“Max?” Candace asked in surprise when he stepped off the elevator and into the office suite. “What in the world are you doing here?”
“Great to see you too, Candace.”
She shook her head and laughed as she stood from her desk and walked around to hug him. “Sorry. It is great to see you. I just wasn’t expecting you, that’s all.”
And neither is he. That’s the point. It’s a lot more difficult to avoid someone when you don’t know they’re coming.
“How’ve you been?” he asked her, looking around and scoping the place out as he did. There were about a dozen people working in the area, and they all seemed to be taking turns looking at him in a way they no doubt thought was sneaky.
“Good. Good. And you? The beard’s new. I like it.”
“Thanks. So, is he—”
“Hello, Max.”
The voice he’d heard very rarely since being carted off to Tranquility Peaks—though before that it had been the one constant voice throughout his entire career—came from behind him. Max turned to face him.
“Hello, Leo.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Well, it’s a welfare check, more than anything. Candace has gotten so good at speaking on your behalf that I was beginning to fear she was actually holding you hostage in the break room or something.”
Leo sighed. “Come on back.”
Max followed him through the peanut gallery back to Leo’s office and couldn’t help but wonder what he had done to become such a pariah. Obviously, he knew what he had done, but why did everyone in Leo’s office care so much? As soon as Leo shut the door behind him, he decided to just cut to the chase.
“Thanks so much for all the support you gave me, Leo, while I was in Malibu. And especially since I’ve been back.”
Okay, apparently he was going to passive aggressively cut to the chase.
“Oh, you mean like the support I’ve shown by keeping your restaurant investors on board when they wanted to drop you? Or do you mean the way I’ve kept the network from firing you, full stop, after your little stunt? Maybe you’re talking about how I got you on Renowned, which, just so you know, was the single most difficult thing I’ve ever managed to pull off.”
Max laughed bitterly. “Oh yes, I’m sure that was difficult.” He didn’t doubt that there was some truth in the first two things—maybe a great deal of it. He wouldn’t know. His manager hadn’t kept him in the loop on anything. But he was resolute that he understood the situation with Renowned better than Leo ever would. There was no way anyone had had to twist Marshall Simons’s arm in order to get him to dive headfirst into the season he believed Hadley and Max were going to give him.
Leo stood toe-to-toe with Max and stuck his finger in his face, but Max had a full six inches of height on him, not to mention age and build. Max wasn’t any more intimidated by him than he had ever been.
“And don’t get me started on all the lawsuits I kept from happening.”
“Who? The network?”
“Yes, the network, for one. Your contract has a thing or two to say about you showing up at work drunk and getting drunker throughout a shoot, as you can perhaps imagine.”
“They just kept pouring the stuff.”
Max caught himself and took a deep breath. Nope. No way. He wasn’t going to allow Leo to get the better of him. Not a chance. He took a step back and turned to face the wall. He wasn’t handling this at all like he wanted to. He worked to focus his thoughts for a few more seconds and then turned back.
“What?” Leo asked with an irritated shrug.
Max chewed on his lip and knew he was going to have to pull out all of Buzz’s best tricks in order to control his anger this time. He went back to one of the most effective techniques—personalizing the anger, and the results of losing control of that anger. As she had been since the very beginning, Hadley was that personalization. But now, rather than dark circles under bloodshot eyes and shock etched across her face, he saw her in front of him, his hands over her eyes, her small hands wrapped around his wrists—her trust and comfort overwhelming. While she was assigned the task of figuring out what was missing, he had been afforded an unwitnessed moment to take in everything about her.
For the first time, the focus wasn’t on what he had lost, or caused others to lose, but on what he stood to lose if he lost control again.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, with surprising calm and true remorse. “That was inappropriate. It’s not the network’s fault that I drank so much.”
Leo did a quick double take, and then just carried on. “That’s right it’s not. And do you know who really almost did you in? Norman Salverno.”
Ah, Chef Norman. There was no doubt Hadley had received the brunt of Max’s abuse that day, but he probably at least owed Chef Norman a fruit basket or something.
“What do you mean, he almost did me in?”
“He wanted you gone. He threatened to leave the network unless To the Max was yanked from the schedule—”
“Hang on.” He wasn’t surprised that Norman had pulled something like that. He was a sniveling brownnoser who could burn boiling water—then he’d probably try to serve it on a plate—and he’d perfected his precocious shtick to the point that he’d gotten some equally idiotic food critics to believe he was a genius. What did surprise him was that it had worked. “That’s why I’m not on the air? They sided with Salverno?”
“Of course they sided with Salverno, Max! You didn’t leave them any choice. And then, while you were off at anger camp, who do you think swept in and made a strong case for your time slot? And don’t even get me started on Beckett.”
The mention of Hadley’s name distracted him from all the snide remarks he wanted to make about anger camp, where they would no doubt all sit around a campfire, roasting marshmallows—and their enemies.
“What about her?”
“Well,” Leo began, clearing his throat and collapsing into his desk chair. “I’m not sure if you’ve been paying attention to the world around you, but some of the things you said to Hadley Beckett . . .”
“I know.”
“Let’s just say you treated her a whole lot differently than you treated the male chefs.”
Max stormed toward him. “I said I know!”
“Oh, you know, do you, Max? You’re sure singing a different tune now. Do you remember what you said that day?”
“Don’t remind me,” he said, not as a flippant expression of acknowledgment but as a warning for Leo to stop talking.
“You said being a chef is a tough job and not everyone is cut out for it. You literally said, Max, that if she couldn’t stand the heat, she needed to get out of the kitchen. Do you remember that? You also said you didn’t remember saying anything to her that you wouldn’t have said to the male chefs. But you didn’t call Chef Norman ‘doll,’ Max.”
“He was too busy crying . . .”
No. Stop.
Max caught himself again. The heat was rising up to the top of his head, flooding his vision as it went. It was getting more difficult to see what he stood to lose. He had to calm down. He had to put this into reverse.