Chapter Nineteen

Brenna

I spent the rest of the weekend holed up in my apartment, crying, and sleeping while desperately trying to remember my life before my head injury. Rhett kept calling, but I knew I couldn’t have possibly talked to him. I didn’t want to speak to him again until I figured out the truth. The whole truth.

Monday morning, after I’d cried my last tears, I grabbed a stack of Sport Taste issues from the past year – issues with no pages torn out – before locking myself in a corner conference room. No surprise, Rhett Bradshaw’s smug face smiled back at me on the covers of three out of the past twelve issues. Looking at him now sickened me – that stupid smug grin, his blue eyes twinkling with secrecy and sex appeal.

A mistake. He’d been a fatal error in judgment, and I’d learned a valuable lesson. I only hoped having sex with him wouldn’t end my career.

My fingers trembled as I picked up the most recent magazine with Rhett on the cover. The headline caused me to hiss in a breath.

“Rhett Bradshaw – Miracle Worker…Or Dangerous Manwhore?”

The byline read: “Brenna Sinclair, Lead Sports Reporter, Major League Baseball.” A sharp wave of nausea licked over my body when I realized I had no memory of writing this headline…or this article. The words on the page seemed as foreign as Latin, and I had a sudden feeling that I wouldn’t like what I was about to read.

I took a deep breath and flipped the magazine open to the piece on Rhett. A glossy spread of photos showed Rhett at work, pitching a baseball and grinning with his teammates. Rhett at play, reclining in the stands with a cold can of beer lazily tilted toward the camera. And Rhett doing…whatever, with his arms around two beautiful Playmates, grinning like he’d singlehandedly won the World Series.

My stomach twisted into knots as I began to read.

“Rhett Bradshaw. To many New Yorkers, his name alone is a herald of victory. At twenty-nine, Bradshaw is one of the most successful pitchers signed by the Yankees to date. In fact, Yankees’ coach Don Singer has spent more time extolling Rhett’s virtues on the hallowed ground of Yankee Stadium than almost any other player in recent history.

But is Rhett Bradshaw really an all-American god? Or is there something deeper lurking underneath those bright blue eyes and shining grin?”

I paused and took a deep breath before scanning the rest of the page. As I continued to read, my eyes filled with tears, and I gripped the glossy page so tightly that my fingers began to sweat. I could barely read as the pages trembled beneath the strength of my inner torment.

“With a blue-collar New Jersey pedigree and a grin that’s responsible for dropping panties from Wall Street to Broadway, Rhett Bradshaw seems like a typical jock, albeit a very successful one. His friends on the team have called him ‘easygoing’ and ‘fun.’ But Allison Miller, a waitress and performer at Rick’s Cabaret, had a different story to tell.

Ms. Miller, a beautiful twenty-three-year-old graduate student, makes ends meet by working part-time at Rick’s Cabaret, a celebrated New York City institution.

“My job was so great at first,” gushed Ms. Miller when I met with her last Tuesday. “I loved it.” She pauses to take a sip of her skinny margarita. “I always had fun coming to work. The guys – even the really drunk ones – were always respectful. I never had to worry about my safety.”

Ms. Miller, along with six of her fellow employees, filed a police report against Rhett Bradshaw and Ernesto “Ernie” Garcia – the dynamic pitcher/catcher pair both so important to the success of the Yankee’s starting line-up.

“They came in throwing money around, yelling about making it rain,” Ms. Miller recalls tearfully. “Rhett told me that he had a thing for blondes and that he wanted me to make sure he had a great time, no matter what.” She shrugs, giving a sad smile. “Guys said stuff like that all the time. I had no idea he was going to try to assault me.”

Ms. Miller’s recollection may be shocking, but in no way is she alone in her experience.

I couldn’t read on. I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes. The nausea got stronger by the minute, threatening to upchuck my breakfast of black coffee and regret. I had no idea what I’d just read. Did Rhett…sexually assault someone? A stripper? This didn’t make any sense. The Rhett I knew was a nice guy. Not one time in his presence had I ever felt my safety was compromised. Sure, he made me mad sometimes – like that night he’d kept calling me a girl, even when I explained I found it offensive. But he was just a baseball player…that was how they all acted. Entitled. Arrogant.

It was just for fun, right?

After taking a deep breath to fortify myself, I looked back down at the page.

“Ms. Miller declined to reveal anything else about that fateful night at Rick’s Cabaret, so I went in search of someone who also knew Rhett intimately – Carrie Sellers, his former agent.

Ms. Sellers, a well-respected member of the New York City public relations industry, also had mixed things to say about Bradshaw.

“I can’t deny that he’s a great player,” she says, nodding her curly head. “But his behavior was…well, sometimes more than a little problematic.”

When asked to clarify, Ms. Sellers demurred at first.

“I wouldn’t say he was malicious,” she says slowly, obviously being careful about her word choice. “But there was a side of him, a very manipulative side, which led to more than one potential lawsuit that I had to defend against. For instance, one night Rhett and his teammates went out to celebrate a big win. I got a call in the morning from Rhett, saying that he’d gotten a girl in trouble – an eighteen-year-old girl – and that he’d need some petty cash to ‘take care of things.’ I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant – he never clarified – but after I sent the money, I never heard about it again.”

Ms. Sellers is now representing another Yankees pitcher, Jeremy O’Connell. O’Connell, twenty-four, is a shining star in his own right.

“It kills me to say this,” Ms. Sellers says with an ironic smile. “But I can see Rhett getting away with a lot of bad behavior. He’s just so charming…everyone loves him, no matter what he says or does. He’s just got that IT factor.” She shrugs. “My final comments are clear. If he doesn’t clean up his act, he’s going to wind up at the forefront of a very, very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit.”

Hot, acrid bile rose in my throat, and I leapt from the conference table and ran down the hall and into the bathroom. I barely made it to a stall before projectile vomiting through my hands and all over the porcelain toilet. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and my stomach felt like it was waging war on my body as I heaved again and again.

I felt like I would never stop throwing up. By the time I actually did, my face burned hot with illness and disbelief. My skin felt coarse, like a paper towel, and I sobbed as I laid my cheek against the seat of the toilet. I couldn’t believe what I’d just read.

Who was the real Rhett Bradshaw, and why had no one told me how I truly felt about him? I couldn’t understand it – I’d obviously hated him. So why had he tried so hard to win me over after my injury?

And why the hell had Riley gone along with it? I sobbed even harder as her betrayal sank into my veins like poison. Everyone in my life was out to get me, I thought as panic crested over my head. I can’t trust anyone. Maybe I can’t even trust my own family.

The bathroom door burst open. I froze as I heard Riley’s voice, chirping in a sing-song tone as her heels clacked across the floor. When I realized she was with Nina, our editor, my blood ran cold.

“I’m telling you, Nina, I wouldn’t lie about this,” Riley said. I heard her sigh, then a gush of tap water into one of the sinks.

“I never accused you of lying,” Nina said, her annoyed tone measured. “But all of this seems so out of character.”

“Trust me,” Riley said, that special smugness lacing her voice that only she could muster. “I have evidence. I’ll show you when we get back to the office – Brenna and Rhett have been dating in secret. It’s going to be the story of the decade.”

My heart skipped a beat, and I crouched closer to the toilet, hoping neither Riley nor Nina would notice my shoes poking out from the edge of the stall. Their chatter moved to another subject, and soon the buzzing in my ears became too loud for me to hear their actual words.

As soon as Riley and Nina had left the bathroom, I bolted up from the toilet and washed my hands and face as best I could. When I was done, my cheeks still flamed red, and I longed for a glass of water, but I knew I had to defend myself.

When I walked back into the Sport Taste offices, all eyes landed on me. Everyone I passed couldn’t stop staring at me.

“You all look like a bunch of deer in the headlights,” I muttered sarcastically under my breath as I made my way to Nina’s office, heart thudding. “Stop staring at me.”

Just as I feared, Riley already sat in Nina’s office, spreading photos all over the desk.

“This was taken at the Banks party after they lost at the hands of Rhett’s ineptitude,” Riley said with smug satisfaction, pointing down to a photo of Rhett and me. I gasped when I saw his arm around my shoulders as I looked tenderly into his bright blue eyes.

“Brenna,” Nina said. “I just called your desk. Please, have a seat.”

Riley’s face showed no remorse as I pushed past her and sat down.

“Nina, look, before you get started–”

Nina held up a hand. Her eyes blazed with anger and fire. I couldn’t remember being this scared before, but I sat up as straight as I could and tried to stay calm. I’d done nothing wrong. The truth would prevail. It had to.

“Brenna, Riley tells me that you and Rhett have been dating in secret,” Nina said. She frowned, shaking her head. “I didn’t want to believe it – I thought I knew you, Brenna. I thought I could trust you.”

“You can trust me!” I cried.

Nina held up a hand in the air. “No,” she clipped out. “Let me finish. I didn’t want to believe Riley, but she’s shown me evidence that I can’t ignore.” Her face twisted into an ugly grin as she picked up a stack of photographs and handed them over.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach went from bad to worse as I flipped through the photos. Rhett kissing me, pulling my body against his muscular bulk. There was a photo of me doubled up in laughter at something Rhett had said, a smirk etched on his golden features. And there at the end and the most damning, was a picture of Rhett holding my hand. My eyes were closed, and my head rested on his sculpted shoulder. I looked content and happy...two things I could never imagine feeling again.

“I told you,” Riley said in a know-it-all voice. She looked at me and cocked her head to the side, smiling a grin that didn’t even come close to reaching her dead eyes. “Brenna and Rhett have been dating hot and heavy for months. It was Brenna’s idea – she needed to cover her own ass.”

Nina sighed. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “This level of betrayal – right under my nose. Brenna, I’ve never seen such a level of unprofessional behavior.” She closed her eyes in a blatant show of the theatrics.

“All of those hit pieces on Rhett, they were all faked,” Riley said. She pointed a finger at me accusingly. “Brenna told Rhett that his career would be helped if the press thought he was a bad boy. She did it all to further her own career. And his. If this gets found out, Nina. Well, I hope you know that there could be an investigation into the false reporting. Sport Taste could get shut down. Or worse.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I was living my worst nightmare, but I couldn’t wake up. My breath came in shallow pants as the tension in my chest increased, spiderwebbing throughout my entire body. My fingers and toes tingled like I had frostbite.

“I am so disappointed in you, Brenna,” Nina said. She glared at me for a moment, then grabbed the pictures from my shaking hands and threw them on her desk. “This is the worst example of unethical behavior I’ve ever seen in a journalist. It’s going to cost you your job, and I surely hope it doesn’t cost you your freedom. Journalists have gone to prison for things not even close to being this bad.”

“I don’t know anything about those!” I said, my anger causing me to point at the offensive photos. “I had no idea they were even being taken in the first place!”

“Well,” Riley said and crossed her arms over her chest. “That’s easy, then. Just tell us how you felt about Rhett before the accident.”

“I…” I trailed off, biting my lip.

“Yes, please,” Nina said sarcastically. “Tell me how I could have possibly gotten this all wrong, Brenna.”

“I don’t know,” I said unable to disguise my underlying pain and sadness. I hung my head. “I…I still can’t remember.”

Nina inhaled sharply. “How convenient. Then I have no choice. You’re suspended from Sport Taste indefinitely, without pay.”

“What?” I gasped. My jaw dropped. “Nina, you wouldn’t!”

“No, Brenna,” Nina said. “You wouldn’t do this. The Brenna I knew wouldn’t do anything this…this unethical! You’ve put the reputation of the entire magazine on the line! All for personal gain!” She shook her head in disgust as she speared me with a look I’d never seen before and never wanted to see again. “Go. Now. I never want to lay eyes on you again.”

“Nina, please–” I blinked and focused on Nina’s computer screen. On it was the home page for Sport Taste. I blinked again. “We have a website?”

Nina looked at me as if I were totally crazy. “Of course we have a website. No descent news source wouldn’t.”

Still gaping, I looked at Riley, who only lifted a shoulder, that smug smile still firmly in place.

“You lied to me.”

Riley rolled her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I–”

“Go,” Nina interrupted, her eyes growing sad. “Brenna, just go before I’m forced to call the authorities and have you removed from the property as a trespasser.”

“Yeah, Brenna,” Riley added. She pursed her lips as if she wanted to blow me a kiss goodbye. “You should just go. You’re not welcome here.”

I’d never felt more ashamed, angry, or betrayed in my entire life. And that, I knew for certain.