The Price of Fame: A Price Novel (The Price Novels Book 2) (9 page)

He looked concerned. “We discussed it. You were at the hospital, and I asked you if it was OK with you if I gave them a few pictures that I chose and a little paragraph on the day. No big deal. I didn’t read it to you before, but you said OK.”

Was I losing my mind? “When?”

“Like, a few weeks ago, baby.”

“I don’t remember. You think I have a brain tumor?”

He started laughing. “No, but you were about to go into surgery on a seventeen-year-old kid with one when I made you stop and talk about it.”

I must not have been listening.

“You said OK, baby.” He looked a bit offended. “Were you not listening?” When I stared blankly, he started to laugh again. “Well, hell, I wish I would have gotten you to agree to something else. Something like sex every night for a month.”

“I don’t see you every night,” I deadpanned.

Trying to look serious, he asked, “So, is that a yes?”

I wanted to know more about the pictures. “No, but if you don’t tell me more about these pictures, I’m not giving you any sex for a month.”

“Let’s make a deal. I tell you about it in return for sex for a month.”

I slapped his chest. “Slayde, be serious. Quit thinking about sex and tell me about the pictures.”

“A, it was only four pictures. I will show you which ones when we get home. You looked gorgeous in every one, I promise. And I just told them the details. Where we had it, when, and who was there. That’s it. Nothing personal like that you weren’t wearing any panties under your wedding dress.”

“Slayde, yes the hell I was.”

He chuckled. “It would have been your word against mine.”

I shook my head and gave up.

A few minutes later, we headed back to the beach. I’d forgotten about the paparazzi until then. They had come a lot closer and were taking pictures with these huge lenses. Slayde never looked their way and never let go of my hand.

Of course I, on the other hand, felt extremely exposed and checked to make sure my swimsuit was where it should be. I didn’t want to have a nip slip for the whole world to see. That would be my luck.

After we sat down, Kevin said, “Your friends are multiplying, Slayde. I think we need to go home.”

“Who cares?” Kimberly said. “Let them take pictures if they want.” Of course she felt that way. She was that kind of leechy friend.

“Well, I’m out. So stay if you want,” he said, gathering his board.

Is he seriously leaving her with us?
I looked at Slayde, using my eyes to plead with him to do something. I didn’t want to spend another minute with Kimberly or the stupid paparazzi.

Slayde came to the rescue. Thank goodness. “We are about to leave too. I’m taking Arden out to eat tonight.”

“Where?” Kimberly asked; her attention was unnerving.

Before he could answer, I hit his leg. “Not sure yet,” he said.

I didn’t want her going. Nor did I trust her not to tell anyone where he’d be. She wasn’t just annoying. She was sketchy, and I was ready to go.

I stood up, and Slayde followed suit. After we had our stuff ready, Kimberly finally got out of the chair. “I’ll be glad to carry this,” she said. “Since I am the only one who used it. It’s the least I could do.”

“No, it’s fine,” I said, practically snatching it away from her. I didn’t want her walking back to our vehicle with us. I made myself smile at her. “We got it all down here, so no sense in you doing that. But thanks.”

Once we got closer to the flock of cameras, they became a little more aggressive, calling our names and getting all up in our business. “Drop your stuff here,” Slayde said and then opened my door. Once I got in, I shut it behind me and closed my eyes. He got everything into the back quickly, and we left.

“How do they always know?” I asked.

“It’s their job to know.”

“You’re defending them?”

“No, but I just know I have to deal with it. So that’s how I look at it.”

I should have known he’d be much more positive about all the unwanted attention. That was Slayde. My attitude, however, was not so great. I was tired of dealing with it.

”Don’t you ever get tired of smiling all the time?”

He spit out a laugh.

“No, I don’t mean a real smile. The fake ones. The ones that are just for them.”

“You mean paparazzi smiles?”

“Yeah.”

“I mean, I guess if it’s a long day or something. But it’s just work to me, and I’m usually thinking about you or something.” He looked over at me and winked.

I couldn’t help but smile myself. “I’m just not good at it,” I admitted.

He reached over and grabbed my chin. “Smiling? You’re doing it now.”

“You make me smile. But they make me very unhappy.”

“Why? Why does it bother you so much?” he asked.

I sighed. “I think it’s because I feel like I’m just a character in whatever story they’re telling. There’s usually a small, tiny grain of truth in their ridiculous write-ups, and I’m at their mercy. And they give me no mercy. It’s very hard for me to be relaxed and comfortable when I know that whatever they say is going to be falsified and portray me in a bad way.”

He was quiet until we got to the red light, and then he looked at me seriously. “I don’t care how they portray you, or me, or us. I don’t care about their stories. I care about ours, and they don’t know crap about that.”

I
was a mom. I worried about my kids. All of my kids. Even the ones I didn’t birth.

Brady and Slayde had supposedly made up. Zac told me this, and I’d seen them together several times. They acted like things were normal. But something in my gut told me Brady was really not completely OK.

He would only come to the house looking for his dad. He used to always wait if Zac wasn’t there and visit with me, but he hadn’t done that in a while. Not since the Arden thing in Colorado. He most definitely hadn’t been rude to me, and he had come by regularly. But he hadn’t sat and visited with me like he used to. And that was odd.

Today was no different; he was on his way out when I decided I wasn’t doing this with him anymore. “Brady,” I called after him.

He turned toward me, looking so much like his father. His dark hair, long overdue for a cut, was curling up out from under his hat. His eyes were dark, not blue, but the same shape as Zac’s. His expressions and mannerisms were identical. Genetics was really something.

He looked up at me from under his hat, listening for what I was going to say. I patted the bar across from me. “Come sit.”

His wary expression told me he really didn’t want to, that he was only coming over to me it because he knew he should, because I had asked him to. His mother might have been an idiot, but Brady wasn’t.

When he sat, I asked, “What’s going on with you?”

He shook his head, looking at me like I was nuts.

“You’re mad at me. Why?” He started to stand up, but I grabbed his hand. “You know I love you. Why are you being this way? What’s going on with you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pulled his hand away.

“Something is obviously bothering you. I know it is. Tell me.”

At first I thought he was about to throw a Zac Price “you can’t tell me what to do” fit, tell me I was crazy and that he didn’t have time for this, and then storm out. But instead he took a deep breath. “Was it your idea?” When he looked up at me, I saw the pain in his eyes.

“Was what my idea?”

“To not include me. For him to go and get married far away so I wasn’t there.”

I sat up straight, pulling my hands to my body. That hurt. I couldn’t believe he thought that. After I caught my breath, I said, “No. Most definitely not.”

“I know Dad wasn’t on board with it. And I’m sure whatever Arden said, Slayde did, and you just—” He stopped and looked at his hands a minute before looking back at me. “You’ve always said I was as much a part of this family as Slayde or Taylor.” He shook his head. “But that’s not true.”

“Yes, it is true, Brady. The wedding was not my decision. It was Slayde’s. And I told him then that I wasn’t OK with leaving you out. But it was his wedding. And he had a good point. You’d just showed your ass months before. He didn’t want drama at his wedding. You have to understand that.”

He slammed his hand down on the bar. “It’s always about him!” He raised his voice some, not quite yelling at me, and his behavior shocked me. In all the years I’d been with Zac, I had always felt that Brady and I had a good relationship. He’d given me a hard time as a teenager, like all the kids, but he had never talked to me like that.

“It was his wedding day,” I protested.

He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this with you anymore. You’re his mom. You’re Dad’s wife. And that’s it.” He left, slamming the door on his way out.

That broke my heart, and he knew it. I’d been with him since he was too young to remember anything else. I’d been the one who pushed Zac to have a relationship with him in the beginning. To get split custody of him. To keep him when Zac was home. To take care of him when he was sick and his mom was out of town. The only thing I didn’t do was discipline him. I’d never felt comfortable doing that. But I loved him as if he were mine, no matter how often he caused a ruckus in what had been a calm house before his arrival. When Zac and I had our brief time apart, I missed Brady dearly in a way I wouldn’t anyone but my child.

When Zac came in an hour later, he knew something was wrong. He stopped in the kitchen to look at me. “Lex, what’s going on?”

I stopped scrubbing the countertop and quietly said, “Brady is angry with me. He kinda yelled at me. Kinda.”

Zac looked as shocked as I felt. “What the hell for?”

“He thinks it was my idea to exclude him from the wedding.” Zac began to chew on the inside of his cheek, and he looked down. “And he told me I was Slayde and Taylor’s mom and your wife and that was it.” Saying it aloud brought the tears back.

He came across the room and hugged me. “Oh, he’s just being an asshole. He’s mad really at me. I’m sure he didn’t mean any of that.”

“He did mean it. And he really believes that I would do that to him,” I cried.

The problem was that Jill, his mother, had always said that we all favored Slayde. Slayde was my son, and hell, in my mind, I favored Slayde over Taylor most of the time. But it was because he was more pleasing to be around, and I treated the three children the same.

Taylor and Brady had similar personalities. Similar to their father’s. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Zac. But he could be a jerk, and he was extremely self-centered. Taylor and Brady were the same way. Slayde was not perfect by any means. He had his flaws. But he had a big heart, and he genuinely cared about other people’s feelings. And that was all people, not just his people.

“Why is he mad at you?” I asked.

Zac grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator before answering. Then he leaned back against the kitchen counter and took a sip. “Because I told him I wasn’t renewing his membership at the country club.”

That made no sense. “It’s a family membership,” I stated.

Zac cocked his head and smiled. “He doesn’t know that.”

He started to walk out of the kitchen, but I grabbed his arm. “Wait. Why would you do that? What did Brady do?”

He would have left without telling me, assuming it wasn’t any of my business since it didn’t pertain to me directly. That annoyed me, but that was Zac. I had found out about numerous things Zac had bailed Brady out of that he’d never discussed with me. I only later found them out when I was being nosy in Zac’s office. So this too would have been one of those things if I didn’t ask him.

He looked at me, and I could see the anger boil back up in his eyes as he thought about it. “He and his loser buddies got drunk at the country club, wrecked a golf cart, and ran up a $2,700 bill in the bar last Saturday.”

“What? You have to be kidding me.” I was not only shocked but humiliated.

He shook his head. “No, and Harry was livid when I showed up the other day to play golf.” Harry was the head of the board at the country club, and although he and Zac liked each other, they did tend to butt heads from time to time.

“Why didn’t Harry call you when it happened?”

He shrugged. “Beats me, but he ruined my damn day, and I was so mad at Brady that I didn’t play worth a crap and lost to Jeremy.”

“So, when did you tell Brady that you weren’t renewing his membership?”

“Two days ago, and I haven’t talked to him since. He tried to call me yesterday, and Jill called me last night.”

“What did she say?”

“I didn’t answer. I wasn’t going to listen to her bitch about me being too hard on him and how I would have never treated Slayde that way.”

Immediately defensive, I said, “Because Slayde would never act a fool like that.”

He looked at me. “And if he did, I’d have beaten his ass. So she’s right. I do treat him differently.”

We didn’t discuss the situation anymore, but two days later, Brady showed back up at the house when I was home doing Taylor’s laundry.

“Your dad’s not here,” I said without turning around and looking at him.

He stopped at the laundry room door. “I know.”

I kept hanging up her wet clothes and pretending he wasn’t there.

“I came to see you,” he said.

I stopped what I was doing and looked at him but said nothing.

“Lexi, I’m sorry about the other day. I really didn’t mean any of that. I was just trying to hurt your feelings.”

“Why?” I asked.

He leaned back on the washer. “Because I can, and I’m an asshole.”

I almost laughed at his honesty. “Yes. Yes, you are.” I threw a few things in the dryer and turned it on.

“You think you can forgive me?”

“If I can forgive you for pouring milk in the floor mat of my new car and not telling me about it in the middle of July, I can forgive you for being an ass.”

He looked at me funny. “I was five.”

“And you were being an ass then too,” I said, patting his shoulder as I walked out of the laundry room.

He sighed. “I just wanted you to know that I didn’t mean any of that.”

He followed me to the kitchen, and I made us a glass of tea. He sat across from me at the bar. “Thanks,” he said as I handed it to him.

He took a drink, and when he looked back up at me, I said, “Brady, I do believe that the Arden thing is still bothering you.”

I wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but after a minute, he conceded. “It does bother me, but I don’t really think it’s that it’s her. I think it’s that everyone knew it and no one told me. I felt like I was being left out. Excluded from something that the rest of the family was in on.”

I let him keep talking. What he was saying made sense, and I could understand why he felt that way, for sure.

“Before that, I always felt like I was as much a part of this family as Slayde and Taylor.”

I had to butt in. “Brady, you are.”

“But it sure didn’t feel that way.”

“Honey, I totally understand where you’re coming from, and why you feel this way, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Now, my honest opinion on the whole Arden subject is this: I don’t believe that you have a right to be angry. I do think Slayde should have told you about it, and I really would have liked for you to have been at the wedding, but I didn’t think you would have been able to be there without causing a problem. Am I wrong? Were you still angry?”

“Of course I was still angry.”

“So, do you think Slayde did it to hurt you? Or to keep you from infuriating his wife?”

Looking down, he nodded, starting to understand where I was coming from. He finished his tea and then stood up from the bar. “I love you too, Lexi.”

I smiled at him, and he walked around to put his glass in the sink. He turned and gave me a hug. “I know you do,” I said.

He grinned at me and left.