Chapter 2
HARRISON
If only every problem could be resolved as easily as the personnel issue that had dragged me to LAX.
Ashford Jets had recently hired a new liaison to interface with the airport’s staff, but he’d been getting static from them when trying to set up our quarterly emergency preparedness drill.
Safety was our top priority. It was why we tripled what was the industry standard, and I wasn’t about to let that fall through the cracks, even if it took me coming down in person to make it happen.
No surprise, the moment I arrived, the airport COO appeared like magic, making sure I was getting the attention I needed.
The whole mess was wrapped up quickly, and I was back at our corporate office in under an hour, filled with the satisfaction of another problem decisively put to bed.
I didn’t like pulling rank, but when it came to doing things the right way, there was no room for negotiation.
Which was why the whole Scarlet Rush debacle was such a nightmare.
I sighed as I headed for my office, faking smiles for the colleagues I passed. Lately, my whole life was a nightmare. Running into Gwen had made that all the more clear.
I could maybe admit she had a right to be mad at me, but that didn’t make it easier to see her aim that scowl at me. Should I have been the bigger person and refrained from taunting her? Probably. Did I regret what I’d done instead?
Nope, not even a little. If she was going to sharpen her claws on me, I was going to swipe back. That was just how I operated—for better or for worse.
“There you are.”
I froze in place when I saw Susan and Denise standing at my office door.
I’d hired my assistant, Susan, right as I began my tenure with Ashford Jets, and she’d quickly become the most important person in our entire organization.
More important than me, if I was honest with myself, and she knew it.
Thankfully, we had an excellent working partnership, despite her tendency to lean into our age difference and act like an over-involved mother.
She always teased me that I gave her more gray hairs than her own children.
Our marketing manager Denise was Susan’s work bestie, and the two of them together were more powerful than a coven. But judging from Denise’s expression, she hadn’t just stopped by for a gossip session. She was wearing her “bad news” face.
“What?” I asked as I brushed past them. “You keep my calendar, Susan, you knew where I was.”
“I still think you should’ve sent Mark instead of going yourself,” she sniffed at me. “You have a staff more than capable of dealing with FBO issues.”
“But I like addressing those kinds of challenges,” I said over my shoulder as they followed me into my office uninvited. “All it takes is a face-to-face discussion and poof, problem solved.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not always the solution,” Denise said in a dour voice. “We need to chat.”
I wasn’t in the mood to deal with her doom and gloom. “I wish I could, but I have—”
“No you don’t,” Susan interrupted. “I cleared your next appointment so the two of you could talk.”
I paused with my hand on my chair. “It’s that bad?”
Denise’s mouth went tight. Between her blazer and tidy cropped haircut, she looked like a newscaster about to discuss a train derailment, which my life sort of was, lately.
“Yes. Things have been taking a turn.”
The tension headache I’d been fighting took root behind my eyes. “Okay. Have a seat.”
“Holler if you need backup,” Susan said conspiratorially to Denise as she walked out.
“What’s going on?” I asked as the door shut behind her.
“The Rushies. They’re not giving up. Our ‘wait it out’ strategy is backfiring.”
I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. “Fuck.”
“They’re really creative,” Denise said, barely hiding her admiration for the teenagers currently attacking my business with the social media equivalent of pointy sticks. “They’re rewriting her songs with lyrics that make Ashford Jets sound like it’s the bad boyfriend.
“Scarlet herself liked a few of them, and now they’re going mega viral. Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live made a joke about the whole thing. You’re a hashtag, Harrison. The TikTok algorithm loves the drama. It’s a story that won’t quit, thanks to her star power and Gen Z’s love of memes.”
I’d been convinced the fuss would die down quickly given the internet’s attention span. After all, it wasn’t like I’d intentionally beefed the planet’s number-one celebrity.
I’d been caught off guard by a reporter outside the courthouse as I was closing an unfortunate chapter of my life, finally signing the divorce papers my ex, Miranda, had been weaponizing against me for two long years.
I wasn’t heartbroken about the end of our relationship—our marriage had been dead long before the paperwork—but I was pretty damn ticked off at how she’d dragged things out for no discernible reason other than to make me miserable.
If that really was her goal, then mission fucking accomplished.
Even beyond her petty grandstanding, signing the papers was a reminder of what had pushed us into marriage in the first place, and how different my life was now.
I’d been feeling bruised and raw, and the last thing I wanted to deal with was a microphone shoved in my face.
The breakup of my marriage wasn’t for public consumption. I hated talking about it.
When the reporter asked me my feelings about Scarlet Rush’s recent comments on the bad experience she’d had with Ashford Jets, I snapped.
Like, seeing-red-rage snapped. I refused to watch the footage of what went down on the courthouse steps, but I recalled using the words “silly little girls” and “spoiled-rotten princesses.”
In my defense, anyone with average intelligence could see that Ashford Jets wasn’t actually at fault for Scarlet missing the fan event in Colorado.
Her assistant had given her driver the wrong hangar number, and when she no-showed her departure time without even giving us a courtesy call, we’d released the jet to one of our frequent fliers who had a last-minute emergency.
Scarlet had shown up an hour late, and while my employees said she was charming, her attack-dog handlers went ballistic when they realized that there was no way for her to make the event.
She’d done a live from our hangar with the Ashford logo displayed prominently behind her and made a joke about changing the company name to Lose-slow.
The fans who’d shelled out for the canceled event had been more than happy to aim their anger at my company, but it hadn’t been that big of a deal.
Until my courthouse steps rant was released. Then it became…a very big deal.
Who knew teenage girls could be so dangerous? My company’s reputation was now in the toilet, and it was leading to some real, uncomfortable consequences for our stock prices and business partnerships.
“So what do we need to do?” I asked Denise as I massaged my temples.
“There’s nothing more we can do. We need outside help, yesterday. I’m thinking we need to hire in a PR firm with a crisis-management focus.”
“Fine, okay. Whatever it takes,” I said quickly. “Please vet some options and pull together a list of the top three for me to interview. I want the best of the best. We need to stop the bleeding.”
“I’m glad you agree,” Denise said.
She wisely refrained from reminding me it had been my idea to ride it out.
“I’ll have options for you by COB tomorrow,” Denise said, already flicking through her phone on the way out of my office.
I took a deep breath after she left and wished I had a million small, procedural problems to solve. A million things I could fix that didn’t require me to understand PR or make nice with people I didn’t even know.
Things to remind me I was good at my job when this whole mess had me thinking about everyone I was letting down.
My employees, who I wanted to feel pride in their work.
My dad, CEO of our parent company, Ashford Corporation, who trusted me enough to start Ashford Jets and put me in charge of it in the first place.
My brothers, who run their own divisions of the business and have gotten caught in the backsplash of the stink I’ve dumped all over our brand.
Mom, because even though she was gone now, I could still picture the way she’d sigh and say, “Honey, I love you to the moon and back, but love is not blind, and we can both see that you screwed up, right?”
Yes, Mom. I know I screwed up. But this isn’t the kind of problem I know how to fix. Usually, I keep my emotions in check, to the point where I’ve been called out for being cold. Fine with me.
My focus was my company, which left me little bandwidth for anything else. Ironic, then, that this whole scandal happened because I lost my temper and didn’t have the sense to keep my mouth shut.
A series of Slack notifications went off, bringing me back into the present moment and reminding me that I had a business to run in addition to handling the PR nightmare in front of us.
My phone rang right as I was about to dive in.
My middle brother, Drew. We didn’t speak often, but we’d been connecting more than usual as plans came together for our father’s surprise sixtieth birthday celebration at the Ashford Resorts Carmel location.
“Hey Drew,” I answered. “Let me guess; he figured out we’re planning a party for him.”
“Thankfully, he still has no idea,” Drew laughed. “But I’m banking on him getting it out of one of us. Who’s the weakest link?”
“Logan,” we both said in unison. Our younger brother was as ruthless as the rest of us, but in our family, he’d always be the wild child.
“What’s up, then?” I asked. “I can’t talk long. I’ve got a lot on my plate.”
“Yeah, anyone with social media knows that,” Drew said dryly. “What’s your plan? Because the hemorrhaging is starting to make folks nervous.”
I spun my chair to face the painting of ocean waves I have hanging on my wall—a tiny moment of meditation.