pool party. Someone from one of the condos overlooking the pool had posted a video of Jasmine teaching the kids the dance routine. Coming on the heels of Katie’s video with Archer, it generated a lot of interest. Enterprising viewers had pieced together that Jasmine’s was the profile in the original video and that she had taught Katie. Fortunately, the paparazzi hadn’t been interested since there wasn’t a rock star involved. They had also learned their lesson from the fruitless weeks of stalking Will’s house.
But Jasmine had been just as upset about the videos and the paparazzi’s interest in Katie as he was, he reminded himself.
Seeing his expression, Carol Ann rolled her eyes. “Lord, men are such idiots. You really think everything happenin’ with that dancer hasn’t been exactly according to her plans? She’s just your type, Will. A pretty brunette with her own agenda…a woman who knows what she wants and what she has to do to get it.”
His back teeth clamped together. “You don’t know anything about her.”
“Oh, really? Let me guess. She played hard to get and you did all the pursuin’. She made it seem like she had better things to do than get involved with you. Then she finally got you in the sack, but even that was meant to seem like your idea. I’ll bet she’s even convinced you to have unprotected sex.”
He tensed more and more with every word.
“It’s like I wrote her playbook myself,” she said, pulling out a small mirror to check her appearance. “You’re just too blind to see it. Think about it, though. Any woman can pretend to care about a kid who made her famous just in time to get her career started.”
“And yet you can’t even pretend to care about your own child,” he said stiffly as he got to his feet. “You’re a truly disgusting human being, Carol Ann. Seeing as I’ll be filing a restraining order against you the minute I leave this office, I imagine this is the last time we’ll ever see each other. Thank God.”
He turned and reached for the door handle. “Good luck with those legal fees,” he said as he walked out the door.
His hands opened and closed into fists as he headed back to his room to start making the calls he needed to make. He had known this confrontation was coming. He’d mentally prepared for it. That didn’t stop some of her comments from hitting their mark.
He still hadn’t directly asked Jasmine how she felt about Katie. Her feelings seemed so apparent to him that it hadn’t seemed necessary.
Were there other people who thought what Carol Ann did? That Jasmine was using him and Katie to achieve the success she couldn’t on her own?
He hated that the timing of the progression of their relationship overlapped with the two videos going viral.
And he hated even more that he wondered, however briefly, if Carol Ann was right.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Two days before Pirouette’s Open House, Jasmine stood with Katie in the girl’s dressing room helping her with her bun before their lesson. They had started having their lessons at the studio a couple weeks ago. Jasmine considered them dry-runs in anticipation of the real-deals to come. They used a different instruction room each time so she could try out the sound systems and get a sense of the acoustics in each one. It would be different once there were actual classes in them, but it was still reassuring to know everything worked as it should.
She and Alima had held their soft opening the week before as another way to iron out any kinks before the Open House. They invited their families and their friends from their dancing group, some of whom had already been officially brought on to teach a few classes. They also invited Will’s teammates who had kids, as well as the people they’d met at the Family Fun Day event who expressed an interest in lessons.
Steamy Beans had catered the event and would be catering the Open House, as well, offering an assortment of finger foods and beverages both with alcohol and without. Alima had joked that it was worth applying for the permit to serve alcohol at the event just to get the parents more amenable to signing their kids up.
The good news was they didn’t actually have to rely on plying potential clients with alcohol to get them interested. Thanks in large part to the two viral videos featuring Archer’s dance moves, which the public now knew