“You look like you’ve seen better days,” Clarke said as I walked into his office.
“I have. The call from Drew about one of the production companies couldn’t have come at a worse time.”
“Then why are you back here?” Clarke asked, leaning back in his seat.
“Because Haley doesn’t want me around, and I’m not going to ruin the relationship we were just starting to build.”
“So, you let her push you away. You push her away. You piss each other off for both being too stubborn to admit that you need to be in each other’s lives, and then you never get back together again.”
I rolled my eyes and adjusted my tie. “Look, I didn’t come back here to have my fortune read. Do you know where Drew is?”
“Should be in his office.”
“Great. I’ll meet you for dinner later.”
Drew was sitting behind his desk with his jacket tossed over one of the couches, and his sleeves rolled up. He had several folders spread open in front of him.
“There you are,” Drew said, looking up as his eyebrows furrowed. “Wouldn’t have killed you to be on time, would it?”
I shrugged and dropped down in one of the chairs across from him, smirking. “Aren’t you a little old to have a hickey on your neck? I mean, I know you’re younger than I am, but I thought that people stopped marking each other in their twenties.”
Drew’s face turned a bright red as he shoved one of the folders to me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t,” I said, smirking as I looked down at the file. “So, why am I here?”
“I have no idea where to begin with putting together this client portfolio. Every time I try to talk to the CEO of Westfield Productions, I just get shut down.”
“Most of the time with these companies, you’re going to have to put together portfolios without talking to them.” I flipped through the pages he had already put together. “We’ll find a way to make this work. It’s just going to take a few hours.”
“Whatever it takes,” Drew said, pulling out a pen from his desk drawer and tossing it to me. “Now, you’ve been looking miserable since you walked in here. What’s happening?”
“Just some personal shit. Haley has a stalker, and the police aren’t doing anything to help her.”
“I have some connections in the FBI,” Drew said, pulling out his phone. “I can reach out to them and see if they can head into town and light a fire under the sheriff’s ass.”
“I would appreciate that,” I said before launching into the entire story of what had happened.
Even though Drew had only been at the company for a few months, he was fitting in, and he was easy to talk to. I spilled my life story with Haley to him before realizing how much I had said.
“There you are,” Camille said as she walked into the office with a stack of paperwork in her hands. “I need both of you to make a joint statement on the future of the entertainment side of Crestwood Capital. The media is having a field day with speculation on why Tyson is stepping away, and they’ve started digging around for any story that they can find.”
I sighed and put the pen and the file down, leaning back in my seat.
“And I already told you that it was unnecessary,” Drew said, gritting his teeth and glaring at Camille. “I can handle this without Tyson stepping in to save the day like you so clearly think he needs to.”
My eyebrows shot up my forehead. The pair of them arguing was nothing new but the venom in Drew’s voice was different than it had been before.
“And I told you I’m the one who runs PR for Crestwood Capital, not you. If you didn’t go around and sleep with half of the women in the city, I wouldn’t be spending my valuable time cleaning up your shitty image.”
“I don’t think my image has anything to do with what’s happening. I think you’re a control freak who doesn’t know how to behave when she doesn’t have control,” Drew said, sounding smug as he leaned back in his chair and quirked an eyebrow at her.
“And I think you like to fuck around with women you barely know and let the paparazzi take dozens of pictures of you which is one of the reasons why we are having a good time getting companies to come to you.”
Drew crossed his arms and shrugged. “Have you tried removing the stick from your ass and thinking of PR in a more creative manner? I think that the real problem here is that you can’t spin my image into what it needs to be.”
“If you didn’t ruin everything I did to make you look better, I wouldn’t look like I was incompetent.”
“And there’s the problem. You’re incompetent.”