by Lauren Layne
The anger had set in.
So yeah. She just happened to have a fresh dose of fire in her arsenal.
“My turn,” she said sweetly.
His brows lifted condescendingly. “Think you’ve got a read on me, huh?”
Oh, I know I do.
See, the guy had been pretty dead-on in his assessment of her, but there was one very important detail that he hadn’t hit on. The job that enabled her to wear her “tight skirts and high heels”? That job just happened to be a career in this very type of thing.
Reading men.
And then writing about it.
Sure, Greg might have pulled the wool over her eyes—maybe stomped her ego a little bit—but Grace was determined to regain her title as Stiletto magazine’s expert on men and the games they played. She wasn’t one of the lead columnists of the country’s best-selling women’s magazine for nothing.
And this guy was exactly what she needed to get back in the saddle.
“So let’s see,” she said, resting her head against the back of the seat and mimicking his posture. “You work out religiously, probably to counteract the scattering of gray hairs popping up prematurely at your temples. I say prematurely, because you’re only thirty-three, but you work hard and you play hard, and you hate like hell that you can’t control your hair as easily as you do your biceps. Your job requires you to be endlessly charming, something that you happily carry over to your personal life, which I’m guessing means your longest relationship is somewhere in the proximity of … four months? Give or take. You fancy yourself a New Yorker, but your accent smacks of small-town Midwest—something you probably hate, though you’d never tell your parents, whom you’re close to.”
Grace paused to take a breath.
“It’s never occurred to you that a woman wouldn’t want to share her cab with you, and now you’ll spend the rest of the day wondering why I wasn’t fishing for a reason to give you my number. Then you’ll forget all about me tomorrow when the next tight skirt catches your eye. Also, your one-night stand with Miss Tribeca guarantees you’re wearing yesterday’s suit, although I’m guessing you drew the line on dirty underwear, which means you’re currently commando, which, in conclusion, I would like to point out is completely disgusting.”
As if on cue, the taxi came to a stop in front of her office building, and she pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and leaned over to tuck it neatly into his suit jacket pocket.
“How’d I do?” she asked sweetly, her hand already going for the door handle.
He moved quickly, reaching out a hand to grab her wrist even as he pried open her fingers and placed the twenty back into her palm. “Not bad,” he said, his voice husky.
Her eyes collided with his, and if they’d been warmly flirtatious before, they were burning hot as hell now. “But?” she asked, more than a little curious about how close she’d come.
His thumb flicked across her inner wrist, making her pulse jumpy. “You got everything right but one detail.”
She gave him a look of sympathy. “So you are wearing the dirty underwear, then?”
“No,” he said, his voice dropping even lower. “I mean you were wrong about the part of me forgetting you by tomorrow.”
Grace’s mouth went dry.
“Something tells me I’ll be remembering you for a long time.” With that, he released her arm, and Grace clawed for the door handle, her composure completely shot to hell by one handsome guy.
Grace 1.0 was practically tittering at the pretty words, and 2.0 was howling at the sky in anger.
Since 2.0 was noisier, Grace clung to disdain instead of swooning, and refused to spare the man a second glance as she tucked the twenty-dollar bill back into his pocket and climbed out of the cab.
Good girl, Grace 2.0 said with a little football-player-style slap on the ass. This is supposed to be your time. Single time, girl power, whatever you want to call it.
Right. Got it. Grace straightened her skirt and headed into the lobby of the Ravenna building for the first time in over a month.
First day of her new life and all that.
It was time to figure out who Grace Brighton really was. And that meant no relationships. No sex. No men. For six months, at least.
Especially not tall dark playboys who climbed into cabs with strange women and likely skipped underwear after one-night stands.
No matter how dead sexy he was.
Chapter Two
“Wait, you never answered the question. Was he hot?”
Grace paused in dumping sugar in her coffee and glared at Riley McKenna. “Who cares if he was hot? I said he was an ass.”
“Yes, but was he a hot ass?” This from Julie, who, like Riley, had apparently missed the point of Grace’s story.
“You’re giving him entirely too much credit,” Grace muttered as the three of them headed toward the conference room for their weekly meeting. Thanks to cab guy, she’d made it in plenty of time.
Riley and Julie exchanged a glance. “He was totally hot,” Julie said in a loud whisper.
“Are you allowed to say that? I mean now that you’re engaged and all?” Riley asked Julie.
Engaged. Grace ignored the little twinge that word caused.
She was happy for her friend, of course. Julie Greene was one of her best friends, and easily the most likable person Grace had ever met. With her honey-blond hair, wide smile, and friendly personality, it was impossible not to like Julie. And sure, it had come as a bit of a surprise when her flirtatious, chronically single friend had fallen for the subject of one of her articles a few months ago—particularly since Mitchell Forbes was pretty much the opposite of Julie.
But they were happy together. Happily engaged.
Which was great.
Really.
It was just …
Grace had always imagined that she’d be the first of the Stiletto “it girls” to take the marriage plunge. Instead she was the furthest from the altar she’d been in ten years. It was as though she were twenty again, back before she’d met Greg Parsons and had started mentally putting together the future Parsons family scrapbook.
Oblivious to Grace’s envy, Julie was twisting the diamond on her fourth finger. “Of course I can still ogle hot guys. What Mitchell doesn’t know …”
“Mitchell’s an omniscient robot when it comes to you,” Riley said as they filed into the conference room. “I’m pretty sure he knows everything. And I bet he knows that right this second you’re ogling Grace’s new man.”
“Grace has a new man?” asked Stiletto’s slim, skinny-jean-clad associate fashion editor.
Great, Grace thought. Now they had an audience. Just what she needed—the gabbiest person in the office thinking that she was seeing someone. Grace gave her friends a stern fix-this look. Oliver Harrington was better than Twitter when it came to spreading gossip.
And seriously, people thought she’d moved on already? It had only been just over four months since she’d learned Greg was having extracurricular time between his colleague’s thighs. Surely she was entitled to a little time to heal before she started dating again?
Say, like … six months more. Six months of glorious single time. Six months of girls’ wine nights and maybe training for a half marathon and figuring out how to be on her own.
It was a great plan. She was pretty sure of it. But only Julie and Riley knew that Grace’s sabbatical from men was an actual premeditated agenda, and she wanted to keep it that way.
No need for anyone else to know just how deeply Greg’s betrayal had cut. It was bad enough that her personal life was in upheaval. But in Grace’s case, the very fabric of her career had also been ripped in half by Greg’s admission.
Okay! I slept with her! But before you get up on your self-righteous high horse, take a good look in the mirror, because these things aren’t one-sided.
Yeah, that had stung.
But what had really burned her ass was that just two months prior, Grace had written the v
ery popular “Ten Signs He’s Cheating” article.
She’d thought it was just another in a long stream of her typical relationship articles: “How to Tolerate His Football Habit.” “You Want Sushi, He Wants Wings—How to Compromise.” Basically she told women how to make their relationship work, and they’d listened.
The cheating article had been a diverting challenge. Since she’d (wrongly) believed that she didn’t have any personal experience in the area of infidelity, Grace had spent months interviewing women whose significant others had strayed. She’d recorded all the subtle signs, the little quirks. The lack of sex, the effusive compliments, the changed passwords …
By the time the story went to publication, Grace had thought herself an expert on picking up on infidelity.
She’d been wrong.
The worst part was, she hadn’t even thought to look at her own life. Hadn’t imagined it would ever happen to her.
But it had. And worst of all? Greg and Maureen’s fling had been going on the entire time she’d been writing the article.
The woman whom other women looked to as a relationship beacon was a complete sham.
Grace might have been able to accept that Greg wasn’t the man she’d thought he was. But accepting that she was ignorant about men in general?
Career suicide.
Hence the creation of Grace 2.0.
Her alter ego was everything Grace 1.0 hadn’t been: wary, gritty, and smart. Grace 2.0 knew that men were lying snakes. And she was out to prove it personally and professionally.
“No, Grace doesn’t have a new man, and you’ll forget the thought even crossed your mind,” Riley was saying to Oliver in her scary don’t-make-me-lose-my-Irish-temper voice.
Oliver wisely pretended fascination with his phone as though he’d never been eavesdropping in the first place.
The three of them had just settled around the conference table when Grace spotted the unfamiliar woman who’d entered the meeting room.
“Who’s that?” Grace asked quietly. The woman was pretty in a natural, low-maintenance kind of way. Her shoulder-length hair was light brown and could have been mousy had it not been paired with gorgeous olive skin and wide, brown Bambi eyes.
Riley and Julie exchanged a nervous glance.
“That’s Emma Sinclair,” Julie said, her voice too bright.
It took a second for the name to register.
Oh. Oh.
Emma Sinclair had been Grace’s replacement on the Love and Relationships beat when she’d taken the month off.
The month that Grace had sorely needed, but which had hurt to ask for all the same.
When Grace had reluctantly told her boss that she needed some time away from the office, Camille hadn’t hesitated. The Stiletto editor in chief might be a total hard-ass, but she was also a bit of a man-hater thanks to a disastrous marriage of her own.
All it had taken was the word cheat, and Camille had practically booted Grace out the door with an order to “have some me time” and a suggestion for a local voodoo doll vendor.
And Grace was appreciative, she really was. And of course she’d expected that Camille would have to find someone to fill in while Grace was out.
She just hadn’t quite been prepared for Camille to assign a backup who was quite so … qualified.
Grace had been envisioning one of the newish interns trailing around after Julie and Riley, maybe taking a few nervous story notes. Instead, Camille had hired Emma Sinclair from Sassy. Sassy was Stiletto’s chief competitor in the women’s magazine marketplace. And Emma Sinclair had been one of their top columnists.
During their weekly phone chats, Julie and Riley had sworn up and down that Emma wasn’t a replacement. But from her friends’ guilty expressions, it was obvious that Emma wasn’t just someone they’d tolerated until Grace came back.
Emma had become a friend.
That’s nice, Grace told herself firmly. It would be nice to expand their little family. Maybe even get some fresh blood into the trio of the Love and Relationships section. Change things up a bit.
Then Riley laughed at something Emma said, and it didn’t feel nice at all.
“Order, order,” Camille bellowed, storming into the conference room, wearing a bright green wrap dress.
Grace hid a small, relieved smile. At least some things hadn’t changed. Camille still started her meetings like a power-tripping Supreme Court justice.
“Welcome back, Grace,” Camille said, not bothering to look up as she pulled a half dozen electronic devices out of her oversized bag, tossing them onto the table.
“Thanks,” Grace murmured, not missing the way that everyone smiled at her in that too-careful way, as though she was likely to break at any second.
But as the meeting settled into its old, familiar rhythm, she started to relax a little.
She could do this. It was just like old times, except she was a little older, a little smarter.
In fact, it was better than old times, because Grace wasn’t ever going to let a guy get the drop on her again.
She half listened as Camille went around the table, asking for department updates. When Camille turned to the Love and Relationships section, Grace sat up a little straighter. She didn’t have any updates on her first day back, but she smiled and nodded at everything Riley and Julie said so that there could be no doubt that she was still a part of this crew. She even kept an approving smile pasted on her face as Emma spoke.
And then Camille dropped those dreaded magazine words that occasionally made the rounds at Stiletto but were almost never associated with the nearly flawless Love and Relationships department.
“… there have been some complaints.”
Wait. What? What?
Grace listened in dismay as her boss read letter after letter of complaint.
Riley held up a hand to stop their boss’s flow of words. “I’m sorry—did you just say that some readers think we’re naive?”
Oliver snickered. “As if you could ever be naive.”
Unperturbed, Riley gave him one of her sassy winks. Riley McKenna was anything but naive, at least in the ways of the bedroom. She managed to dazzle all manner of people, from homosexual men to heterosexual women. But her real talent was with heterosexual men, which was a good thing, seeing as she was Stiletto’s number one sex goddess. Riley didn’t just write about sex, she embodied it. Her long black hair had that perpetual just-rolled-out-of-bed look, and her bright blue eyes had a naughty, Marilyn Monroe kind of way about them. Most annoying of all? Riley McKenna could out-eat anyone Grace knew and still wore a size two.
All of which would make Grace hate her if Riley wasn’t just about the best damned friend she could imagine.
Of course, none of this was even remotely relevant to their boss right about now, as Camille was definitely less than pleased with her usual golden trio.
Or golden quad, Grace thought, with a quick glance at Emma.
“There’s just been increasing feedback that we’re not adequately tapped into the male perspective,” Camille said. “That we’re living in a female bubble.”
“Crazy, since this is a female magazine,” Julie muttered.
“Exactly,” Camille said, jabbing her finger on top of her notebook. “Just like Oxford is in a male bubble.”
Everyone exchanged a confused glance. What the hell did Oxford have to do with this? Grace was willing to bet most of them had never read it—she certainly hadn’t, beyond occasionally flipping through an issue Greg might have left on the coffee table.
Oxford was to men as Stiletto was to women—and seeing as how most everyone in the room was female, Oxford was about as familiar a reference as, say, jock strap. Only Oliver could pretend to relate, and even he made it clear to anyone who would listen that he preferred talking shoes over cars any day.
“I’ve had several meetings with Alex Cassidy over the past two weeks, and he’s been finding the same trend in letters from his readers,” Camille was saying. “Quite
simply, both Oxford and Stiletto are guilty of the same one-sided journalism.”
Grace lifted a hand to get Camille’s attention. “Who’s Alex Cassidy?”
“The new editor in chief of Oxford,” Emma Sinclair volunteered. Grace thought she heard something bitter in that tone, but a quick look at the other woman revealed nothing. Just a calm, nothing-fazes-me expression.
A quick glance around the table showed that Grace was the only one surprised by this news. What the hell had happened to Bill Heiner? He’d been Oxford’s editor in chief since before most people in this room were born. Being out of the loop sucked.
“Got it,” she said quietly.
But Camille apparently had bigger things to worry about than the fact that one of her most tenured columnists was out of the loop, because she was doing that weird hair-tugging thing that generally meant trouble for someone.
“So what’s the solution?” Julie asked. “You want one of us to grow a penis? Maybe throw in a couple token interviews with guys so we can get the man’s perspective and all that?”
“No, we need to address it more head-on than that,” Camille replied.
More head-on than growing a penis? Grace wondered.
“Alex and I have talked about this, and we want to be deliberate. To let the readers know that we’re hearing their concerns. Apparently there are more crossover readers than we realized, and we can’t have male readers hollering about how we misrepresent males. And Oxford doesn’t want female readers lamenting about how Oxford’s way off base.”
This was not sounding good.
“Which is why we’ll be inserting a new special series of stories for the next three issues. A sort of his-and-hers approach to the Love and Relationships section of the magazines.”
“I’ll do it!” Oliver said, his hand shooting in the air.
Camille gave him a look. “With all due respect, Mr. Harrington, aren’t you the one always telling us you relate more to women than men?”
His brow furrowed. “Right. I was thinking I’d write the her perspective.”
God help them, he looked serious.
“Ollie, until you’ve had to suffer the indignity of running into an ex while buying Vagisil or asking a stranger for a tampon, I’m thinking maybe you don’t quite have the proper intel or the proper parts for this,” Julie said kindly.
