CON
Naturally, Kim hired a hack to tail me. I spotted the dumb fuck immediately. He was parked just outside the gates of my community, and he didn’t even give me a head start before pulling onto the road behind me. I gave him a curt wave in the rearview mirror to let him know I knew what he was doing. He had the nerve to wave back, and I saw a grin creep across his wide face, the corners of his mouth pushing his cheeks up into round scoops.
I shook my head in disgust. Leave it to Kim to hire some cheap ass PI who would tail me on the freeway and ask my clientele for autographs. I had half a mind to call her up and offer her a hundred grand to get someone less obtrusive. The moron tailed me all the way to work, even trying to follow me into the parking garage beneath my building.
“Don’t let that guy in,” I said briefly to Frank, the garage attendant. “My ex-wife hired him to dig up dirt on me.”
Frank nodded, unfazed. He was used to all kinds of strange requests. He’d been working in LA since the 70s.
Instead of taking the elevator straight to the executive floor like I usually did, I stopped in the lobby. The woman behind the desk widened her eyes in surprise when I approached, and I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been down here. Even on my way out, I took the side alley exit the actors used to avoid paparazzi.
“Good morning.” I glanced at her badge, but it was turned around. “I wanted to make sure that everything was set up for an intern who is starting today.”
She reached for a stack of folders and flipped through them quickly. I knew I was making her nervous and wondered what the hell had happened. When I first bought out my dad and made the company my own, I’d made sure to know everyone. There were company happy hours that included everyone from the mailroom to the top tier management. Now I’d become as disengaged as my dad had been. I made a mental note to fix this later, when Kim was off my back.
“Lily Anderson?” She pulled a blue folder out from the middle of the stack. “One-year internship? Starting in brand consulting?”
“That’s the one. Is everything ready for her?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as she gets here, we’ll—”
“I’m here!”
The now-familiar bright lilt of Lily’s voice sounded behind me. I stiffened, wishing I’d gone straight to my office at all. Unexpectedly, the memory of her body pressing up against mine played in my head again. Her generous curves brushing against my chest, her slender arms slipping around my waist. I could feel her soft hair brushing my throat and chin again, smell the notes of vanilla perfume that clung to her skin.
Unwillingly, I turned around to face her. She was wearing a lavender dress that she’d dressed up with a blazer and heels. She looked professional, except that the sunlight streaming in behind her made her gauzy skirt filmily transparent. I could see the outline of her shapely thighs, the curve of her hips. My mouth went dry when she smiled, so sunnily innocent of what she was doing to me.
Nothing. She was doing nothing to me. I tightened my mouth. “Good morning. I was just making sure everything was ready for you. Lily Anderson, this is…”
Shit. I still didn’t know.
“Helena Upchurch.” The receptionist said immediately when I hesitated. She rose and held out her hand to Lily. “Pleased to meet you. I’ll let security know you’re here.”
“Security?” Lily’s eyes widened and sought mine.
“For your badge,” I said tightly. Why did she keep looking at me with those wide, appealingly blue eyes like I was saving her from something? I wasn’t here to be her knight in shining fucking armor. I rapped my knuckles on the desk, an old habit. I’d worked to break it ever since Griffin told me it was my tell in poker. “Whenever you feel backed into a corner, you start tapping.” Then I’d realized I did it in contract negotiations too. And apparently Lily was making me feel backed into a corner now.
“I have to go,” I said abruptly. “Helena, you can take it from here, right?”
The dark-haired woman nodded smartly. I nodded goodbye to Lily, who smiled and started to thank me again, but I was already moving away. When the elevator doors closed behind me, I breathed out an irritable sigh of relief. I hadn’t felt this itchy around a woman in a long time. Generally, it was straight forward. If she caught my interest, I went after her. When my interest waned, I broke it off. Between the business and my daughter, I didn’t have time to waste being the nice guy when my heart wasn’t in it. And I could count on one hand how many women kept my interest long enough for me to introduce them to Halley.
Alone in the elevator, I could admit to myself that Lily had caught my attention. I wasn’t sure why. Yes, she was beautiful, but I worked in LA. There were beautiful women everywhere I looked. There was an innocence about her, a naivete. The hug, for example. With any other woman, I’d have assumed it was calculated. I’d have laughed and stepped away because the rules of the game would have been clear. But with Lily, I didn’t get any sense of artifice. She had hugged me because I’d been helping her, because I was her best friend’s dad. Not because she expected the gesture to go straight to my dick.
The problem was, I couldn’t follow my usual routine. Lily had caught my attention, but I couldn’t do jack shit about it. And I definitely couldn’t do what I normally did—sleep with her. It was a surefire way for me to lose interest, but she was practically a kid, only a year older than my daughter. Her littlesister, in sorority language.
A small tingle of disgust wormed its way up in my throat. It wasn’t as good as disinterest, but it was a start. I berated myself the rest of the way to my office, trying to solidify this feeling. Trying to forget the way the sun turned her hair into gold and rendered her dress all but transparent.
For the majority of the morning, I was successful. I was still haggling over top billing for one of my clients, and I was trying to convince a major studio to cast a relative unknown in a big part—never an easy proposition.
“You said yourself she did the best read,” I said to the producer, snapping my pen against my desk the way I only did when I was this close to biting someone’s head off. “I signed her myself. You think I waste my time on anyone who isn’t the cream of the crop?”
“She’s not pretty,” the man on the other end said bluntly. “She can act her ass off, but her face is still…” he paused, looking for a diplomatic way to put it. “Not pretty,” he finally repeated.
“Not pretty?” I spat, smacking my pen against the glass desktop so loud that Maureen turned around in her chair to look at me. I held up a hand, letting her know everything was fine, and lowered my voice. “I must have missed something in the script. What do her looks have to do with inspiring a worker’s revolution in earlytwentieth century America?”
“Everything in America has to do with looks,” he said drolly, unimpressed by my self-righteous anger. “Especially when it gets put on a billboard in Times Square.”
“You’re a fucking idiot if you don’t cast her, Pierre.”