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“I figured you’d need it.”
“I do.” Assuming she could get it down without hurling. She gestured with the covered cardboard cup. “Okay. Let me have it.”
“Disaster, that’s all.”
Her stomach lurched. She swallowed. Hard. “I’m listening.”
“The Wise Brothers just broke up,” Giles said. “Their manager called Mike yesterday. They’re not going to be available for the Christmas cover story.”
The Wise Brothers were the biggest thing to hit popular music since…comparisons failed her. And this was not good. Very, very not good.
B.J. shoved a stack of back issues off Giles’s lone extra chair and sank into it, dropping her briefcase to the floor, letting her bag slide off her shoulder. “Tell me you’re joking.”
Giles did nothing of the kind. “I’m as serious as a cheap tie. Trust me. ‘Christmas with the Three Wise Men’ is history.”
“But…a different slant, maybe? Their new solo careers? Their, uh…”
Giles was shaking his golden head. “They don’t want to do it. They are all, and I’m quoting Mike quoting the manager, ‘devastated.’ They’re also all in seclusion, or some such crap. Mike tried all day yesterday to get through to at least one of them. No luck. And we both know that if Mike can’t get to them, nobody can.” Mike Gallato, one of the best, was Alpha’s top contributing editor.
And B. J. Carlyle never gave up a major story without a fight. She shouldered her bag again, grabbed up her briefcase and shot to her feet. “I’ll make a few calls.”
“Been done. It’s hopeless.”
“Never use that word around me.”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Hah.” She started to turn.
Gingerly, from behind her, Giles suggested, “Just…a point or two more.”
She whirled back to him. “Speak. Fast.”
“Arnie wants a meeting at eleven to discuss your plans.” Arnie Dale was the managing editor. In recent years, Arnie pretty much ran things at Alpha, though B.J.’s father, who had created Alpha on their kitchen table back when B.J. was in diapers, had never relinquished his twin titles of publisher and editor-in-chief.
B.J. prompted, “My plans for…?”
Giles looked at her patiently. “The new Christmas-issue cover feature.”
She blew out a gusty breath. “Fine. Meeting at eleven.” She looked at her watch. Nine-thirty-two. She needed to get going on those calls. “Anything else?”
“Ah. Yes.” Giles wore the strangest expression, suddenly. Pitying? Worried? She couldn’t read it. B.J. made an awkward wrap-it-up gesture with the hand that held her briefcase, after which Giles clucked his tongue and tossed his golden locks again. Then, at last, the perfect line of his square jaw hardened. His fine nostrils flared. He yanked open his pencil drawer and whipped out the latest issue of TopMale magazine—the one Melanie had been reading so furtively a few minutes before.
“Oh, please,” B.J. said. “As if I’ve got time to read that rag with my December cover feature dead at my feet.”
Giles stood—or sat, in this case—firm. “Darling. You need to read this.”
“Just give me the salient points.”
Giles only shook his head and shoved the magazine toward her. “I marked the page. Go in your office, sit down, drink your lukewarm latte and then deal with that. And when you do, keep in mind that it’s nothing but meaningless drivel written by a dickless ass.”
In her office, with the door firmly shut, B.J. set down her bag and briefcase, tossed the November issue of TopMale to the side of her desk, hung her jacket on the coat rack in the corner, booted up her computer, and made those calls.
Giles had been right, of course. She got nowhere. The Wise Brothers had called it quits, they weren’t talking to anybody and she had no cover story for the issue that would hit the stands in twenty-eight days.
There would definitely be meetings. Several.
Her head pounded and her stomach churned. Still, gamely, she picked up her latte and removed the lid. She sniffed. Waited.
And didn’t gag.
Carefully, she sipped.
Oh, yes. Excellent. It was almost cold, but it went down fine.
Sipping some more, she considered. She had a half an hour until the meeting with Arnie. So? E-mail, phone messages—there had been several new ones while she was making all those hopeless calls—or TopMale?
She picked up the phone and punched the code for message pick-up.
Big mistake. The first one was from Buck. She heard his voice—so deep, so sexy, so gallingly tempting. “B.J. Give it up. Give me a damn call.”
She slammed the phone down. Later for messages.
With a heavy sigh, she slid TopMale—by a corner—from the side of her desk to right under her nose. She sneered down at the eye-candy guy on the cover. A winning smile and six-pack abs. Not terribly imaginative, but effective.
TopMale didn’t have Alpha’s market share, or its cachet. After all, Alpha managed to be all things to a wide cross-section of men. From bon vivants to backwoods survivalists to your everyday Joe with a beer in one hand and the remote in the other, they all bought Alpha. Still, the upstart TopMale did have a solid readership, a readership that kept growing….
B.J. flipped the magazine open to the page Giles had marked for her. She drank her cold latte and began reading.
Manhattan Man-Eater
Well, okay. A reasonably catchy title. Then she read the byline: by Wyatt Epperstall.
The last time she’d seen Wyatt was the day four months ago when she’d told him she wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.
Her hand began to shake. Cool milk and espresso sloshed on her wrist and stained her pink blouse.
He wouldn’t.
He couldn’t….
Oh, but he had.
You know her when you see her. She’s tall and she’s smart and she has great legs. Great legs and killer shoes on her narrow, perfect feet. You know the kind of shoes I mean. Shoes with fancy Italian names and price tags to match, shoes with high, pointed heels that have you dreaming of what it might be like if she wore them and took a walk on your chest.
If you’re lucky, she might do just that.
She makes the rules. And she makes sure you live by them. That is, until she’s through with you—which, believe me, will be sooner than you think.
Okay, big guy. I know what you’re muttering right about now. No driven, focused, powerful steamroller career woman for you. You don’t go for that type.
Let me tell you. You would. You could. In the dark heart of every man lies a yearning for a dangerous woman he cannot control. She is that woman. She could have you if she wanted you. One glance from those frosty gray-blue eyes and you are her slave.
In bed, she—
B.J. shut her—admittedly—gray-blue eyes. But shutting them didn’t do any good. When she opened them again, the damn article was still there—the article about her written by her sleazeball ex-boyfriend, Wyatt. Oh, she should have known better than ever to get involved with him.
He’d seemed so…nice. So harmless. So sweet, really. At first, anyway. But then the niceness began to get on her nerves. The sweetness got cloying. She found herself doing what she always did with men she’d dated in the past six years: she compared him to—
No. Not the B-word. She wasn’t thinking about B— No way. No more. Not today.
And she really, truly had to face it: she was good at a lot of things. Especially her job. But men? Not her forte. Every time she tried with one—which wasn’t all that often, no matter what Wyatt Epperstall wanted every TopMale subscriber to think…whenever she tried with one, it always ended badly.
Just like it had with Buck.
Oh, God. Buck…
And there. She’d done it. Thought his whole first name, again—twice—not thirty seconds after promising herself she wouldn’t.
Note to self: Do not think of B.
Second note to self: No. More. Boyfriends. Ever.
And really, she should never have taken that big sip of latte. Because, for some reason, her swallowing mechanism seemed to be malfunctioning. Her stomach was rising.
B.J. knocked over her chair as she stood. The latte went flying. It hit the floor and splattered—across the floor tiles, up the wall. She glanced frantically around.
Oh, God. What she wouldn’t give right now for the corner office—the one her father never used, the one with its own damn bathroom, for pity’s sake.
She spotted her wastebasket in the corner. What else could she do? Making hideous gagging noises, she staggered toward it….
Good thing she had Giles. Once she was through ruining both her blouse and the wastebasket, she buzzed him and he came right in.
He shut the door. “Darling, my God,” he said, wincing and wrinkling his patrician nose. Then he considered. “Ditch the blouse. Wear the blazer, buttoned up. It’s going to be fine. I’ll just crack the window…”
He went out while she changed and came back with one of the maintenance people. She escaped to the ladies’ room. When she returned, her office smelled of floral air freshener. The wastebasket had been replaced and the splattered latte mopped up. She gave the maintenance guy a massive tip and he took the blouse, promising he’d have it back, good as new, in a day or two.
“Alrighty.” She forced a grateful smile, thinking at the same time that if she never saw that blouse again, it would be more than alrighty with her. The janitor left her alone with her assistant.
Giles looked at her and frowned. “Go home,” he said.
“Not on your life—BTW, you are invaluable.”
“I am, aren’t I?”
“And it’s ten-fifty-five. Arnie awaits….”
The meeting was not a success.
They came up with zip. The alternative features simply wouldn’t do. Either the slant was wrong or the story wasn’t big enough for the cover. There was nothing in the works that could effectively be moved up. Fresh ideas were in short supply.
Arnie told her to “work it out” and get back to him by the end of the day.
After the meeting, there was lunch. B.J. took a pass on that. She ate more crackers from the box she’d stowed in her desk and drank some water and racked her exhausted brain for a solution to the cover-feature dilemma. Racking did nothing. Her brain refused to spit out a single viable idea.
The afternoon brought more meetings. Tense ones. She made frequent trips to the restroom and avoided the eyes of her colleagues. When she wasn’t in a meeting or hugging the toilet bowl, she received sniggering and/or sympathetic calls from acquaintances and associates who had seen—one even went so far as to say she had devoured—the “Man-Eater” article.
At four-thirty she met with Arnie again—to tell him she’d have something for him by the next day. Arnie was not pleased.
At five, as she and Giles were brainstorming madly, her outside line, set on silent page, began flashing. She glanced at the display. Her father. So not the person she wanted to talk to right then. But also not someone she could ignore.
“L.T.,” she said to Giles. Her father’s name was Langly Titus, but everyone, including B.J., called him L.T.
Giles nodded, got up, and left her alone.
She picked up. “Hello, L.T.”
“We need to talk,” said her father, and then fell silent. L. T. Carlyle fully understood the power of silence. He would make pronouncements, then wait. And wait some more. First one to speak was the loser. L.T. never lost.
B.J. allowed a full count of ten to elapse before prompting wearily, “About?”
More silence. Then, at last, “First, and of minimal importance, that pissant, Wayne Epstein.”
“Wyatt. Wyatt Epperstall,” she patiently corrected as her stomach gave a nasty little lurch. So. L.T. had read the “Man-Eater” article. She wasn’t surprised. Though he rarely left his world-famous mansion, Castle Carlyle, upstate, L.T. made it his business to know just about everything that was going on in the outside world. He subscribed to every newspaper and magazine known to man, TopMale included. And he could read two thousand words a minute.
“Wyatt, schmyatt,” grumbled L.T. “A wimpy, whiny-assed piece of work if ever there was one. Didn’t I warn you about him?”
“Yes,” she said carefully. “I believe that you did.”
L.T. laughed his lusty laugh. “But I have to say, B.J.
You make your old dad proud.”
“Oh? How’s that?” she asked, though she knew she wouldn’t like the answer.
She didn’t.
He said, “‘Manhattan Man-Eater.’ That’s my girl. Tough, smart and always on top. Takes after her old man, and that is no lie.”
“Gee, L.T. I never thought of it that way.”
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm? Stand tall. Be proud. Let the Waldos of the world whine and whimper.”
“Wyatt. The weasel’s name is Wyatt. And I’m sorry. But I don’t see it that way. That article just happens to be a total invasion of my privacy.”
Her father swore. Eloquently. “B.J. You shame me. You’ve got to do something about that Puritanical streak.”
That was way below the belt. B.J. was no Puritan, far from it. But she wasn’t an exhibitionist either. She wanted the details of her private life to remain exactly that: private.
