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“Theyfiredyou?” Cole couldn’t wrap his head around it.
“Yup. As Linda just helpfully explained, with a job like this one, there’s no room for error. None at all. I’d guess that when I check my email, Bernard will have dropped me as a mentee, too, and he won’t vouch for me moving forward. So that’s done.”
Her voice was so flat, Cole couldn’t tell how she felt. It was probably the same mess of feelings he was having, but she would probably organize them into a spreadsheet later.
She pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “I—I messed up. I knew it, I knew I shouldn’t get involved with someone I’d worked with, and I did it anyway.”
“You did it because—”We’re in love.
Suddenly, Cole realized that this—they—had been worth it. Even if his career and reputation were spoiled, being with Maggie would have been worth it.
But to her, maybe it didn’t feel like that.
“Because I messed up,” she finished for him.
Maggie turned and started down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Away from him.
Cole rolled up and followed her. He knew she was ... mad? Crushed? Sad? Fucking up again made him want to change out of his skin. But somehow, he had to get her to see that there were things they could at least try to do.
“Please, join this call with my team. Brett will be able to do ... something.” It might not make it go away, but he would be able to issue a comment at the very least. “You need to hear what he has to say. I’m certain Tasha will want to make a statement, and then you have to tell me how you want me, us, to weigh in.” Cole understood why they’d tried to keep things under wraps, but the horses were so far out of thebarn, there was no use talking about how they should’ve locked the door.
Maggie pulled open the guest room door—the freaking guest room door, not the door totheirbedroom—and marched inside. “Not right now. I need to be alone.” She shut the door in his face.
Cole wanted to fall against it. He wanted to wrench it open. He wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her until they remembered what mattered—but the truth was,thismattered. Her reputation mattered. His career mattered. No amount of kisses, not even his and Maggie’s kisses, could make that go away.
But a kick-ass PR team could make a difference.
Cole texted Brett.Read it. What’s the plan?
Five minutes later, he was on a Zoom call with Brett, Drew, and Quinn.
“I take it that we’re all having an exciting day,” Brett said. “Tell me what we’re dealing with here, Cole. Is any of this at all true?”
Cole ran his hands through his hair. “The only part that’s even close to real is that I am involved with Maggie Niven, but nothing happened until after principal photography wrapped. Not a damn thing. And I haveneverbeen involved with Tasha, who, by the way, was in the Azores with someone else.” And not brokenhearted at all. “The optics aren’t great, I know, but this isn’t an abuse of power, not from me and definitely not from Maggie. I don’t know if this is Vincent, trying to hit back at—”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, Cole,” Drew said. “We don’t know where the story came from.”
“I just—I mean, I don’t get it. The buzz aboutWaverleyhas been so good. If I was such an ass on set, how do you square that? And everyone’s been saying that they felt so comfortable filming the love scenes. If Maggie was so unprofessional, how could that be? None of it makes any sense.”
“The most important thing is to stay calm.” This had always been one of Drew’s key rules.Mismanaged response causes more than half of all PR problems.
Cole had always wondered how he had figured that out. Like, how did you crunch those numbers?
But since Cole had signed with Drew, he had always followed that advice to the letter. He let Brett do most of his talking to the press for him. They hashed out the language for releases, and they weren’t in a rush to talk until they knew what they wanted to say.
For years, that had served Cole. He had to believe it would work this time too. “I know. And I really appreciate having you all on my team.”
He’d been annoyed with Drew when he’d tried to kill Cole’s quotes in Libby’s story, but now that they were facing a potential nightmare that could derail everything, there was nothing but upside to having Drew in his corner. The guy was a machine.
“We know you are. I have a call in to the reporter,” Brett said. “In fact, I have four calls in. I’m going to figure out where this bullshit came from, and—”
“I’m less worried about the source than countering it,” Drew said, a bit sharply. “We need to get Zoya on record. Tasha might not want to give quotes to the press because she’s at the center of Libby Hansen’s story about Vincent, but maybe the rest of the cast could speak up.”
“And we gotta address Maggie too,” Cole said. “We have to clear her name.”
“That’s not a priority for me,” Drew said.
“Well, it is for me. There’s no rehabbing my reputation without addressing hers. We’re a package deal.”
