The Perfect Score
The long and heated conference finally call comes to an abrupt end.
Taking a deep breath, as he irritably rakes his fingers through his hair, Mark Peters sits back in his tufted leather office chair.
His lover’s jinx had struck yet again, and for the second time in less than six months, he’d been betrayed by another woman looking for her five minutes of stardom, via the press.
He’d been seen entering a hotel with her. Cameras had flashed as he left alone, but apparently she later strutted out to meet the hungry reporters who were dying for any information she was willing to offer about their tryst—and boy had she offered them a feast…
The opened daily newspaper link emailed to him by his colleagues showed her Cheshire Cat grin as she practically gave them a pay-by-play of what they’d just finished doing, and even let on that they had met at a strip club where she had been working the pole extra hard the night she caught his eye.
Ordinarily, blunders like this would cause one due embarrassment, but swiftly be swept under a rug in order to make room for better decisions (or more private locations) in the future, but that was not the case for Mark Peters.
This slip-up wasn’t just his blunder.
No error was his sole responsibility when he was the “Peters” in Jefferson, Peters, and Lloyd Productions.
His two college-buddies-turned-partners, Eric Jefferson, and Michael Lloyd, were everything Mark was not, and he had no problem admitting to it. They were responsible, hard working, respectable, mature…
Mark was still a frat boy in every sense of the term, preferring to work little and play hard.
Truth was, as much as he hated shouldering the responsibility of upholding the company name, he knew how much he needed his partners. He also knew his life would be over if they delivered on their threat, only moments ago during the conference call, to cut him off and kick him out.
He’d be the joke of his industry. Who would want to hire a failed producer, shunned by his founding partners for being a flagrant gigolo?
Sighing again, he cursed the senseless stripper underneath his breath.
Was it really a crime for him to want to try to erase the years spent shackled to a woman he’d only married because she’d gotten pregnant after their first few (careful) months together? Should he go rushing back into another marriage (which was akin to imprisonment to him), in order to uphold the company name, and act as the other partners expected?
Turning to face his reflection in the tinted office windows, he studies himself.
At the age of fifty-three, he was still a “stud”, as the ladies called him. He took good care of himself (went to the gym several times a week, and even went running some mornings). He wasn’t a smoker, and only drank during social events.
He was a good-looking man, with sandy-brown hair streaked with gray, and hazel eyes. His muscular body, along with his clean-shaven face, gave him the look of a man not quite yet approaching forty. All of this (plus the fact that he had a career that got him into any private party or club, not to mention loads of money to spend) made him a hot commodity amongst the ladies, and while he knew he hadn’t made the wisest choices when it came to them, he also knew he could not quit sampling them so readily.
That had been the deal: if another troublemaker threatened to tarnish the company’s reputation with his name on the tip of their tongues, he was through at JP&L, and instead of dumping his initial, they’d just replace him with his ex-wife, Caroline—who had refused to drop his surname after the divorce.
A knock at his double doors
Nathan Shumate (Editor)
Alexia Stark
Pamela Labud
William Mitchell
Katy Regnery
The Scoundrel
Claire Delacroix
M. G. Higgins
Heather Graham
Nikki Godwin