college classmate whom you dated years ago. She had since married and was recently divorced. Thankfully, before the trip.” She rolls her eyes heavenward in appreciation for that small gift.
“The trip was because she was upset about her divorce,” I grind out. “We weren’t intimate at all. I wasn’t taking advantage of her. I was being a good friend.”
“I’m sure,” Jayme says cynically, clearly figuring we put some motion in the ocean during our trip. “But you can see how it looks from the outside. Your old sweetheart, with a freshly broken marriage, running off for a beautiful, scantily-clad weekend with you. It looks like you’re either the cause of the marriage break-up or the rebound fling.”
“Or a good friend.”
Jayme lets out a sigh of defeat. “Carson . . . look, I’m not trying to piss you off. I’m telling you how you’re perceived. It doesn’t mean that’s how you actually are. You could be an angel, you could be a demon. I don’t care. My job is to deal with how the public sees you. My job is to fix perceptions. Your family comes with baggage. Your grandfather had a questionable history of how he got the money together to start your precious Americana Land. Your father had a long-running affair with an Americana Land employee while still married to your mother, and then he left her to marry the mistress, making her your stepmother. Your older brother has been divorced twice and is a playboy. So when you go out with a woman while the ink is barely dry on her divorce decree, it looks . . . bad. Birds of a feather and all. The motorcycle riding and gambling add to your image as a bad boy with more money than sense, and that image is being dinged left and right by this whole Abby Burks situation. She’s basically America’s sweetheart on YouTube and you practically tackled her to the ground.”
Her voice has gotten louder and higher, more and more strident as she reads me up and down. She’s uncomfortably spot on. I do come from a line of men with a deep bastard streak. I wake up every morning and look at myself in the mirror, reminding myself that I’m not the culmination of my genetics.
But somewhere in the midst of her tirade, I began to notice the flush of pink on her cheeks, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathes heavily, and the way her skirt inched up when she scooted to the edge of the couch to yell at me.
Something about the way she’s holding her own, going toe to toe with me, lights me on fire. In both good and bad ways.
