it to others. If his father refuses to work with any company who’s gotten into it with his son about this kind of behavior, then do we really want to be seen as one still working with them?”
“What are you saying?” Jefferson frowned. “Junior is a loose cannon, but I’ve been working with Fayette for a long time. I’m sure I can get him back to the table.”
“If that table is filled with only people who are willing to look past his son’s indiscretions, is it a table you want to sit at?”
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” he reasoned, but I’d seen the way his brow had furrowed. He was worried about how this was all going to play out. Rightfully so, if we got Fayette back and René got exposed for the creep he was in the tabloids at some point.
Frustration gripped my gut, but before I could say anything, Leah started sneezing like crazy. She turned away from the people around her, rushing to the far side of the room with a hand held protectively up to her neck.
What the…
Jefferson’s attention had been diverted to a man who’d come up to talk to him and Katie had walked over to the bar. Thankfully, the people who had been around Leah had dispersed and no one was staring at her where she continued to sneeze even as I went to her.
“Are you okay?” I asked, my hand landing on her lower back.
She nodded, but her shoulders were shaking, and for one terrifying moment, I thought she was crying. My heart crushed in on itself and panic swept over me until she looked up. Her eyelids were red and puffy. There were tears in them, but when I looked closer, I realized that they seemed to have come from laughter. Confusion clouded my mind almost instantly, until I caught sight of a rash spreading on her neck.
Sneezing. Rash. Perfume. Oh. Fuck.
“Leah, are you allergic to the perfume?” I asked urgently, my voice barely above a whisper.
More laughter burst out of her as she started nodding furiously, covering her face in the hand that wasn’t still trying to hide her neck.
“Yeah,” she managed to get out between giggles. “I’m pretty sure I am.”
For a minute, all I could do was stare at her as she kept laughing between fits of sneezing, shaking her head as she kept her back to the party. As the shock, panic, and confusion drained out of me, the irony of the situation dawned.
The next thing I knew, I was laughing right along with her. Holy shit. This is going to be one hell of an interesting campaign.
Chapter 33
LEAH
It occurred to me how bizarre all of this was while I was practically running away from the crowd of adoring people who had gathered around me. Soon after Dane had sprayed the perfume on me, I’d started to feel the tell-tale itch creeping along my skin.
I’d held out for as long as I could, posing for pictures and making small talk until it had all become too much. Every woman in the room had been spritzed with the perfume by that point and the men had been close enough that even they smelled like it.
When one lady who seemed to have been moving in a cloud of the stuff had leaned in to take a picture with me, I’d started sneezing and I hadn’t been able to stop. The spritzes on me hadn’t been that bad except for the itch, but it seemed like having more perfume than air to breathe had gone and done it.
The more the absurdity of it all sank in, the stronger the urge to laugh about it had become. I’d made it all the way to a semi-private spot at the far end of the room before the laughter had started bubbling out of me.
Here I was, parading around in a glamorous gown between millionaires and billionaires on the other side of the world, pretending to be someone I wasn’t. All for a marketing campaign for a brand of perfume that I now knew I was allergic to.
All along, I’d known the possibility existed, but I’d hoped that it wouldn’t go this way. The perfumes that I wasn’t allergic to were few and far between, but I’d really hoped that Beautiful Moments would turn out to be one of them.
As it was, however, I was shit out of luck on that front. A potentially beautiful moment for the campaign had become one