by Holley Trent
“Are you fucking kidding me? Lisa, I told you that—”
The storm door creaked open slowly in a way that couldn’t be blamed on windows or creatures that lacked opposable thumbs.
Whoever was there was getting fired.
He didn’t care who they worked for, but he was going to see to it that it happened.
“Um,” came a timid voice from up front.
Lisa hurried out of the bathroom and snatched up the laundry basket on her way past. “Hey, come on in,” she said to whoever it was. “Did you get your bags from Keely?”
“I did, yes. Thank you. Are you truly fine with me staying here? I hate that I’m putting you out. I didn’t intend for things to go so sideways, but they…always seem to where I’m involved.”
“It’s fine,” Lisa said in a placating tone.
It was the same voice she used on her dog, Margo, during thunderstorms.
It was the same voice she’d used on Joey’s frantic mother during her last surprise visit to the city.
Lisa had popped in at the absolute worst time. Mom had been having a bit of a meltdown because she was terrified about having to go under anesthesia for a minor surgery she was having done the next day.
Prickly termagant though she was, Ma trusted Lisa, and Lisa seemed to know better than anyone how to handle the high-strung, and often tactless, worrywart.
One of the worst parts about Lisa cutting him loose was his mother’s disappointment in him. She’d already decided that Lisa would take care of her in her old age if Joey wouldn’t. Now she regularly texted him, “I guess if I go into a home, Lisa will still visit me there. I’ll put her on the weekend visitors list. You can come at Christmases, I guess.”
Ma had always been good at guilt. She’d learned the art from her aunt, the nun.
Smoothing back his mussed hair, he followed Lisa out of the bedroom only to stop just past the threshold upon spotting the newcomer.
She was a slim woman of average height. Her hair, unfashionably long and worn loose over her shoulders, was neither blond nor brown but some tone that hinted at both. Night-dark eyes. She had the unhealthful pallor of publishing in her skin, and he recognized it well. He was about two weeks from translucence himself.
He supposed she was attractive, but he wasn’t in the sort of mindset to be able to discern that for sure. Due to his situation with Lisa, his head wasn’t quite screwed on all the way. That was probably why the woman’s name escaped him for a few moments. That, and because everyone in the publicity department called her a name privately that most wouldn’t repeat in expanded company. They called her “squirrel” because she was terrified of her most successful author.
Mentally raking down the list of retreat attendees, he snapped his fingers in discovery.
The women turned toward him with curiosity in their gazes.
Finch, not squirrel.
“He’s leaving,” Lisa told her, putting her back to him.
Joey gritted his teeth.
“Am I…interrupting anything?” Finch asked with concern in her voice.
“Yes,” Joey said at the exact same time Lisa responded, “No.”
And then she repeated it, slightly louder, while making sure to stare him directly in the eyes. “He came to ask me a question, but he’s busy running your thing. He’s going to head out, just like I am.”
“Oh.” Finch’s brow creased. “I still feel terrible about displacing you.”
“It’s just a couple of days,” Lisa said. “I feel like it’s half my fault, anyway. I should have checked the lists myself to make sure everyone was situated. Besides.” She shrugged. “I’ll be fine. I can sleep anywhere. There were nights in college when I was doing weird shift work and had to grab Zs wherever I could, like in the janitor’s closet at the hospital I worked at.”
“You never told me about that,” Joey said.
He’d thought they’d told each other pretty much all of their sordid little secrets. They’d stayed up until sunrise so many times, talking about anything and everything. He’d wanted a lifetime of that with her.
Lisa gave him a flat look. “Maybe I just never got around to it.”
Well, maybe you could have, sweetheart.
“My family has a canning business. That’s what I did after classes in college,” Finch said in a voice precisely as loud as someone with a name like that should have. “I put on a hairnet and a plastic apron and canned things, mostly Irish stew. They send it to grocery stores all over the northeast.”
“Did they pay you well?” Lisa asked.
“Enough to save up to cover my housing when I did my publishing internship a million years ago. For the entire four years of my undergrad, I forgot what free time was. This was what I wanted to do, though.”
Perhaps realizing there wasn’t even a modicum of cheer in her voice toward the end, she spun to face Joey, eyes wide with terror.
“I—”
“I’m not here. I didn’t hear anything,” he said, putting up his hands. Actually, what he’d heard from both women had been rather educational. Apparently, Lisa felt comfortable enough to share trifling factoids with Finch but not with Joey.
What is it about her, then?
Was it because Lisa had different sorts of things to say when what they had was her idea of not enough time?
Or was it because Finch wasn’t domineering and challenging in conversations the way Joey was? He’d always thought he give Lisa plenty of opportunities to get a word in edgewise. Maybe he was wrong.
Or maybe he was right, and the difference was in her enthusiasm and priorities.
“I didn’t intend to sound ungrateful,” Finch said softly. “Please don’t misconstrue me.”
Soft.
He scoffed.
Of course Lisa would want to sit and chat with her. Finch had a voice like a public radio show host. It managed to be both soothing and aggravating at the same time.
“Hey, I get it,” he said. “People fall in and out of love with their careers all the time. But now that we’ve met, I wonder if the rumors are true.”
“What rumors?”
“That you cry whenever Stacia turns in a book.”
Her jaw dropped.
“You are such an asshole,” Lisa snapped.
No, I’m domineering and challenging.
She grabbed him by the shoulders, turned him one hundred and eighty degrees, and gave him a shove toward the door.
“I am not,” Joey said. “I had to ask. If it’s not true, I’d love to be the one to dispel the rumor. Of course, it never made sense to me. Athena could easily assign Stacia a different editor.”
He suspected he knew why they hadn’t, and it wasn’t due to a lack of talent in the editor bullpen.
What the bigwigs at Athena cared about was profit.
Finch was an associate editor working on blockbuster books. She was cheap labor. But if Stacia complained—or if Finch dared to—they’d switch things up, no problem.
“I’ll have you know, I did not cry,” she said to his retreating back.
“No? So, you’re not afraid of her?”
“Of course I’m afraid of her. Who isn’t? She’s terrifying because no one except Raleigh can tell when she’s being sarcastic, and he certainly isn’t going to walk around acting as her personal decoder ring. I don’t want to accidentally offend her. And I really enjoy editing her books, though I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if I’m really smart enough to be doing it.”
For Finch, that was practically a speech. He’d never heard her say more than a few words at a time, and most were usually spoken under her breath.
He was curious about what other quirks she was suppressing. Beyond that lulling voice, there had to be something unusual about her for Lisa to still be standing there, waiting for her to talk.
She was obviously doing something right that Joey wasn’t.
“I know Stacia pretty well,” Lisa said. “I think she can tell when her sarcasm is floati
ng over someone’s head. Whether or not she cares enough to clarify is a different story.”
“Since when were you and Stacia buddy-buddy?” Joey asked and his annoyance surged. Lisa seemed to be living an entire life without him. “Every conversation she has with me includes a threat of some sort.”
“Well, I have plenty of time now to make friends.” Lisa’s voice was flatter than his mother’s dinner rolls. “Especially on the two days of the workweek when I never have guests and I can move around a bit.”
Joey threw up his hands. “Are we seriously back on that again?”
“She has a really nice house. I was down there with Everley a few weeks ago, in fact. It was a side trip. I went down to Rocky Mount to check on the mums I planted on my grandma’s grave. They were blooming fabulously, by the way.”
I would have gone. I would have fucking gone with you.
He opened his mouth to say exactly that, but before he could get the words out, Finch piped in, “Is that where you’re from? Rocky Mount?”
Lisa gave her hand an indecisive waggle. “Not exactly. When people ask, I usually say that because it’s the closest city. I grew up in the sticks. Unincorporated Halifax County. Not that I expect anyone to know where that is.”
“Oh, but I do know.” Finch’s eyes narrowed to mere slivers and she shifted her weight in that thinking way far-too-logical people tended to do. “We got lost there one summer. My family, I mean. We were road-tripping down 95 to Disney and got turned around somehow after stopping for gas. With the way my parents were arguing, all us kids were terrified they’d finally decide that was it and file for divorce when we got back home.”
“Where’s home?” Lisa asked.
Seriously?
They were doing it again. Finch was chattering away like she hadn’t established herself as a lone wolf at Athena, and Lisa’s smile had gone warm like Finch had said the exact right things to unlock every secret Lisa had locked away.
He’d had no clue those were things she’d wanted to hear.
They were acting like he wasn’t even there, and in his opinion, he was pretty hard to miss.
Aggrieved, he cleared his throat.
“Yes, Mr. Novak?” Lisa snarled. “I thought you had someplace to be.”
“I thought you did.”
“Maybe I don’t.”
“Hell, maybe I don’t, either. Maybe I’ll go to bed. It was a long drive from the city. Pretty sure the Athena staff will do just fine watching a movie without me. They all think I’m a spy for the executive team, anyway.”
“Because you are.”
“You are?” Finch asked, wide-eyed in a sort of storybook princess way.
Maybe that’s what it is about her. It’s not just the voice.
He was starting to feel like the villain in his own story.
Joey gritted his teeth.
Lisa grinned. “Argue about it if you want to, Mr. Novak. I’m sure the discovery process on our end will be most educational.”
He scoffed. “Our?”
“Mm-hmm.” She draped an arm around Finch’s shoulders in that conspiring-to-raise-hell way she usually reserved for Everley Shannon…not that Lisa couldn’t get in trouble just fine all by herself if she wanted to. “Safety in numbers.”
“So, now you’re a team?”
“Sure.”
Joey couldn’t be quite sure, but he was pretty certain that was the tiniest of grins creeping onto Finch’s mouth. And it wasn’t a “ha-ha” grin. It was a “make him suffer” grin. He would have recognized one of those from twenty paces away.
With Lisa, they were practically foreplay.
He didn’t know Finch. He didn’t know what that smirk meant, but seeing as how it was accompanied by what was, for her, an unusually bold stare, he could make some assumptions.
And he didn’t like any of them.
CHAPTER FOUR
During her first year at Athena, Finch had been tasked with editing a psychological suspense novel called Homewrecker. It was about a woman who’d insinuated herself into the lives of a struggling married couple and became the figurative straw on the camel’s back.
She’d hated the depiction of the supposed villain in that book, and how the author had infantilized her. He’d planted the seed that her drive to attach herself to the husband was because she couldn’t do any better on her own and that it would be so much easier for her to just supplant the ex-wife and take everything that she’d built.
That was it. That was the whole motivation—he will take care of me.
There was nothing else in her backstory. She was just a fucking pitiful character.
Finch had stated her objections, they were ignored, and she and that particular author parted ways for the next book.
Finch always thought there had to be backstory for cruelness to make sense…or at least to show that it was a product of habit.
Catching the tail end of Lisa and Joey’s discussion, she decided that she’d been wrong. Sometimes, cruelty was merited and didn’t need a life story.
He was harassing that poor woman and apparently couldn’t take no for an answer. In her experience, men like him were a dime a dozen. They showed up at family functions with her aunts or cousins and sucked all the oxygen out of a room. They dominated every conversation and took up more space than their bodies needed.
She’d dated a few of them, too, and in a couple of cases, for far longer than she should have.
They’d had her convinced that their way was the natural order of things.
But it wasn’t.
She was tired of being shoved into corners by people like that.
Maybe he was so used to the easy stream of pussy he had access to in the city that he didn’t know how to react to one woman rejecting him.
While the last thing Lisa probably needed was another contender scrambling to get her attention, at the very least, Finch could make Joey back off if Lisa showed the slightest bit of interest.
And maybe Finch would be lucky for once in her life.
“Actually, aren’t there were some card decks in the rec room?” she asked Lisa. “I’ve got a bit of a solitaire fetish. Helps me relax before bed.”
“Tons of them, mostly swag sent here by Athena. We’ve got some with character art from Stacia’s books, some with those ridiculous reptile mysteries, and even a deck with those Fugoff books.”
“Can you show me where?”
“They’re on top of the piano,” Joey said. “Let us know if you can’t find them.”
“Since you know, why don’t you go fetch a pack?” Lisa lifted the lid of a cedar bin beneath the window and extracted a sleeping bag and a flannel-covered pillow from the compartment.
“If you’re heading there,” Joey said, nodding at Lisa’s bedding items, “I’ll go with you.”
Fuck, that backfired.
Finch groaned inwardly. She wanted him to go away. She had things she wanted to say to Lisa and needed to say them without an audience, and certainly not an audience with such a keen investment in the spectacle.
“Never mind the cards,” Finch said, flustered. “I changed my mind about the movie and dinner. I guess I’ll go. Retreat or not, there’s no use sequestering myself here when all my peers are mingling. It’d do me well to catch up on all the gossip I miss when I’m in my editing cave.”
“Let me know what you think about the movie,” Joey said.
Finch gritted her teeth and turned squarely to Lisa. “You’ll be there, hmm? Or is that Keely’s job?”
Lisa groaned. “You know what? I was going to leave her and the part-timers to run the show, but with the way things have been going today, I can’t afford it. I’ll come back to get these.” She set the bedding on the top of the chest and patted the pockets of her jeans. Murmuring, “Ah,” she extracted her phone. “Ten minutes until the movie starts. I’d better go make sure dinner’s running on-time. Service is supposed to start when the movie does.”
Lisa let herself out, ho
lding the door open for Finch.
Tossing a look of warning over her shoulder at Joey, who scowled at her, Finch followed.
Halfway to the path to the auditorium, Lisa excused herself and hopped onto a four-wheeler with an attached cart that was speeding by with some of the catered food items, leaving Finch to trudge through the thatch and fight the wind alone.
Twigs cracked underfoot behind her.
Finch rolled her eyes.
Not alone.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Finch and Joey had never been familiar, so it was easy enough to pretend he hadn’t been talking to her, and especially not with that splenetic tone.
How dare he?
But then he jogged around her and continued toward the auditorium, walking backward so as to see her.
And to make sure that he saw her, apparently.
Cocky jerk.
She kept her gaze forward without actually looking at him. She’d always been good at that. Too often, people read eye contact as an invitation to annoy her.
“Listen, I don’t know you from a hole in the wall,” he said gruffly, “but maybe you’re not so great at reading a room. If that’s the case, let me fill you in on what you may have missed. Lisa and I were trying to have a difficult conversation.”
“Really?” Finch said drolly, letting her gloved fingertips skim across the prickly leaves of some hardy holly bushes on the way past. “It looked to me like you had a lot you wanted to say, and she didn’t want to hear any of it.”
She did meet his gaze then because the end of the year was approaching, and really, she was too tired to care. There was a certain peace in allowing one’s self to not give a shit about things for a little while, and at that moment, she didn’t give a single shit about the wishes and needs of some entitled, spoiled, senior staff member.
