Chapter 5
“We need to find you a date.”
Luke’s head snapped up. Marla didn’t even look up from the tablet she had cradled in her arm, stylus tapping against the screen, after dropping that bombshell.
“What?” he asked around a mouth full of dry chicken. The catering company on this leg of the journey wasn’t all that great. One month and he’d be eating his mama’s homemade chicken and dumplings. He closed his eyes and imagined her drop biscuits, smothered in homemade sausage gravy. The already dry chicken turned to sawdust in his mouth and he guzzled water to make it moist enough to swallow. Appetite gone, he pushed away the plate in front of him.
“I thought I needed to be the single, eligible bachelor in order to appear attainable to the female fan base.”
Marla glanced up from her tablet and gave him a look that was all too familiar—his mama had given it to him for most of his teenage years when she thought he’d said something incredibly stupid.
She looked down at her tablet, the stylus tap, tap, tapping away. She turned the screen toward him. “You’re trending down with women between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty-five. They see you as the stereotypical party boy.”
All he saw was a flash of some graph with a bunch of different colored lines.
“What does that matter?” Brett asked. “Young or old, women love him.”
Maybe growing up with a house full of women had taught him better than most men how to interpret a look, but if Brett knew what was good for him, he’d shut his trap because he was about to get schooled.
“Women control over twenty-million dollars in worldwide spending. In the U.S., they account for eighty-five percent of all consumer purchases. More than ninety percent of women pass along deals and information to other women. Seventy percent of women use blogs to share information while almost sixty-five percent use social media. One bad comment from a social media influencer can have significantly negative effects on a product”—she looked at Luke —“or person and the trending topic onI Was A 90s Groupieis, ‘I’m so over the bad boy cliché.’
“Which all leads to—you need a date for the charity gala at the end of next month. Preferably someone whose dress covers their ass.”
Brett scoffed. “Who cares what some bored mommy housewife with an online diary has to say?”
“That bored housewife with an online diary has half a million Instagram followers, a quarter million Facebook followers, over fifty thousand hits a day on herdiary, and is a Luke Stone super fan. She attends every concert of his in the Northeast and we’ve sent her tickets to give away on her blog for the last ten shows because she is an influencer and women, who spend twenty million dollars annually, listen to her. The day after her blog post, album sales dropped by three points.”
She shifted her body so her back was ever so slightly toward Brett, effectively dismissing him from the conversation. “Who’s Rowan Mitchell?”
Marla might as well have slapped him in the face with a catfish. “What?”
“She’s on your friends and family list, but as far as I can tell she’s the only non-family person on there. So—friend or distant relative?”
That chicken threatened to burn an acidic hole in his diaphragm and he drank some more water. “She was a friend.”
“Was? But not currently?”
“Wasn’t that your high school sweetheart?” Brett asked.
Marla pulled out a chair and sat at the table, two faint lines forming between her eyebrows as she looked down at her tablet.
“Wait…hang on. That was my first year with the label…” she muttered, tapping on her tablet. “Here it is. Jeez, I remember that meeting—that’s when Bobby John suggested you’d sell more records if you didn’t have a girlfriend. Swear to god, that was stupidest thing he’d said that week.”
Luke wasn’t sure if he was meant to hear that last part.
“So you don’t think I should have pretended to be single?”
“What do you mean pretended? You two broke up.”
“That’s because she was jealous of all the attention he was getting,” Brett said.
Luke glared at him. “That’s not what happened.”
Brett shrugged and crossed his arms. “Happens all the time. Girlfriend is supportive until she has to stand on the sidelines while the star gets all the attention and no one remembers who they are and then they get jealous.
“Plus, and I hate to be a dick by pointing this out, but your career skyrocketed after you broke up. You poured all that emotional angst into your song writing—you got your first number one single off that record. The truth is, breakups are good for hit songs.”
He ignored the part about his song writing, because he wasn’t wrong. But he was wrong about Rowan. “Rowan didn’t care that I was getting all the attention. She’s not like that.”
