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In Alec’s Vette, Cleo took advantage of the luxurious leg space, stretching and crossing her extended legs at the ankle.
His gaze flickered to her thighs, traveled down her legs to her feet. The trace of a smile appeared on his mouth as he shifted his eyes back to the road. Cleo pretended not to notice.
“Since we can’t go back to the office, what should we do?” she asked.
“The first thing you need to do is get familiar with what we write.”
“I left all the issues on my desk.”
“I’ve got some in the trunk. We could go over them together.”
“Where?”
“My place.” He offered it up as if he thought she’d actually go there.
“Unh-uh.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Then where do you want to go?”
She couldn’t think of anywhere she wanted to be seen with a stack of tabloids, but his place was out. What she really wanted was to get out of the slut suit. There was only one place she could do that. “I’m not really settled in yet, so don’t expect much, but how about my place?”
The look he shot her made her wonder if he, too, was thinking about getting her out of her suit.
She directed him to one of the nicer residential districts of the city. The kind with six-acre estates and gated driveways. The awe on his face was almost worth the shock she knew was coming. She pointed toward the three-car garage—one of two on the estate—and told him to park beside it.
He got out of the car and stared at the house.
He was so absorbed, she had to struggle out of the impossible passenger seat on her own. Looking at him across the roof of the car, it wasn’t hard to guess what was running through his mind as he gazed at the two-story house with a rock façade and multiple rooflines. To her eye, the most impressive feature was the balcony that extended across the front of the upper story. It invited visions of long summer evenings and parties with formally dressed guests sipping sophisticated drinks from fine crystal. The house represented a lifestyle most people couldn’t even imagine, let alone aspire to, and he looked gob smacked at finding himself there.
Too bad she was going to have to burst his bubble.
“Hey, Alec.”
He pulled his gaze away from the house.
“Why don’t you grab those editions from your trunk?”
When he had them, she led him to the outside stairs that accessed what would have been the chauffer’s quarters had the owners employed one.
In spite of the prestigious address, it wasn’t the apartment she would have chosen, but the rent was only a token payment and only available to her because the owner’s wife was an old friend of her mother’s who had married well.
Proving once and for all that contacts were everything.
~***~
The old rock song “Stairway to Heaven” ran through Alec’s head as he followed her up the wooden steps. Holy hell, this woman had an ass on her that made him want to lean forward and take a bite.
And she was full of surprises. Like this place where she was living. A tiny living room, a kitchen-dining room, a single door that led to a bedroom. The bathroom had to be en suite, though the term seemed pretentious for such a simple apartment.
Several moving boxes were stacked in a corner of the living room beyond the loveseat. One was open to reveal pots nested in pans, hand towels, and various kitchen utensils.
“You can put that stuff here.” She shoved aside a bowl of fruit to make space on the kitchen table, then turned away as she pulled her phone from her purse to check for messages.
He dropped the tabloids on the table, still stymied about the apartment. After all, she had a good paying job at a tabloid. Hell, if Jackson was right, she had a great paying job and a signing bonus. So why was she living in this tiny apartment over someone’s garage? Even if it was in an exclusive part of town, it was still a garage apartment. And it was just a guess, but he was pretty sure it came furnished, which meant the furniture was secondhand.
“I have a question,” he said as he dumped the tabloids in the kitchen.
“What?” She frowned at her phone.
“I know firsthand how tabs pay, and rumor has it you got a fat signing bonus for bringing your credentials into our little family.”
“So . . . ?”
He held his hands out, palms toward the ceiling, indicating the walls around them.
“I have . . . debts.” She colored slightly, but her chin rose as though daring him to challenge her.
He always had liked a challenge.
“Student loans?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“And?” he prompted.
“And what?”
“We all had student loans to pay off, but once you get hired at The Word, you can afford to live halfway decent while you pay them off.”
“This is decent.”
“Yeah.” He eyed her body language and took a stab in the dark. “And cheap.” The flinch was subtle enough he could have missed it, but it told him he’d hit a bullseye. “So what other debts do you have?”
“My, but aren’t you nosy?” She dropped her phone back in her purse, trying to play it casual.
He wasn’t fooled. “Occupational hazard. What debts have you got?”
“Is this how you interview Elvis?” She looked up. There was a hint of fire in her eyes.
“I don’t do Elvis stories. Talk to me.”
“About my financial situation? No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“No. Just no.”
“That’s right.”
Reporters. The smart ones always gave the worst interviews.
~***~
After Cleo changed into jeans and an old, white T-shirt, they started reviewing the stories. She’d looked at an issue after she’d accepted the job at The Word, but hadn’t gotten past the first few pages. That she’d have to write stories like the one about a man whose twin had purportedly turned out to be his clone made her physically ill. She gritted her teeth and looked at the headlines of the most recent issue.
Michael Jackson’s Ghost at Neverland?
5000 Year Old Prophecy Predicts One World Government!!!
Frogs’ Mysterious Deaths—Is Man Next???
They could have been story ideas for The New Twilight Zone. “Did you write any of these?”
He flipped through the pages, stopping at the center page spread, tapping the headline, Baffling Unsolved Murders!
The article that followed gave a recap of ten famous, unsolved murders, starting with the Black Dahlia case from Hollywood and mentioning the movies and books the 1947 murder still spawned.
The writing was not as sensationalized as she’d expected. It didn’t have to be. The material was sensational enough. Murder always was, of course, and unsolved murders doubly so.
“You want anything?” he asked.
“Uhm . . .” She finished the section on JonBenet Ramsey and looked up.
He stood in front of her open fridge, one of the Cokes left over from lunch in his hand.
She bit down on her annoyance over how thoroughly he’d made himself at home. “Yeah. Grab me a pineapple juice.” She bent her head and read on. The later cases included several rap artists who all blended together in her memory. Dian Fossey. She was vaguely aware that he set her juice on the table as she started reading the segment about Amber Hagerman, whose death had inspired the Amber alert system.
“This is good.” She moved to another section. “Very well written.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Uhm. . .” She looked up again. He sat in the chair to her left, an ankle crossed over one knee, the hand that held the soda balanced at the wrist on his other knee. His smile was the tiniest bit crooked. She felt as if she’d been caught in a game of Gotcha!
“Well, of course, I knew you could write. You wouldn’t have a job here if you couldn’t. I expected . . . Uhm, I expected―”
“That I couldn’t write a sentence without a dozen exclamation points.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Sure it is.”
Couldn’t he at least pretend to believe her? She looked at the page again and couldn’t resist taking a jab. “Not exactly cutting-edge journalism though, is it?”
“No. It was something I put together to make Nigel happy because I was working on a different piece. This”—he flipped open another edition—“is what had my interest at the time.” His finger stabbed at the page.
She scanned the article about civil forfeiture, a government practice of taking property even though the owner hadn’t been convicted of—or sometimes even charged with—a crime. The language was a little florid, but she expected that given the audience he was writing for. Still, she understood the outrage she sensed behind the words. “Who’s this Institute for Justice you mention?”
“They’re a public interest law firm. What the ACLU should be but isn’t. They work pro bono for the little guy. You know about him, right? The working stiff who gets trampled by the government because he can’t afford a protracted fight.”
“Did they pay you to mention them?” She wouldn’t be surprised if they did. Sort of like product placement in movies.
The corner of his mouth crooked up as though he thought he was going to shock her. “Actually, I pay them. I make a donation every month to support the cause. It ain’t cheap taking cases to the Supreme Court.”
She wasn’t shocked, but she was surprised. A tabloid reporter who put his money where his mouth was? She had the awful feeling that continuing to feel superior might be harder than she expected. “How do you pick your stories?”
“Sometimes management assigns stories. Usually when they’re topical. But I always have something percolating in the back of my mind. When I think I’ve got an interesting take, I run it past Nigel, and then I write it.”
He made it sound simple. As if editorial approval was a mere formality. In her experience, it was never that easy. “How often does Nigel kill your ideas?”
“Almost never. Then again”—he gave her a cocky grin—“I have stellar ideas.”
“Oh, yeah? What are you working on now?”
“Life-after-death experiences.” He nudged the squat, plastic juice bottle on the table closer to her.
“Really?” She’d always found that subject interesting, but she’d never had an excuse to pursue it.
“Really. Don’t be such a skeptic.” He reached into the bowl of fruit she’d pushed aside to make space on the table and popped a handful of grapes off the stem.
“No Elvis stories? No Bigfoot?” she asked, hoping he’d admit to at least one.
“That’s Sasquatch to you, and no, I have yet to write one of those.” He flipped a grape into the air.
She expected it to end up on the floor, but he caught it in his mouth. Refusing to acknowledge his circus trick, she closed the paper and pushed it aside. “How do you come up with story ideas?”
“I’m an eclectic reader. Something’s always grabbing my attention. If it makes me curious, I dig a little deeper.”
“And if you can’t think of anything?”
He flipped another grape into the air, catching it as neatly as the first one. “Nigel’s got an idea box,” he said once he’d swallowed. “He writes down a subject and throws it in the box. If you can’t come up with something on your own, you pull two slips of paper out of the box and write about whichever one appeals to you.” He shook his head and took another swig of Coke. “Trust me. You don’t want to do that.”
It sounded as though he knew what he was talking about. She peeled off the plastic tab that sealed the juice. Lifting the bottle almost to her lips before she asked, “Where were you before?”
“Before what?”
She narrowed her eyes at him as she swallowed. Setting the bottle on the table, she kept her gaze steely. “Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you. Where were you before you sold your soul to the dark side?”
He gave her a tight-lipped smile. She had a feeling the “dark side” comment irked him.
“I was wondering how long it would take you to ask. What you really want to know is why I choose to work at a tabloid.”
“Okay, yes. You’re brighter than I expected. More principled.”
“And I should be a sleazy Deliverance type, shouldn’t I?” There was a hint of a sharp edge in his voice as if he was suppressing his resentment.
“Well, no. . .”
He tossed and caught another grape. He eyed her in the couple of seconds as though deciding how hard he wanted to set her in her place. She saw it in his eyes the moment he made the decision and knew it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Would it surprise you to know Nigel has a master’s degree from Oxford?”
An Oxford alum at a tabloid? That made no sense. Had she stepped through a portal into an alternate universe?
“Jackson has a master’s in communication from the University of Florida. Marge is a UC Berkeley alum.” He went on to list four others, all graduates of one or the other prestigious journalism schools.
Cleo didn’t get it. Those were all top schools. They could have gotten jobs anywhere. Why put in that kind of work—accumulate that kind of debt—to work at a tabloid?
“And what about you? Where did you go to school?”
He shrugged. “I went to a good school.”
Cleo cringed inside. She hadn’t meant to embarrass him. She should have known enough to leave the question unasked when he’d left his credentials off the list. But he was smart. Smart enough to impress her against her will even if his bona fides weren’t of the same caliber as everyone else’s. She picked up an apple from the bowl and rolled it in her hands, so she had an excuse to look away from him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked. I just―”
“No es importante.” He dismissed her apology with a sweep of his hand. Then he must have seen how awkward she felt because he added, “It was good enough to get an internship at the Washington Post,” impressing her yet again.
“That’s the kind of internship people kill for. How did you . . . ?” She stumbled to a halt. When would she learn to shut up?
“Sink so far?” he finished for her. “I don’t think I have.”
She cocked her head, wanting him to explain.
He shrugged again. “Is it so hard to believe I didn’t want to be their token Hispanic?”
“Oh, please. Do I look stupid to you?”
His eyes flashed down over her body. “Honey, when a woman has a smoking hot body, I almost never ask her to take an IQ test.”
Heat flashed through her, catching her off guard. Pitching the apple at his head was as quick and instinctive a response as pulling her hand back from a red-hot stove.
He fended it off. The apple glanced off his shoulder, but his hand swept a wide arc and caught the bottle of juice. She jerked forward, bending, trying to catch it before it hit the floor. She almost made it. The bottle didn’t even tip. It landed straight up, the impact with the floor creating a geyser of juice that splashed her face, her arms, her T-shirt, her hair.
The sweet-tart juice dripped from her chin as she straightened.
He caught her arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t . . .” He looked appalled.
“It’s fine.” She forced a smile even as she spoke through gritted teeth. “An accident. Could happen to anyone.” Anyone who was a misogynistic pig.
His gaze dropped to where he grasped her. Already she could feel the stickiness of her skin. Peeling his hand from her arm, he got up, heading for the sink.
He returned with a wet paper towel in hand, but when he reached out to wipe her face, she caught his hand and took it from him. As she cleaned her face, her nails snagged in a sticky strand of hair. The entire roll of paper towels wasn’t going to be enough.
“I’m really sorry.” He sat back down and watched her without meeting her eyes.
“No, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have thrown the apple.” Even as she said it, claiming the blame that was rightfully hers, she seethed. She wouldn’t have thrown the apple if he hadn’t been leering. “I need to take a shower.”
He nodded, still not meeting her eyes. Did he really feel bad? Or . . . She looked down and realized he wasn’t meeting her gaze because he was staring at the large wet splotch where her T-shirt molded to her right breast. Wet and chilled, her nipple was erect enough to poke out insistently. Apparently, that was more than enough to mesmerize Alec and strike him dumb.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” she muttered. She didn’t wait to see if he’d shake it off, heading instead for her shower.