2. Reed
Reed
“Forty-seven thousand views,” my head of PR, Celeste says. “In three hours.”
She’s in the seat across from me, phone face-out, already playing the video before I can tell her I’ve seen it. Someone’s shaky vertical footage, shot from the Deleon’s front steps. Me in the doorway. Her on the steps. The paparazzo’s flash going off like the world’s worst punchline.
I watch it once.
The comment section is open at the bottom of the screen and I can see it loading, reply after reply stacking up faster than the numbers can update, and every single one of them is saying the same thing. I don’t need to read them to know they’re not in my favor.
“Turn it off,” I say.
Celeste turns it off.
“How many of the board have seen it?”
“All of them.”
I turn my chair to the window. Forty-seven thousand views. It took me only four seconds to make a decision that is now its own news cycle.
“Sharpe?” I ask.
“He called me at midnight,” Celeste says. “He was polite.”
“Of course he was.” I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose. “Christ.”
Sharpe, Hawthorne Group’s longest-serving board member and the man who’d been angling for my seat since February.
Being polite is Sharpe with a blade he hasn’t shown you yet.
I’ve been in enough rooms with that man to know the difference between him being reasonable and him planning something.
Midnight politeness after a viral clip is not reasonable. He has an agenda.
“He said he hoped the evening was otherwise productive,” Celeste says. “He also said he’d be in touch.”
“Meaning Monday.”
“Meaning Monday,” she confirms.
I stand up. “I’m going to shower. By the time I’m out I want a plan on my desk that doesn’t involve me resigning.” I grab my jacket from the back of the chair. “Fix this, Celeste.”
She’s already typing. “I was fixing it before you asked.”
I crank the shower to cold and step in before it has a chance to change my mind, water hitting my shoulders hard enough to make every muscle seize on contact.
I stand there.
I tell myself what’s running under my skin is adrenaline. The board, the video, the four-second decision compounding in real time into something with a comment section. That’s what it is. That’s all it is.
Then I see her face.
Not when I handed back the slip. Before that.
In the gala, when my security team was walking her through the room and she knew every single person within eyeline was watching, and she smiled.
Not a flinch of a smile, but a wide one.
Like being frog-marched through a black-tie event was exactly where she’d planned to be.
Chin up, shoulders back, brown eyes bright.
She was petite and her hair was going in four directions but she stood in front of me without making herself smaller. She challenged me in front of everyone. Challenged and lost. But at least she tried.
My cock takes an interest.
I notice it and turn the water down another degree.
It doesn’t work.
Eight months since the divorce finalized.
Longer than that since I actually fucked someone, since I was anything other than a custody schedule, a board problem, and a man managing the perception of his own life.
And now my body picks a furious baker to remind me it still works. Great timing. Fantastic.
I turn the water down until it’s genuinely punishing.
My cock has exactly zero interest in the board’s concerns. I stand there in water cold enough to qualify as self-harm and run Walsh acquisition financials in my head, unit by unit, until it finally, grudgingly, stands down.
I get out, get dressed, and return to my desk where Celeste left a fresh cup of coffee for me. I reach for it when a board member calls. I have no doubt he’s doing Sharpe’s bidding.
I pick up on the second ring. “Vincent.”
“Reed.” Same emotionless temperature it always is. Having spent thirty years as Hawthorne Group’s chair of the board, Vincent learned before I was born that the quieter you are, the more the other person squirms. “Apologies for the late hour. I hope I’m not catching you at a bad moment.”
“Not at all.”
“Good, good.” The pause. The one designed to make you fill it, but I don’t. I’m too seasoned to fall for cheap tricks. “I imagine you’ve seen the footage from this evening.”
“I have.”
“Mm.” Another pause. “The board has as well. There’s some concern.”
I keep my voice easy, my shoulders relaxed, every muscle in my body doing the opposite of what it wants to do. “I understand the concern, Vincent. What happened tonight was a vendor verification issue, and it’s already being addressed internally. It won’t be a factor going forward.”
“Of course, of course.” Not convinced. Not even close to convinced. “It’s less the incident itself and more the accumulation of them, Reed. The coverage, since the divorce. The narrative that’s been building around your, ah, public profile.”
“I’m aware of the narrative.”
“Investor confidence ahead of Walsh is a delicate thing. The shareholder meeting requires a unified front, and unified fronts require confidence in the man at the top. In his stability.” He lets that land for a full three seconds. “I’m sure you understand what I’m saying.”
“Completely,” I say. “And I want to be clear: I have this under control. Tonight will not define the next six weeks. You have my word.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Let’s get the board together and talk on Thursday,” he says, and I have no doubt that Sharpe instructed him to say that. “Just a check-in.”
“Of course, just a check-in. Thursday works.”
“Excellent. Get some rest, Reed.”
He hangs up.
I set the phone down. “Son of a bitch.”
I pick up my coffee, find it’s gone cold, and set it back down.
A check-in. Right.
My office door opens. Celeste walks in with her tablet in her hands.
“Thursday’s a warning,” she says.
I’m already up, moving to the window, because sitting still right now is not something my body is going to allow. “I know it’s a warning.”
“They’ll ask about Walsh, they’ll be very pleasant, and then you’ll leave and Sharpe will gather votes to replace you.
” She turns her tablet around, showing me the coverage of the last two hours.
Three blogs, a gossip column, a financial sidebar.
Hawthorne’s Gala Incident Goes Viral. Billionaire CEO Under Fire.
Divorce, Instability, and a Baker Named Mia.
“They’ve named her. Someone found the bakery website.
She’s been tagged eighty thousand times since the first picture was posted. ”
“Eighty thousand.” I shake my head. “Last time you showed me the clip, forty thousand people had looked at it. It’s even worse than I thought. It’s spreading like a fucking wildfire.”
“She’s likable. She showed up to do a job, got humiliated in public, and ended up standing on those steps like she wasn’t going to give anyone the satisfaction.” Celeste scrolls something on her tablet. “The internet has a type. She’s it.”
I pace the length of the window and back. “Sharpe’s going to call a vote of no confidence.”
“Not Thursday. But if the next six weeks look like the last eight months, yes.”
“The last eight months.” I stop pacing. “I got fucking divorced, Celeste. I didn’t rob a bank.”
“You finalized a messy, public, heavily covered divorce while running a company that is weeks from the biggest acquisition in its history, and last night you went viral for throwing a baker out of your own charity gala.” She looks at me over her tablet.
“Get it out. All of it. Curse as much as you want. But be sure to always do it only in front of me and not anyone else, because the second you let it slip in front of Sharpe or a camera we’re done. So go ahead.”
I raise my brows.
“Go on,” she says. “I mean it. Otherwise you’re going to pace a hole in that floor and then go into Thursday holding all of it, and then it’ll come out sideways in front of someone who’ll use it.” She lifts her chin in challenge. “I’ve seen your sideways. It’s not pretty.”
“This is a complete fucking disaster,” I say.
“Yes.”
“I made one decision about a goddamn vendor list and now I’m a headline.
” I pace back to the window. “Sharpe’s been looking for a reason since February.
He doesn’t give a shit about the baker, he doesn’t give a shit about the clip.
He wants a reason to push me out before Walsh closes and I just handed him one on a silver fucking platter. ”
“All correct.”
“And apparently my divorce is still happening in the comment section of a fucking gala video.” I drag a hand through my hair. “Eighty thousand views, Celeste. Eighty thousand.”
“One hundred and twenty as of two minutes ago,” Celeste says. “It’s a good clip. She’s compelling.”
I stop pacing. Stand in the middle of my own office and breathe. In for four, out for four, the thing my therapist taught me when I needed a way to calm down after I caught Vanessa cheating. I only use it when I’m close enough to the edge to admit it.
“What’s the play?” I ask, feeling more like myself again.
“We stop being reactive.” Celeste sets the tablet down.
“The board wants settled. They want a man who looks like the last year is behind him and not still running his life. They want someone in his corner who isn’t on his payroll.
” She pauses. “Six weeks. Timed to Walsh. Stable father, grounded man, someone real in his life.”
I narrow my eyes. “No.”
“You haven’t heard the full idea.”
“I don’t need to hear the full idea to know what you’re about to say, and the answer is no.”
“The answer,” Celeste starts, a ghost of a smile on her face.
She knows she has me, she’s just waiting for me to catch up.
“Is that you have six weeks to change a narrative that has been building for eight months, and the tools available to us are limited. One of those tools walked into your event a few hours ago with two tiers of delicious cake and over a hundred thousand people on her side.” She picks up her tablet again. “You should look at her website.”
She turns the screen toward me.
Small site, hand-built, the kind that runs on a free template and sheer refusal to quit. Calder Bakes, hand-lettered logo, photos of cakes that probably took days and murals that eat entire walls. The whole thing looks like it exists purely because she won’t let it not.
“Check the About page,” Celeste says.
I take the tablet.
She’s standing in front of a half-finished mural, paint up her forearm to the elbow, hair going in every direction exactly like it was last night. Grinning at the camera like she just won an argument and enjoyed every second of it.
“I’ve already done a background check on her.
She’s clean but uh…the bakery’s behind on rent,” Celeste says.
“Five months of late notices from the landlord. She’s been running at a loss since she expanded the studio space.
There’s a version of this conversation where you can both get out on the other side as winners.
” She meets my eyes. “I’m talking about a clean and direct contract with a defined timeline.
She scratches your back and you financially compensate her. ”
I look at the photo for another moment. The paint on her forearm. The grin. My cock stirs and I close the browser.
“Set up the meeting,” I say, returning her the tablet.
“I have her address,” she says. “She opens in five hours. We should pay her a visit.”