Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
AIDEN
The fucking memoir.
I rub a hand over my face. The stubble feels rough to the touch, and I know I need to shave again tonight before having dinner with the investors.
I should never have agreed to it.
But what choice did I have? Either appease the Board… or lose the opportunity to expand Titan Media in the direction it needs to go. The direction we all need to go in.
Modernization, technology. Streaming. Every day that passes we lose another chance at creating something lasting. The train has already left the station, and we need to get on it.
It’s the only way to get this company truly back on its feet and ready to face the future. And to prove myself to everyone who would love to see me fail.
There are nine members on the Board, including two who were old friends of my dad. The only ones I haven’t been able to replace, yet. But they’re heading for retirement soon enough, even if I have to push them there by force.
The Board is younger now than it was when my father or my grandfather ran the company. Partly because of sheer necessity. When my dad’s fraudulent activity was exposed, the Board was almost as much to blame as my father. Corporate oversight is sort of their job, after all.
And there had been very little oversight.
Now, the new Board wants a new image for Titan Media.
I turn in my chair and look out at the city. I would rather be anywhere else than right here, right now. The rolling hills of Utah. Joshua Tree National Park. A stretch of beach at an exotic destination.
The memoir isn’t about me. Not truly. I know it, the Board knows it, and, soon enough, so will Charlotte. The story will be about my father—my relationship with him, his court case, and the time he’s currently serving. And it will conclude with a beautiful triumph about how I helmed the company and turned it around in the nick of time.
It’s a memoir about my life, part of it anyway, but really it’s about Titan Media. It will be picked apart by tabloids and business media alike for nuggets they could splash across web pages, newspapers, or turn into a high-profile documentary in a few years.
The Board wants a bestseller that will cleanse us all with holy fire. Use the lemons my father left us with and make lemonade. Apply whatever metaphor you want, and the result is the same.
They want to control the narrative.
But it’s my family’s story that will be presented like a sacrificial lamb on a pretty little platter for the public to tear apart.
Well.
I had agreed to a first draft in two months. A hard deadline for the deliverable in exchange for the Board’s approval of my new investment. They’ll sign off on the finalized negotiations once that initial draft is in their inboxes.
But I never intended to make it easy for the memoirist.
They’d want my secrets? My personality, my demons, the scoop on my family? They’d have to drag it out of me. It was a fuck you to the Board, with the poor memoir writer as a civilian casualty.
But yesterday the door opened and she walked in… Charlotte. I received the information about the ghostwriter before the meeting. The first name had been the same, sure. But what were the chances? There was no photograph. No other identifying traits.
The writer enjoys solo road trips across our country’s great national parks.
None of that.
But there she was.
Charlotte Gray.
Standing in my office in a pair of dark-blue jeans, a gray blouse, and with her long light-brown hair wavy around her elfin face. Bright-blue eyes and a plump mouth.
Staring at me like she just walked into a nightmare.
The odds of us meeting again were astronomical. So fucking slim that, had she been a lottery ticket, I would have won millions.
Millions.
There was a flash of panic in her eyes. I’d been ready to send Eric away, to let her know that if she wanted out of the contract, she could leave. But then she’d steeled herself. Rolled her shoulders back, met my gaze, and delivered her sentences with deliberate professionalism.
It was too damned intriguing. All of her is so damn interesting. Just like she’d been in Utah. Competence and vulnerability living side by side in her dazzling, intelligent gaze.
A complication.
Made worse by the fact that she had given me a goddamned fake phone number. She had brushed me off, and we both knew it.
But we still have to work together for two whole months.
My gaze lands on a helicopter in the distance. Sweeping over Los Angeles, a sprawling city that sometimes makes me feel like a king, and other times claustrophobic. It’s where I grew up, where I have my base.
My pride can take it.
It should be able to. What’s a snub, after all? So she didn’t want more than just one night. There have been times in my life when I haven’t, either. Nothing personal.
Except, as first times go, the sex had been fucking amazing. I had a feeling that it would only get better if we got to know each other more. Had seen in her eyes that there were secrets to uncover…
Okay. Maybe my pride was stung.
And the effects have continued for weeks since the night in Utah. My thoughts had returned to her regularly, and more than once with a tinge of bitterness. Clearly, I’d played my cards damn wrong if she felt the need to give me a fake number.
And now I’ll have to spend time with her every single week.
It was spiteful of me to tell her I preferred communication via email. But I’d been pissed, sitting there and seeing her looking at me—notebook in hand, eyes serious and wide on mine—like she was fully throwing herself into this professional conduct.
She wouldn’t give me her number… I wouldn’t give her mine.
Spite. Pride. They are emotions I hate in myself. Emotions that had been my father’s downfall. But here I am, prone to them anyway.
My childhood had been idyllic, by all conventional standards. Privileged. A multimillion-dollar house in Brentwood, and later in Malibu. Two dogs, private school, plenty of friends, sports. A little sister.
It was almost embarrassing how good it was, looking back.
Even with the cracks that were there. Barely visible to a child, but obvious to an adult in hindsight. Raised voices behind a bedroom door. Arguments that were brushed under the rug. Holidays where Dad showed up late. Where Mom put on a brave face. My grandmother’s harsh words about my father.
I was twenty-nine when the news first hit. Front page. The company my grandparents had built and that my father took over, was in the news. And not in the best of ways.
Under the worst of circumstances, to be honest.
And I was too stupid and too ambition-driven to let it be sold to the highest bidder. I’d stepped in as the CEO two years ago, after the majority of the company’s Board was forcibly changed, and everyone thought I was about to fail.
Including me.
A company with perfect financial books was now in ruins. Parts had to be sold off. People let go. At the same time, my father was in custody and awaiting trial.
The fall of the golden family.
That had been one headline, published in a small magazine read by a cultural elite, but I’d never been able to shake the accuracy of that statement.
It’s been two years since that day, and I don’t want to relive that time. But Charlotte is going to force me to.
There’s a sharp knock on my door. I turn in my chair, but the door opens before I have a chance to speak a single word.
Ah.
A blonde woman comes waltzing in. She has honey highlights in her hair, new since the last time I saw her, and a wide smile on her face.
She practically bounces through the space.
“You look happy,” I tell her. “And you should have called first.”
Mandy waves that away. “Of course not, I’m always welcome. You were the one who told me that.”
“Can I rescind it?”
“No.” She bends to swiftly kiss my cheek, her red bag bumping against some papers on my desk. It just barely misses the coffee mug. “You look like you’re in a mood. What’s happened?”
“What hasn’t happened?” I ask. “Every day, another fire.”
“Yes, yes, being the CEO is very hard,” she says and sinks onto the chair facing my desk. “But this is more than that. Did you get smacked in the head by your surfboard this morning?”
I level my sister with a withering glare. “I don’t have time to surf anymore.”
“Okay, so what’s up then?” She leans back in the chair, a wide smile on her face. “Let me play therapist.”
She’s six years younger than me, and that had been abundantly obvious when we were growing up. When I was sixteen and she was only ten, when our interests were worlds apart, when I felt like an adult and she was just a kid. But that was then, and now is now, and over the years… we’d grown closer. Learned how to be adult siblings.
“I told you about the memoir. Right?”
“You’re going through with it?”
“I have to.”
Mandy’s eyebrows pinch together. “You don’t have to do anything.”
“The Board demands it in exchange for approving my expansion plans.” I tap my fingers against the desk. “So, I kind of do.”
“Who’s writing it? You?”
“No. The Board approved the executive team to vet and hire a ghostwriter. I met her yesterday.”
“I’m not sure I like this,” Mandy says.
I sigh. “Yeah. Me, neither. Ergo, mood.”
“I mean, memoirs are usually written about people who have done a ton of things. Like, incredible athletes, war veterans, or former presidents. What have you done?”
I give her another withering glare. “Mandy.”
She continues, her voice tinged with amusement. “You inherited a company in distress, sure, but so have a lot of other people. You’re not particularly athletic anymore , even if you surf every now and then. You’re not a president of anything, and you certainly haven’t?—”
“I get it, I get it. I’m an incredibly unimpressive person.”
She shrugs. “Well, you’re not, but you know it’s my job to keep you grounded. Are your feet firmly on the ground?”
“We’re on the thirteenth floor.”
“So that’s a no. I will keep going.” She lifts her hand, like she’s about to count on her fingers. “You’ve got no sense of?—”
“You’re ridiculous.”
“And you’re in a better mood than when I arrived,” she says smugly. “So what’s bothering you? That the Board wants you to… relive things?”
“They want the memoir to be a clickbait. An excuse for me to be invited to interviews, profiled in magazines. It’s an attempt to dredge up the past while controlling the narrative.”
“They’ve said that?”
“They didn’t have to. It’s clear.”
She digs her teeth into her lower lip. “That sounds… Aiden, I don’t think I want that.”
“I know. I don’t, either.”
“How will you avoid it?”
The look in her eyes is exactly why I need to thread this needle. My family has come a long way in the past year. Healing has been an odd process, coming in sudden lurches and then long periods of standstill. But we’ve somehow gotten there. Into a new reality, a fragile truce with the past, and a father we seldom mention.
“I’ve given the Board my word to help with the memoir process. That’s it. That’s as far as I’ve committed. I’ll play the rest by ear. And the memoirist can’t write about Dad if I don’t give them everything, now can they?”
Mandy nods, but there’s a furrow between her brows. “Yes. That’s true. Besides, maybe there is a point to… acknowledging it publicly. We never really did. Well, you never really did.”
No. I took over a company that was on the brink of bankruptcy, a company that was my grandparents’ crowning achievement, a company that employed thousands of people.
I shouldered a mess when I had expected to inherit a legacy.
And I’ve worked day and night to make everyone forget that Hartman or Titan Media means scandal.
“Don’t worry,” I tell Mandy as I push away the memory of Charlotte sitting in the same chair. Her hand shaking mine. The intrigue I feel despite my intention to give the ghostwriter next to nothing. “I know what I’m doing.”