By the time I was back in my own office after meeting Hanson Bell, I knew exactly what I was in for with him. A hard time.

Bell was the type of person that thought he was above rules, above the word “no,” and hot enough to get away with it. Coach Thompson was clever enough to know what he had in Bell as a player, but he was a little bit like a father, too nervous to reprimand his son.

It made for a bad combination. Especially considering that my body seemed to think differently about Bell than my mind did. I was glad, however, that he was gone, because without his presence to distract me, I was gathering the mental fortitude to focus on representing him instead of fucking him.

“Lacey,” Conrad said, knocking on my door with papers in his hand. “Do you have a stapler I can use?”

I nodded and opened my drawer. I held it out to him. His hair was messy and his tie askew. It looked like he’d slept in his office again.

“I heard you got Hanson Bell,” he said, taking the stapler from me and crushing it down on the corners of his pages. “How did that go?”

“Not as well as I’d thought it would. He’s a real piece of work. It’s not going to be easy getting this guy on track.”

Conrad grinned and handed me the stapler back. “I could have told you that. The guy is a legend on the field, but off it? He’s a machine. Women fall for him wherever he goes. He’s like a modern-day Hansel, leaving women in his wake instead of breadcrumbs.”

I chuckled. “That’s a terrible comparison.”

Conrad shrugged. “It’s true.”

I nodded slowly. I had a feeling Conrad was right, if Bell’s response to me was anything to go by.

“What are you going to do with him?” Conrad asked.

I shrugged. “My job. I’m going to get him back on track and turn his notoriety into esteem.”

Conrad chuckled. “You would be the first woman that would make a lasting impression on him.”

I shook my head, but I was smiling. “It’s because I’m not here to have a piece of him.”

“And if he won’t change?”

“I’m not going to ask him to change. I never ask anyone to change. I’m just going to ask him to put the side of him the public likes to see in the forefront and keep the rest to himself.”

Conrad shook his head and walked to the door, still chuckling.

“Some people aren’t as four dimensional as you paint them to be,” Conrad said, turning at the door. “What if there isn’t anything else to show? What if there’s nothing more to him?”

“Then what they say about him is true,” I said. “He would be just a dick.”

Conrad laughed at my joke and left my office. I turned my attention back to his file. I didn’t think for one second that the side Bell showed everyone was the only side to him. And it wasn’t just because of my dirty fantasies about him. Instead, it was the philosophy I lived by in this job.

Everyone had alter egos. Everyone had secrets. You just had to know which parts of yourself to highlight so people didn’t think you were an asshole.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at my laptop screen for a moment, thinking. A trail of breadcrumbs, huh? And what was it leading to?

I opened Google and typed in his name. The usual results popped up. Wikipedia page, game stats, score cards. All the stuff you would expect for a pro football player. But there were also other pages that had nothing to do with his achievements on the field, but off it.

If they could be called achievements. Hanson Bell was a tabloid favorite. There was only one thing that made the gossip magazines happy and that was gossip, of course. And there was more than enough of that going around in Hanson’s life.

From what I could tell, Hanson Bell was a different-woman-every-night kind of guy, and he made sure that the world knew about it. Or rather, he didn’t hide it. Page upon page that I pulled up in my search results reported on his extra-curricular activities. They called him a womanizer, a player that hadn’t been benched in his sex career so far.

This wasn’t good. I could relate to the man. It was easier to sleep around and not get attached. But if it was about fame and reputation, Bell would have to keep what happened between the sheets away from the press.

I didn’t believe that people could change. In fact, they only became more of what they already were over time. I did believe that you could choose what you showed the people around you. It was what made me so good at my job.

My clients listened to me because I didn’t expect the impossible from them. I helped them be who they were, just more efficiently.

It was something I’d had to do my entire life, so it was only natural that I would be good at it and choose it as a career. I had a father that couldn’t practice what he preached and a vision for who he wanted me to be. It taught me how to show the right faces to the right people.

Hanson Bell was going to be easy. Sex was like an addiction. It made you feel good, and when you came down from your high, you looked for another fix.

That boy knew what he was doing. His reputation was the price, and he was all too happy to pay up. That wouldn’t do, though. It was my job to pull him out of the image he had created for himself.

I had an idea about how to do that, too. If he was portrayed as someone who took, rather than gave, we had to do the opposite. If he was self-centered, he had to show a selfless side of himself. If he was hated, he had to show compassion. People were easy to please and to convince. You just needed the right formula.

I pulled a notepad closer and started scribbling down bullet points about the kind of person Hanson was showing himself to be to the public, and what we could do to fix it. By the end of the day, I had an idea in mind. Hanson wasn’t going to like it, but he would have to choose. Either his career would suffer even more, or he would play my game by my rules.

The women had to go. He had to clean up his act and show that he could be without random hookups, if that was what it came down to. He needed to demonstrate dedication and commitment, not only to football and his team, but to himself, as well.

I leaned back in my chair again and swiveled back and forth, my elbows on the armrests and my fingers interlinked. I thought about Luke.

He had been a good guy. Any other woman would have been thrilled by someone who was that committed. I just wasn’t like other women. I didn’t want commitment. I wanted fun. I wanted no-strings-attached sex. I wanted to be my own woman, without having to make changes for a man. It wasn’t a lot to ask, was it?

Luke had thought so. He had gotten hurt because he had invested himself emotionally in me. I had warned him not to.

I hadn’t gotten hurt by telling him goodbye. Would I miss him? Yes, there were sides to him that I enjoyed spending time with. But I could do without those things if it meant maintaining my own independence.

The moment you committed yourself to someone else and let them in, you sacrificed a part of yourself. The more you did together, like build a life and a family, the more you lost of yourself. Until eventually, there was so little left that you were only half of who you used to be. And then, when something went wrong and you lost the person you put everything into, you couldn’t stand by yourself anymore.

I had seen it too many times. It had happened to too many people around me.

I refused to let that happen to me. I was happy alone. And if I had to break a couple of hearts to stay that way, so be it.

I just didn’t do it out in the open for everyone to see, the way Hanson Bell did it. I understood what it meant, though, and I knew how to help him.

It was how I had figured out how to help myself. It was just a matter of keeping parts of myself hidden until no one else was looking. When they were, I’d bring my other sides to the forefront.

Hanson Bell was about to get special treatment. I wasn’t just going to show him what to do as a PR Manager. I was going to teach him my own tricks of the trade.

And I was determined not to allow myself to become distracted again by thoughts of him fucking me. Sure, I would let him tie me up to the goalpost and take me publicly in front of a football stadium of cheering fans if it was what he wanted— if he weren’t my client.

But since he was, he was off limits. I had to let go of those dirty thoughts. Starting right then and there. No more thoughts about his tongue circling my nipple and then creeping slowly down to my wet pussy. Those thoughts were done, completely, I promised myself, right before I allowed myself to indulge in them a little more, just last one last time.