The Sterling Cup (Coronado #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“I’m not asking for special treatment.”

Brad paced the same six feet of sand he’d been wearing a trench in for the last ten minutes.

Maddy had gotten three hours of sleep, her nose was burning, and she had a mosquito bite on her left ass cheek that she couldn’t scratch because a thirty-six-year-old personal trainer who listed “apex competitor” as a personality trait on his contestant application was currently threatening to quit.

In other words, just another Tuesday.

Hell, that was every day since they’d started shooting season sixteen of Marooned & Merciless on this volcanic speck in Fiji’s Lau archipelago.

She had been on the island for eleven weeks and two days. She’d thought that when she became Supervising Field Producer two years ago, she’d be able to spend more time in the air-conditioned production trailer than putting out metaphorical fires under the equatorial sun. She’d been wrong.

And Brad was directly responsible for at least thirty percent of Maddy’s sun exposure this season.

On the plus side, the sun had bleached her honey-blonde hair to the platinum she preferred, sparing her a trip to the salon when she got back to LA next week.

“I’m not asking for special treatment,” Brad said again. He stopped pacing long enough to plant his feet in the sand and square his shoulders like he was bracing for a deadlift. “I’m just asking for things to be fair.”

He was, in fact, asking for special treatment.

He wanted them to rig the final challenge so he’d stop losing to Ainsley—a kindergarten teacher from Vermont, five-foot-nothing, who had spent the past seven weeks systematically dismantling him in every competition with the cheerful efficiency of a woman who wrangled twenty-five small children for a living and found one large man from Tampa a refreshing change of pace.

Maddy took a sip of coffee that had gone lukewarm twenty minutes ago, knowing Brad would fill the pause and keep talking until he eventually gave her exactly what she needed.

“The audience wants to see me compete.” He said, warming to the version of this speech where he was the protagonist of a sports movie. “They don’t want to watch me get humiliated by a—a—she teaches kindergarten, for fuck’s sake. Kindergarten!”

“She does.” Ainsley hadn’t lost a challenge in four weeks. Brad had brute strength on his side, but Ainsley had the cardio of a Border Collie and more brains in the nail of her pinky toe than Brad had in his whole steroid-filled body. None of which was a mystery to anyone on this island but him.

“So what does it say about this show if the alpha of all the contestants—” Brad thumped his chest once on the word alpha “—the guy everyone expects to win, can’t beat a woman half his size?”

Sam, her associate producer, former linebacker gone soft around the middle, shifted at his monitor cart. He was wearing Hawaiian shirt number six, on its scheduled day in the seven-day rotation she’d mapped during season twelve.

“It says she’s smarter than you,” Sam said out of the side of his mouth, low enough that only Maddy caught it.

She had produced sixteen Brads across eleven seasons and had, somewhere in the part of her brain she would under no circumstances describe to a therapist, a Brad flowchart.

This one slotted into Branch 4B: hero complex.

It resolved through a specific sequence she could run in her sleep, and occasionally had.

Her assistant Lexi’s voice crackled through the surveillance in her ear. “Maddy, what’s your location?”

Maddy took the earpiece out and left it dangling over her shoulder.

“What I’m hearing,” Maddy took a step closer, “is that you’re worried about your image. About what it looks like to walk away from this season as the guy who got outplayed by a kindergarten teacher.”

Brad tensed, his shoulders lifting half an inch higher. “I haven’t got—”

“Because you’re right.” She held his gaze.

The sun was directly behind her, which meant he had to squint, which meant his face was doing half her work for her.

“That’s exactly what the footage shows right now.

And if you quit before the finale like you’re threatening to do, Brad—that’s the story.

That’s your legacy. That’s what people remember. ” She let it sit a beat. “But.”

Brad’s shoulders dropped a fraction.

Maddy tilted her head. “If you stay, if you go into that final challenge and you compete—full effort, everything you’ve got, and you beat Ainsley—the story changes.

You’re the guy who got knocked down and got back up.

Audiences love that. You still have a chance to be that guy, Brad.

To show seventy million viewers that this was all part of your strategy.

To let Ainsley think she could take you on, only for you to pull the rug out from under her in the finale. ”

Brad’s chin came up. She could practically hear the trailer music swelling in his head.

She heard her name come through Sam’s walkie. Sam poked his head around the monitor, and she gave him a small head shake. He spun in his chair and mumbled something into his walkie too low for Maddy to hear.

The mosquito bite on her ass chose that precise moment to flare back to life with renewed urgency. She pushed it aside and focused back on Brad.

“Think about it.” She watched him closely.

“If you had beaten Ainsley in every challenge without an ounce of mercy, cancel culture would have you unhirable within a week. Networks wouldn’t touch you, brands wouldn’t sponsor you, and your influencer platform would sink faster than your fantasy football league. ”

His nostrils flared. Not anger. Recognition.

“But now?” She spread her hands. “Now you get to be the hero, Brad. The guy who played the game smart, instead of hard, and let a kindergarten teacher beat him week after week, only to prove in the end that he was the better player all along. Everyone’s going to be rooting for you, the network’s going to beg to bring you back for an All Stars season, and brands are going to be banging down your door to sign a deal. ”

Brad’s fingers opened and closed at his sides.

He looked out at the water, and Maddy could see it happening behind his eyes: the recalculation, the moment he stopped being a man who’d been losing and became a man who’d been strategically biding his time.

By tomorrow, he’d believe it had been his idea.

“I want extra airtime in the finale,” Brad said, as if he had at any point had the upper hand in this negotiation.

What a schmuck.

He turned on his heel and crossed the staging area with his chin lifted and shoulders thrown back.

The final challenge was thirty-six hours away.

Ainsley was going to destroy him. And Brad, who’d just talked himself into competing with his whole heart because he believed the cameras would capture his glorious underdog comeback, was going to have the most spectacular, authentic, emotionally raw meltdown they’d had in five seasons. On camera. In high definition.

She glanced toward Sam, whose face had disappeared behind his monitor, and finally—covertly, with the hand furthest from the camera op four feet to her right—scratched.

Okay. Now that that was handled.

She pulled up the dailies on her tablet, the glass hot under her fingertips where the sun had been hitting it.

Three of yesterday’s B-roll shots needed re-angles, the sound mix on the tribal council was muddy, and someone had to deal with the craft services situation before the caterer revolted over the—

“Maddy!” Lexi was running across the lot, out of breath.

Her assistant was twenty two and far too earnest, but she was a breath of fresh air in an industry full of vultures, so Maddy kept her around. Lexi thought every situation was a crisis that required Maddy’s immediate attention and approval.

Maddy checked her watch. Brad: handled. Sound mix: flagged. B-roll: queued. Crafty: could probably survive another two hours before mutiny. Nothing that couldn’t survive giving Lexi thirty seconds of reassurance.

Then she saw Lexi’s face. Pale under her tan skin, knuckles white where they gripped the edge of her walkie. “There’s been an accident.”

Shit. “Brad or Ainsley? How bad?” Please let it be something they could fix with NDAs and careful editing.

“No. It’s—” Lexi hesitated, then pushed it out. “It’s your mom.”

Maddy blinked. The world that contained Bunny Sterling felt so separate from this one that it took her brain a second to recalibrate.

Every night when Maddy popped into the production trailer to connect to the spotty WiFi and check her messages, she had a missed call and at least three texts from Bunny.

Maddy usually dismissed them until they became frequent enough that she knew she needed to give her mother proof of life.

It had been three weeks since she last sent her a response.

Bile began crawling up the back of her throat. She swallowed it down before it could reach her mouth, and inhaled.

“How bad?” She asked again, her voice steadier than she felt. Muscle memory from eleven years of managing crises took over: assess, strategize, execute.

“I don’t know the details. Someone named Lorraine called the production line, and they patched it through to me.

” Lexi was often in the production trailer on her laptop, filtering through Maddy’s daily flood of emails while Maddy was out in the field.

For all that Lexi lacked in proactive decision-making, she was excellent at managing an inbox and creating spreadsheets.

“Lorraine?” Maddy didn’t know a Lorraine.

“She said she was a neighbor and your mom was in the hospital.” Lexi’s voice dropped. “And…she said she doesn’t have long, Maddy. You need to go home.”