Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 91146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91146 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Clearly, Nicole disagrees with him. “After a handful of tweaks, I’ll be confident the audience is purchasing a part of me, not a manufactured hit designed for the masses.”
Emanual looks stunned. He isn’t the only one. I thought it would take more than a night of songwriting to have Nicole believing in herself enough to go against everything her record label wrongly told her was the right direction for her career.
It shows how vastly I underestimated her confidence.
“That is not something I’ve heard before.” Emanual laughs when Nicole’s face whitens. “It isn’t a bad thing. It’s just been a while since we’ve had an artist who places the demands of their heart above their bank balance.” After drinking in Nicole’s blush with more admiration than I like, he tells the live audience and the ones listening in that they’ll be back after a short commercial break to hear Nicole perform “Glitter.”
“I was hoping I could perform something else.” Nicole gets Emanual and the live audience over the fence by announcing it’s a song that’s never been heard. “I wrote it recently with a… friend of mine.”
When the producer seeks Emanual’s approval, he shrugs. “It can’t be worse than the garbage they were pimping before her YouTube video put her interview request at the top of the pile.” He hits Nicole with a truth I’d rather he keep to himself, but with the honesty she deserves. “I was planning to cancel your interview today. The stuff your label was sending through was bad. I thought the trolls got it right for a change, that you’d escaped the circus with Madam Fleur and Dani Trace. Then I saw this…” He taps a tablet on his desk. “This is what we need. This is what we deserve. So if you’re guaranteeing this is what we’ll get…”—he once again highlights the video playing on his tablet—“you can perform any song your heart desires.”
“She’s going to fucking ruin me,” Knox murmurs when Nicole promises to give Emanual’s audience the performance of the year. “And when she does”—he turns his narrowed eyes to me—“I’ll make sure you go down with us.”
27
NICOLE
“You’re fucking insane. You asked for an inch, then took it a mile.” Knox thrusts his hand at the radio station our shared limousine is pulling away from. “First, you go off script by performing a song not contracted to the label. Then you tell him your album needs tweaks.”
“Nothing that can’t be—”
“Nothing at all. It’s been finished for months now. Months! You made the label look like incompetent fools.”
His glare lodges a brick in my throat, but I refuse to back down on the decisions I made this morning after our discussion slash argument in the limousine. “How? By striving to give the people we need to make the album a success an album worth buying? You heard what Emanual—”
“Emanual is a disc jockey getting too fucking big for his boots.”
Even though I agree with him, I continue speaking as if he never interrupted me. “He was ready to cancel my interview. The only thing that stopped him was the footage that went viral on YouTube last night.” The footage he stabbed his finger at was of me singing the only solo performance of the rain concert. The rest of the performances were duets with either Laken or River. “This is what we need. This is what we deserve.” Instead of mimicking Emanual's southern drawl, I return my voice to its standard setting. “Laken said the same. That my fans deserve to hear my songs.”
“Laken doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He isn’t a music producer.”
My heart speaks on my behalf again for the umpteenth time over the past twenty-four hours. “I’m still willing to risk it.”
Knox’s eyes are on me, hot and heavy. “Risk what?”
“I want Laken to produce a handful of my songs.” When this idea popped into my head this morning, I thought lust had made me looney, but after having Marcus look over the work Laken and I had done the day before and hearing the crowd's response to the song we co-wrote, there’s no denying the obvious. Laken has talent by the bucketloads. He could be a star, but unlike Marcus, he only wants infamy behind the desk because it is the only way he can do a job he loves and protect River at the same time.
A fragile soul can only take so much before it cracks, and although River’s outer shell seems unbreakable, those who truly know him know it is a front he uses to protect himself.
That’s why he never argued for better when Knox made him clean the restrooms after the stinky road crew messed them up, and why he never batted an eyelid when his services went unpaid for months.
It is also why Laken continually lets Knox walk all over him.