Page 10 of Something to Prove
“Fuck your principles, Ty. Woodrow is well connected, and?—”
“So what? It’s a hard no. And how did you know about the interview anyway?”
Toby scoffed. “You, genius. You left me a message last week about some guy named Walker Woodrow. Ring a bell?”
Oh. Right.
I raked my fingers through my hair in frustration. “Uh, yeah.”
“He called here too.”
My eyes bugged out of my skull. “He called you?”
“I didn’t return the call. You know I don’t deal with influencers directly.”
I released a jagged breath of relief.Thank fuck.
“Good.”
“But I did my homework, and this is nice exposure for you. So nice that I ran it by the Jackals’ PR team. They loved it more than me. Turns out Walker’s mom was a big-deal journalist who?—”
“That’s nice, but my message to you was a heads-up. That’s it. I’m not doing that interview, and I’m not changing my mind.”
Toby growled into the phone. “Don’t be a dumbshit, Czerniak. You might be a big fish in your small pond now, but you’re an untested rookie in the pros. No one knows you from Adam.”
“They will…eventually,” I replied, squinting at the contractor knocking down a bathroom wall on my flat-screen.
That earned me a dramatic sigh. “You’re missing the bigger picture here. A, Woodrow has a huge platform to reach a wider market than most rookies get. B, early positive publicity is a good thing. This would be a walk in the park for you. I admit that you’re vaguely charming when you’re not testing my fragile patience. Show a wider audience of hockey fans who you are—a skilled player who’s not bone ugly.”
“Gosh, I think that was a compliment.”
“No, this is me pointing out the obvious. And sometimes that means you gotta do shit that doesn’t appeal to you. It’s part of the game, kid. Do the right thing, will ya?”
The right thing.
“Jesus.”
“Do you want to set this up on your own time, or do you want me to do it?”
“I’ll take care of it,” I grumbled.
I tossed my phone onto the sofa cushion and dropped my head between my knees. I wasn’t sure how a simple, run-of-the-mill BJ had resulted in total mayhem, but this was not good.
CHAPTER 5
TY
The best way todeal with this bullshit was to face it head-on. If Walker had any grand plans for extortion, I wanted to know…so I could personally assure him that karma was on my side and hungry for vengeance. I didn’t want to waste a single second worrying about what he could do to my career.
Christ, had he taken pics?
I looked up Walker’s contact info and left a direct message for him on his site.
Meet me at Coffee Cave at nine a.m. sharp. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll find out where you live and hunt you down. This is not a joke.
He responded with a thumbs-up emoji. That was it.
I didn’t get the impression that Walker was a man of few words, so I spent a minute reading into the casual emoji. But that was silly. Overthinking wasn’t going to do me any good. I just needed a face-to-face chat with the slippery little shit to see why the hell he’d followed me into that alley.