Jason Page 4

  Jason had ignored her comment. He had the best in the industry, and Mallory was his assistant. She didn’t know a fraction of what those men knew. She’d said it again during editing, and again he hadn’t listened. Neither had Neil. “The gaffer knows what he is doing,” he’d assured Jason.

  Funny how no one seemed to remember that now. Mallory was right. And yet, she never threw it back at him. In fact, she’d been very encouraging when he’d mentioned the review in The Atlantic. “You’re missing the bigger picture,” she’d said. And then she’d had their publicity department pull together several reviews to demonstrate that most were good and did not mention poor lighting. “Story is the thing,” she’d said. “That’s what has to be on point. You can have the best production values in the world, but if you don’t have a good story, you lose.”

  He had discovered that she could be surprisingly astute about this crazy industry sometimes, especially for an assistant with no experience. Jason knew he was being paranoid about the reviews, but no one in his industry or his company understood what a big deal this Netflix production was for him.

  It was everything.

  First, he’d had to borrow money from the family coffers to get his entertainment company off the ground. There had been conditions to that—his entertainment company had to be branded as part of the Blackthorne suite of businesses. And Blackthornes didn’t put their name on just anything, as he’d been reminded over and over again all his life.

  The Blackthorne brand had begun more than one hundred years ago when his great grandparents emigrated from Scotland, bringing their secret to distilling good whisky with them. Over the next one hundred years, the Blackthorne brand had become synonymous with excellence. No one made better whisky than the Blackthorne distillery. No one in the world, to hear his family tell it.

  Jason’s uncle Graham, his brother Brock, and his cousin, Trey, had been hard on Jason when he’d come to Blackthorne Enterprises to ask them to invest in his production company so he could get it off the ground. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone he was asking—Jason had been pursuing this avenue of life for years. And yet, he got the lecture. He would never forget that day, the way he’d stared out the window of the Blackthorne Enterprise offices in the Hancock Tower in Boston, at the sweeping views of Back Bay, the Charles River, and Boston Harbor. “The Blackthornes don’t put their name on just anything, Jason. If you see the name Blackthorne, you expect excellent quality.”

  “This isn’t reality television, Uncle Graham,” Jason had said, a little defensively. “Are you saying you don’t think I am capable of delivering quality?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Uncle Graham had said patiently. “I’m saying that what you do has to be in line with our brand, that’s all. And to me, that would mean a program that is capable of winning awards. Art, as it were.”

  Award-winning art? That was the litmus test? In any given season, dozens of scripts might get tapped by a studio. From those, maybe a third would be made into pilots, and of those, maybe as many as two would be ordered to series. Sometimes none. It was damn hard to get picked up, and Jason had done it. Not to mention, creativity didn’t flow into neat little packages of award-winning art or trash TV. There were so many things to consider, like the networks and platforms that would take his project and air it. There were so many moving parts, so many things that had to fall in line for this to happen, and the last thing Jason needed was a new bar to hurdle.

  “What Uncle Graham is saying is that if it’s a bust, we’re taking our name and money from the project. That’s all.” This had come from Jason’s younger brother Brock. Brock must have noticed the withering look Jason gave him because he’d smiled and said, “Hey, I totally believe in you, Jase.”

  “Gee, thanks, Brock.”

  “We’ll need to have the Blackthorne logo on everything you do,” Brock had added.

  “Like what?” Jason had asked suspiciously.

  “I don’t know…opening and closing credits? Stationary, payroll, that sort of thing.” Jason must have been looking at him like he’d lost his mind because Brock said, “I don’t know what all. You tell me.”

  The whole meeting had pricked at Jason. It wasn’t as if he was going to go out and make a reality show, or push something to air that was under-written, overproduced, or poorly acted. It’s like he told Mallory that night in his office when they were watching the dailies of the final episode of the first season. “This is exactly what I tried to explain to my family. You start with the vision. You see the characters, you see the narrative arc, right? And you build from there. You can’t say at the onset it’s going to look exactly like this,” he’d said, gesturing at the screen. “This is a work in progress and it slowly builds to what it is. We made that happen.”

  “I totally get it,” Mallory had said. She’d sounded almost dreamy. She’d looked pretty damn dreamy. But then again, they’d had a lot of wine.

  Yeah, that night. Jason thought about it again, for what had to be the millionth time since it had happened. He’d had a buzz, and he could remember wondering what else Mallory got, and how fucking amazing she looked in that red dress she was wearing, or how her eyes were so blue through her dark-rimmed glasses, and how she always looked half prosecutor, half vixen. She was always adjusting those glasses to take notes. And she was always taking notes. Jason had never known anyone as organized as Mallory Price.

  “You do?” he’d asked her that night, like he didn’t believe her. “You really get it?”

  Mallory had looked at him with surprise, then had held his gaze a long moment. A tiny hint of a smile had tipped up one corner of her mouth. “Yes, Jason, I do. I really do.”

  He didn’t know how or why she’d ended up straddling him, but he remembered the way her blue eyes had slid down to his mouth, and how fast he was hard. He remembered the way her breast felt to the palm of his hand. How dense, yet light. He remembered that feeling like a bomb had gone off in him. And he’d been ready to put her on the floor, right there in his office, as someone on the dailies droned on about finding the body on a warehouse floor in a pool of red blood, Jason could feel the red blood in his body, red with desire, spreading through him with the quickness of light.

  He had kissed her neck, had felt the flutter of her pulse beneath his lips, and her heat radiate through his hand and up his arm.

  Jason had played that night over and over in his mind so many times, alternating between lustful thoughts and remorse, hoping he had not done anything to take advantage of a very late night after a very long day. But sometimes, he looked at Mallory and he just wanted her. He always felt so connected to her in a strange way—his disorganization didn’t seem to faze her. Her instincts very often matched his. And she was so incredibly desirable. There was a constant air of anticipation when they were in the same room, and that night, it had all come together, and he’d been desperate with want.

  Jason hadn’t intended it to happen—now he was sounding like Darien in his own head—but he truly hadn’t, and that it had happened had surprised him as much as it had surprised her. He could remember having the idea that he ought to drop his hands and move her off his lap, but he’d been invigorated by the scent of vanilla and roses, and his body had hardened, his erection pressing against her thigh. He was too enthralled by what was happening, and he had let his thoughts take flight, imagining them making love in some sultry bedroom lighting, a scene for the ages. He supposed that’s why he’d lifted her up and put her on the conference table.

  “She was killed with this knife. Looks like she might have been stabbed a dozen or more times in the neck and face.”

  It had been the dialogue from the dailies, still playing. Who cares? Jason had thought, but Mallory had all but gasped in his mouth and had pulled away. She looked at the little screen and then back at Jason. “In the neck and face? That seems a bit much. I think we should edit that.” And her lips curved into a wonderfully Cheshire little smile of pleasure, and she’d slipped away from
him.

  And that was that.

  They’d never mentioned it again. Specifically, Mallory had not. Jason had waited for her to say something, if not that night, then the day after. And the day after that. But she’d never said a word. She’d acted like it hadn’t happened, and therefore, so had he. Like he’d imagined the whole thing.

  But Jason thought about it. Real or imagined, he thought about it a lot. He was hyper-aware of Mallory every time she was near. It was as if there was a taut string tethering them to each other.

  Yeah, well, given what had happened with Darien and that girl from Calabasas, Jason definitely needed to put Mallory from his mind.

  He picked up his jog again, and ran back to the estate to shower. When he was dressed, he answered some emails that had been sent overnight from L.A., then made his way to the kitchen.

  He was whipping up a smoothie when his cousin Devlin sauntered in. He stopped when he saw Jason. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Jason said, switching off the blender. “Please don’t tell me you don’t remember I was cheering you on in the race.”

  “Of course I remember, idiot,” Devlin said with a playful slap to the back of Jason’s head. “But I thought you’d left.”

  “A better question is, what are you doing here?” Jason asked.

  “I just stopped by to pick up a couple of things and check in on Nana.” He picked up some mail from the counter and leafed through it.

  “Have you heard from Aunt Claire?” Jason asked.

  Devlin shook his head.

  A little more than two weeks ago, the family had gathered to celebrate Aunt Claire’s sixtieth birthday. Jason had had a work crisis in the middle of it—the sound editor was leaving for another gig without notice—so Jason had been a little preoccupied, and had spent most of the night on the terrace on his phone. He didn’t know what had happened to spark Aunt Claire, but when he stepped back inside, Aunt Claire had changed clothes and was standing in the door with a suitcase at her feet. Jason didn’t hear all what she said, but he could see she and Uncle Graham were at odds, and as he moved into the room, he heard her say, “I’m done putting my life on hold. I've been by your side, in your shadow for way too long. I've kept your secret, even when I knew I shouldn't. It's too much. I can't do it anymore."

  Jason wasn’t sure what happened next, because his phone had started to ring, and he’d stepped out on the terrace to silence it. When he stepped back in, Aunt Claire was gone and Uncle Graham was telling everyone she was just trying to get through a milestone birthday.

  They’d all stood in shock for a long moment, and then everyone was talking at once. Phillip was laughing like it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

  Well, it was more than facing a milestone birthday, apparently, because that had been a couple weeks ago, and she was still gone. The only thing any of them knew was that she was in Paris. Jason had reached out a few times, but she never responded to his texts or calls.

  “So is anyone going to talk to her?” Jason asked Devlin.

  “Not right now,” he said. “Dad won’t go talk to her, and that’s who needs to go. Right now, she just wants a little space.”

  “From us,” Jason said.

  “From everything,” Devlin said. He tossed the mail back onto the counter. “How long are you going to be around?”

  “A couple of weeks.” That’s what he hoped. He was going to try and manage the Darien crisis from here. The Netflix brass predictably wanted the issue resolved as soon as possible, especially with Emmy nominations coming up in a couple of months. They’d invested a considerable amount of money in a For Your Consideration campaign plan to garner some Bad Intentions nominations. Something like this could definitely derail a carefully planned campaign.

  “Good morning.”

  Devlin and Jason turned toward the door as Uncle Graham strolled into the kitchen. He was nattily dressed, in slim khaki slacks and a crisp white collared shirt.

  “Hi, Uncle Graham,” Jason said.

  “Hey, Dad,” Devlin said. “Back to Boston today?”

  “Leaving just as soon as I speak to Mother. I need to get out of here, though. The weather is supposed to turn.”

  “It is?” Jason had really hoped to finish some of the location work today. He was falling behind schedule—a schedule that was all out of whack after just a few days without Mallory to helm it.

  “Batten down the hatches, Jase!” Devlin said, and playfully clapped Jason on the shoulder. “It’s supposed to be a big one.” He said goodbye to them both and left with a hearty, “See you at the Vault!”

  When Devlin had left, Graham braced his hands against the bar and leaned forward slightly and settled a fatherly gaze of concern on Jason. His uncle had adopted this habit when Jason’s own father and mother had been killed in a plane crash, and he and his brothers had been taken in by their aunt and uncle. Seven boys under one roof. Seven distinct personalities. No wonder Jason felt like he’d bled into the wallpaper.

  “So you’ve got a bit of a problem,” Uncle Graham said.

  Jason shook his head. “If you’re talking about Darien Simmons, I fired him. My assistant should be here this afternoon and we’ll start the process of getting someone new on board.”

  “I’m glad you took action quickly, but that hasn’t stopped the tabloids from calling the Blackthorne press office and asking for comment.”

  “What?” Jason asked reflexively. He’d specifically told Marlene, the Blackthorne Entertainment publicist, to get out in front of it and shield Blackthorne Enterprises. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. We are getting ahead of it, Uncle Graham. We’ll recast as soon as possible.”

  Uncle Graham nodded. He walked to the fridge, opened it, and took out a bottle of Perrier. “By the way, I saw the first episode of your show.”

  There had been so much going on with the Southern Maine Sailing Invitational last week that no one had mentioned Jason’s show. He felt a knot form in the pit of his stomach, the same knot he always got before someone passed judgment on his work. “What’d you think?”

  “Pretty good,” Uncle Graham said. “It certainly held my interest.”

  Well, it wasn’t exactly enthusiastic praise. But it wasn’t damning praise, either, and Jason would take it. “It’s getting some good buzz.”

  “Good. I wondered about that. I happened to see a review that called it Pulp Fiction for millennials. Whatever that means.”

  Fantastic. Jason hadn’t seen that one yet. There was nothing he enjoyed quite like hearing a new bad review. “We’re sitting at 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and that’s pretty remarkable for a new series—”

  “I have confidence in you, Jason. I just want you to make sure none of this is going to come back on the Blackthorne name.”

  “I know,” Jason said tightly.

  “Something like this opens you up for lawsuits, as I am sure you know. It can be very costly very quickly if you aren’t proactive.”

  “I know, Uncle Graham.”

  He nodded. “Too bad about Darien Simmons. I really liked him in Comes the Night.”

  “Everyone did. He’s a great actor. Too bad he’s got an issue keeping his fly shut.”

  “Yes, too bad. You can never guess a man’s sexual predilections, can you? But that kind of scandal with less than fantastic ratings?” He shook his head. “Not good.”

  “We don’t have mediocre ratings,” Jason said sharply. “We really don’t have any ratings. This show just started airing. You have to give people time to get invested.” He realized that he was arguing about the efficacy of some stupid score on Rotten Tomatoes and then arguing it didn’t matter, but Uncle Graham always put him back on his heels.

  “I didn’t say they were mediocre. I said they weren’t fantastic. You know, like one of those Avenger movies.”

  Why did it always feel like Blackthorne Enterprises was pointing a finger at him? Sometimes, this business with the Blackthorne na
me was too much. It was never about accomplishments, it was always about whatever he was doing had better be damn good. He better not even think about besmirching the sacred Blackthorne name.

  Uncle Graham was watching him, his brow furrowed. “Did I say something wrong?”

  Jason shook his head. “It’s a good show. It’s not campy, it’s not trashy. It’s gritty and real and the people at Netflix love it. Darien, we’ll deal with. And a bad review here and there is to be expected—you can’t please everyone all the time, Uncle Graham. From my perspective, it’s going well.”

  “That’s great to hear. But we both know if you lose a star, you lose money. That’s just the way things go.” He shrugged. He looked at his watch. “I need to get on the road. Check in on your grandmother while you’re here, okay?”

  “Sure,” Jason said. The last time he’d “checked in on” Nana, she’d ended up pouring him into his bed, laughing at how he couldn’t hold his whisky.

  “All right, Jason, I’ll see you soon.” Uncle Graham picked up his Perrier and went out the kitchen door, taking the path down to Nana’s cottage.

  Jason watched him go. Maybe he was defensive, but it always felt like he was held to a higher standard than his cousins or brothers. Phillip, his older brother, just made everything into a prank and laughed about it. And Brock, well, he took it to the other extreme. He was so into the Blackthorne image that he made Jason’s art department redo the thistle logo a dozen times before he’d get off their ass.

  He shook his head.

  When was Mallory getting in? She’d remind him of all the positive news they were getting, of the critical acclaim—at least he hoped there was some critical acclaim. If there was any good news floating around, Mallory would find it. She always had his back that way. She had a lot of positive energy, and she would want to get this Darien thing behind them as quickly as possible.

  He paused in the middle of draining his glass. Did he really call her at three thirty? He’d make it up to her. He’ll get dinner ordered in or something like that. Maybe ask Pam O’Reilly, the housekeeper, if she could arrange something.