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With one more glance to Neil, she told me, “He’s planning to write a memoir. It will include some chapters about his involvement in the BDSM lifestyle. A large portion of that section will cover the time he spent with Neil. There are details—”
Neil exhaled an impatient breath. “He’s going to reveal intimate details of our brief sex life,” he finished for her.
“Neil, if I had any control over this—” Valerie began, and it seemed like they’d already covered this part.
Neil interrupted her again. “You had better find some way to control this. He’s your brother.”
“And it’s not being published through an Elwood and Stern company. My hands are as tied as yours.”
I snorted, but my unintentional mirth was quickly silenced by two nasty glares. “Sorry,” I tried to explain. “Tied hands, BDSM…”
“Yes, Sophie, I understood your joke.” He turned his ire on Valerie. “He is your brother. This is your mess to clean up.”
“How does he even have enough to write about Neil?” I had struggled to flesh out my book, and I lived with the man. “All these years later, what could he possibly have to say? So, people will know that you’re into the whole domination and submission thing. So, what? Aren’t people okay with that now, what with that spank-me book that was everywhere?”
“With the concept of it, yes,” Neil said. “But it is still humiliating to have your personal proclivities described for an audience. Especially when those descriptions won’t be entirely accurate.”
“Wait, what?” I asked, but he gave me a slight shake of his head, as if to say we’d discuss it later.
“I’ve tried to reason with him on this point, but he won’t budge,” Valerie explained apologetically.
I still wasn’t grasping why it was such a big deal. I mean, I wouldn’t shout to the rooftops that I liked to be spanked and slapped during sex, but if someone found out, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. “Neil, there are like four unauthorized biographies about you already. None of them seem to have hurt you. Why would this one?”
“This one will have a wider readership,” he explained tersely. “The only people reading those four books you’ve cited are likely biography enthusiasts or young professionals who think they’ll learn the secrets to my success.”
“This one has celebrity buying power behind it,” Valerie continued. “Stephen is in the public eye, more so than Neil. The salacious memoir of a television personality will sell much better than a cancer narrative about a rich man who’s only slightly on the radar.”
I suppose I should have arrived at that conclusion on my own. But it wasn’t until Neil said, “And that rich man is about to get married. Perhaps his fiancé’s family wouldn’t be thrilled to imagine their young relative being tied up in the bedroom.”
I almost argued that he was overreacting, that his relationship with Stephen had been years ago, and people would naturally assume that he’d been going through a phase. But before I could say it, I knew how wrong that was. People never forgot stuff. People never assumed that others could change.
If someone—my mother, for example—read that book…
“We’ve got to do something.” My eyes grew wide as I stared at Valerie. “You have to get him to take those chapters out.”
She shook her head. “I’ve tried. Believe me, I’ve tried, Sophie. Stephen says that I have to stop ‘clinging to the past.’ He chalks my objections up to a matter of decades-old unrequited love.”
“What about… Could we sue him? For libel?” I looked from Valerie’s grim expression to Neil’s.
“It’s only libel if it’s not true,” he reminded me. “And I did sleep with him. A lawsuit will only bring more attention to this.”
“Our best course of action would be to buy Splendor publishing, if we can, and put a halt to the book entirely,” Valerie explained. “I’ve already put the lawyers on it.”
“Reynholm Media will never part with the publisher.” Neil rubbed his hands on his knees then stood. Sitting was inertia, and he wanted action. The tension vibrated off him.
I also hated the feeling that nothing was being accomplished. “Okay, let’s take a look at the situation. You’re going to try to buy the company. If it works, no problem, the book gets squashed. How does that happen? You just don’t publish it at all?”
“There’ll be a clause in the contract guaranteeing the return of rights if the book isn’t published in a certain time frame.” Valerie sighed, as though all of this was too much to explain to an outsider. I was pretty sure she’d forgotten that I used to work in the media—at least, in an arm of the media—and had relegated me to official trophy wife status. But she went on. “If the rights are returned, he can simply sell it elsewhere. But we could draw it out, reject the manuscript, demand revisions, and remove the chapters.”
“Okay, then…problem mostly solved, right? If it doesn’t work, we go a different route?” I asked.
Neil had paced to the window. He looked out as though he could see all manner of my enraged relations marching down the street toward our house. “Our problem, right now, is that it takes a long time to buy a company. It might take them considerably less time to put this book on the shelves.”
“And, once it’s out, the only thing left to do is damage control, which runs the added risk of calling more attention to it,” Valerie said. “Public perception is important to our jobs. We’re not celebrities, but if a business rival or potential partner forms an unsavory opinion of Neil, it could damage the company.”
“Even if he’s not working there anymore?” I didn’t understand. Neil had retired. He didn’t need to worry about his perception in the business world, right?
“It appears that if we make this possible purchase, I may need to come out of retirement. At least for a time.” He swore under his breath. “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.”
