“If I said ‘bite me,’ would you fire me?” he asked.
“No, because that’s exactly what you’d want me to do so you could get out of talking to the press. C’mon, Trace...take one for the team. We need this.”
Trace swore and shook his head, knowing Peter would badger him almost as incessantly as the press, and frankly, it would be harder to avoid his boss than the reporters. “One interview,” he said. “And I mean—one.”
“I guess if that’s all I can get out of you,” grumbled Peter, adding a sharp, “But it’d better be a good interview. Plug the program several times and make sure you mention how you couldn’t have found the girl without your support crew.”
“Yeah, sure,” Trace said. “Gotta go. Set up the interview and let me know when and where. I’ll show up with bells on.”
“Sure you will,” Peter said, not believing him for a second. “If you don’t show up...”
“I will,” he assured Peter, sighing. “I promise.”
“Good.” Peter clicked off and Trace tossed his phone onto the seat, freshly irritated. He didn’t understand what the big fascination was with him doing his job. Nobody got this fired up about the mailman delivering the mail. Why should anyone care about what he did? In a perfect world, everyone minded their own damn business and left each other alone.
He hated reporters.
He hated the limelight.
And he most definitely hated toeing the line for someone else’s agenda.
The only thing that made this situation tolerable was the fact that Clarissa Errington hadn’t been frozen solid by the time he’d found her.
He swallowed the sour lump in his throat. Clarissa had cried with relief when she’d seen him appear from the dense forest, his orange vest blazoned with Search and Rescue in bold black lettering, and she had stumbled into his arms, terrified and sobbing, so cold she could barely hold on to him.
It wasn’t that he was flippant about saving a child’s life; it was that he simply didn’t want accolades for doing his job. He wasn’t a hero, and he hated when anyone used that term to describe him.
He was no hero. He was just a guy trying to make a living doing the only thing he’d ever been good at.
What was so interesting about that?
He needed a beer. Maybe two or three. Was it considered bad form to show up to an interview drunk? Celebrities did it, so why couldn’t he? That ought to quash any more of that hero talk that kept getting tossed around.
Peter would likely blow his top if he walked in three sheets to the wind, and Trace didn’t want an earful from Peter’s wife, Cindy, who’d blame him for causing Peter’s blood pressure to skyrocket.
Nope, he realized. Stone-cold sober was the only way available to him.
Just get it over with and be done with it, he told himself.
Twenty minutes of his life and then he could put the nuisance behind him. After that, everything could return to normal and the rest of the world would find something else to chew on while he went back to doing his job—quietly and without microphones being shoved in his face.
CHAPTER TWO
DELAINEY SETTLED INTO her leather-backed chair, ready to throw everything she had into this pitch meeting, having spent a week brainstorming for the most interesting and stellar idea for a new show in the hopes that the gods of television were smiling down on her and would grant her a boon.
Her nerves buzzed from too much caffeine, but she was operating on too little sleep and couldn’t chance that she might doze off at the most inopportune time. Calm down, she told herself sternly, working hard to breathe slowly and steadily to still her shaking fingers. This is only the single most important meeting of your life, so why stress? Ugh.
Frank Pilcher, head of programming, sat at the head of the long conference table, looking as austere and foreboding as ever, and no matter how many times Delainey tried smiling and putting on her best face, he rarely appreciated her efforts. In short, that man terrified her—more so now than ever because that baleful stare seemed centered on her more than anyone else. Or maybe she was just being paranoid....
“Vertical Blind has, in the history of this network, lost more money in the first six weeks than any new show given the green light from this company in the past five years. What have you got for us to lose money on this time, Ms. Clarke?”
Oh. Maybe she wasn’t being paranoid. Was it possible to slide down in her chair and slink from the room on the power of her own mortification? A shaky smile fit itself to her lips and she opened her day planner with all her notes and ideas, but her eyesight had begun to swim.
“Well?”
“Uh, yes, well, Vertical Blind did not perform as well as we had hoped,” Delainey admitted, clearing her voice when a small shake betrayed her. “But, I have been studying the demographic test groups and have found that—”
“Conversely, Ms. Yaley, your show, Hubba Hubba, is blowing all projections out of the water,” Frank said, cutting Delainey off in midsentence, causing her cheeks to flare with heat as she had no choice but to sit and nod in response to Frank’s assessment. “The kids seem to like watching one train wreck after another ad nauseum.”
“Yes, sir. We are very pleased with the momentum of Hubba Hubba,” Hannah said with a smile. “The show easily snags the seventeen to twenty-five age bracket, and already we’re getting calls from quality advertisers eager to place their product in the commercial slots. Overall, I’d call Hubba Hubba a smashing success, one the network can be proud of.”
“It’s lucrative for sure, but something to be proud of? I wouldn’t go that far,” Frank said, surprising both Hannah and Delainey. “Although Vertical Blind dropped like a stone, the concept was, at least, less inane than Hubba Hubba.”
Hannah lost her smug smile and nodded, unsure of how to respond, not that it mattered because Frank had moved on. “There was a time when we made quality programming. We need to find a way to do that as well as continue to make money. Thus far, we’ve missed that mark. I want to hear ideas that do both. And I don’t want to hear any more ideas about shows that follow young, drunken idiots around all summer,” he warned the group with a dark glare. “I want to hear something people can really get behind and care about, and not because it’s filled with debauchery or alcohol-soaked shenanigans.”
Hannah pretended to study her notes, as if she’d actually jotted something down that might fit the criteria, but Delainey knew for a fact that since Hubba Hubba was a hit, Hannah had been looking for several different ways to copy its success, relying mainly on the same format and concept.
Which left the floor open for Delainey to take the stage and show Frank what she could do. “Actually, as I was saying, I think I may have some ideas you might like,” she started, flipping the pages until she came to the circled ideas. “I was thinking there aren’t any cooking shows aimed at teens—”
“Teenagers don’t cook,” Ira West interrupted drily. “I should know. I have two at home who barely know how to operate the toaster.”
“Right, scratch that,” she said, drawing a line through the idea and moving to the next. “So, America loves an underdog. I was thinking of something along the lines of—”
“Alaska!” Frank snapped his fingers with a wide smile that looked wholly unnatural on his face, and her hopes plummeted when she realized he hadn’t been listening to a word she’d been saying. “We need that guy who saved the little girl from the mountains.... What was his name?