CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER TWO
W HEN HER PHONE rang at five thirty the next morning she knew an instant shot of regret over taking the night off.
“Hello?”
“Is this Augusta Fremont?”
“Yes?” She rubbed her eyes and rolled over in her large, empty bed. If she was like Matias she would have gone out and found herself a bedmate. She would have batted her eyelashes and seduced a gorgeous Spaniard. But she was not, and she was alone. As per always. Her and her cell phone.
“Augusta Fremont of Your Girl Friday?”
“The very one,” she said. She did not tell the woman on the other end of the line that everybody called her Auggie. She had hoped, when she was younger, that the nickname Gus might catch on. It was cuter, in her opinion. But no. She was Auggie forever. Now though, when she thought of the nickname, she heard it in her mother’s voice, and it softened things inside of her.
“Do you have a comment to make on the news that Matias Balcazar is a fraud?”
“Excuse me?” she asked.
“Yes. Media outlets received reports this morning from an anonymous source alleging that he has engaged in a years-long corporate espionage campaign which has stolen information from his father, Javier Balcazar, and therefore he has built his image on lies.”
“It isn’t true,” she said, sitting up and pushing her brown hair out of her face. “I know that for a fact. Matias is a self-made man whose reputation as such is very important to him. I’ve spent a great deal of time with him, and I can tell you, he never even mentions his father.”
“Well, the evidence that was faxed to us this morning is quite compelling. It doesn’t really matter whether you have a comment or not, the story is going to run everywhere.”
“Expect a cease-and-desist,” she said, hanging up the phone. She was panicking. Not so much because she cared about Matias, but because she was so connected with him.
She scrambled out of bed and put her clothes on. She was his keeper. For better or for worse. And Your Girl Friday was associated with him. His name was going to be strongly linked to them no matter what, and if this...
She was immediately spinning stories in her mind. Even as she was FaceTiming the work wives.
Irinka was lying in bed, glaring intently at the camera. Maude was out on a country road somewhere, she seemed to be walking a spaniel, but the camera was jiggling wildly, so it was hard to say.
Lynna was in a chicken coop. “Fresh eggs,” she commented, lifting a shoulder.
“Well, here are some not fresh eggs. There’s going to be a major scandal connected to the Pitbull.”
“What, did he get caught with his hand in the honey jar, so to speak?” Irinka asked, rolling onto her back and bringing the phone with her. She sat up, revealing that she was wearing extremely luxe-looking pajamas.
“I wish. He got...” She covered her face with her free hand. “Somebody stole something from his office. It was Charmaine. I’m convinced. So that is some commitment to the bit, because she definitely slept with him.”
“Auggie,” Lynna said. “We’ve all seen him. It’s not really hugely sacrificial for a woman to sleep with him.”
“Like you would know,” Auggie said.
If Lynna was put out by that shot about her nonexistent love life, she didn’t let it show. Instead, she stroked a chicken’s head, and stood, holding the phone up toward her face as she began to walk out of the chicken coop area.
Lynna was professionally unbothered.
“I have to fix this. What am I going to do?”
“You’re not his publicist,” Irinka pointed out. “She needs to get involved with this.”
“But they called me. They called me in the morning, and they asked if I was Augusta Fremont of Your Girl Friday. And I am. We are all Your Girl Friday. If my most prominent client that I have ever had goes down in flames while I’m embedded in his life like this...”
“You need to be embedded in fixing it,” Maude said, red-cheeked in the cold English air.
“Right. I do. You’re right. I have to fix it. We built this business ourselves. And I can’t count on anyone else to do this. Not a publicist, who thinks that the best way to shape his image is to paint him as an idiot. This just makes him look even more stupid.”
“He’s probably not stupid ,” Maude said thoughtfully. “It’s just that he’s egotistical. Overconfidence gets beagles into a lot of trouble also.”
“He’s not a beagle,” she said.
“No, I know that,” Maude said.
Auggie decided to let that go. “Remember in Jaws ,” Irinka said.
“I don’t,” Auggie said. “I don’t share your affinity for shark movies.”
“Well,” Irinka said. “In Jaws , when they actually see the size of the shark, they realize they need a bigger boat. If you can’t have a smaller shark, get a bigger boat.”
“I’m not following,” Auggie said.
“If there’s a big headline, make a bigger one.”
“Well, first I need to talk to him, I need to find out what’s going on. I need to find out if there’s any truth to this. Because we can always squash it with the truth.”
Irinka laughed, the sound like a fork on crystal, and sat straight up in bed. “Are you that na?ve, Auggie? You can’t fix lies with the truth. Because there’s a certain point where the truth doesn’t matter. That’s not what the public wants. They want a narrative. The idea that he might’ve done something underhanded to gain his success is a fantastic narrative, because you know he has secret haters.”
“He doesn’t. Everybody loves him. A light shines upon him. He is the most beautiful man in the world.”
“He has slept with more women than most men have ever met ,” Irinka persisted. “He’s rich, he’s gorgeous, and people love to watch a guy like that fall. They really do.”
“You think they’re going to turn on him.”
“I think that’s what mobs do,” Irinka said.
“Hedgehogs also do that,” Maude said.
No one said anything in response.
“Okay,” Auggie said. “I’ll keep you posted. I have to go to... Wherever he’s at.”
“Good luck,” Lynna said.
“We all need it,” Auggie said, hanging up the phone. She took a couple of deep breaths and looked in the mirror. She was not quite as done up as she would like. But there were things she had to do. Very important things.
And then she was off like a hare, making a beeline straight for the residence that he kept in Barcelona. The address was in her files, and she had gotten a car before even finding it.
The whole drive she became more and more agitated. She was supposed to be finished with him soon and this was a logistical nightmare.
She had been nice, and she had been silent, and she had been the wallpaper, and look where it had gotten them both.
He was going to be reamed for this. She wasn’t going to handle him gently here. She had tried to warn him when he’d gotten off the plane and he hadn’t listened.
When she was dumped summarily out onto the sidewalk, she went to the wrought iron gates that led to a winding driveway, and pressed a button on the intercom. She was fueled by indignation and outrage. “Hello, Augusta Fremont is here to see Mr. Balcazar.”
She did not expect Matias himself to respond to the intercom. “Of course you may enter, Augusta.”
The gates swung open toward her, and she took two hopping steps backward, and then skittered inside, running up the steeply graded driveway toward the most opulent hacienda she had ever seen in her life. Tucked into the hills, with bright pink flowers spiraling all around, vines growing up a tall wall that encircled the outside of the stucco masterpiece. The red-tiled roof gleamed in the early morning sun, and Auggie had never been so full of hate. She leaned against the front door, trying to catch her breath. And then it opened, and she nearly tumbled inside, and right into the solid wall of Matias’s body.
She gasped, and lunged backward. “You are in a crisis,” she said.
His dark brows lifted, and he looked around. “Am I? I do not see a crisis anywhere in the vicinity.”
“Of course you don’t. Because it’s not printed yet. You took Charmaine to the office, didn’t you?”
“She wished to see the headquarters.”
“She wished to do some digging. I’m convinced. I saw an email on her phone...”
“You were on her phone?”
“I always check their phones, Matias,” she said, not breaking eye contact with him. “For photographs of your penis.”
He looked shocked. Not by the word penis , she supposed. But by her pushing back against him. She didn’t care. She had absolutely nothing to lose in this moment. She pinched the bridge of her nose and continued.
“I got a call from a media outlet this morning claiming that they received evidence that you engaged in corporate espionage.”
And that was when the smile melted right off his face. “What?”
“They’re claiming that you’ve been stealing from your father. Everything . Leads, information. I don’t know what all. I’m not an expert in corporate espionage, I am an expert in... Knowing that this is a very bad thing.”
“I have taken nothing from my father,” he said, his voice suddenly hard.
“Well, they seem to think that you did. And supposedly there’s evidence to that effect.”
“Why do you think it was Charmaine?”
“I picked up her phone, and there was an email preview. It said, When you’re done with him... I didn’t read the rest because that isn’t in my scope, but when you said you were taking her to the offices, it got my antennae up. I tried to get you stay back and talk to me, but you didn’t.”
“No,” he said. “I didn’t, but you didn’t say you were worried she was going to do something nefarious.”
“I didn’t know what she was going to do, because I didn’t know what she might find evidence of at your offices, Matias.” That he might be guilty of corporate espionage was a problem, she supposed. It was just that she didn’t care. Trying to apply ethics to billionaires was stupid, and in her opinion, based on everything she knew, his father was the worst, so what did it matter if he took some of the old man’s trade secrets?
On moral grounds, she couldn’t care less if she tried.
But if he was guilty, it was a complication in the practical sense.
He paused for a moment. “Why do you care?”
“What do you mean, why do I care ?”
“Your contract with me ends next week.”
“Exactly. And if I leave you in the rubble that is going to be... Smoldering when all of this comes out, it’s going to reflect badly on me. On my company.” And she was not a billionaire with generational wealth. She was worried about herself.
“And for a second I thought you cared.”
Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her pocket.
Did you find the Pitbull?
His eyes glanced downward, and he caught the message on her lock screen. She put it away quickly.
“The Pitbull?” he asked.
“You have a code name, obviously, with my coworkers. Because we have to talk about logistics, but of course we’re discreet.” She gritted her teeth and did not say: unlike you.
“You call me a pitbull because you find me dangerous?”
Well, to his point, she had a week left on her contract with him. And no reason not to tell him exactly what she felt.
“I call you a pitbull, because pitbulls are silly , and emotional , and make very abrupt reactionary choices. That is what makes them dangerous, not their aggression. And apparently it’s what makes you dangerous too.”
“I am not silly ,” he said, the hardness in his eyes that she had never seen before.
“Well, you’re going to have to do some work to prove that to me.”
“I have nothing to prove to you Augusta. If you find me inconvenient, then leave.”
“No. We have to fix this. We have to... We need a bigger boat.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“If you have a big shark, you need a bigger boat. That’s... That’s what I know. This is going to hit the headlines, and it is going to create a sensation. You have to make a bigger sensation.”
“I’m listening.”
“What would be the biggest thing. The biggest thing...”
She turned to him suddenly. “You have to get married.”
He stared at her for a moment, long and hard. “You’re right, Augusta. I have to get married. And I think I should marry you.”