Faked - Karla Sorensen Page 0,3

that sprang into my head. Slapping the words away one by one until my brain was silent of objections.

"I'll do it."

Chapter Two

Bauer

"You got fired, Bauer. You won't be able to talk them out of it."

My trainer, Scotty, knew me well enough that saying that kind of shit to me would only make me that much more determined to do it. Like he'd waved a red flag in front of a snorting bull.

"Listen, I had a great relationship with Burton before the ... situation."

"The situation?" he hooted. "You’re talking about when you got caught on camera, drunk—"

"I was not drunk," I interrupted. "I'd had three beers and was having a good time with my friends, but I was not drunk."

"Whatever. You got caught on camera cussing out Burton's favorite athlete; the gold medalist snowboarder who's been with them forever, and everyone loves and adores." He was quiet, probably waiting for me to argue. He'd known me since I was a punk-ass seventeen-year-old, and I pretty much always had an argument. But because it was Scotty, I stayed quiet. "And you are not a gold medalist who everyone loves and adores. You are a few good competitions away from qualifying for the Olympic team, but that doesn't mean shit in the grand scheme of things."

I winced. None of that was wrong.

But, in my defense, the other guy had been drunk, and the camera didn't catch the part where he was standing behind my friend Cassidy making some pretty rude-ass gestures about her figure. So who looks like the asshole on Twitter?

Me.

My main sponsor, the one making it possible for me to keep competing, dumped my ass before I could so much as blink.

They apologized, of course. Told me it had been great working with me for the past couple of years. Just ... not enough.

Not enough to risk the brand, where the rest of the sponsored athletes have a harmonious working relationship.

The exact wording of the voicemail on my phone was burned into my brain. So me being me, I'd decided to hop my ass into the car and head down to their offices in Seattle to try to convince them to keep me around.

Because if they didn't, my part-time hours bartending would not cut it as income.

That should've told Scotty how serious I was about this because I hated coming back to Seattle.

The drive from Vancouver down to the Emerald City was as familiar as the back of my hand, which is why I hated making it. The kind of drives that I loved making were the ones where I was a hairpin curve away from the next mountain vista. Not knowing what might happen next was what made it exciting, made my blood pump and my brain hum with bottled-up energy.

That was not the case when I drove from my home base by Whistler and Blackcomb Mountains back down to where my dad and Adele lived with my half-brother Finn. No matter what the circumstances were, I avoided going home like the plague.

"You gonna go home while you're there?"

I snorted. "Gotta stay somewhere."

"Did you warn them?" he asked dryly.

"Nope." There was a certain level of glee in my voice that had Scotty chuckling despite himself. "Can't wait to see Adele's face when she warns me for the thousandth time not to corrupt her angel while I'm home."

"She doesn't do that anymore," Scotty said. "Quit making shit up."

He was right, but I'd heard my stepmom say something along those lines so many times over the years that it felt like she still said it.

Finn, don't listen to a word he tells you, look at where his choices have gotten him.

Sometimes, I heard it on a loop in my head even though it was close to seven years since she'd said it. She'd leaned down and said that to my just turned fourteen-year-old half-brother as I finished packing my bags to move out. My parting piece of advice had been not to do every single damn thing that they told him to do because otherwise, he'd end up miserable.

"She sure as hell thinks it, though," I pointed out. "The second my years of teen attitude ended with me in handcuffs, she wrote me off for good."

Scotty harrumphed on the other end of the phone. "Yeah, well ... without those cuffs, you never would have ended up with me, so consider yourself lucky."

I grinned. "I do, old man."

"You still haven't thanked me for not pressing charges, you ungrateful little shit."

Destruction of private property