Cates Bride Back Fat: See the Pics popped up on his phone screen. There was a picture, obviously altered, of Marj in a strapless gown with a bulge of back fat above the seam. It seemed like every middle school bully suddenly had a blog and PhotoShop and nothing better to do than target Marj.
So managing his meetings on the Dubai deal were actually far less troubling than the firestorm of media scrutiny on his bride. He’d been advised by the publicist (the same one who made him get a spray tan) not to tell the press to back off, not to seem defensive. It was almost impossible to listen. In light of all the dreadful things being said about her—that she was only after his money, that she was ugly and fat and stupid and probably had a contagious disease—he cringed when she called him back, hoping his anguish over the blogs didn’t show when they Skyped.
She was still plenty mad about their night out, and he couldn’t really blame her, but he was tired of hearing about it and thinking about it. He had to protect her and try to clean up her reputation without letting her know that this was going on. He’d instructed the IT guy to block TMZ and a couple of other sites from the house network. If she wanted to look at celeb gossip she’d have to go to Starbuck’s and use their Internet. He had taken the precaution of having his secretary notify Britt and ask her not to tell Marj about the negativity in the press about her. He tried to safeguard her from every possible angle. She would still find out, but he wanted it to be later rather than sooner.
When she called, instead of being glad to see her face, since he missed her enough to order coffee, he felt annoyed. He was spending most of his waking hours trying to put down negative online outbursts about her, and she was rather ungratefully complaining about her boredom and neglect. He wasn’t about to tell her that he was spending his time in Dubai largely working on protecting her because it would defeat the purpose.
Still, it wounded him that she thought him indifferent and was starting to have sympathy for Lena, whom she’d once dubbed the Wicked Queen and vowed to help him defeat. He missed the days when they were partners in crime like that, when they weren’t working at cross purposes and all alone as they were now.
He thought about sending her flowers or a present—it’s what he’d always seen his dad do when Lena was angry—but she hadn’t responded all that well to the diamond necklace. He had never heard of a woman who didn’t like to be given diamonds when he messed up. But Marj was different, which was both the best and worst thing about her. She wasn’t like anyone else, but that made her unsettling, unpredictable. He left the hotel room to meet with Charles, the VP from the London office who’d come out to help with the closing. They were determined to find a pizza or something in this town that didn’t have curry powder added. Charles had a phone full of photos of his wife and two adorable kids. The thought of those pictures gave Brandon a headache, possibly from a bad case of jealousy.
He had no idea how to protect Marj from public scrutiny and still keep her content with him. It was a balancing act he had no experience at. He was used to handling business deals worth tens of millions of dollars, the jobs of hundreds of American and overseas workers hanging in the balance. He managed it handily, making sure every detail was handled with meticulous care, with the appearance of it all being effortless. He was a natural at that, at ordering the lives of thousands, at bringing in surges of capital at just the right moment to secure a deal or save a project.
He wasn’t just the public face of Power Regions. He was a veritable king. Scores of people depended on him, and he wore that mantle of responsibility easily, flawlessly. It was the weight of one woman’s expectations that threatened to break him. Because a personal relationship, a marriage, was far outside his comfort zone, far beyond his expertise. He might be brilliant at inspiring confidence at a corporate level. In matters of the heart, he struggled. He felt—stunted. As if he had never developed whatever skill he now so desperately needed—empathy perhaps or some kind of interpersonal communications ability he’d never honed.
Brandon’s previous relationships had been superficial at best. A fancy dinner or two, a lavish weekend getaway not unlike the Mexico trip he took Marj on, a few weeks of carefree sex. Then he’d be too busy with work and stop returning calls and texts, and the women would just fade away without drama. It was pleasant that way, no confrontation, no arguments. Just a slow freeze out and he’d never think of them again. He enjoyed his freedom and not answering to anybody.
It was, in Brandon’s world, way past time for the fade out with Marj. Except for the truly inconvenient fact that he wanted to keep her around. Not just because of his family’s company and securing that inheritance, but because she was so different. She wasn’t like anyone else he’d ever known. Her energy, her irreverence, her resilience. She was necessary to him. That was what he was afraid of. Brandon had a creeping awareness that she was becoming a needed, indispensable part of his life. He felt off balance and grouchy because she was unhappy with him. He wanted to tell her he was totally justified in being busy since he was mostly busy trying to slap libel lawsuits on anyone who called her a slut online or in print media. He had alerts set for whenever her name appeared in the same post, comment or tweet with a host of unflattering words like “whore” and “gold digger”. So far, slut was winning by thousands. Odd, considering how rich he was, but apparently nothing beat a nice misogynistic insult when trolls were acting up.