The Publicist's Plight (Book I in The Harrison Inc. Series) | ✓

Chapter Four: Please This Sexual Tension Is Too Much

An extra thirty minutes is needed to look through the unmentioned information on Sebastian Harrison, my new "client." Apparently I learned that he is allergic to peanuts and strawberries, stands six feet, two inches tall, and was part of the "Young Astronomers" club when he was nine at his prestigious and very expensive Los Angeles private school.

Darcy, my timid yet oh-so reliable assistant, is internet surfing for alleged guest related intelligence on the Opera tomorrow night. Somehow, I'm certain she's actually watching cat videos like I've caught her doing before. Still, it's Sunday, and if I can have any type of preoccupation in Darcy's way to prevent her from asking me personal questions and referring me to her therapist, I'll take it gratefully.

"Andrea Bocelli is the headliner!" She abruptly exclaims.

I take a spoonful of Banana Nut Oatmeal and place it in my mouth. "I know, Darcy."

Hearing his name reminds me of my mother, who happens to be obsessed with the exalted Italian Opera singer. Every Sunday, while I studied at home and our Nanny took my younger sister, Samantha to ballet lessons, Mother would play his music loudly downstairs while she drank abstractedly. Tradition is so heavily enforced on my mother's side of the family, music involved.

"Don't continue to hinder me of the little happiness I have left." She would say in her drunken disarray, when I asked if she could turn the music down. "Bocelli reminds me of home. The home that I can no longer have because of you. We...we could have been a happy famiglia, just us three. Just with your sorella. Like it was...supposed to be."

Dragging herself out of the library I found her in, she pushed passed me with "Andrea Bocelli's Greatest Hits" in her arm with her wine, and treaded up the sepia-carpeted winding staircase to her bedroom.

"La mia famiglia. La mia paese bello." I heard her mumble sorrowfully before she slammed the door.

I will never forget her words, or her voice singing in Italian in her room for hours that day. But most of all, I will never forget the way my mother hugged, loved, kissed and adored Samantha when she arrived from ballet as if her Italian rant towards me never happened. It still haunts me. Especially her voice-her melodies in her native language were much more disconsolate and depressing. But despite my mother's flagrant hatred towards me, I still tucked her in when she was completely comatose from excessive drinking and drew her pictures in grade school that she never hung on the refrigerator.

Which I found sitting in a trash bin in the basement when I came home from school one day.

"Ms. King? Ms. King?"

Darcy's voice snaps me out of my thoughts. I lift my head up from my keyboard, ignoring the lump that has grown in my throat. She's holding the desk phone in her hands with an aghast expression on her face.

"Hudson Bradford is on the phone-"

There's yelling on the other line for a moment. Darcy listens, and with a roll of her eyes turns to face me.

"Sorry. Hudson Maximus Bradford...the third is on the phone, Miss."

Crap. Just what I need. An apology call. It makes sense, really, why he has been calling constantly the last now twelve hours. I'm contemplating making Darcy put him on hold for a few hours, but I'm certain I won't be able to receive any true closure or the ability to forget the year wasted on our artificial relationship. So instead, I decide to face him and lay it all on the table. Hopefully he can pass on information to Alejandra about the job she now does not have and the stuff she now needs to remove from my office.