Fully Engaged Page 2

  When she left, Sandra checked her watch—ten minutes until showtime. She pulled out her cell and jabbed at it to redial Will.

  WILL FINALLY SAUNTERED in to the greenroom with just five minutes to spare before his segment started—and without Taney.

  Sandra’s first instinct, to plant a grateful kiss on him, was swiftly superseded by a wave of anger. “Where the heck have you been?”

  As he headed for the coffeepot, he slanted her the lazy smile that charmed female fans, but which Sandra always felt indicated a lack of backbone. “Keep your hair on, Sandy. I’m here now.”

  Uh-oh. No one called her Sandy. No one. Not if they valued their health. Not unless they were out of their senses. Or unless they were…

  Sandra registered Will’s unnatural rigidity, the faint trembling of his hand as he poured a cup of coffee. The awful truth hit her. “You’re drunk!”

  “I am not.” Will managed to sound outraged, even as he abandoned the coffee and sank onto the couch with exaggerated care. “I was drunk last night,” he admitted. “Okay, maybe early this morning. But my only problem now is a slight headache.”

  Sandra didn’t waste time asking how he could have been so stupid. Will Branch was immature and spoiled—that was a given. Later, she would tear him apart and donate his carcass to the North Carolina Zoo. Right now, she had four minutes to decide what to do with him.

  She paced in front of the couch, pinching the bridge of her nose to aid clarity of thought. “Couldn’t you have walked under a bus? Internal injuries would be much easier to explain.”

  “That’s not nice.” He switched to his hurt, puppy-dog look. Sandra was unmoved. Even if Will wasn’t several years younger than she was, she wouldn’t be interested in him. You could tell just by looking at him that he was irresponsible.

  Funny how that showed in a man’s face, just the way Taney’s unquestionable strength of character—which, admittedly, she more often called pigheadedness—showed in his.

  “Plus, you’d get a lot of sympathetic media coverage if you were in the hospital,” she said. “Whereas now, you won’t get any.”

  It took a second for her words to sink in. Then Will jumped to his feet, wincing with the suddenness of the movement. “You can’t take me off the show,” he protested. “Sandra, I’m not drunk, I swear. I’m sorry I went out last night, it was a dumb thing to do. A pal of Bart’s was having a party—”

  She might have known his twin had something to do with it, Sandra fumed, as he rambled through his explanation.

  “I won’t let you down,” Will beseeched her. “I know how hard you’ve worked to get this interview set up and I’m not going to blow it.”

  At least someone appreciated her efforts. Will’s face was more serious than she’d seen before. No trace of that juvenile arrogance, just the intent to do his best.

  Could she let him go on the show?

  For a second, Sandra wished Taney was here—he had a way of cutting to the heart of the matter that let him make quick but well-considered decisions.

  Then she remembered she didn’t usually agree with those decisions.

  Taney would tell her there was no way his driver would go on air if he wasn’t a hundred percent sober.

  Taney didn’t have a business that couldn’t pay its bills. He didn’t have the family responsibilities that weighed so heavily on Sandra they threatened to drive her into the ground.

  “Please, Sandra,” Will said, quietly, soberly.

  She juggled her options. If Will had been falling-down, spit-in-your-eye drunk, she’d have pulled him off the show that instant. No matter that the consequences would have been horrendous—her hard-won reputation for reliability would be lost, she would never again get a client on to this or any other big TV show and Taney would probably fire her for not managing her client better.

  She eyed Will. He was on that cusp of drunkenness where you had to look pretty hard to see it, and he was heading toward sobriety. If he hadn’t called her Sandy, she realized, she wouldn’t have noticed his condition. She’d have put his shaking hands down to nerves, and his slow gait likely wouldn’t have registered.

  “I promise you, the last drink I had was about three this morning.”

  No wonder he looked tired. But tired wasn’t the same as drunk. A glance at her watch gave an unpleasant reminder of how little time they had. Two minutes. Tick-tick.

  She grabbed the coffee he’d poured, shoveled sugar into it, then rammed the cup into his hands. “Drink this.” And when he just stood there, looking at it, she ordered, “Now!”

  He chugged it, made a face at the sweetness, but kept drinking.

  Ideally, Sandra should have weighed the risks of putting Will on the show without considering the impact on her own future. But objectivity was impossible.

  One minute to go.

  Will could sometimes be a little raucous, but when he’d had a couple of drinks he tended to mellow out—and get funnier, more charming. Those qualities would serve him well in his interview with Olivia.

  “Whaddya say, Sandra, do I go on?” Will shoved a hand through the curly blond hair that drove girls crazy.

  “You’re eye candy,” Sandra said with a sudden sense of revelation.

  He blinked. “Uh, sure.”

  “This is a breakfast show, a chat show, not a hard-hitting news show.”

  “That’s right,” he encouraged her.

  She couldn’t bear to think of her reputation slipping away, and all that would follow down the track.

  Half a minute.

  On days like this Sandra wanted to be a little girl again, curled up on her mama’s lap. But she was too big to go on anyone’s lap, and the buck stopped with her for everything, including her parents.

  The door opened. The production assistant again. “I heard you were here,” she cooed at Will, eyelashes fluttering. “We’re in the commercial break right before your segment. I need to take you out there now, there’s a makeup girl waiting—she’ll do what she can.”

  Will shot a pleading glance at Sandra.

  She let out a breath. “You’re on.”

  “Yes!” He punched the air, and this time the movement didn’t seem to affect his headache. See, he was better already.

  “Thanks, Sandra.” He hurried out behind the assistant, his walk steady, his eyes on the woman’s bottom in a way that suggested he was his normal self.

  Confidence swelled inside Sandra, displacing the anxiety. Anxiety, she now realized, brought on by Gideon Taney’s implicit disapproval and his refusal to reconsider the budget. She’d let him rob her of her assurance.

  Thank goodness she’d found it again in time to make her decision—undoubtedly different from the one Taney would have made, but she was happy with it.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  CHAPTER TWO

  SANDRA SLIPPED into a seat at the back of the studio just as Olivia Winton announced that the show’s next guest was “rising NASCAR star Will Branch”—a phrase taken directly from the briefing materials Sandra had supplied, rather than based on Will’s performance on the track.

  The studio audience—ninety-five percent female, as Sandra had expected—hollered and whooped as Will walked on stage. She congratulated herself on reading the situation correctly: these women would be more interested in his hot body than anything he said. Sandra cast a dispassionate eye over Will. None of last night’s excesses showed in his graceful bearing, his warm smile and his firm clasp of Olivia’s hand, which was followed by a kiss—apparently spontaneous, but in fact coached by Sandra—on the host’s cheek. The audience cheered the kiss.

  Sandra let her shoulders sag. It’s going to be fine.

  “Our boy’s quite a showman.” The words, spoken softly in her ear, made her jump. She didn’t need to look around to identify the speaker whose warm breath sent a shiver across her neck.

  “You think?” she said nervously. Taney was the only other person observant enough to notice Will’s ineb
riation. She pulled herself together, before her jitters made him suspicious. “This audience must be right in Her Fitness’s target market. They love him.”

  Will bowed to the still-applauding crowd. Okay, that was a little over-the-top, but no one objected, and a few wolf whistles rose above the noise of the clapping.

  Sandra chanced a sidelong glance at Taney, saw him nod in agreement.

  “Her Fitness did have doubts as to whether a ‘second-rate,’ as they put it, driver like Will would have sufficient mass market appeal,” he admitted.

  When she didn’t say anything, he nudged her arm. “Aren’t you going to jump on me with a hefty new contract to sign?”

  The superserious Gideon Taney was teasing her—she chalked it up to one more moment of weirdness in this crazy day. He was right, that was exactly what she should do. But she’d lost the stomach for a fight. All she wanted was for this interview to be over. She forced a weak smile at Taney.

  On stage, Will looked calm and confident—and sober—as he settled on the studio’s couch.

  “Will Branch, welcome to the show. You’ve got to be the best-looking guest we’ve had in a long time—and I’m including those romance novel cover models,” Olivia said generously.

  Will smiled at her, his dimples deepening. Somewhere in the audience, Sandra heard a woman sigh. “Thanks, Olivia, you’re looking great yourself.” He leaned forward and picked up the glass of water on the table in front of him. Dehydrated, Sandra thought.

  Something about Taney—an increased alertness?—made her turn to him. His eyes were on Will. He said, “Something’s up.”

  What? What was up? Sandra’s head swiveled back toward the stage. What had Taney seen?

  “He’s doing okay,” she said, reassuring herself as much as him.

  Olivia asked Will a couple of easy questions about the life of a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver. He handled them perfectly.

  “Will, you’ve had more headlines than you wanted recently, and they haven’t been about your racing,” Olivia said, her voice a blend of sympathy and curiosity.

  “She’s going to ask about Hilton,” Taney hissed.

  A couple of months earlier, Hilton Branch, Will’s father, had absconded with millions of dollars from the bank of which he was president. He was still at large, and the case was garnering a ton of media attention.

  The bank had been Will’s and Bart’s primary sponsor. The management’s natural reaction to the theft—pulling the plug on both drivers—and the media storm it had created were the cause of Sandra’s current woes.

  “The producer said they couldn’t ignore it,” Sandra murmured. “But they’ve agreed to tackle it sympathetically and get the topic out of the way early.”

  It had been a fair compromise—Olivia Winton would look stupid if she ignored that Will’s father was America’s most-wanted white-collar criminal. The approach they’d agreed upon would sustain her credibility and at the same time emphasize Will’s admirable loyalty to his family. And, hopefully, engage the audience’s sympathies.

  In an aside to the audience, Olivia gave a brief summary of Hilton Branch’s alleged crime. “What are your feelings about what your father did?” she asked Will.

  This was where Will would say he’d hoped his father was innocent, but right now it didn’t look that way. That although he was angry, he loved his dad and wanted to hear the truth directly from him. Will took a swallow from the glass of water he held.

  In his left hand.

  In a burst of clarity, the morning’s events rewound in Sandra’s head, superfast, then coalesced to form an entirely different picture.

  She cursed, a word she’d never said before in her life. One that would have been covered by a loud bleep if she’d been up on stage.

  “Are you okay?” Taney’s fingers circled her wrist and clamped tight. He’d never touched her before, beyond a handshake. She longed, for the briefest moment, to lean in to him.

  “Sandra, what’s the matter?”

  Her mouth moved, but her brain was still working through the implications of her discovery, and no words came out. She tried again, remembered to keep it to a whisper. “That’s not Will up there. It’s Bart.”

  In the absence of an immediate answer from Will, Olivia was expanding on her question. Words like fraud and shame floated off the stage.

  Taney shook Sandra’s wrist. “Are you sure?”

  “Bart’s left-handed, Will’s right.”

  He looked up at the stage, registered the water glass. “Why the—No, we’ll figure that out later. Just tell me, do we have a problem?”

  Ha ha ha! Manic laughter rose in Sandra’s head. Ten out of ten to Taney for recognizing her incipient hysteria. He tugged her out of her seat and hurried her back to the greenroom, where he pushed her none too gently onto the couch.

  “Explain,” he ordered.

  On the TV above them, Olivia had run out of things to say, and was waiting for Will to speak, concerned sympathy on her face. Sandra could feel Bart’s tension from here. How could she have been so stupid as to allow him to go on stage? She swallowed. “Will—Bart—is drunk.”

  Taney gaped. Then his jaw set in a firm line and he said grimly, “You knew he was drunk and you let him go out there?”

  “Inebriated.” She regretted her stark first choice of words. “Tipsy, really.”

  On screen, Bart answered the question. He followed the script Sandra had agreed to with Will, more or less, and he was still smiling. But there was an edge to it. It was one thing for the Branches to condemn their father within the family—talking about it on TV was another matter altogether. Bart hadn’t had time to prepare mentally for public disclosure.

  Sandra drew a deep breath. “We do have a problem,” she confessed. “When Will gets drunk, he gets funnier.” The memory of last year’s client Christmas party played vividly in her head. “When Bart gets drunk, he gets…louder.”

  Taney’s dark eyebrows knit together.

  “More aggressive,” Sandra said miserably, remembering how she’d stepped in to break up a brawl and almost been decked before Bart realized who she was.

  On the TV screen, Olivia said, “Did you know your father was stealing from the bank?”

  Will was supposed to deny all knowledge, then express regret for anyone who’d been hurt by the missing money, whether it was his dad’s fault or not. Because, to the rest of the world, his father should be innocent until proven guilty.

  Bart’s face darkened.

  “Did your mother know?” Olivia asked.

  “Uh-oh,” Sandra murmured.

  “Leave my mother out of this,” Bart said loudly. “Since this happened, the media have been a pack of vultures who can’t wait to feed on my family’s misery. You’re a bunch of—” A series of bleeps overrode his words, all except the last one, which happened to be morons. The camera panned to the shocked studio audience.

  Olivia’s eyebrows shot up. She looked furious, understandably, given Bart’s comment was clearly intended to include her. “Has your father been in touch with you or your family?”

  “How can he, when our phones are probably tapped?” Bart demanded rudely.

  The camera zoomed in on Olivia, her face now a tight mask. “Your father has brought shame on your family and damaged your racing career—”

  She was going beyond the questions Sandra had agreed to with the producer, and who could blame her?

  “Hey!” Bart leapt to his feet. “No one got hurt except a bunch of fat-cat bankers caught out with egg on their faces.” He was yelling now. “We have enough trouble with the cops hounding us. I don’t need some overweight bimbo TV host—” the audience gasped, as Olivia Winton’s weight was a notoriously sensitive subject “—sticking her big nose into my family’s problems.”

  Olivia straightened her spine and fixed Bart with an icily regal glare that reminded everyone she was the queen of talk. “Given the Branch family is so keen on its privacy, the recent intimate revelations b
y Hilton Branch’s longtime mistress must have been somewhat…irritating?”

  Sandra whimpered. Taney groaned.

  From what should have been rock-bottom, the interview went downhill fast. Bart and Olivia launched into a shouting match that enthralled the audience and would undoubtedly make the network news tonight. It lasted until Bart stormed offstage. The audience gave Olivia a standing ovation for facing down a guest who was such a jerk.

  In the greenroom, Sandra said, “Taney, I’m sorry—”

  His scowl slammed into her apology, knocking the wind out of it.

  “Stay right where you are,” he snapped.

  THE PLAN HAD BEEN for drinks and snacks to be served in the greenroom after the show, so Will and Olivia could chat less formally.

  Instead, Olivia disappeared to wherever celebrity show hosts went when they were too mad to speak. Taney went out to find Bart and hauled him into the room.

  “You idiot.” He didn’t hold back, delivering an articulate assessment of Bart’s personality as he shoved him down onto the couch next to Sandra. Sandra got up—if she stayed this close, she’d slug him.

  Bart was still breathing heavily, his face red. “Did you hear what that witch was saying about my family?”

  “Get over it,” Sandra snapped. “Where is Will?”

  Bart flinched at the realization he’d been found out. “He’s sick.”

  “Hung over?” Taney asked.

  Bart shook his head. “He came with me to the party last night, but he didn’t drink. He didn’t want to risk it ahead of the show. But he woke up this morning with the worst case of food poisoning you ever saw. I left him on the can and I’ll bet he’s still there.”

  Sandra pushed aside the unpleasant image. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Will was desperate not to miss out on the show—he knows he’ll never get a chance like this again. I said I’d come instead.” It wasn’t the first time the twins had pulled a switcheroo—they were both practical jokers. “It’s never got us into trouble before,” Bart said defensively.

  “I ought to take you two apart and sell you as shark bait,” Taney snarled. It was so close to Sandra’s earlier intention to turn Will into zoo-food that she started.