The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,47

the air-conditioning.

“Oh. My. God,” she murmured. Then her eyes came to meet mine, wet with moisture once again. “No wonder you made me get so dressed up.”

“You’re right,” Bella said nearly three hours later. “I might have died if I never got to see that. And I wouldn’t have even known what I was dying of.”

She used my pocket square—which I’d never be able to use again, thanks to all the mascara streaks on it—to pat at her face once more, and then smiled shyly at me. “Sorry about your handkerchief.”

I waved it off, laughing. “I have about a million of them and it’s not like they usually serve a purpose,” I said. “Are you ready?”

A shocked look was my only answer for a moment.

“Ready for what?” she asked.

“To go backstage and meet the cast.”

She stared at me for at least ten seconds before she managed to get an answer together for that one.

“Meet the cast? Can we do that? Won’t we be bothering them? Are we allowed back there?”

I held my arm out to her and tucked her hand into the crook of my elbow when she gave it to me.

“Bella, I come here an awful lot. I’ve been backstage before. Yes, meet the cast. Yes, we can do that. No, we won’t be bothering them. They like to hear how amazing they were from the audience. And yes, we’re allowed to be back there. What do you think I am, some sort of rule breaker?”

She gave me a wry glance. “I think you’re the kind of man who runs a company that occasionally steals other people’s music. I think you’re the kind of man who will insist that a girl hang out with him, even though she doesn’t have time and is worried that it might affect her career. But I’ll go backstage with you. This once.”

This once. It was good enough for me—because I knew it meant I was getting my foot in the door. And when I got my foot in the door, it was always only a matter of time until I followed with the rest of my body.

Chapter 27

Ethan

I listened closely to my assistant, my eyes on the desk in front of me as she relayed the news.

“Otis Hardin has signed to Stanton Records,” Kira announced. “Our rep has been meeting with him on and off for over three months and though he thought he had the contract signed and sealed, Hardin ducked out at the last minute. Apparently, he’s been meeting with Stanton on the sly and never bothered to tell our rep about that. Just trying to see who would offer the better deal, I suspect. I’ve met with the lawyers and I’m not sure there’s anything we can do about it.”

“Maybe we can fine the guy for all the time and money we put into wining and dining him, only for him to screw us over,” I muttered. “Thanks, Kira. I agree with you about not being able to do much. If we make a move on it, it makes us look like sore losers, and that’s more than our reputation can take right now, after what happened with Josh Lee. Let’s act like it was a mutual agreement with Hardin—we both decided it would be better to part ways. I don’t think it’s worth talking about legal action here. We’re better off just letting this one go.”

Kira nodded and strode out quickly, and I watched her go, thankful for an assistant who could not only deliver bad news quickly and efficiently, but who could also get up and leave when I asked her to, rather than trying to give me any further news—or worse, try to make me feel better.

Still. There were times—like right now—when it would have been nice to pack everything up, shut down my computer, and get out of the office, heading directly for someone who could make me feel better. This wasn’t an enormous issue—just an artist that we’d thought we had signed, who had backed out at the last minute—but we’d spent quite a bit of money on pursuing him, and I’d had one of my top reps assigned to the deal, working only on that for months.

It was a waste of resources, and a waste of talent. And I hated wasting resources and talent.

At that moment, I wanted to go out and get a beer, discuss those wasted resources and talent with someone outside of the industry, get an entirely different take on the