Seven Nights of Sin - Lacey Alexander [63]
Padding naked to the table, she picked up the phone, flipped it open, and retrieved the message.
Then she heard Jenkins’ voice. “Just checking in with you, Brenna. Damon mentioned in e-mail that you’re learning fast and have a real ear for music, so good job. Especially since things aren’t looking promising with Claire. I wouldn’t be surprised if she files suit very soon, and if that happens, you know what it means—Damon’s out and you’re in.”
Oh hell.
She flipped the phone shut, hoping Damon was asleep.
No such luck. “Anything important?”
“No.”
“Then why do you look upset?”
She glanced over to find his gorgeous brown eyes now open and studying her with clear concern.
“It was Kelly,” she fudged. “She’s having man trouble, that’s all.”
“Ah,” he said, tipping his head back lightly into the pillow, then letting his eyes close again. “Turn out the lights and come to bed. I want to wrap around you.”
So now she’d lied to him. Up to this moment, it had only been deceit, keeping something from him that affected him greatly, and that had been awful enough. But now she had pointedly, purposefully, lied to keep her dirty little secret.
And like she’d told Kelly when all this had started, she hated lying.
She did her best to swallow back the stinging guilt as she flipped off the bedside lamp and crawled beneath the covers with her lover—the man she was misleading in order to steal his job.
THE FIFTH NIGHT
“Pleasure is the bait of sin.”
—Plato
One
The next day, Damon informed Brenna that he needed to make a few phone calls to some of the acts he managed at Blue Night, and he was going to put them on speaker phone so she could hear how he dealt with “the talent.”
Thus she listened as he assuaged the fears of an alternative band whose first CD wasn’t getting as much attention as they’d hoped. And as he explained to an R&B singer why the release of his next long-awaited CD was being pushed back another two months. And as Blue Night’s biggest star, British rocker Malcolm Barstow, bitched Damon out over everything from song selection on his upcoming CD to not liking the photographer who’d done the cover shoot.
Damon dealt with each person differently, she noticed, playing into his or her personality and particular issues, until each seemed adequately appeased—although with Barstow, “appeased” was probably too optimistic a term.
After pushing the disconnect button the final time, he looked up from the sofa where he lounged in his usual jeans and tee to face Brenna, who rested on a satin-upholstered chaise. “There you have it,” he said. “The dark side of A&R. Think you can handle it?”
Not on my best day, she was tempted to say.
She knew how to deal with Jenkins when he was overworked and stressed out. And she knew that when Kelly was having a rotten day, the best thing to do was just agree with everything she said and it would all work out in the end. She knew how to fix copy machines and finesse Microsoft Word and efficiently run a small office with one hand tied behind her back. Yet despite Jenkins’ and Damon’s belief in her, she had no idea how to take care of people who probably had good reasons to be upset about problems that likely couldn’t be solved.
And sure, she’d talked to most of these people on the phone before herself, but only to patch them through to Jenkins or assure them their check was in the mail—and this was different. Old Brenna was a hand-holder, but not to angry, hysterical rock stars.
“I’ll admit I’m intimidated by everything I just heard,” she replied, trying not to sound as freaked out as she was.
“And I’ll admit that I usually don’t have to make three phone calls like that in a row. But being on the road allows things to stack up a little, and part of why they were all so mad is because I didn’t get back to them five minutes after they called. Artists are temperamental