Page 115 of Home Grown Talent
Slowly, Naomi opened her eyes.
For a moment, she was silent. Then she took a deep breath and said, very clearly, “Owen Hunter has never bullied me… But Misty Watson-King has. Since the moment I started working for her as an unpaid intern.”
Leah gaped at her.
Naomi plunged on grimly.
“It’s true what Mason said. When Owen refused to lie about the pineapples, Misty made Mason shoot extra footage and then edited it to make it look like the plants in the greenhouse were Owen’s. She said it didn’t matter whether it was real or not because the Weekend Wellness audience was too stupid to know the difference.”
“Now, hang on,” Marc said.
Suddenly, a security guard blundered onto the set. He stepped towards the sofa, and Naomi quickly stood up and took several paces back. The security guard followed, grabbing for her and taking hold of her arm.
Naomi blinked big, frightened eyes at him. She looked very young in her pinafore dress and ponytail, and the security guard’s hand looked massive curled around her slender arm.
“Oh my God,” Lewis said in Owen’s ear and began laughing. “This just keeps getting better!”
Owen watched in astonishment as the security guard tugged at Naomi, trying to pull her off-screen—and bloody hell, Naomi resisted him! She pulled back as the guard tried to haul her away, looking straight at Leah as she said, “Misty Watson-King is a bully. You know it, Leah. She bullies everyone, no matter how hard they work. She makes unreasonable demands because she knows that if we want to work in this industry—”
The screen went blank. After a moment, the velvet tones of a continuity announcer came on. “We seem to be having some technical issues with Weekend Wellness this week. So, instead, let's see what’s happening on tonight’s episode of Celebrity Cook-Off…”
“Holy shit!” Lewis crowed down the phone line. “They actually pulled the plug!” His voice sounded tinny and distant because Owen had let his hand fall to his side as he’d watched the chaos unfold in utter disbelief. He lifted the phone back to his ear just as Lewis said, “What a fucking shitshow. That was brilliant!”
All Owen could think about, though, was Mason. Where he was, what they might have done to him, how he might be feeling.
And how Owen had treated him.
Instead of listening to Mason, he’d let the banshee wails of social media frighten him. Instead of believing in him, he’d assumed the very worst. And instead of loving him, he’d turned his back and walked away.
To Lewis he said, “What do I do now?”
With surprising gentleness, Lewis said, “Do you really need me to tell you?”
And of course, Owen didn’t. His heart knew exactly what to do, and he was already reaching for the keys to his van when his brother added, “Go and get him, you idiot.”
He was on the road before he even knew where he was going.
He considered driving up to the RPP studio, but Mason would probably be long gone by the time he got there, so in the end, he drove to Mason’s flat in Clapham, parking a couple of streets away and feeding all his spare change into the meter.
He jogged down the steps to the front door of Mason’s garden flat and rang the bell, then knocked on the door for good measure. No answer. For a few beats, he stood there, unsure what to do. Maybe he should have gone to the studio after all? But no, he was pretty sure Misty would have had Mason chucked off the set by now. Might he have gone somewhere else? To a friend’s? His family? Owen wasn’t sure that either of his parents were likely to be sympathetic about what Mason had just done…
Stop being a fucking coward—you have his number.
Sitting down on the bottom step, Owen pulled out his phone and navigated to the long thread of messages they’d exchanged over the last weeks and months. The last twenty or more were all from Mason, all of them unanswered—message after message begging Owen to just let him explain.
Owen’s gut squirmed with guilt and regret as he thumbed through them, reflecting on some of the uncomfortable truths he’d had to face over the last few days. Like the fact that he was, apparently, a control freak.
Provided he was in control of a situation, he had no problem putting others’ needs first—in fact, that was his natural reaction. If he looked back over his life, he could see that he had indeed taken on the role of knight in shining armour on more than a few occasions. And yeah, it was a role he’d quickly fallen into with Mason when he’d agreed to do Weekend Wellness.
But Owen’s problem wasn’t when he was playing the saviour role. It was when he was the one who needed help. When he had to trust someone else, rely on someone else. When that happened—well, that was when he brought down the shutters. Did his “brick wall thing” as Lewis had called it, shutting out even the people who meant most to him in the world.
Sitting there, at the bottom of Mason’s steps, Owen faced a truth that made his heart pound and his palms sweat: maybe he wasn’t as strong as he’d always believed himself to be. Because being strong wasn’t always about galloping in on a white horse to save the day. Sometimes, it was about making yourself vulnerable. Sometimes, the strongest thing you could do was admit that you’d been wrong, that you’d made a mistake, knowing that all you’d get for your pains was criticism and public humiliation.
Owen’s eyes stung with sudden tears as he thought of Mason on TV this morning, sitting alone in the RPP studio on that huge sofa with no one to look out for him. No one to cheer him on. In fact, pretty much everyone had tried to close him down, but he’d kept on going, exposing his own flaws in the process.
Wiping his eyes, Owen began typing a message to Mason.
I’m so sorry. I need to see you. Please tell me where you—