Series: Fever Falls Series by Riley Hart
Total pages in book: 101
Estimated words: 96922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96922 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 485(@200wpm)___ 388(@250wpm)___ 323(@300wpm)
Keegan and Nance didn’t seem to pick up on the insinuation, and the conversation naturally shifted away from their grief over losing Crawford, something I could tell by their mention of him, still weighed on them a great deal. Changing the more macabre subject, Jace, Nance, and Keegan caught up with one another about their days.
Even in the short amount of time I’d spent around Jace, it was evident he really was this good ol’ boy he presented to the world…the sort who couldn’t be so easily persuaded by the spotlight and big paydays. I’d seen this before, actors or models or even average Joes trying to put on an act as though it was too much for them, in hopes of maybe getting some more money out of a deal. But in all my years in PR, I’d never encountered a Jace Kruse.
Knowing the consequences of this sort of endorsement deal I’d come to him with made me almost feel bad for presenting him with the opportunity.
Did he really need the toxicity that came along with all that? He’d experienced the fun part of having his fifteen minutes…or really, fifteen seconds. If he walked away, he could still keep his life intact without dealing with any of the negative bullshit—the rumors and speculation, the social-media drama, the onslaught of attacks that naturally follow stardom.
I tried to shake the uneasy feeling. What was I thinking? If he said yes to working with Hacksmore, it was his decision.
And if a little persuasion was all it was going to take to keep this account from Freyda Inc., I could manage that.
6
Jace
“That wasn’t what I was expecting,” Dax said as we headed onto the back porch.
He had a beer Nance had offered him, and I held on to my glass of sweet tea from dinner.
We’d finished eating about thirty minutes earlier, Dax falling effortlessly into the conversation with Nance and Keegan as they discussed the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House, which apparently, they were all fans of. I sat back and enjoyed their speculation about some of the plot twists, or what Nance kept referring to—to Keegan’s chagrin—as plot holes.
“What were you expecting?” I asked as I walked over to the porch. It was dark out, leaving the back and the woods behind the house illuminated by the porch light I’d flipped on before we stepped out.
Dax moseyed over to me. “More of a business meeting,” he replied as he sat. “I thought Nance was going to be a godfather-esque figure who would need to know all the details of the deal we were discussing.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t what I meant. I just wanted her to get a read on you. And she liked you.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She doesn’t need to tell me these things. We know each other well enough that I can pick up on it. If she didn’t like you, she would have kept looking at me real distinctly. That’s how we do it—give each other signals when dealing with someone particularly awful.”
“Glad to know she didn’t do that with me,” Dax said with a laugh.
“Not yet, at least, so we’re good on that front, and you seem like an honest guy, Dax.”
“Let’s get something straight, Jace. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Honest definitely isn’t a word I’d use to describe myself.”
“Something you want to share?” The way his gaze shifted around the yard, I figured something was weighing on his mind.
“I don’t mean that I’m some bastard who goes around lying all the time, but while we were having dinner, I was thinking, here I am, trying to convince this pretty real, cool guy to enter a world of greed and corruption, a world that thrusts people into the spotlight only to knock them down and see them get consumed by darkness.” He took a sip of his beer.
“You think I’m cool?”
I thought he was going to spit out his beer as he chuckled at that.
I added, “I do have to say…I am curious. If you think that way about your industry, what the hell are you doing—”
“—in a job that’s built around it? Well, long story short, it’s what I know. My mother always told me you needed to play to your strengths, and I do just that. Haven’t done too bad for myself for being a high school dropout.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Clearly don’t need a degree to be a successful hottie like yourself.”
He chuckled. “It’s also not too bad since I’m not actually dealing with the consequences in this line of work, so it’s easier to manage from this side. I just see what it does to other people. It leaves them in financial, physical, or emotional ruin. People—even good people—wind up in some bad situations. It’s a lot of pressure, and sometimes they’re looking to numb the pain. They’re prey to all kinds of addictions, and they wind up in rehab, passing their kid along to strangers until they basically have to grow up on their own.”