My (Mostly) Secret Baby - Penelope Bloom Page 0,73

tried and failed to hide from my staff. Ironically, the information I’d expected to undermine their respect for me had seemed to humanize me in some ways. The usual tension and thickness of atmosphere at Rose Athletic was noticeably diminished, and I couldn’t say I minded.

“We’ll be down forty percent next quarter. Tia Klein and Trevor Castle leaving in the same week shook confidence,” Emma explained. She was one of my long-time admins—a woman in her sixties with a no bullshit attitude.

Chelsea set down the pad she’d been jotting notes on. “The problem isn’t the money from Tia and Trevor’s contracts, exactly. People’s confidence is shaken in Rose.”

Emma shrugged. “Okay. But what does that do for us? How do we use that?”

Chelsea chewed the tip of her pen. “Well, it’s a branding issue. Rose was like the elite force in athletic representation. We have the best of the best with Chris Rose, and that spoke for itself. If you wanted to be like Chris Rose, you joined Rose. But when we brought attention with Tia and Trevor, we opened ourselves up to this. Now it looks like Chris is just Damon’s brother, which undermines trust in our abilities.”

“Okay,” Emma said. “So, we do what, though?”

“Change the brand,” Chelsea said. She shot me a look. I didn’t understand what she seemed to be silently asking me permission for at first. She scribbled something on her pad, then held it up so only I could see.

Make your real dream public?

I sat back in my chair, frowning. I’d obviously opened up to Chelsea about what really drove me. I’d even gone into quite a bit of detail with her. She knew how badly I wanted to help young athletes avoid getting taken advantage of. But the idea of showing the world that felt terrifying. It seemed like turning my back to a crowd of people with knives in their hands.

But when I saw the earnest hope in Chelsea’s eyes, I wanted to trust her. I nodded my head.

She smiled at me, then squeezed my leg under the table in a silent “thank you.”

For the next ten minutes, she ran the room through a plan so detailed I was almost positive she hadn’t thought about it on the spot. Basically, she wanted to take my secret charity cases I did on the side and turn them into the main purpose of Rose Athletic. Take the teams we used to spot talent and set up elaborate events to lure in new clients and use them to find athletes who needed our help.

The cornerstone of her plan was to add a branch of our business designed to be a school for upcoming athletes. We’d have a training program designed to teach them what to look for and how to avoid falling into the same traps so many athletes did. Financial training, tax courses, and everything else they’d need.

When she was finished, the room was silent for several long seconds.

“I love it,” I said, breaking the quiet.

An explosion of voices followed as my staff worked out the details and ran over her ideas. Within an hour, we’d settled on something close to a final plan, and I couldn’t have been more fucking proud of Chelsea.

38

Chelsea

Luna and I met Damon for lunch a couple weeks after we initiated the plan to transform Rose Athletic. The weather was cool and sunny, so we took a seat outside on the patio by the street. Luna had on her heart shaped sunglasses and a shirt that read: “I’d care if I could.”

She sipped her smoothie while we waited for Damon to arrive.

“What’s daddy’s favorite color?” She asked.

“Probably black,” I said.

Luna frowned. “No. I think Daddy likes orange.”

“Not many people pick orange as a favorite color.”

“Orange is the tastiest color.”

I laughed. “If you could only eat one color for the rest of your life, it’d really be orange? You wouldn’t be able to eat strawberries or bananas. You love those.”

Luna pursed her lips. “French fries are orange. Halloween donuts are orange. Chicken nuggets…” She scrunched her little face up as she tried to think of more examples.

“You might actually have a point. Maybe orange would be the way to go.”

Damon surprised me from behind with a tight hug. He kissed my neck, then stole a kiss on my lips too that wasn’t entirely appropriate for public places.

“You kiss like people in movies,” Luna noted.

Damon took a chair beside us. “Because people in movies kiss the best.”

“What’s your favorite color, Daddy?”

“Orange,” Damon said