First, she rang up the bar and spoke to the owner.
“Mr. Rivera apologizes for the damage,” she said, putting words in David’s mouth. “We’d be happy to cover the bill for any repairs. Please send it straight to me.”
The bar owner guffawed, loud and long. “Naw, don’t worry. I’m making the dipshits pay for it, the ones who started it. Your guy was just having a beer and watching the rugby until Bruiser decided to prove his dick was bigger. Picked the wrong mark this time.”
David had gone up against someone named Bruiser? Not only that, he’d come out of the altercation better off? And both Fox’s use of the word “guys” and the bar owner’s of “dipshits” meant Bruiser hadn’t been David’s only opponent.
Thea was having difficulty comprehending any of this. Of all the men in the band, David was the most stable. He was the one who made the band a family—and she wasn’t sure any of the four men even realized it. David was the calm center in the midst of the storm, rooted and so sure of who he was that nothing could shake him.
He did not get into bar fights.
He did not put Thea in the position of having to clean up after him.
He did not end up in jail with a black eye and bruised ribs.
Except he’d done exactly that. “Here are my contact details just in case,” she said to the bar owner, not about to allow her frustration and shock to stop her from doing her job. “You’ll probably get some media attention—”
“Already spoke to a few reporters,” the man replied cheerfully. “Phone’s been ringing off the hook.”
Thea slapped a hand silently over her forehead and bit back a groan. She was seriously going to strangle David. “Well,” she said, trying to salvage what she could of the situation, “if you need any assistance dealing with them—”
The bar owner interrupted her again. “Naw, I can handle it. I told them the drummer guy beat the crap out of the bozos who were hassling him. That boy learned his moves somewhere where they don’t fight pretty, that’s for sure.”
Thea released a relieved breath, the publicist in her immediately seeing the positive angle. Yes, the Gentleman of Rock had been in a bar fight against locals, but he hadn’t started it and he’d come out of it the victor against multiple opponents. Everyone liked the underdog who’d beaten the bullies. Especially when the underdog was a sexy, straight-arrow rock star who generally stayed out of the media spotlight.
So she played that angle, laughed good-naturedly with reporters as she gently nudged things in the direction she wanted them to go. Then, logging into David’s main social-media account—which he usually only used to answer fan questions—she pretended to be him and began to type out a message.
He could yell at her later. Not that David ever yelled. But he’d made it clear she was only ever to touch his account if he was held up somewhere and fans were waiting for a concert, or something else equally important. As far as Thea was concerned, this qualified.
“Damn it,” she muttered, erasing what she’d already written to start all over again. A laughing, smirking admission wouldn’t work, wouldn’t sound like David. But she couldn’t allow him to maintain radio silence, not this time. The print and online media could still spin the story the wrong way if she didn’t give them another angle bolstered by fan support.
That boy learned his moves somewhere where they don’t fight pretty, that’s for sure.
The memory of the bar owner’s admiring statement made her mind click. Fingers to the keyboard of the lightweight laptop that acted as her virtual office, she wrote: I guess no one told them I was born and raised in the South Bronx.
There, she thought, that was David. No explanations, just a proud shout-out to his old neighborhood, a neighborhood his parents and siblings continued to call home. Of course, his folks and younger brothers were no longer in a shoebox apartment in a tenement building, but on the top floor of a spacious new five-story complex. Because David was a man who respected the meaning of family—the one he’d created with the band and the one into which he’d been born.
She knew he’d offered to move his family to a more gentrified area of New York and an even nicer place, but the Riveras liked their part of the Bronx and didn’t want to “sit on their asses all day, mooching off their son.” David had said that to her, paraphrasing his parents, when he’d told her his folks had no intention of retiring; the admiration and affection in his tone had made her want to kiss him.
In quiet respect for their pride, he’d bought the complex, then convinced Vicente and Alicia Rivera that he needed them as live-in managers. They were meant to oversee the small staff that took care of any physical maintenance, but his father apparently couldn’t help himself at times, and neither could his mother. Their building not only had a thriving rooftop garden but was so spick-and-span that there was a waiting list of potential tenants.