The Boss (20 page)

“Deal.” I eased from the bed reluctantly,
before I could be lulled to sleep by all the gentle touching and
warm, naked skin. As I dressed, he watched me, saying nothing. I'd
just pulled my sweater over my head when he finally broke his
silence.

"Stay the weekend with me."

I had bent over to pick up my bobby pins from
the carpet, but I straightened quickly at his words. "Excuse
me?"

"When I'm back in my own apartment, where
we'll have privacy and not be bankrupted on take out." The corner
of his mouth twitched with a half-smile. "I don't know if you're
aware, but I'm very rich. So, my apartment is spectacular."

I put my hands on my hips. "Listen, I'm
not
rich, and my apartment is still pretty spectacular, Mr.
Elitist. But I thought we were keeping things strictly sex. Do you
think it’s a good idea to spend a whole weekend together?"

He rose from the bed and walked to me,
totally comfortable in his own nakedness, and pulled my clothed
body against him. One hand groped my ass through my jeans, the
other pressed against the small of my back. "Do I think it would be
a good idea to spend forty-eight or more hours fucking you? Taking
you in every room of my house, on every bed, desk, chair and table
in the place?"

I purred a long, slow, "Mmmmmm," as he
nuzzled my throat. "You make a very compelling argument."

"I should be settled in again weekend after
next," he murmured against my skin. Red-hot sparks of desire
simmered my blood. How could I already be craving him, when I was
still exhausted from our last encounter?

I groaned inwardly. "No, I can't that
weekend. Holli wanted to throw me a party to celebrate my new job.
Which is really just an excuse for her to invite all our friends
over to get hammered, but she's really excited, and I promised her
I'd do it."

"Well, I can hardly ask you to turn your back
on your friends." He lifted his head and stepped back. "What if I
sent my driver to pick you up Saturday night, instead? We could
sleep in on Sunday and have breakfast?”

I hesitated. “You don’t go to church or
anything, right?”

A look of shock crossed his face. “Of course
I do. You knew I was devoutly religious, didn’t you?”

I didn’t know how to respond. Then I
realized, in a moment of panic that turned to indignation, that he
was joking. I slapped his shoulder. “Very funny.”

“I worship at Our Lady of Extremely Late
Brunch,” he quipped, bending his head to kiss me, and I lost myself
in him as he wrapped his arms around me again. When he raised his
head once more, he asked, “So, two Saturdays from now, is it?”

"Yeah, I think that would be great." It would
also be about a month into our "relationship" at that point. I
supposed one month wasn't unreasonable for a first overnight. And
it would be like a little vacation for me, just in the same city I
lived in.

Oh, who the fuck was I kidding? I wanted to
spend more time with him because I had a crush on him. No matter
how casual I might want to keep things, I really liked this guy.
That didn’t mean I had to hang my hat on some romantic ideal. But I
did like being with him.

Neil called me a car, and on the ride home I
leaned my forehead against the tinted window and closed my eyes.
Another night without enough sleep, but it was worth it. I felt
energized, and weirdly renewed. I guess I'd never had enough mind
blowing sex to realize what a great stress buster it could be.

* * * *

The next afternoon,
I was squirming in my office chair, trying make my sore ass more
comfortable, when Rudy came in and stood expectantly in front of my
desk.

"You just missed him," I said, gesturing
toward Neil's office. "He went down to the seventh floor to check
out the stilettos shoot."

"I know." Rudy's perfectly plucked and filled
eyebrows raised a fraction. "I came here to talk to you. And where
is little miss..."

"Deja?" I supplied for him, bristling at his
"little miss" comment. "He took her with him."

They had left me behind to start cleaning out
my desk. I was glad for the time alone, because it was definitely
bittersweet to be moving to the beauty department. I'd been with
Porteras
for two years, all of them in this very office. I
was just going across the floor, but it might as well have been
Mars.

"Good." Rudy thumped the desk with the side
of his fist. "I needed to talk to you and not have the busy-body
blabbing it all over the office."

"Busy-body?" I remembered my conversation in
bed with Neil. Had he mentioned it to Rudy? "Why would you say
-”

I don't think I've ever been the focus of so
withering a stare. "We can cut the bullshit, Sophie. I know you're
sleeping with Neil. He's my best friend, he tells me everything.
And apparently, Deja knows you're sleeping with him too?"

"She suspected," I said quietly. "Will you
lower your voice? Deja is a professional. More professional than I
am, because she's not sleeping with her boss. She just picked up on
the vibe."

"I didn't come in here to talk about her,
anyway. Tell me what you can about Jake Kirchner."

"Jake?" I frowned. "Not a lot. He's got a
girlfriend, he does some freelancing on the side, lit crit essays,
mostly - ”

"No, no, no. Tell me something useful. Does
he still talk to your old boss?" As he spoke, Rudy's eyes narrowed,
slowly punctuating his sentence.

"Ah. As in, is he someone to worry about?"
That wasn't a question I could really answer. I liked Jake a lot,
and he'd never done anything to openly sabotage anyone, but he
wasn't happy with the changes being made to
Porteras
, and he
had always been at Gabriella's beck and call. If he had a chance to
put her back on the throne, I knew which side of the revolution he
would be on, without a doubt.

Still, I wasn't about to tell that to Rudy.
Jake hadn't done anything to breach my trust, and Rudy hadn't done
anything to earn it, yet. "I really couldn't tell you. I'm not in
contact with Gabriella these days."

"But you are in contact with Jake." Rudy
wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily. "Look, you may not
realize exactly how much work it took to pull off the sale and
restructuring of
Porteras
, but I have been working on this
with Neil and Valerie for over a year."

Valerie? Who the hell is Valerie?
I
guess I really didn't have any clue as to what was going on behind
the scenes. "I know you guys did a lot of hard work. I promise, I'm
not being purposefully reticent. I just don't know. But I care
about this magazine. And I care about Neil. If I were privy to any
information that could hurt him, I would tell him immediately."

Rudy looked surprised at that, and
uncomfortable. I put that down to him not experiencing surprise all
that often. He momentarily pursed his lips then said, "Fine. We'll
leave it at that. Thank you for your honesty."

He was nearly to the door when I said, "By
the way, I saw
Giulio Cesar
last season. Your costumes were
amazing."

"I know. Thank you." But he couldn't hide his
smug little smile behind the glass door.

Alone in the office, I continued my slow
removal of my stuff from what would be Deja's desk, and considered
my options. I didn't want to purposefully wheedle information out
of Jake for Rudy. That was completely off the table. But the fact
that Jake had become a concern - or a liability - was something I
should keep an eye on. I liked Jake, but I didn't want my
association with him to put my new job in jeopardy. I also didn't
like to think that Gabriella was trying to infiltrate the magazine
through her former employees.

One thing was for sure, though. Jake had
helped me out for two years, and it would be shitty of me to know
that he was under scrutiny and not give him a heads up. As much as
I truly did care about Neil, my friends - even just work friends -
were more important than a guy I just started a casual relationship
with.

I had to tell Jake, and live with the
consequences if Rudy found out.

Chapter Eleven

I didn't get a
chance to talk to Jake until Thursday. He'd been swamped fighting
to keep all the lush photos that accompanied his Versailles story
in the January issue. By Thursday morning, Neil and Rudy would have
made their decisions, so I figured that either way, it was the
right time to tell Jake about Rudy's weirdness.

I found Jake in the conference room, looking
down at glossy photos, their printed surfaces reflecting the light
from the fluorescents. I couldn't tell if he was thinking, or
grieving.

"Hey... you." I wasn't great with telling
people news I thought they didn't want to hear. "How did it
go?"

"I lost four pages." He looked up with a
humorless laugh. "Rudy Ainsworth thought they were redundant."

I pretended to consider the four panels he
had spread out in front of him. He'd brought up Rudy. That gave me
enough of an opening. "Are you and Rudy not getting along?"

"Who can get along with that guy? He's so
jumped up his own ass and self-important." Jake raked his hand
through his hair.

I tried a different approach. "I can't wait
until I get into the beauty department. He hardly ever goes in
there. Maybe that's something you could do."

"What, work in beauty?" he snorted
derisively. "I think lip gloss and eye shadow are a little beneath
me at this point."

Wow, tell me what you really think,
dick
. I was beginning to wonder why I wanted to help him save
his job. "Oh, but a lady mime in black leather and a powdered wig,
that's totally important journalism."

Whatever point I'd been trying to make hadn't
penetrated even a little bit. My sentence was barely finished
before he abruptly declared, "Neil Elwood is going to burn this
place up like a dying star." Jake snapped his fingers. "Poof, just
like that, it'll be gone."

"I think stars take a lot longer to die than
‘poof’.” I had never seen him so petulant, so utterly unlikeable.
He would have never dreamed of acting this way when Gabriella was
running the show.

A good friend would have told him exactly why
the photos should have been cut. They really were too similar, in
that each one had some kind of fur accessory featured, and would
speak to a modern perception of Soviet Russia rather than harkening
back to French nobility. But I had a feeling he'd already been told
this, and wouldn't see my criticism as helpful. Instead, I told
him, "Well, I think I'm going to just keep my head down. The
squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I would really like to avoid a
grease stain."

He smiled at that, but reluctantly. "You
know, I shouldn't be telling you this." He picked up a photo and
dropped it. "Don't get too comfy. There are some... things in the
works. I'm trusting you not to pass that along."

Pass what along? Some vague pronouncements
that were grandiose in their pretentiousness? I nodded solemnly.
"Absolutely, I understand."

Then I got the hell out of the conference
room. Jake had always had his little oddities, like his sometimes
embarrassingly passionate feelings about his own work, but it was
the kind of stuff I had been able to overlook to remain friendly
with him. Now, with Gabriella gone, he was behaving like a toddler
throwing a tantrum. It was like... like Dr.
Jake
ll and Mr.
Hyde.

Oh, how I wished Holli were with me so we
could high five over that

pun.

I walked through reception, feeling all itchy
and weird. I guess I had expected the entire meeting to go
differently. I’d tried to be helpful, and instead I’d gotten
insulted. The new job I’d start tomorrow was apparently beneath
Jake. I was some lowly joke he deigned to speak to. Had our
“friendship” always been like that?

Or was it because I was going from
“assistant” to “assistant editor” that he suddenly had a problem
with me? Maybe I wasn’t a threat if he thought of me as the chick
who got coffee and dry cleaning. Now, I was moving into editing
actual content for the magazine. Maybe he couldn’t handle the
thought of being supportive of someone unless they weren’t
competition.

You’re no longer tied to Gabriella’s hip.
He can’t use you for anything
, I reminded myself. Maybe my
proximity to Gabriella had been the point of our friendship all
along.

Distracted by my disappointment, I almost
walked right through reception without spotting Deja sitting on the
long, white sofa, her arm on the back, smiling brightly at...
Holli?

"Hey!" I greeted her, trying to cover my
surprise. Holli never just showed up at my work - Gabriella had
expressly forbidden personal visits, and Holli had been very
careful about that rule. On the rare occasion she’d had to come up
to the main office for job-related reasons, she’d never said
hello.

"Hey! I was in the neighborhood and thought
it might be safe to stop by and ask you to lunch. Safer than it
used to be." Holli slid her hands into the back pockets of her
painted-on jeans and rocked on the balls of her feet, her lower lip
caught between her teeth. "And then I ran into Deja here."

Ah and ha.
I hid my smile as much as I
reasonably could.

"Do you two know each other?" For a city of
eight million people, New York could be an incredibly small
world.

Deja stood, giggling awkwardly as she looked
to Holli for permission or confirmation. I got the feeling there
was a conspiracy there. "Holli worked an event at RM a few years
back."

"I was a human sushi platter." Holli beamed
with pride. "It was one of my first modeling jobs. I got to meet
Aerosmith."

I laughed with them, the way you laugh when
you’re the third wheel in a conversation. It wasn’t that they were
intentionally excluding me from their in-joke; obviously there was
a vibe between them. I shrugged and smiled. "How can you forget a
naked sushi girl, right?"