Page 40 of Wild King
Trust me. I’ve had several long weeks to try my damnedest. Let’s just say it’s been my newest failure.
Swinging my legs off the bed, I stand up and walk out into the hallway, desperate to find anything to do with my time. Is this what being in prison is like? Because if it is, I’ve underestimated how fucking terrible it is to do time.
A noise downstairs gets my attention, and I walk down to the first floor as I hope it isn’t Nathan I’m going to run into. That guy has nothing interesting to say. He acts like his job is to be as sullen and silent as possible. Well, with me. With Salem, he’s far nicer, but I get the feeling he sees her as someone he can respect, while I’m just Matthias King’s younger brother he needs to make sure doesn’t run away.
That night with the car and Max nearly running him over didn’t help. Not that he actually would have done it. Max loves his Porsche, and driving into something the size of my bodyguard was only going to hurt the front end of his car. The giant would have likely walked away without a scratch.
I stop just outside the kitchen and take a breath, ready to encounter the cranky sasquatch again. As I turn the corner, I see Salem, and I don’t think I’ve ever been this thankful.
She looks back and sees me, but I get no response from her. Not surprising, I guess. I haven’t exactly been a great person to be around while she’s been here.
For nearly a minute, I watch her mixing something in a bowl and see flour shoot up into the air in puffs. “Tired of eating the food my family has delivered?” I ask as I take a seat at the island.
She wipes her hands covered in flour on the red shirt she’s wearing, leaving palm prints near her hips. “Not really. I like to bake when I’m frustrated.”
I laugh at her mention of being frustrated, so she quickly adds, “At work. Frustrated at work. Baking helps me get my focus back.”
“Oh yeah? Nobody willing to believe I’m not the world’s biggest asshole?”
Salem returns to mixing whatever she’s making but finally turns around with the bowl in her hands and says, “You know, I do want the world to see the person I saw down in the islands.”
When she brings up our time at the resort, her cheeks grow pink, almost as if she’s embarrassed. She shouldn’t be. We’re both adults, and we had a damn good time.
Not that I believe telling the world about that would help my current situation.
“I’m not sure that’s going to help as much as you think it will. If I recall correctly, your first impression of me was that I was rude.”
That makes her sigh, and she begins mixing whatever that is in the bowl again. “True, but the person I saw afterward is who I think the world should meet.”
Her genuine concern for my reputation with the public impresses me, even if I doubt it’s going to help me now. “Yeah, well, goodness doesn’t interest people. Trust me.”
Setting the bowl down on the counter, she wipes her hands on her shirt again, leaving more white palmprints near her hips. With a smile that reminds me of how much fun she was at the resort, she says, “That’s where I come in. I make the public see what they need to see.”
“So your plan is to show me as a good lay?” I ask, sort of joking.
That makes her smile disappear, and she shakes her head as a frown replaces her happy expression. “They need to see you as the nice guy who excelled at school. Smart and polite Kellen, which I’ve been promoting nonstop since I got here.”
A tiny spark of hope ignites inside me. “Any luck changing minds?”
“I’m sure some. These things take time. I have to reconstruct the public Kellen King, highlighting the best parts of you. I want them to think of good things when they hear your name instead of what Gina’s been putting out there for all to hear.”
“She has been busy. No doubt about that. Are you sure you don’t want to mention how I am in bed?”
That gets me an eyeroll. “Not exactly what I want to focus on. In fact, I don’t want a soul to think of sex when they hear your name. To them, you need to be anything but sexual. That’s what got you into this mess in the first place.”
I let out a heavy sigh as I think about how a few dates with a single woman made me persona non grata in the world. “When did it become so bad to enjoy a women and them enjoy you?” I wonder aloud.
Salem quickly answers my question. “When you chose to enjoy a woman who wanted more than you did.”
And that right there is the core of my problem. Gina wanted more than I did, and when I made it clear she wasn’t going to get it, she decided I sexually harassed her.
Salem’s words filter through my brain, and I realize she might not think I’m the bad guy everyone else does. “So you believe that I didn’t sexually harass her?”
“I can’t make a judgment on that. Your legal team gets to wrangle with that issue. My task is to make you someone people don’t want to hate. If I’m really successful, they won’t want to hate you and might even want to defend you. I’ll be happy if they like you, though.”
She returns to mixing what’s in the bowl as I admit to myself for the first time since everything happened between us that I don’t want her to hate me. Nothing I see now, though, shows she has any interest in me at all. I want to tell her I regret all the things I’ve said and especially abandoning her at the villa.
If only I could change things.