I was definitely single again, since my fiancée, Tina, had officially called off our engagement. But like I told the guys, our relationship wasn’t exactly a fairytale, so it wasn’t really a fucking shock that a sex tape scandal pushed her over the edge.
And it definitely wasn’t a surprise that the media was all over it, either.
They just loved to chronicle every moment of my glamorous, billionaire bachelor lifestyle. And they loved it even harder, apparently, when I fucked up. They loved it when I dated. They loved it when I got engaged. They loved it when I got dumped.
They loved it when they found out that they—along with my fiancée and the rest of the world—could see me fucking in an online video.
And they’d love it when I took a business meeting in public with a group of businesswomen, dressed in a bespoke Brioni suit and looking impervious to the world’s judgment, days before a women-in-media gala event, and days after a leaked sex tape hit the web.
They’d love anything they could morph into a splashy headline. (“Sex tape billionaire charms female CEOs”?)
No matter what I did in my personal life, I was quintessential media fodder, even before the big scandal.
But three days ago, when that sex tape went public, my status as a semi-famous person turned sour for the first time in my life.
Sure, people had sex. Even billionaire bachelors. Big surprise.
But they didn’t do it on-camera, with multiple partners at once, end up in a leaked sex tape, and expect to retain the respect of the human populace.
Including their own family’s, apparently.
Besides all the scrutiny I’d been under these last few days, probably the most humiliating part of this whole thing—worse than having my dick on the internet without my permission—was this bullshit right here: I now had ahandler. Hired by my mother. A man I’d never met before two days ago was now shadowing me along with my security team. To offer guidance and, as it turned out, criticism of my every move.
Let’s be real: he was here to make sure I behaved myself.
And of course, report back to my mother.
He sat across the restaurant, watching me in that lunch meeting. I could feel his critical eyes on the back of my neck.
He’d been flown in from London for his expertise, was clearly one of the world’s most judgmental human beings, and frowned one-hundred-percent of the time since I’d met him. His Savile Row suit was almost as expensive as mine was, he was almost as old as my grandmother, and as soon as we’d walked out of the pub this morning, he’d criticized my decision to partake of public ale drinking with the likes of Shane Madrigal.
And now, as I finished my lunch meeting and we walked out of the restaurant, he seemed to take exception to the fact that I’d sat “too close” to one of the women.
“Which one?” I asked, utterly confused. Did he mean the cougar who kept pawing at her neck and undressing me with her eyes? She was on the other side of the table.
“The one on your right.”
What the fuck?She was older than my mother. I didn’t tell the restaurant where to put the fucking chairs. And I wasn’t trying to hit on any woman in the middle of a business meeting, mere days after my fiancée dumped me and the world at large decided I was a fucking creep.
“I’ll aim to be more conscientious about where I put my ass at future meetings,” I told Sir Holier-Than-Thou. Despite the language and the thinly veiled attitude, it seemed to please him.
Hard to tell with the permafrown and the rod permanently lodged up his ass.
My fourth meeting of the afternoon was with a woman named Janelle Gorman.
I was told she was the previous owner and current manager of the Vancouver-based modeling agency that had been acquired about half a year ago by Superior Talent, one of our many properties in the talent management field.
Despite having bragged about it to Shane, just to be a dick, I didn’t actually buy the agency myself. It was just one of our many recent acquisitions. I knew virtually nothing about it other than it sounded impressive over beers with the guys.
In the car on the way to the restaurant where I was meeting with Ms. Gorman, I brushed up on the agency. My team had hastily prepared a several page summary of each company for me, so I could orient myself before each meeting. I was familiar with most of our companies, but not all, and not many on the west coast. Ninety-percent of Valhalla’s global business operated out of the Toronto area, and that was where I focused my attention.
If you asked me, we could’ve dumped everything we owned out west. More chance I’d never have to come back out here.
According to my team’s research, the agency had opened in the eighties, and Ms. Gorman herself had been signed by the agency as a model for several years. She had to be in her fifties now. She’d returned to the agency a few years ago as an agent. Then she and her wife had bought the agency from the previous owner, not quite two years ago. They’d divorced earlier this year, and her wife had left the company to start up another agency.
The history of the agency, the reputation and experience of the staff, all probably added to its value. But last year’s revenues were unimpressive.
I wasn’t involved in this particular acquisition. It was handled through one of our companies, Global One, which my mother was more involved with than I was. I had no idea why this agency was chosen; I could only assume that Superior wanted a presence on the west coast. And now they had one.
