Chapter 17 – Grayson
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
GRAYSON
“Who put you guys up to this?” I laugh as I glance around the dispatch room, where everyone has their heads bowed at their stations, trying to fight the grins on their faces. “Bueller? Bueller?”
I take a step closer to my desk and just shake my head. There are copies of the Gazette’s gossip column everywhere. There’s Sidney kissing me on the lips taped to my chair, to my monitor, to my headset, to my bulletin board. To every fucking place imaginable. The words “hot dad” are on a banner stretched over all of it.
Christ.
I look around again and this time everyone is looking my way and they all bust up laughing. “You guys are assholes.” I start taking down the papers.
“Oh, flyboy, come and give me mouth-to-mouth!” McArthur mocks.
“Mount me, Malone.” That one was Vin.
“Way to date a rich girl!” Uley says, and his words stop me in my tracks. I know he means nothing by it, but every part of me rejects his comment, and it takes me a second to clear my head. To bring my mind back from the bullshit it brought up.
“Dating? Sorry, Uley, but not this man. How’s a guy supposed to work with all this crap in the way?”
“You could always roll it up and spank her with it,” someone at my back tosses out, and the whole room busts up laughing.
“She isn’t a dog, and it’s just gossip.”
“Gossip, my ass,” Uley says. “Looks to me like she has you right where she wants you.”
I look over to him as his words hit, but his head is already down, and his fingers are flying across his keyboard. Then I look back down to the picture of Sidney kissing me. The same damn one my brothers had already given me shit for.
I was letting myself believe it was a coincidence—that I was the one who started the chain reaction by kissing her—but as I look at the photo I realize it’s the second time she’s made me look like a fool. It’s the second time she’s manipulated me into her publicity-fueled fire.
It’s the second time she’s used me.
Maybe that’s why I’ve yet to hit send on the bio she wants. Maybe that’s why I’ve gone to text her ten times already to cancel the photo shoot.
I try to shrug off the notion that her kiss was nothing but a publicity stunt, but it sticks in a way that makes me want to bail from work, from this office that’s a kicker of a punishment on top of grounding me.
And I hate that for a second time with a similar woman, I’ve let my guard down.