I did my very best to shove back that insidious wee voice in my head that whispered I couldn’t be this lucky. That something or someone would find a way to take Baird McMillan away from me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
BAIRD
The past week had been a blur. I was an optimist, so the good far outweighed the bad, and thankfully, Maia seemed to feel the same way. I kept glancing at her as I drove through Falkirk, watching her curious expression as she took in the town where I grew up. She’d told me she’d never been here before, so I promised her we’d drive down to see the Kelpies, our most visited tourist landmark, once we’d had dinner with my family.
Ainsley had a work thing so she couldn’t make it this time, which was probably a good thing since she was the reason Maia and I had to jam a second family dinner into an already packed week when all we wanted to do was fuck. That was the straight-up truth. The woman made me horny all the time.
I put a leash on it, though, knowing we were heading to my childhood home.
Instead, I wondered what Maia was thinking and hoped it was all about the present and not about some of the shitty things that had happened this week.
Last Sunday we’d done the second video shoot for thevenue part of the campaign, including filming at Blantyre. Good news was Pennington’s went for our idea, and we were now going to get free marketing for our hotel. Bad news was when the video went live, we discovered the film crew had included private footage.
Neither of us really wanted to look at the campaign posts. Maia, however, gave into her curiosity and had scrolled through the comments during her lunch break.
There were comments like:
Ugh, this is obviously so fake. I want to see REAL people getting married.
Eh … like Maia and I weren’t real people. What the actual fuck?
He’s so hot. He could do way better than her.
Why did women do that to each other? Especially when it was straight-up bullshit.
There are people dying in the world. Maybe talk about that!
So, because it’s just occurred to you that people die, you don’t want anyone to talk about anything else ever? Make that make sense.
And then there were nice comments like:
They look so in love. I want this!
And then confusing comments like this:
I think my ovaries just exploded.
I’m afraid to admit how many times I’ve rewatched that kiss.
Find a guy who kisses you like this!
That kiss was a bit NSFW, no??
It was that last comment that prompted Maia to watch the video because our kisses for the camera were polite. She’d then called to tell me to watch the video. One of the fucking cameramen had followed me and Maia at the venuewhere I dragged her into the ballroom to kiss the life out of her. Now, don’t get me wrong, the kiss was hot. But it was a private moment that should not have been part of the footage. It was the kind of kiss some sickos might get their rocks off to, and I didn’t want anyone seeing my fiancée like that.
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 theclub 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 wassordid. Since when did having sex and partying here and there become a bad thing in the twenty-first century? Fucking tabloid journos twisted everything.
