Daddy's Big Package Read online

  As I pulled the car out of the lot, I felt a surge of anger toward him. He was trying to get me out of the business, once and for all, so that he could go on and live his life, pretending that he had never met me in the first place. But I was never going to let him take over Changing Places: it was mine more than it was his. I actually gave a shit about the kids we helped out. He was crazy if he actually believed that I was just going to leave, all nice and quiet, like he wanted me to.

  I set my jaw firmly. So, he wanted me to organize this event? I would organize the best damn event this company had ever seen. This actor they had managed to get their hands on, the one who was hoping this would rehabilitate his image – well, I would make sure nobody wanted him to do anything but pet puppies and kiss babies from here on out.

  Yeah, that was how I would get back at him. I would turn this all the way around on him. Adam thought that he could just toss this in my direction as a snide backhand, hoping that it would be enough to shake my confidence badly enough to quit at last? Well, he had another thing coming. I had worked my ass off for that place, and this was going to be no different. I had pulled off so much in the last few years, all by myself, even with Adam practically working against me most of the time. Did he really think this was going to be enough to throw me off my game?

  I put on the radio and hummed along idly to some big pop hit as I drew closer to the daycare. The traffic was heavy, but I didn’t give a damn. My mind was racing. And I knew I was going to make this an event that nobody would ever forget.

  3

  Morgan

  "Glass of the house red, please," Haven ordered from the waiter as he approached our table. "And a water for my friend."

  "Seriously?” I shot back, raising my eyebrows at my agent. She tucked a strand of her poker-straight hair behind her ear and shrugged at me.

  "Hey, you said you want to get your reputation back in check, right?” she reminded me, hitting me with one of her signature hard stares. Any other man might have shriveled beneath it, but I knew better than that. I just met her gaze calmly, and she rolled her eyes away from me.

  "Alright, maybe one glass won’t hurt," she grinned at me, waving the waiter back over and making the order. I leaned back in my seat. It was good to have her around. Haven was a good influence on me, the kind of person who could actually bring me back down to earth in this crazy industry. I had never met another agent quite like her, and I had no doubt that it had been her influence that had kept my career from veering completely off the rails when I had been forced into those anger management courses.

  "So, have you found anything for me yet?” I asked Haven as the waiter arrived with our glasses of wine. He placed mine down carefully in front of me, as though he half-expected me to blow up at him for no reason. Alright, so maybe a little of that reputation of mine was well-earned.

  "Well, first and foremost, I have to tell you: you’re not going to get anything for this year," she warned me. I sighed deeply. I had pretty much figured that was the case – it was only a few weeks out from Christmas, after all, and the best I could have hoped for was a cameo – but the news still stung.

  "Shit," I muttered, lifting the wine to my lips. At least the booze was good. That would help take the edge off. Haven pushed her glasses up her nose and eyed me intently with a look that I recognized – you didn’t work with someone for as long as I had worked with her and not get a feel for their tics and tells. She was about the only woman I had managed to keep around all this time who I felt nothing romantic or sexual toward, but that was because she had carefully cultivated herself as utterly sexless to me. She was interested in my career, not what was between my legs. Which made for a nice change. She was more of a sister to me than anything else, a no-bullshit family member who would tell me everything I needed to hear when I needed to hear it.

  "But that doesn’t mean we can’t get stuff in line for next year," she continued keenly. "I actually think I have a few projects that would work pretty well for you, but you need to make sure you’re cleaned-up enough that they want to work with you."

  "Right, yeah, I get that," I nodded. "What kind of projects?”

  "The ones you’re looking for," she replied smoothly. "We can talk about that later. For now, we need to focus on what you have to do to get these people interested in working with you."

  "Well, I can start by not getting into any more brawls with the paparazzi," I suggested, and she grinned at me.

  "Yeah, that’s a start," she agreed. "And maybe if you could stop quite so visibly sleeping with everything that moves, that would be helpful, too."

  "What…seriously?”

  "Seriously," she nodded. "I know it’s going to be hard, but it’s the only way you’re going to read as wholesome to any of these directors."

  "And how long do I have to keep that up?” I wondered aloud, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice – and failing.

  "Let’s say until the end of the year," she suggested. "Not too long. Just a few weeks, to show that you could last a shoot without bringing in some drama that the set doesn’t need."

  "Fine," I leaned back in my seat with a sigh. "Is that it? Is there anything else I need to do?”

  "I actually have one more thing I think you should get involved in," she replied, pulling her phone out and tapping through something on the screen before her. She came across what she was looking for and took a sip of her wine before she continued.

  "Okay, so it’s a charity," she explained. "Small place. Nothing special, but that’s exactly what you should be getting involved with these days, you know?”

  "No, I don’t," I admitted. "But I trust that you do. What’s the charity for?”

  "It’s a place that’s supposed to make the transition out of foster care easier for kids who’ve spent a long time there," she explained. "Save them from a life of delinquency, that kind of thing. Could work well with your stuff, I think. The anger management especially. We can frame it as you trying to lead kids away from the same life that almost took you, right?”

  "Right," I replied, looking down into my wine. I could already feel my hackles rising. Not at the thought of working with that charity, but at the thought of those kids who had been through hell and were now acting out in the real world because they had no idea how to function in it. That was something I related to. More than I might have cared to admit. I papered over the cracks with cigars and girls and cash, but they were still there, gaping, reminding me of what had happened all those years ago.

  I did my best to avoid kids at all costs because seeing them reminded me of everything that had been taken from me when I had been young. The memories flitted through my mind like snapshots, my brain doing everything it could to keep them at arm’s length. I never lingered on them too deeply; instead, I locked them behind some door in a deep part of my psyche that I rarely approached. But if I was going to do this event, I would need to face up to them.

  I had been abused by one of my father’s friends when I was a kid. Even thinking those words hurt my head and made the room spin in a panic just like it had back then. I shut down these thoughts at once; I couldn’t risk having a freak out in here, not if I wanted to repair my reputation like Haven was currently in the process of trying to do. I closed the door to the memories quickly. I would address that one day, I really would, but today was certainly not that day.

  Being around kids, though, that was going to be tough. I had always avoided them, not just because of what they reminded me of, but because they underlined so vehemently what it was that I was lacking. I had never really settled down, never bothered with a wife or kids, and my time was running out. Plus, every woman I hooked up with seemed to guess at once that I was nothing more than a one-night-stand, hardly father material. Even if I had knocked someone up, I would have had the fear that I was going to pass down my fucked-up-ness to my child, inflict on them the mental torment that I had been through. I was broken, cracked down the middle, and no part of me wanted to rais
e a child knowing that it could see that in me.

  But what if I laid eyes on these kids and suddenly changed my mind? What if I suddenly wanted children after seeing these ones? What if I went out and had kids? What if then they grew up in the industry and wanted to become actors? How would I keep them safe? I knew the dark side of the industry better than anyone, and I wasn’t—

  "So, you’ll do it?" Haven asked keenly, mercifully pulling me back from the place in my head I had vanished to. I blinked at her. I had never told her what had happened – had never told anyone when I could avoid it – so she wasn’t to know what this had triggered in me. Still, I was on the defensive, holding back and sharper than I had to be.

  "I don’t know." I shook my head. "Is there no other way?”

  "This is perfect," she assured me. "And trust me, it’s the best thing we could get on this short of notice. If you want a chance of getting in for the shoots for next year, you need to take this. Trust me. There’s this cute little family comedy going into production next month, and you could be in it if you play your cards right."

  "Fine," I sighed heavily. I didn’t like the thought of it, but Haven knew what was good for me. If she thought this was the only way I was going to get my career on the track that I wanted it on, then I had to believe she was right.

  "Excellent," she replied, a big grin spreading out across her face, one I recognized as her victory smile. She glanced down at her phone and pressed a few buttons.

  "I’ve sent along the contact details for the woman you’re working with," she explained.

  "You can’t set it up for me?”

  "You should do it yourself," she replied firmly. "Trust me, that personal touch goes a hell of a long way toward making you into a real person."

  "Well, that’s what matters here, right?” I remarked, squinting down at the email she had sent me and feeling my heart sink. The thought of having to go all the way out there and put on a show to convince a bunch of people that I was a decent person was already boring the hell out of me. But not as much as the thought of spending the rest of my career stuck in stupid action roles.

  "Thanks for organizing this, Haven," I nodded to her.

  "That’s my job," she replied, lifting her glass to me.

  After our meeting was done with, I sent off a text to the woman who was acting as my contact for this charity – Kari Rodriguez. I wasn’t even sure what I was supposed to say to her. It had been such a long time since I had done any of my own organizing that I had forgotten how to draft a message that wasn’t just “hey, you up?” at two in the morning. But eventually, I managed to come up with something passable, something that would do the job, and I sent it off to her.

  I found myself waiting nervously for her reply back. She didn’t take long to respond, but it was still a strange feeling. I hadn’t held out on a text from someone in years, and the sensation was so old, it almost felt new again. When my phone buzzed, I sprang up from the couch to check it and found that she had suggested dinner to discuss what could be done with my involvement in their fundraiser. She was in Vegas, so I would have to fly down to meet her, but that wasn’t a problem. I would have a chance to stop in at that hotel again, as was my tradition every time I passed through the city, and check to see if my mystery woman had made her return yet.

  I replied with the name of a restaurant I liked and called up Haven to organize a flight for me while I got ready – I had to make a good impression, and I wasn’t going to be able to do that if I was trying to book a first-class ticket to Vegas all evening.

  "You make sure you don’t say anything stupid," Haven warned me in her usual inimitably blunt fashion.

  "You know I won’t," I protested.

  "I know you might," she corrected. "Which is exactly why I’m telling you not to."

  She booked the flight, and I prepared to head across the country to meet with this Kari woman about her charity. I had read a couple of articles on this Changing Places thing, all of them headed by photographs of a man around my age beaming a cheesy grin. I wondered why he wasn’t the one coming to meet me. Maybe they ran it together? Whoever they were, they had to be seriously passionate about kids if they were spending their lives working to protect them from the world at large.

  I felt a twinge in my chest as that thought crossed my mind. I knew I shouldn’t linger on it so long, but it hurt when I considered that nobody had done the same for me. Everyone had assumed that because I was growing up in a rich family in a fancy city in a gorgeous house with an incredible career ahead of me, I didn’t need protecting. But more than anything, I had needed someone to step in and see that things were wrong. Unfortunately for me, no one had been looking too closely, not when there was money to be made by throwing my father into a new set of infomercials or corralling my mother into featuring for a new perfume line.

  But I couldn’t let my past get in the way of my future anymore. Maybe I had taken on all of those actions roles because I knew I could insulate myself in them, hide my reality in the muscles and the violence and the murder. Those roles were big enough that I could vanish inside of them, and sometimes, I’d wanted nothing more than to leave myself behind entirely.

  And a trip to Vegas would be the perfect way to do that. I could get out of my head for a while, get out of the city, and get far enough away from my mother that she wouldn’t be able to burst in on me when I least expected it. Hell, even getting away from Haven would be a good thing for me. I just needed some time to breathe and gather myself. I wasn’t sure what for, but I knew something had to change.

  Haven sent me the details for the flight, and I high-tailed it over to the airport. I would normally fly private, but with this little notice, I didn’t have much choice – first-class would have to do. I managed to make it to the private lounge without attracting too much attention, and the worst I got beyond that was the flight attendant looking from my passport, to me, and back again, obviously trying to work out if this was some kind of joke. Luckily for me, her co-worker nudged her to hustle her along, and she took me to my seat and got me a drink so that I could settle in.

  I watched some crappy TV show while we were in the air, and for a few hours, I just lost myself. Surrounded by people who worked in business and likely had no time for my movies, it felt good to lounge in relative anonymity for a little while. When I landed, that would all be different, but for now, I would take it.

  The flight was uneventful, and I arrived on time, heading over to the hotel to drop off my stuff before I rolled to the restaurant I had booked us for dinner. I hadn’t been able to secure a room at the place I had met that woman before, but I wasn’t far from it, and I could easily slide down there for a drink later on. Nobody would have to know that I was there looking for the woman I hadn’t been able to shake after all this time. I hadn’t mentioned her to anyone, but the memory of her was still as fresh at the back of my mind as it had been the morning after. Sometimes, I swore I would catch a whiff of her perfume, a glimpse of her hair from behind, and I could swear that the entire world tipped sideways as I thought that I had found her once more.

  The restaurant I had picked for this meeting was Limon, a little French place that had a great reputation and an almost permanently booked-up reservations page. They always made room for me, though, and I liked to exploit that whenever I was trying to impress somebody. Seats at a sold-out restaurant might be cliché, but they worked nearly every time.

  I made my way up to Limon and grabbed my table ten minutes early, like I always was when I was trying to make a good impression. Haven would have been proud of me. She knew my late ass had trouble making it to set on time, let alone dinner. I casually checked my appearance in the gleaming glass windows at the far end of the restaurant – I was wearing a suit and a tie, nothing fancy. In fact, it was the same tie I had worn when I'd met her, and I hadn’t even noticed that until now. Perhaps I was trying to put out some silent mating signal, hoping she would pick up on my presence now that I was back in tow
n.

  But that was ridiculous. Whoever that woman had been, whatever had happened between us, it hadn’t been made to last beyond that night. I had barely spoken to her. I didn’t know anything about her, other than the way she’d looked in that dress and the way she’d felt when her body was next to mine. Was that enough? Was that enough when it was so intense? She must have felt it too. It was as though the vibrations of her presence were arcing through the air, reminders of her painted everywhere all over this city. But I still couldn’t find her.

  But there was no way she was here. Maybe she wasn’t even in this city anymore. That wouldn’t surprise me very much. A woman like that had to be in high demand across the country, men beating down her door for a date every chance they got. I wondered if she had that effect on every man she got close to. Or if it had been reserved and unleashed especially for me.

  The buzz in the restaurant was low, and I couldn’t make out any of the conversations around me – or maybe my mind was just too hyper-focused on the memory of that woman for me to allow anything else in instead. I watched the door, trying to distract myself from the nonsense rushing through my mind.

  And that’s when I saw her.

  She walked through the door and peered around the room, and I stared at her for a long moment. I had just conjured her up from my memory, right? There was no way that she could actually even remotely be standing in front of me right now. I blinked a couple of times, waiting for her to snap out of existence and be replaced by the woman I was actually supposed to be meeting tonight, but she didn’t. She stayed right there in front of me.