Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Whit
“ I f you’re serious about getting Johnson on board, you’ll consider it,” Nikki said with one of those stern looks she used when trying to impress me with her wisdom.
“It’s sketchy.” I shook my head and looked out the tinted window of the town car.
Ru was driving us back to my house after a mildly disastrous meeting with John Smith Johnson’s team. He’d popped in at the end, but hadn’t stayed. Nikki had declared the meeting an unmitigated disaster .
“It’s done. All the time. You know this. Get over it, and think about what you want.” Her attention, as always, stayed on her phone.
The city blurred by as her words sank in. Think about what you want . I knew what I wanted.
I wanted to work with John Smith Johnson. I wanted him to back me as his option for the lead writer in a new project I’d caught wind of—I’d be writing the songs, but I wanted the score, too. There was no way he could know I’d gone to Juilliard thanks to a name change and burying that history deep before auditioning for SouthernStar . He couldn’t know I had that level of skill, but everyone knew I’d written everything on my albums, even the instrumentation. Some artists wrote the lyrics, maybe even the melody, but they didn’t craft the whole musical set.
The problem was, not being in charge wasn’t one of my fortes. It wasn’t arrogance to say that I was usually the most skilled musician in the room, nor was it me being pushy when I gave my opinion, stuck to my guns.
Fine . I could admit I was stubborn and had a temper. But that wasn’t what happened in the meeting. The team Johnson sent to talk with me confirmed their status as a bunch of ill-informed hand-holders in minutes. What they expected me to do, who knew, but when I sat down, I presented them with my idea for the score, the songs, and the feel of the sound. Of course, all of that would change if I actually worked on the film, but I had to provide them with something showing I had the capability, the vision.
Johnson’s team’s notorious inflexibility showed in their stiff necks as I spoke, their subtle frowns before responding.
They took the lead, shaped whatever project, and went for it. Part of the reason no one argued was that they had a track record going thirty years back. Johnson had demonstrated how his instinct never led him astray. But one thing his instinct was always known for: only choosing women who were pretty, conservative, and married.
Yeah.
So he mostly worked with dudes.
My not being married was likely no longer a deal- breaker. It was so old-fashioned, it must be possible to get around it. But my stubborn nature, my willfulness as my parents used to call it, and probably most of all, the drama with Jamie Morris, were knocks against me.
So let’s talk about that.
I dated the very famous, broody, gorgeous, talented (and on and on and on…) Jamie Morris. We worked on a song for a movie about eighteen months ago and got along well. The stars aligned, and we were both in LA for other things after the recording, and we started dating.
It didn’t stay quiet, so people started freaking out. Headlines like Country Princess and Rock God Seen in Epic Lip-Lock splashed the Internet after he kissed me in public as though he’d never been in a relationship with another celebrity before.
And that’s when he told me—after everyone was already predicting I was knocked up with his baby and that he was cheating on me with another woman (his sister, it turned out, who had come to visit him while he was in LA—lovely girl)—that he never had. Not once. He’d never dated a celebrity, and hardly anyone at all .
But the press always rages about anything anyone remotely famous is or even isn’t doing, so it was no surprise. We went on a few more dates before my return to Nashville. Jamie came to visit me one weekend about six months after we’d met in LA. During that time, I didn’t date anyone else, and I was fairly certain he didn’t date anyone else, either.
But Jamie visited the same weekend my friend from Juilliard came to stay. My male friend. The paparazzi had photos of his car at my front door and of me ushering him inside while looking out warily—they caught the perfect moment. I was nervous about people seeing him, but not because I was cheating on Jamie.
Jamie and I were barely dating, so it would have been hard to cheat on him, anyway, but I wasn’t a cheater. Second, Sam had never been interested in me, partly because the stars had declared we’d be friends, and partly because I was far too female for his taste.
But I couldn’t come out and introduce him. No one could know about Sam, now a cellist with the New York Symphony. That would unleash all kinds of issues in that no one wanted to hear about my privileged upbringing.
SouthernStar had suggested we keep that quiet to make me more sympathetic, more of a Cinderella story, and I’d stupidly agreed. Now, it would be an even bigger deal if word got out that my parents were from old money— old old, like Dukes and Earls and peerage in England kind of old. In fact, I had a cousin who’d come into his dukedom, or whatever you call it, when his father died the week after he turned thirty.
Whatever, the point was, the world thought I’d two-timed Jamie. He’d been exonerated by the same public opinion that had wanted to hang him when he made a statement indicating that the visitor had been his sister, and he wouldn’t share her name for the sake of her privacy, but that he had never and would never cheat on me.
Very sweet. But I couldn’t do the same.
And thoughtful, sensitive, adorable Jamie Morris (I know, cliché, right? Sensitive rock star? But I’m telling you, he is.) understood. He knew I had secrets I couldn’t share, and he also knew I hadn’t cheated on him after he spoke to Sam, who was far more interested in Jamie than me.
But we also couldn’t stay together. More than anything, it was because we had all the chemistry of a paper bag and a rock, but also because we never saw each other. I’d been prepping for a European tour, and he’d been heading back into the studio. It wasn’t meant to be, and we walked away friends.
And I walked away being called all manner of things people like to call women who a.) date men, b.) are suspected of cheating, c.) exist. I won’t list the names here. Though I’d braced myself for the backlash and swallowed down Nikki’s suggestion that I suck it up and deal with the fallout rather than letting the larger lie blow up in our faces at that point—the general perception that I’d come from “nowhere” and worked my way to the stage in Nashville (which was true, except that my nowhere had eighteen bedrooms and tea served every afternoon and private tutors).
But words can wound.
And they did.
So I went on tour and kept my head down. Happily, most of the tour went without incident, and other than paparazzi constantly asking me who I was banging now , I didn’t have to deal with the problem.
But now that I was back, no longer on tour and out of sight of the local paparazzi and the American paparazzi, my apparent indiscretions were surfacing again through quiet whispers and sly looks and pointed questions by bloggers and interviewers.
I had to turn it around—no question about it. I wanted to just walk out one day and tell them where I came from. There’d be backlash, not least of all from Cynthia and Stuart Grantham. But they would deal—whenever it did come out, they’d have to, and so would I.
What Nikki suggested made me feel a little sick. I didn’t like the idea any more than she thought I would—she knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t be happy about another lie to make me look better. Especially considering the problem that started all of this, my supposed cheating, wasn’t even an actual thing.
I took a deep breath and let it out to the count of five. If I was doing it, I wasn’t going to lie to anyone it might personally affect. That included Ben.
“Fine. I’ll do it. I’ll call him when we get home.”