Ridge

Not Again

Caroline here, I need you to get back to me a.s.a.p. about the Ridge Noble photos and interview…

Those are the words that popped up on Allison’s phone this morning when I was cooking breakfast. I couldn’t read the entire message because I don’t know the code to unlock her phone, but I saw enough to know I’ve been a fucking fool.

I thought she was different. I thought she was someone I could trust with my secrets and my dreams and my heart. I should have known better. City women only want one thing—well, maybe two—power and sex. Allison has been furthering her career by feeding her boss information about me. And photographs. Fucking hell, the pictures she’s taken of me... Those would surely skyrocket her into the boss’s good graces so that she gets the promotion she needs to get out of that ghetto neighborhood where they live.

And to think I was going to offer to help her financially. I was even going to ask her to marry me. I wanted to move her and David to Montana. No self-respecting city woman would want to live in the country with a cowboy no matter how luxurious the surroundings are. There are no spas or dance clubs, no hair or nail salons to frequent, no designer clothing stores to shop in, no movie stars to photograph, and no fashion industry to cover. That’s what those women want—power, expensive things, and a sexy trophy man at their side. Well, that’s not going to be me.

As soon as I read that text, I packed my bag and put it in the trunk of the rental. I didn’t want to fight with Allison in front of David, but I couldn’t stand the thought of spending the day with her. I made breakfast and gave them an excuse for why I was leaving. And now I am going home where I pray there are no reporters waiting to pounce on me at Ash’s gate.

How much information has she given to her boss? How many photographs? I fucking knew better. I should never have gotten involved with a city girl who worked for a magazine. It was a recipe for disaster that I just couldn’t help cooking up.

Now I get to go home and start damage control. I don’t know what they’re going to say about me, but good or bad, any information they use was obtained in private and private is how it should have stayed.

She is a liar, a betrayer, a con-artist. How could I have been so blind? Sitting in the plane looking out the window the clouds seem angry and dark mirroring my mood. My quiet life of living under the radar is now threatened. All I ever wanted after the trial was to be left alone. I thought once it was over, things would be better, calmer, but they weren’t.

The world wasn’t quite done with me yet. They felt the wrong person had won that case, and if the legal system wasn’t going to do something about it, the press and public were. All the time I was receiving death threats and being slaughtered by the media, the pop princess who lied about everything sat in her high-rise apartment in New York playing the victim.

She accused me of watching her change her clothes in hotel rooms, making unwanted advances when we were alone in the car and her jet. She said I offered her drugs. This one got me. I’ve never done drugs in my life, and she was a cokehead long before I ever took the job. But as ridiculous as that was, the worst accusation of all was being called a rapist.

At the time, I was thirty-three years old, and she was sixteen. That’s a seventeen-year age difference. I mean, come on. The girl was living a lifestyle no child her age should be living, and that’s how I looked at her, as a child. She was so out of it most of the time, the publicists had to work miracles to make her appear to be the sweet, innocent star they were representing. That wasn’t easy. She spent more time in clubs drinking and doing drugs than she did in the studio recording music. Nobody cared that she was five years away from the legal drinking age—she was a star, she could do anything.

At least once a week I had to carry her out the back door of a club and as discreetly as possible get her home alive. I was the only person in her life who would tell her that she was fucking up. I tried to get her help, rehab, talk to her parents, her manager, somebody who could point her in the right direction, but she wouldn’t have it. She tried to get me fired on more than one occasion, but nobody else wanted the job—she was a handful. Her accusations were her way of finally getting rid of me. And it worked like a charm. Too bad she obliterated my reputation in the process.

And now it’s happening again.