Scott set his briefcase down beside the battered wooden kitchen chair facing the desk and sat down with deliberate caution. “I was in a business meeting. But Jess is perfectly capable of directing a segment on her own.”
Gina looked him up and down, from his impeccably cut and groomed hair to his polished hand-stitched English oxfords. “You look very nice.”
“Thank you,” Scott said, fingering the tie. “So do you. Look, Gina, let’s cut the drawing-room comedy, please. What’s going on? Why are you skulking around in my office?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “I wouldn’t call waiting for you in your office skulking. The door wasn’t locked. Why, do you have something to hide?”
He sighed. “You’ve been reading my memos.”
“Nuh-uh,” Gina said. “Just the résumé. Although that in itself was quite a revelation. I never realized you were the creator of Fresh Start.”
He waved his hand in dismissal. “That’s just résumé-building. Nobody takes that stuff seriously.”
“I do,” she said. “And I didn’t realize I should have been building my own instead of concentrating on my piddly little job here.”
He stood up and closed the office door, then sat back down.
“I was going to talk to you. Today. After I got back from my meeting. I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way.”
“Find out what?” She felt like screaming. But she’d never been much of a screamer. “What’s going on with the show, Scott?”
“God,” Scott said. He crossed and recrossed his legs, then leaned forward and took Gina’s hands in his.
“I’ve been in a meeting with the Tastee-Town people all morning. It’s not good news, Geen. Wiley wants to pull the plug on the show.”
Tastee-Town Foods was the sponsor of Fresh Start with Regina Foxton. What had started as a mom-and-pop grocery store in Hahira, Georgia, in the early 1960s had evolved into a multistate publicly traded supermarket chain with outlets all over the Southeast. Wiley Bickerstaff III was the grandson of the founder of Tastee-Town. And the current CEO.
Gina was stunned. “But…Wiley loves me. He loves the show. He had me cater his fiftieth birthday party last spring. He’s been selling the cookbook in all the stores in Georgia. I was the guest speaker at his Rotary Club meeting last month. He invited me to lunch at the Piedmont Driving Club two weeks ago. He never said a word.”
She rolled her chair around to within inches of Scott’s. “Wiley Bickerstaff loves me! This must be a misunderstanding.”
“Yeah,” Scott said bitterly. “He’s nuts for you. He just doesn’t love the show anymore. Talk about passive-aggressive behavior. Wiley always wants to be everybody’s buddy. He left it up to me to be the bearer of bad news.”
Gina stood up abruptly. “Scott, when were you going to tell me? After you’d already fired every single functional member of the crew and hired on a bunch of teenagers? Or were you going to tell me after you had me substituting Spam for pork tenderloin?”
“Hey!” Scott said sharply. “I was trying to protect you. I still thought until this morning that there might be some way to salvage the show. That’s why I slashed the personnel and grocery budget. To try to show Wiley we could still produce a viable product for a reasonable amount of money.”
“And?” Gina said.
Scott’s shoulders slumped. “No go. Tastee-Town’s new marketing director is under the mistaken impression that their advertising dollars could be better spent elsewhere. They’re putting all their money on NASCAR racing.”
“So that’s it? We’ll be off the air?”
Scott sat back in his own chair. “Looks like it. I’m really sorry, Geen. I’ve been putting out feelers, hoping we’d line up a new sponsor, but right now, I’m not optimistic.”
“I guess not,” she said. “Since you’re obviously hunting for a new job.”
“That’s not fair,” he said, looking hurt. “And before you go off half-cocked, accusing me of abandoning you, you should know that since Wiley started making noises about dumping the show, I’ve pitched you all over the country. Sent Fresh Start tapes every place I could think of. I didn’t tell you anything because I didn’t want to distract you from making the best show possible.”
“Oh.” Now she felt like a heel. First for spying on him, and second, for coming this close to accusing him of disloyalty, when all he’d been doing was looking out for her best interests.
“Scotty,” she whispered, coming over and sitting down on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I had no right—”