Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 115308 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115308 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 577(@200wpm)___ 461(@250wpm)___ 384(@300wpm)
Maia requested a meeting with her boss Hilary, I joined in via video call, and we pretty much demanded nothing like that ever happen again. Hilary was apologetic and assured us she’d talk to marketing, the director, and the crew, and also to legal.
Marketing responded by being total dicks, insisting that the kiss made the video go viral. Thankfully, legal assured them they were opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they pulled anything like that a-fucking-gain since it clearly stated in the contract that Maia and I only agreed to use of permissible footage. Since he’d filmed us behind our backs like a fucking creep, it was not permissible. I went a step further and asked for a new cameraman and I also insisted we see the final posts before they were published.
I’d never cared before about anything I did making it into public consumption. But I cared about people witnessing intimate moments between me and Maia. Moments that were supposed to be ours. I cared that because some bitchy twit called Becky had a problem with My that we were in this situation in the first place, swinging Maia’s arse out there for anyone to make shitty comments about her or use content of her for their own perverse desires.
I couldn’t protect her from that, and it fucked with my head more than I expected.
It was one of the reasons I hadn’t told her that the tabloid media had started planting themselves outside the club every morning before training, hounding me about the campaign and about my “sordid” past.
I’d looked up that word and I did not think my past was sordid. Since when did having sex and partying here and there become a bad thing in the twenty-first century? Fucking tabloid journos twisted everything.
Another crap thing that happened was that Pennington’s informed us they’d booked our date for the bungee jump. Now that I was in my right mind again, there was no bloody way I was putting Maia at risk by throwing us off a platform suspended forty meters above a river. Maia, however, decided she wanted to do it. We got into an argument, which I hated. She insisted Will had made her feel boring and unadventurous, and she’d like to prove to herself that she wasn’t. Who could argue with that? I put my overprotectiveness to one side and realized that my inability to say no to this woman did not bode well for me in the future. Though ultimately it wasn’t up to me whether she did the bungee jump. She was a grown woman, and it was her decision.
Whether I liked it or not.
The fact that when we went to dinner at her parents’ house and her dad found out and wasn’t happy about it almost made me want to throw my support behind him … until I saw the sheen of tears in Maia’s eyes as she argued her point. She wasn’t getting upset to get her way. Maia often got teary when she was frustrated, which just frustrated her even more. I thought it was adorable, though I knew better than to tell her that.
Other than the bungee jump discussion, dinner with her parents and Lockie went well. Lockie was a bit in awe of me, so I tried to make him comfortable and answered his million questions about football and the Professional League. Maia’s dad treated me with an assessing politeness, but he warmed up toward the end of the dinner and joined me and Lockie in our discussions.
Maia’s stepmum Grace was a sweetheart, as always. She was one of the classiest women I’d ever met and had one of those posh English accents that made everything she said sound smart as fuck. She and Maia had a bond that transcended blood, and I decided Grace MacLeod had my loyalty for life.
Ainsley, of course, had then let it slip to my mum that we’d had the long overdue family dinner, and Mum’s response was worse than if she’d just been annoyed. No. She sounded butt hurt instead and I couldn’t handle that, so I asked Maia if we could do dinner at my mum’s Friday night. Maia’s answer was an instant “Of course.”
So here we were.
We slowed to a stop outside my grandparents’ house. “This is it.”
Maia looked up at the end-of-terrace home with its large front bay window.
At her silence, I asked, “What are you thinking?”
She turned to me. “That this seems like a nice house, a nice street, to grow up on.”
Emotion clogged my throat. To most folk, this was a modest house on a modest street. Totally ordinary. Nothing special.
Maia saw a family home. A street where kids could play safely together.
She saw that because she’d grown up in a dangerous, poverty-stricken area of Glasgow, never feeling safe inside or outside her home.