Chapter Twenty-Five
A week later, Bryna walked into her last class. Her spot was open between Avery and Tara, but she hadn’t been sitting in it since she had kicked them off the committee. She had replaced them with two other cheerleaders who had been ecstatic to see their stars rising.
She sat down in her new seat near the front of the room as her phone started buzzing noisily in her purse.
Fuck! Who the hell was calling her while she was in school?
She checked the screen and smiled brightly.
“Miss Turner, please put your phone away,” the teacher instructed. She looked annoyed that Bryna would even have it out, as if all the students didn’t text through her class.
“It’s my father calling from New Zealand. I have to take this,” she said. She confidently strode from the room. “Dad!”
“Hey, sweetie!”
“I’m in the middle of school. Time difference is kind of killer.”
“Sorry about that. I’ll send an apology over to Harmony, but I had to speak with you. Did you talk with anyone from LV State?” he asked, his tone turning serious.
“No. Pace said someone called, but they didn’t call back.”
“That’s funny because they called me, worried that my daughter wasn’t interested in doing a campus visit. What is this I hear? You don’t want to go to LV State? It’s my alma mater, Bryna. Your mother’s alma mater. It’s where you belong,” he insisted.
“I still want to go there. I didn’t speak to anyone. It must have been Pace. He’s been playing this silly game, but it’s getting out of hand. He’s trying to sabotage my college prospects,” she said, playing on the sweet and innocent vibe.
“I’ll deal with your stepbrother, Bryna. But you have to go to that college visit that they set up. They wanted me to be there this weekend, but just because I’m not in town doesn’t mean you’re exempt,” he told her.
“This weekend?” she groaned. “I have plans this weekend.”
“Break them. Your future is more important.”
Fuck! She was supposed to have her big talk with Jude this weekend, and now, she had to call the whole thing off. And she couldn’t even tell him where she was going to be, not without giving everything up before they met in person. The whole thing was frustrating.
As soon as she left school, she called Jude to break the news to him. They would have to plan another day to talk about their problems. Hopefully they would be able to chat on Monday as long as he didn’t leave again right away. He had a tendency to do that.
When she finally spoke to Jude, he seemed suspicious on the phone, but when she explained that it was an emergency, he backed down. After that call with her dad, there wasn’t any way for her to get out of it, and she promised Jude she would make it up to him as soon as they could meet again.
She was packing for Las Vegas when Celia called up the stairs. “Bryna! Your boyfriend is here.”
Bryna cringed. Boyfriend. She must be talking about Gates. It was all so fucking confusing. She couldn’t tell Celia that she and Gates weren’t dating without raising red flags about what had happened over Christmas, and she hated explaining anything to that dimwit. Hopefully, the air would be cleared up soon enough.
She stepped out into the hallway as Gates reached the top of the stairs. “Hey, B.”
“Gates,” she said with a nod. She gestured for him to follow her back into her room.
Once he was inside, he shut the door. His eyes surveyed the mess. “Well, I was going to see if you wanted to go out, but it looks like you’re leaving.”
“LV State invited me to a recruitment weekend.”
“Vegas?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “Can I come, too?”
“Don’t you have shit to do with your movie?”
“Nah. I have some free time before I finish off the promotion. You still coming to the premiere with me?”
“Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine,” she said, distracted. “You can come to Vegas, too. Whatever.”
“You okay? You seem out of it.”
“Jude and I were supposed to have this big talk this weekend, but my dad found out about this weekend visit, so I have to go now. I’m so pissed, and I don’t know how this talk is going to go at all.”
She tossed an LV State T-shirt into her bag and then tried to force it closed. Gates pushed it down, zipping it for her.
“Try not to stress it, B. You clearly love the guy.”
Bryna dropped the suitcase she had just picked up and stared up at him with terrified eyes. “What did you just say?”
“You love him, don’t you?” Gates asked. The typical humor in his eyes was replaced with sadness.
“I…don’t want to talk about this,” she muttered.
Not with Gates.
Not with anyone.
Love. That was the biggest four-letter word out there.
Did she love Jude? Her throat closed up, and her palms started sweating. She felt sick.
No, she wasn’t going to think about that.
“All right. Are you staying on campus, or should I get us a place at the Bellagio?” Gates asked, changing the subject.
“I’m supposed to stay on campus, but get us a room in case the place is shit,” she suggested.
“Done.”
Gates immediately got on the phone with his manager and asked him to book them a room on the Strip for the weekend. They stopped at Gates’s place to pick up an overnight bag and then headed out.
* * *
They arrived on campus just off of the Vegas Strip late that night. After checking in at the visitor’s center, she was given directions to the campus hotel. The room was nice enough that she decided to stay there.
Gates drove back to the Bellagio alone with big plans to go to the casino and stay up half the night playing blackjack.
She had a meeting the next day, so she got some much-needed sleep before heading to the president’s building in the morning. His assistant directed her down the hall to a large conference room. She stepped inside a roomful of other students. She wondered what they were all being recruited for. How many parents had the president personally contacted to get them here?
She saw President West speaking to a few students on the other side of the room. He smiled when he saw her, but she walked in the opposite direction. Was he seeing her or dollar signs?
She might have ended up here at her father’s insistence, but she wanted to like LV State. It had always been her top choice. She had been on campus since she was a baby. She wanted to rule like she did now at Harmony. But with nearly fifty thousand students, would that be possible? The thought set her on edge. She wanted to find her people…now. She didn’t want to wait for school to start to make friends and step into the limelight.
Bryna tried mingling with a few students and found out that many of them were there for a scholarship interview. They were finalists for a full-ride merit scholarship. She ended up sitting next to one of the girls during lunch with the president. The university had flown the girl in from some small town in Alabama, and she had a thick Southern drawl that made it difficult for Bryna to understand half of what she was saying. It was clear…these were not her people.
By the end of lunch, she was glad to skip the tour for her meeting with the head football coach, Coach Galloway. While he was a young coach, he had earned the spot at LV State two years ago after there was a scandal with the previous coach. Coach Galloway took the team to a national championship victory that year and wasn’t planning to leave anytime soon. Her father had made it a point to become friends with him, so she was relatively well acquainted with him.
She walked into the athletic complex and straight to his office. She knocked twice.
“Come in.”
She pushed open the door. “Coach Galloway, it’s so great to see you again.”
“Bryna, how are you?” He stood, shook her hand, and gave her a dimpled smile.
“Great. It’s so good to be back on campus.”
“Glad to hear that. Why don’t you sit down?”
She took him up on his offer and sat in the chair opposite his desk.
“How is your father doing?”
Bryna held back her sigh. “He’s filming on location in New Zealand, so he is incredibly busy.”
“It was unfortunate that he couldn’t attend the homecoming game this year. And we’re missing him this weekend.”
“So am I.”
Everyone always asking about her dad. Between Gates and her dad, people were going to know who she was on campus all right. It made her second-guess the decision to bring Gates along…and second-guess this meeting as well.
“I’m sure he’ll be around next year when I’m cheering on the sidelines.”
Coach Galloway laughed jovially and nodded. “I’m sure he will.”
A knock on the door sounded, and she turned around to see who was interrupting.
“Hey, Coach. You called for me?”
“I did. Bryna, let me introduce you to our student representative.”
Bryna’s smile brightened. “Eric Wilkins.”
He turned at his name, and she drank him in. Six feet tall, dark brown hair, light honey–hazel eyes. He was still built as if he had never blown out his knee beyond recognition last year in the middle of his touchdown interception that won them the game during the national championship.
“I shouldn’t be surprised you recognize him. Eric is training underneath me as a student coach,” Coach Galloway told her. “Eric, this is Bryna Turner. Her father is Lawrence Turner, nineteen eighty-eight National Championship winner.”
Eric nodded appreciatively and walked over to shake her hand. “I love his movies,” he told her. “Clever work.”
“Thanks,” she murmured.
“If you don’t mind, Eric, I’d love for you to show Bryna around. Her father is a very esteemed alumnus.”
Bryna stared back at Coach Galloway in surprise. They really were bringing in the big guns if they were getting Eric Wilkins to show her around. She wondered how many millions of dollars her dad donated every year for her to be getting this kind of treatment.
“Of course, Coach.”
“Well, I have some more business to attend to here. It was great seeing you again, Bryna. I’ll probably make a surprise appearance at the Sunday send-off brunch, so we’ll talk again there.”
Bryna took that as her dismissal. She shook the coach’s hand again and then left the office with Eric.
“So, what are your plans today?” Eric asked. “Campus tour? Sit through an information session on the school? Tour the dorms?”
She cringed. “No, thanks. I’d rather do what students actually do on campus.”
He laughed. “Get drunk and play football?”
“Sounds like my scene,” she told him truthfully. If she made friends now, then she would be one step closer to taking over the school.
“Then, we need to go to Posse.”